Wings Over Scotland isn’t the only website dedicated to verifying the truthfulness of things claimed by politicians and media pundits. There’s the widely-respected and diligent FullFact.org, Scotland’s own The Ferret, and there’s the BBC’s Reality Check (which frequently takes the unconventional approach of, er, not making a finding either way about what the reality of things is).
And then there’s Channel 4’s FactCheck, which we’re going to generously assume had a liquid lunch yesterday and was a little under the weather.
Because not only is the conclusion that it reached on the subject of an independent Scotland having to use the Euro utter nonsense that’s been debunked roughly 1000 times in the last six years, it doesn’t even agree with itself.
It was triggered by an extraordinary display of arrogant rudeness by Kay Burley of Sky News the previous day, who shouted all over SNP MP Ian Blackford and then accused him of “mansplaining” when he calmly and politely attempted to correct her while being flagrantly and unashamedly in possession of a penis.
A stream of actual experts (along with hundreds of angry Scots) duly and patiently informed Burley of her error on social media, to which she responded with the grace and humility one would expect from an impartial news broadcaster.
But for some reason, C4’s FactCheck then decided it ought to weigh in on her side, but without bothering to actually, y’know, check any facts.
Because its first assertion was this:
And that’s going to come as quite a surprise to the EU, which on the page the C4 FactCheck article actually links to says this:
And also this:
(To save you clicking to make those pics more legible, the highlighted sections say “Participation in ERM II is voluntary” and “it is up to individual countries to calibrate their path towards the euro and no timetable is prescribed”.)
It’s quite a piece of “fact-checking” to read the unambiguous words “participation in ERM II is voluntary” and then interpret them to mean that participation in ERM II is not voluntary. Yet that’s exactly what happened.
An obligation which is voluntary is not an obligation at all. The EU makes absolutely no attempt to enforce the “requirement” to join the Euro. One-third of the EU’s member states do not use the Euro and most have no meaningful intention to do so.
Some have been members for literally decades without adopting the currency, despite having no formal “opt-out” as the UK and Denmark do.
But “FactCheck” wasn’t done there. As well as carrying on making entirely groundless assertions, it decided to throw in another endlessly-debunked lie just for fun.
The claim about Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia is simply complete rubbish, as we’ve already established. If you want to use the “road” metaphor, it’s like saying someone standing on the M1 motorway just outside Watford is “on the road to” Newcastle, where the highway terminates as the A1(M).
Which is to say, it might be accurate in an abstract technical sense but in reality it’s meaningless drivel. The ROAD might go there, but the person using it may have absolutely no intention of ever doing so. They might only be going to Luton, and nobody is ever going to try to force them to travel any further.
But then comes the double-whammy:
Oh dear God. Because as well as proclaiming as fact the opinion that Scotland avoiding the Euro indefinitely would be “unlikely” – without offering a single reason why – “FactCheck” knows fine well that the other sentence there is a total lie , as it goes on to explain in the next two paragraphs.
So Channel 4 has asserted, and then immediately disproved, two ancient myths, before inexplicably announcing that they’re actually both true. And false. But somehow still true anyway.
It’s an embarrassing shambles from a broadcaster that many independence supporters have generally regarded as the least biased and least incompetent of the UK’s broadcast news outlets, and we can only hope that some manner of sense prevails and the entire farce is quietly fed into an electronic shredder before too long.
