E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

I'm both calm, and thinking - in fact, I think about this stuff a lot because it's literally my job: I'm a journo. We literally already have an organisation for this stuff, IPSO, which took over from the Press Complaints Commission in 2014. It's independent, a form of self-regulation, but could easily be given actual teeth by an Act of Parliament.

Straw man. I didn't say anything about "fair," I said "absolute bollocks" (in my first post) and "errors deliberate or otherwise" (in my second). I'm not talking about spin, here, I'm talking about falsehoods - like the old one about the EU banning bendy (or straight, again I can't remember which it was) bananas. It's literally untrue, and easily proven so.

Going back to IPSO, the Daily Mail is a member and typically tops its worst-offenders list. But so long as it says "sorry" and publishes the aforementioned Page 37 8pt correction, it's all good. That's what should change.

You're making a hefty assumption that I'm relying on stereotypes, there. Amazingly, I'm not a member of the so-called "metropolitan elite": my father, until his death when I was 13 years old, was ex-Navy who bounced through a variety of blue-collar jobs before gravitating to middle management and ending up a business studies lecturer at a technical college; my mum was primarily a stay-at-home parent, but in the years following his death has done everything from cleaning the local hospital to driving a delivery van for a car parts company. (She's now a teacher in a maximum-security women's prison, interestingly enough.)

I can't really remember what newspapers my father read - I was too busy with comics, myself - but I do know that until very recently my mother was a subscriber to the Daily Mail. I also know plenty of other people who read various tabloids - even, shudder, the Sun - and the majority are, indeed, nuanced and varied individuals.

But, again, you're going for the straw man. At no point did I say "the newspapers brainwashed all their readers into doing their shady bidding." That's not how propaganda works. All it has to do is "brainwash" enough of its readers, and the job's a good 'un - and given that you can hit any social network and see a host of leavers parroting the absolute lies that the Daily Mail and others have published in the last three years as their reasons for voting the way they did, it clearly worked. Yeah, there are plenty of people who read the Daily Mail for its... Christ, I don't know, considered opinion on underage celebrities' legs in short skirts; but there are also plenty of people who read it 'cos there's no black in the Union Jack so send the buggers back.

 

Which would have also been wrong, though more on the 'misleading' than 'lying' front, because nothing in the EU legislation prevents grocers from selling bananas as they come and customers choosing to buy whatever bananas they want.

Here it is from the horse's mouth: you were right when you said that the legislation is about classification. There is nothing in it, not a damn thing, to stop a grocer buying Class 2 - the ones with major "defects of shape" - bananas and selling them to customers. The legislation only exists so that the grocer doesn't order what he *thinks* is Class 1 bananas with only "slight defects of shape", and pays Class 1 prices, only to have a crate of Class 2s turn up. Basically, it exists to stop people getting ripped off. That, to me, sounds like a good thing: I hate it when I'm promised X but Y turns up instead, whether it's PC monitors or bananas.

I look forward to robust defences of these stories, too. Especially the one about the benefits of blowjobs, 'cos that's hilarious.

 

Ooh, I've actually found a, sadly blurry, photo of my dad reading a paper - in socks and sandals, the trend-setter:



That looks a lot like the Daily Mail masthead t'me.

 

And it's fine for you to think that, but I'm willing to bet if you actually spoke to anyone responsible for ordering a few tonnes of bananas they'd quickly disagree with you.

Likewise, I'm sure you don't complain about the legislation we have that means you can buy a monitor and send it back if it's not fit for purpose, right? Same thing.

 

Works well when you're buying one banana for your lunch; doesn't work so well when you're buying a billion bananas for the UK's lunch. How many companies do you think there are selling a billion bananas? Back in 2002, there were five companies (including one based in Ireland, that well-known tropical banana plantation country) controlling 70 percent of international trade; today, that has thankfully dropped to 44 percent - thanks, in no small part, to the EU's regulations allowing for supermarkets to purchase directly from growers or from smaller wholesalers while being guaranteed to receive bananas adhering to a mutually agreed and legally defined standard.

Let's try this another way. What do you think is more efficient: every greengrocer in Europe coming up with its own definition of good-quality and bad-quality bananas, then having the banana wholesalers (or individual growers) trying to sort out each shipment according to a million and one different definitions; or the EU coming up with a single, jointly acceptable definition? Which costs the least money? Which takes the least time? Which is the only approach that actually makes sense at scale?

Legislation. The answer's legislation.