I came across the EU run Euromyth website (HERE) the other day. I confess I didn't know it existed in spite of spending a lot of time looking at the stupid stories the Eurosceptic press run about bent cucumbers and the like. It is a treasure trove of factual information rebutting the more lurid misinformation and fake news that has filled the pages of much of the mainstream British media for the past twenty five years or more. There are hundreds of these stories.
The stories are usually about the EU banning some much loved British icon or institution like loaves of Bread or Butchers shops that might be funny if they were not so serious. Some go back to 1992 or further and are quite obviously not only wrong but utterly ludicrous.
The amazing thing is that the EU have to have such a website at all. I don't believe they spend time and money on fake news rebuttal in any other EU state.
We are somehow unique in having a press that is so narrowly owned by a few individuals and with so much anti EU nonsense published relentlessly over thirty years or more. A few people, seemingly driven by delusions about Britain's past and future, have done this, perhaps unwittingly in some cases simply in the pursuit of sales and profit. They created the market and kept feeding it until they themselves came to believe the myth.
An essay by Charles Grant HERE at the Centre for European Studies has a section about the role of the press and this report HERE explains BoJo's central part in it all from the very beginning.
Do have a look at the database on the Euromyth website. Pick any story at random from the late 1990s or 2000s to see if you can find a single one that ever turned out to be true, or even connected with the EU at all. The odd one that had a grain of truth in it usually turns out either to be a good thing or completely accepted now without question or both.
