The late Christopher Hitchens attacks the EU! Or Does He?

Here  

http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/weekend-press-watch-5-6-july-2014/#

 

you will find what appears to be an official European Commission website, which purports to note and correct ‘myths’ and ‘errors’ about the EU in the British media.

 

What it calls ‘errors’ seem to me to be, in many cases, differences of interpretation or emphasis, disputes over hard-to-quantify figures or objections to reasonable journalistic licence such as Christopher Booker’s reference to Brussels as being the real capital of this country. Of course this is not officially so. But nor is it a ‘strange suggestion’ to anyone other than an EU propagandist. In terms of the origin of our law, the conduct of our trade policy and of much of our foreign policy,  Brussels (along with Luxembourg,  seat of the European Court of Justice) is increasingly the fount of power.

 

A lot of the blog is simply an illustration of exactly why power of any kind should have no influence over newspapers.

 

But I thought it hilarious that, in a blog loftily taking the press to task for errors, the original version read:

 

‘ “Handing policing powers to Brussels” or cooperation to tackle crime?

The Times saw the UK opt-in proposals as “handing policing powers to Brussels”. Of course, this is all about a legal framework for cooperation to tackle criminals, to make sure justice works across borders and to guarantee the right of victims and defendants. This is not “transferring policing powers to Europe” or conversely “clawing back powers from Brussels” in the words of the Daily Mail.

In the Mail on Sunday, meanwhile, two star columnists took rather different views of the EAW. On p27 Christopher Hitchens calls it “an outrageous EU intrusion into our legal system” a rather odd view given that it has only ever applied because the UK and other Member States wanted it and will only apply in the UK now if the government opts in to it.’

 

Christopher Hitchens!  Did he now? My late brother, alas,  has not been writing for anyone since December 2011, and never did so for the Mail on Sunday. Had he done so, he would have been supportive, not critical of the EU (many of his admirers do not realise how keen he was on the project).

 

So the authors of this blog taking others to task for their mistakes, manage to confuse a deceased American Marxist internationalist with a (so far) living British conservative patriot. Initially, when I pointed this out to them, they just changed it. I said this was really a bit off,  given the nature of the blog (you can see our correspondence at the bottom of the page, but you’ll have to negotiate a fairly laborious registration to join in). I thought they should prominently admit their error. So now it as it is, which is better than it was, but still not very good. We all make mistakes. Even I do so. But if I ran a whole blog devoted to attacking others for making mistakes, I like to think I’d be careful to keep it error free.