Saturday 13 May 2023

Straight banana anyone?

Sometimes you have to laugh at Brexit otherwise you'd cry. For more years than I can remember, the EU bendy banana regulation has been a totemic issue for Brexiteers. Whenever so-called 'burdensome' EU regulations come up, somebody will point to this bendy banana rule. Now The Telegraph, The Mail, and The Sun are up in arms that this regulation is not included in the 600 laws to go by the end of the year published on Thursday by business secretary Kemi Badenoch. You can only marvel at the sheer concentrated stupidity of the Brexiteers in the right-wing media.

I had assumed, wrongly it seems now, that the journalists who peddled this nonsense were aware that it was nonsense. Now I’m not sure. Have a look at this:

There is an EU regulation (1333/2011 of 19 December 2011) that classifies bananas but doesn’t ban bent ones and I seem to remember an article from years ago that this standard pre-dates the EU anyway. It is simply a way of helping trade, to allow a buyer ordering containers full of bananas to know what they’re getting. The latest regulation replaced an earlier one from 1994 (2257/94) which originally sparked all the stories.

The EU Mythbusters says:

"Bananas are classified according to quality and size for international trade. Individual governments and the industry have in the past had their own standards with the latter’s, in particular, being very stringent. The European Commission was asked by national agriculture ministers and the industry to draft legislation in this area. Following extensive consultation with the industry, the proposed quality standards were adopted by national ministers in Council in 1994."

In any case, apart from the synthetic fury sparked by these daft newspaper reports, who is upset by the banana regulation? My wife complains even now about the quality and size and ripeness variation in bananas in our local supermarket. Imagine where we would be without 1333/2011?

This is why the EU rule is not going to be repealed and probably not even amended. In seven years not one of these right-wing newspapers has ever thought to delve into these myths, which tells me they aren’t interested beyond using them as a stick to lash out at Brussels.

Euroscepticism isn’t an ideology, it’s a disease.

However, it brings me to a serious point. I have always thought that a lot of the leave voters, ordinary men and women in the street, would have expected what they were told were ridiculous and sometimes entirely mythical EU laws, to be rolled back pretty well overnight. They probably can’t understand the reasons for the delay and the Tory party - and their imbecile friends in the media - can hardly explain it’s because either they don’t exist and never have or the stakeholders in different industries want to keep them.

Sometimes they want to keep the rules because they’re useful and sometimes in order to avoid extra paperwork when trading with our European partners.

To the average leave voter, Badenoch and Sunak are behaving like chronically malnourished people starved for years on end suddenly confronted with a juicy 32oz T-bone steak, replete with all the trimmings and triple-cooked chips, choosing to nibble the edge of a water biscuit instead.

Or like an F1 driver complaining the handbrake is jammed on but when given the chance to release it chooses to pick a dead fly off the front wing instead. It makes no sense because it makes no sense.

I am convinced this is going to do more to undermine Brexit than anything we remainers have done since 2016. There is no way the Tories can explain any of this stuff away, except by admitting - and I am certain one day someone is going to have to do it - that all the mad stories, many initially invented in the fevered imagination of Johnson, were simply not true.

How are The Mail and The Sun and The Telegraph to cope?

Longworth

At the risk of appearing to revel in other people's discomfort, I want you to take a look at a tweet from John Longworth - presumably sent from a secure institution - where he claims the 'benefits and successes [of Brexit] keep growing every day.'

Or this one from (journalist and broadcaster?) Sophie Corcoran:

Noel Gallagher didn't say Brexit is a 'disaster' he said (HERE), "Brexit has been a f*****g absolute unmitigated disaster."

But imagine you are Sunak, with people like Longworth and Corcoran and others on your own side and in the press, castigating you for not cutting EU laws that either don’t actually exist or the industry says are useful and need to be retained.

He is in an impossible position and there is talk of his MPs and the chief whip going to see the chair of the 1922 committee. This is Chris Hope of the Telegraph:

We may yet see another change of leadership before the next election. who knows?

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