With Brexit looming on the horizon, there is not much for pro-Europeans to celebrate. However, yesterday afternoon the UK section of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) held a seminar at Europe House in Westminster to mark 50 years of its existence. The theme was UK-EU Relations beyond Brexit, which most speakers were agreed would need to remain close — both on economics and security matters — even if Brexit does go ahead on 29 March 2019. However, several contributors, such as the former Whitehall mandarin Sir Martin Donnelly and the anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller, minced no words about Brexit being a mistake and held out hope that somehow it could be averted. In contrast, the former Labour MP and arch-Brexiteer Gisela Stuart (soon to take up the position of Chair of the FCO’s policy forum, Wilton Park) maintained that the voters had made the right choice in the 2016 EU Referendum and that the result had to be respected.
Given the audience — which included over a dozen journalists from other AEJ sections, from Ireland to Cyprus and Bulgaria — there was quite a lot of discussion about the role of the media in Brexit. Quentin Peel, former Financial Times correspondent in Brussels, admitted hat he had been lucky in working for an employer who wanted to know the details of complex European matters which were also of interest to the paper’s readers, whereas Peter Foster, Europe Editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, outlined the difficulty of covering the European story in ways accessible to the general public. The name of the Telegraph’s “star” columnist, Boris Johnson, was unsurprisingly bandied about, as people recalled his fabrication of anti-EU stories early in his career and now his championing of his own Brexit scenario. I was based in Brussels myself for eight years, initially with Reuters news agency, and it was there that I first joined the AEJ (French-speaking Belgian section). The everyday minutiae of news from the European Commission were challenging to convey in an interesting fashion, but the longer I stayed in Brussels and began to understand the purpose of the European project, the more I believed in its aims — which is why the prospect of Brexit does sometimes keep me awake at night and why I will continue to fight for Remain, probably via a People’s Vote or new referendum on whatever terms Theresa May’s government agrees with the other 27 EU member states, always assuming agreement is possible.
In the weeks since Theresa May invoked Article 50 and Britain started heading down the slippery slope to exit from the European Union, whole swaths of the Tory Brexit Press has gone into hysterical overdrive in its futile attempt to try to silence those of us who believe passionately that we are better off inside the EU. On social media, too, the Brexiteers have been ridiculing “Remoaners”, accusing us of being against democracy, whereas we Liberal Democrats, in particular, are the champions of democracy by insisting that not only Parliament but the British electorate should have the chance of saying yes or no to whatever deal with the EU27 Theresa May and her team come up with in 2019. But it’s the intolerant nature of much of the right-wing media comment that is disturbing, at times verging on the fascistic. The High Court judges who gave a ruling that displeased the Brexiteers were denounced as traitors and enemies of the people, whereas in reality the independent judiciary is an essential safeguard of our democratic society. Gina Miller, who has courageously used the courts to challenge blind Brexit, has been vilified and threatened. The latest epithet coined by the Brexit Press to describe Remainers is “saboteurs”, as the Daily Mail, Express and others parrot the line that we are trying to thwart the will of the British people. I am not convinced that a majority of the electorate actually wants the sort of hard Brexit that Mrs May is pursuing — which entails leaving the European single market and customs union, as well as many European agencies. But just as early members of the Religious Society of Friends proudly accepted their detractors’ insult, “Quakers”, and made it their own, so I and many others are proud to adopt the term “Saboteur”. because to sabotage the government’s plan for national suicide is a noble cause. So I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with highlighted Saboteurs such as Ken Clarke (Conservative), Peter Mandelson (Labour), Caroline Lucas (Green) as well as, of course, Tim Farron and virtually the entire Liberal Democrat Party.
Jonathan Fryer 