Oh dear. Over the weekend, the Guardian ran an editorial on the EU referendum entitled ‘this campaign must show more respect for both facts and voters’. In the article — published on Saturday — the paper criticised the Vote Leave campaign for ‘recklessness’. They called on the Brexit camp to put an end to ‘deceptions’ such as the claim that we send the EU £350m a week:
‘It is now more than a fortnight since Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage began chugging around Britain in search of photo opportunities in their Vote Leave campaign battle bus. From day one in Truro, the bright red double-decker, which was built in Poland by a German company, has been festooned with a slogan which, to put it politely, may deceive those who see it. “We send the EU £350m a week,” the slogan reads. “Let’s fund our NHS instead.”
Back in April, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Andrew Dilnot, had already censured the £350m a week claim as “potentially misleading”, after a complaint from the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb. A few weeks later, the bus entered the campaign with the claim unchanged. It is still there today. It is still misleading. And it ought to be removed.’
However, for all the preaching about the importance of facts, there’s a problem. The editorial begins by stating that both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been touring the UK ‘in their Vote Leave campaign battle bus’. Alas Farage has done no such thing as he is part of the rival Grassroots Out campaign. Given the well-documented feud between GO and Vote Leave, even the most basic of research would have highlighted that it would be unlikely at best for Farage to be travelling through Britain on a Vote Leave vehicle.
This error means that the Guardian have now had to issue a correction:
Mr S hopes that the Guardian will learn to practise what it preaches and ‘show some respect for truth’ in the future.
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