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Dear Subscribers,
In a new article on BfB this week, we reveal how the BBC responded when presented with overwhelming evidence of its anti-Brexit bias in a recent BBC Radio series. In other news, two notable pro-Remain economists, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau, take apart the idea that Brexit has had a negative effect on the UK economy, and is the EU Reset about to get supercharged under Hamish Falconer?
New on BfB: Ten Years After Brexit, and the BBC Still Won’t Admit Its Own Bias by David Keighly
In last week’s Newsletter we reported News-watch’s new analysis of BBC Radio 4’s Ten Years After Brexit, which found overwhelming evidence of anti-Brexit bias across the series. This week, News-watch managing director David Keighley, a former BBC journalist, tells BfB readers how the BBC responded when confronted with that evidence — dismissing a formal impartiality complaint within days. The BBC’s response reveals a Corporation that, ten years after the Brexit referendum, still refuses to acknowledge its own bias.
Varoufakis and Munchau on Rejoiner dishonesty
In an article for UnHerd, Yanis Varoufakis picked apart the recent US National Bureau of Economic Research working paper ‘The Economic Impact of Brexit’, which Rejoiners have been using as evidence for Britain’s alleged lost decade of growth since leaving the EU. Varoufakis does far more than question the Rejoiner assumption that Britain would have fared better had it voted Remain in 2016 – he dismisses the report as ‘founded on non-credible data’ and goes so far as to suggest its authors crossed the line ‘from mere incompetence to intentional fraud’. Despite having campaigned for Remain, Varoufakis is highly critical of the EU’s ‘culture of oligarchic merriment’ in which deindustrialisation and a spiralling debt have been presided over.
Varoufakis also debunked the idea that Brexit has been an economic disaster in an earlier UnHerd podcast, Econoclasts, alongside Wolfgang Munchau, who was also a Remainer. Munchau is as direct – Project Fear was a ‘statistical delusion’, the ‘Brexit effect is trivial’, a ‘macroeconomic non-event’ and opinion polls are ‘irrelevant’. He also emphasises how the City has since adjusted to a post-EU world and has little desire to rejoin – and, more surprising, even the CBI would prefer to stay out of the EU. Rejoiners today, like Remainers in 2016, continue to ‘hide behind fake economics’.
It is highly significant that economists as prominent as Varoufakis and Munchau, who both actively campaigned for Remain in 2016, are so dismissive of the statistical arguments that Rejoiners use as a crutch. This stands in stark contrast to the BBC, which asserts that a negative economic effect is the ‘consensus among economists’ with no ‘significant’ voices claiming otherwise, and treats that claim as settled fact requiring no balancing view. It shows the BBC’s habit of anointing the economists it judges as authoritative and presenting their conclusions as proof that Brexit has failed for what it is: one-sided, and a serious breach of its duty of impartiality.
Falconer intensifies the EU Reset
In an interview with Sky News this week, Hamish Falconer, Minister for European Relations since Andy Burnham’s reshuffle, and the man now leading the EU ‘reset’ negotiations, was asked by Sophy Ridge whether he would approach the brief differently from his predecessor, Nick Thomas-Symonds. His answer was telling. He wanted to consolidate the existing work, he said, but the government also needed to ‘see how we can go further’. Lord Kinnock believes rejoining ought to be in the next Labour party manifesto, and Falconer, when presented with this, declined to rule it out. Falconer’s ambiguity reflects what David Maddox in The Independent has gleefully recognised as Burnham’s (and Falconer’s) dissatisfaction at Starmer’s EU Reset not having gone far enough.
What we’re reading:
France may be on fire, but ‘the world’ is not by Ross Clark for Spiked
Ross Clark spikes the catch-all narrative of climate change activists, for which the fires near Bordeaux are confirmation of their millenarian world-views. In fact, Ross argues, 2026 has so far been the least-bad year for wildfires in Europe – and every other continent – since 2012. In the case of wildfires, the climate-change narrative obscures a more mundane cause — poor forest management — while serving a broader political agenda.
Why Burnham is the new Boris by Henry Hill for The Critic
Most Conservative analysis of the new Prime Minister has been jaundiced and pessimistic. Thus, Henry Hill looks at Andy Burnham and sees Boris Johnson: high self-regard, a tendency to delegate authority and, ‘most debilitating of all, a desperate need to be liked.’ Hill believes such qualities will see Burnham shirk from hard choices and will be his undoing.
Yet pessimism might not necessarily be warranted at this stage. Hill seems to overlook the fact that were it not for Covid, Johnson might still be Prime Minister: and, if Burnham avoids such crises, what is to say that self-regard, delegation to effective advisers and a need to be liked won’t lead to success?
