Brexit

    Or maybe they knew something...

Boris is there to keep people distracted when the government is readying itself for a burst of activity. Don't be surprised if he turns up with a squirty flower and a collapsing car.

Of course. How could I have ever assumed that SS meant Stephen Schwartz?

Sorry about the confusion - of course it's neither Smith nor Schwartz - it's that famous premiere tunesmith S'theresa S'may.

Stephen Crabb resigns in a huff, "in best interests of my family". What did Theresa offer him? Fisheries?

The problem is when you remove the red nose and make up, you still have bobo the clown.

Thank you thematthew. I thought it was like that. I googled it and the articles are all about post-Brexit now apart from one from the recent Euros tournament about France banning some UK supporters.

I don't know why the tabloids are so anti-Europe, but I suspect it's down to the knowledge that people just love to believe their problems are somebody else's fault. It's a very appealing idea: you deserve a better life than you have, and the reason you don't have it is because of Them. And the EU is a useful Them to blame. After all, the objective of a newspaper isn't to tell people the truth but to keep selling the paper, and you keep selling papers by making people feel like they're the true right-thinkers in a world of fools, not by embarrassing them by telling them that their opinions are wrong.

The idea of the incompetent and malicious EU screwing everything up for poor Britain has never made sense to me, so I started following up on all these stories about how the EU was stacking the deck against Britain or how they were creating stupid regulations that any idiot could see were crazy. And it turns out that they're all misrepresentations deliberately twisted to allow Britons to sneer at stupid Johnny Foreigner.

As an example of how the press misrepresents things, consider the harmonisation of mains electricity. (This is one of the first examples I looked at in depth for myself, as it happened around the time I first had Internet access at home.) Britain uses 240V and most of the mainland uses 220V, so in 1994 the EU harmonised the standard voltage as 230V. Cue newspaper scare stories about how the bureaucrats were going to force everyone in Britain to replace all their electrical appliances and build new power stations, along with reports about how the Europeans were too stupid to realise that nobody in Europe actually uses 230V. Let's all laugh at the idiot foreigners who are too dumb to notice the obvious flaw in their idea.

Except that wasn't what was going on.

Although our mains supply is nominally 240V it actually varies quite a bit as the load varies. Our mains supply is officially defined as 240V ± 6%, so the supply you receive can vary from 226V to 254V and all electrical equipment sold in Britain has to be able to operate correctly and safely over that range. A similar situation existed in countries like France and Germany, where the mains voltage was defined as 220V ± 6% so the supply there can vary from 207V to 233V. Having different standards for each country creates a problem for manufacturers because they need to test their products against each country's standards, and even when several countries have equivalent standards the manufacturer still has to test for each country. They can't test against one country's standard and then claim to have passed all the others. Each country wants a test against their own standard, not against another one that happens to look the same.

So the EU's idea was to have one standard that manufacturers could test against for the whole of Europe, and the way they did it was to change the standard voltage for the EU to be 230V ± 10%. (They actually did it in two stages, but this is where we are now.) 230V ± 10% covers a range from 207V to 253V, which neatly spans the old UK range, the old French range, the old German range, and so on. It's important to understand that nobody's mains supply has actually changed and all the generating equipment is the same as it has always been: in the UK we still get a supply that hovers within 6% of 240V and in France they still get a supply that hovers around 220V. What has changed is that now there's one standard for manufacturers that covers the whole of Europe, which makes electrical equipment much cheaper and makes it possible to buy an electrical appliance in any EU country and use it in any other and know that it will work.

There is no downside to this regulation and in fact we've all gained a considerable benefit from it, but you wouldn't think so from the way it was reported in Britain. Instead of showing how it would make electrical appliances cheaper and safer our media tried to make it look as though the stupid foreigners were interfering in things they didn't understand. Tried, and succeeded.

This happens all the time. Whenever you see a story about some stupid EU regulation it almost always turns out that the regulation is actually extremely sensible and the people who came up with it did actually know what they were doing, but it's been reported in a way that allows the British to imagine they're smarter than the idiot Europeans. It infuriates me that the British fall for this nonsense time after time, because you'd think it would eventually occur to people that if the EU's actions were as stupid as we keep being told they are then someone other than the British would be able to spot the stupidity, and as that doesn't happen perhaps we're being lied to.

But selling papers is more important than telling the truth.

Newspapers are owned by individuals, more often than not they use that power to promote their own interests. As people who follow theatre we all know how powerful narratives are and that they can affect us emotionally in a way that overcomes the logic of them not being real. The power that being able to do that to a mass audience is one of the greatest powers that can be wielded in a nation and, I would suggest, more powerful than any political party or movement.

You would have thought that the internet might have reduced that but it is, in many ways, worse. There are a number of narratives being constructed and broadcast through it but these tend to harmonise as the 'echo chamber' effect means that people tend to spread ideas coming from each other and from a limited number of powerful sources. It's the same on all parts of the political spectrum but the nature of the internet is such that the fringes are made more powerful than their numbers would allow for in the real world.

Are there any stats about how Doctors voted? All the ones I know (A&E Doctor's and GPs) voted Remain.

Newspaper lie, what they don't know they make up, I remember reading an article in a respectable tabloid and thinking this is rubbish, where did they get that from, they have exaggerated that completely, no one did that - I was in prime pole position to comment as I was a professional observer, the day before I was on that jury panel in a big case, I was shocked how much a tabloid, what they didn't know, they simple made up, what didn't read great - they sexed up, what actually they did say as fact, the press sensationised. All during the trial no journalists were present in court.

As we saw in the recent reporting of the Chilcott report, the press suffered from collective amnesia and never apologised as the ones who stoked the fire, for Britain to go to war, for instance - as the great Charles Kennedy had the audacity to be anti war, one of the tabloids I don't need to say which one portrayed Charles Kennedy as a cobra and a person who can spray his vile venom at a great distant, he never recovered from that, his drinking took a turn for the worst. So yes the press hand are as dirty as Tony Blairs and MI6.

Can't speak for the other 11 but David Tennant was pro-Remain.