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how your money is used to tell you what to think
(See also funded by the EU)
Introduction
The Constitution
Children
Introduction
The EU has never been shy of abusing taxpayers' money to buy popularity
for the European project, under such guises as "promoting active
European citizenship". Quite apart from indirect advertising via
highly visible EU-funded projects required to display the EU logo, the
EU funds innumerable pressure groups including
"astroturf organisations" (ie they seem to be grassroots organisations
but are in fact artificial), professorial chairs and even quasi-academic
courses with titles such as "European Integration and the Future
of Europe". Even EU arts funding is tainted with a political motive
– the Culture 2007 programme cites as its aim "... [to] contribute
actively to the development of a European identity from the grassroots...
with a view to encouraging the emergence of European citizenship."
Sometimes it buys good publicity more directly, as with the Euronews TV channel, in which objectivity is abandoned in favour what have been described as "Soviet-style items about grateful workers getting higher standards thanks to the Commission". Then European Commission President Romano Prodi denied that this funding compromises the channel's editorial independence, but admitted that it is required to "respect the image of the European institutions and the raison d'être and general objectives of the Union".
The Constitution
Whenever faced with the inconvenience of having to ask the people of Europe
whether they are in favour of further European integration, the Commission
(and national governments) will quite openly use taxpayers' money to campaign
for a yes vote. Although the Constitution will probably never now be put
to the vote in Britain, it is worth reflecting on the abuses of public
money that had already been planned in the hope of buying the British
people's support.
Then Minister for Europe Denis MacShane famously announced his intention to spend "serious money" prior to the referendum on the Constitution. Polls show that 71% of voters do not believe the government should be allowed to spend public funds in this way, an opinion endorsed by the Neill Committee on Standards in Public Life.
Some of the money would have been used to recruit celebrities to endorse the Constitution, and £80,000 was earmarked for a pro-Constitution website. Some of it was to go to the public relations firm Geronimo, hired to promote the Constitution as a "success for Britain". The firm had been instructed to target "soft media" eg non-news magazines which are likely to have a less critical approach and give the government an easier ride. Another PR firm, Trimedia Communications, had meanwhile been hired to promote Britain's forthcoming presidency of the EU, in the hope that this would "soften up people" and make them more likely to vote yes to the Constitution. The firm would be paid out of a budget of £750,000 for promoting Britain's presidency.
The European Parliament also planned to spend £86,000 on promoting the Constitution in Britain, despite pleas from the government which feared a PR disaster if this were to become widely known. Meanwhile the European Commission, in the person of Commissioner for Communications Margot Wallstrom, put forward "10 concrete actions" to ensure the Constitution is ratified in all member states, including "training seminars for national and regional journalists", radio and television programmes "to inform citizens about the Future of Europe" and "Europe Direct" call centres on which 840,000 euros had already been spent in the UK alone.
The Commission had also given nearly a million euros in grants to pro-Constitution pressure groups in the UK, and yet more to pan-European pressure groups with a presence in Britain. It intends to continue funding the "Spring Day for Europe" programme to celebrate the "values" of the Constitution in British schools. It voted to double its total budget for promoting the Constitution from 4.5 million euros in 2004 to 9 million euros in 2005.
This is a tactic that has already worked very well. The Spanish government spent nearly 15 million euros of taxpayers' money on the yes campaign prior to that country's referendum (the Commission chipped in a further 1.3 million euros). This paid for celebrities to endorse the Constitution on TV, public "celebrations" of the Constitution at half-time in popular football matches and regular radio slots praising the Constitution immediately after every news broadcast. There was even a poster ad which showed a monkey turning into a man after drinking a can of the energy drink "Referendum Plus".
The Spanish Electoral Commission ruled that the government had violated electoral law by using public money to attempt to influence the outcome of the vote. However, this seems not to have discouraged similar plans elsewhere. The Dutch government, whilst allocating the same 400,000 euros to the official yes and no campaigns, admits that it has reserved 1.5 million euros for its own yes campaign. The British government also has in place discriminatory laws to benefit the yes campaign, limiting the spending of both the official campaigns for the last 6 months of the campaign but only limiting its own spending for the final 28 days.
Meanwhile in France, the yes campaign was bolstered by heavy government advertising spending, and benefitted from a disproportionate share of TV airtime.
French journalists found that reliable figures on Government advertising spending were hard to obtain. In January Le Figaro reported that the French government planned to spend 10 million euros promoting the EU Constitution. However, by February the planned budget had swelled and L'Humanité reported that the government would be spending 11 million euros on TV adverts alone. In March, Le Monde reported that the government's spending would be bolstered by a further 10 million euros from the European Parliament.
The allocation of airtime to the campaigns was also unfair. The official French broadcasting authority, the CSA, called on French TV channels to rebalance their coverage, after it found that the yes campaign had enjoyed nearly two thirds of the airtime in the campaign so far (63 compared to 37 percent of the time). A delegation of journalists sent a petition signed by almost 15,000 people to the President of the CSA – denouncing the "Yes plugging" by the media. (Le Monde 19 May)
However the bias continued, as the French Government's referendum rules allowed the 'yes' campaign 90 minutes of airtime during the last two weeks of the campaign, compared to only 50 minutes for the 'no' side.
Children
Most insidious of all is the way the EU targets propaganda at children,
in direct contravention of rules forbidding political indoctrination in
classrooms. In addition to the "Spring Day for Europe" programme
(see above), the EU produces classroom materials such as "Let's Draw
Europe together" (the opening section of which was entitled "My
country: Europe") and classroom videos which proclaim that "to
simplify things, they should make a Single Currency [so that] everyone
is happy. See – it's better this way." There are also comic
books – "Troubled Waters", which shows plucky MEPs fighting
to prevent environmental pollution, was translated into 22 languages –
and even a superhero, Captain Euro, who battles against the evil Dr D.
Vider.
This strategy of targeting children should come as no surprise. The Working Group on Euro-Education noted in 1998 that “Children can perform a messenger function in conveying the message to the home environment. Young people will often in practice act as go-betweens with the older generations, helping them familiarise themselves with and embrace the euro.”
This idea is not new:
"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to
your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already... What are
you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new
camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"
Adolf Hitler
It is not suggested that the European Commissioners share Hitler's racist or murderous intentions. However, they do seem to share his view of democracy as an inconvenient – though not insuperable – obstacle to their own projects, which they consider so unquestionably right that the trifling matter of public opinion should not be allowed to stand in their way.
See also funded by the EU