Simply following the Barclay Brothers’ agenda? The dead tree press is more and more simply an organ of political persuasion and pressure.

Good piece, Tim.

From the linked Telegraph article:

“The government is under pressure to cut soaring British contributions to the EU budget after the publication of official figures last month. These showed that British taxpayers paid a total of £5.3billion to the EU in 2009.”

And from the National Audit Office ‘Consolidated Statement on the use of EU Funds’ [in the UK] (http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/1011/eu_funds_2008-09.aspx):

“Reported receipts from the EU [are] £4,687,084,000 in the cashflow statement (p.7).

So we paid in £5.3billion, and got back around £4,7bn, in the context of being one of the wealthier EU countries, directly into UK-based spend.

I’m not suggesting the way in which European (Structural) funds are managed by the EC (or the UK govt) is good – there are loads of problems – but these figures do put in context the Telegraph’s highly selective use of figures, which are intended to show that all our money heads off to a bureacratic black hole in Brussels, or ends up in the hands of the Italian/East European mafia (though there’s no denying that is an issue, as the FT explorations recently suggested).

The Telegraph stopped being a “paper of record” yonks ago, this is just another nail in the coffin of a once quality newspaper (even if I disagreed with its stance 99% of the time it was still undeniably a decent read).

Nowadays we have stories like this gem from last week http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/kate-middleton/8450314/Jelly-bean-resembling-Kate-Middleton-to-fetch-500.html but I suppose since the Daily/Sunday Sport has gone under we’re going to have to get our inane stories from somewhere.

…and of cours the Telegraph is at its most cretinous when covering the Global Warming issue.

Not that I’m in shameless plug mode, but just to point out that this is an edited version of the following post:

http://zelo.tv/f63kuO

@4, my conclusion is that it’s more a question of the rabid nature of many of the Telegraph’s blogs. Del Boy, Toby Jug and Dan, Dan the Oratory Man are equally strident and either poorly informed or blatantly selective.

As the shale gas business has been in the news again, expect Del Boy to start preaching the merits of this dubious technology as soon as he returns from sneering at his fellow holidaymakers in the SW.

Have you only just noticed? What about all the references to the ‘collapse’ of the euro? The Telegraph completely lost touch with reality along time ago.

Was the DT ever considered as a newspaper of record? It was the Times that claimed that distinction and which has clearly gone downhill.

The DT used to have a great deal of news in it, mostly copied from agency stories but, as far as I can remember, its main stories always had a lot of bias in them.

@2 Paul,

A bit selective in your analysis there. The full quote from the Telegraph article:

“These showed that British taxpayers paid a total of £5.3billion to the EU in 2009 which increased to £9.2billion in 2010. The proposed £600 million increase for 2012 will mean British taxpayers will be paying more than £10 billion to the EU, at a time when the British government is making cuts. ”

So in 2010 the UK paid £9.2bn – I believe a major reason for the increase is the loss of the UK rebate. No doubt the amount handed back to the UK will increase slightly, but the net contribution will still be around £5bn.

Apart from this talking about the net contribution is not the point. When we talk about UK taxes going up we don’t talk about net taxes – i.e. reduce the taxes paid by the benefits the individual recieves from public spending. On this basis with our public borrowing you would argue that on average the UK citizen pays negative tax!

And of course the £4.7bn is no doubt used very wisely with massive benefits to the whole of the UK.

I don’t know what planet you have been living on Tim, but the torygraph has never been the paper of record. You might as well pop into tory central office and pick up a pamphlet rather than buy a copy of the paper.

It has always mixed up editorial comment with news. Hence why so many readers whinge about the BBC. They are not used to non partisan journalism, where both sides get equal time.

4. BenM

> …and of cours the Telegraph is at its most cretinous when covering the Global Warming issue.

That and anything to do with renewable energy.

I’ve described the Telegraph as ‘the Daily Mail with big words’ for many years now. And any publication that would employ James ‘I Wanna Be The British Glenn Beck’ Delingpole isn’t fit for the bottom of the budgie cage.

…and of cours the Telegraph is at its most cretinous when covering the Global Warming issue.

Here’s the thing though. Its environment correspondent Geoffrey Lean is actually quite good.

But they decided to feed the wingnuts by having Christopher Booker and Delingpole and Richard North in there. Maybe they like having to apologise for getting things wrong every few weeks.

11. Sunny Hundal

> Its environment correspondent Geoffrey Lean is actually quite good.

You’ve just reminded me that I did read a good piece in the Telegraph the other day on nuclear energy by… Geoffrey Lean: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geoffreylean/100082443/the-nuclear-industry-must-understand-that-the-unexpected-can-happen-even-in-britain/

That must be a tough gig for him – tarred by association with the frothing tossers who work alongside him!

No one’s mentioed it yet, so I suppose I will. Though there was almost a hint of it in the OP. Was that deliberate?

These are all Bruno Waterfield articles:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/author/Bruno%20Waterfield/

Where to begin?

1. It is not a key part of the definition of a paper of record that Guardian readers find it an acceptable substitute for Left-slanted news.

2. in the days before the paper began its conversion into a broadsheet Daily Mail, any hack presenting such a piece for editorial consideration would have seen it instantly spiked Clearly you have forgotten Boris Johnson’s incumbency as the paper’s Brussels correspondent!

3. Pejoratives such as … painful national cuts … are a no-no, eh? Fine, so long as you’re going to be consistent about that one.

Although too cliché-ridden for my taste, there isn’t a lot wrong with Waterfield’s report from a news-reporting point of view. You could find much more ideologically-weighted prose on the news pages of the Guardian or Independent any day of the week.

@7 Guano: “Was the DT ever considered as a newspaper of record? It was the Times that claimed that distinction and which has clearly gone downhill.”

For most of the 20th century, big council libraries and university libraries were stuffed full of bound copies of The Times plus the local newspaper. From the 1970s, newspapers were available on microfilm which reduced storage space. Subscriptions remained expensive, so libraries continued to purchase one national newspaper: The Times. The CD-ROM liberated libraries, allowing them to subscribe to more publications. The concept of “newspaper of record” can more or less be defined as the national paper preserved by your local library before the invention of CD-ROM.

Prior to the invention of the CD-ROM and multiple subscriptions, between 1 December 1978 and 12 November 1979, The Times was not published. To determine whether the Daily Telegraph was considered the alternative newspaper of record during that absence, we only have to count microfilm and bound copy subscriptions.

@14 Flowerpower: “It is not a key part of the definition of a paper of record that Guardian readers find it an acceptable substitute for Left-slanted news.”

I am guilty of purchasing the Guardian because it publishes stories that I want to know about. In the mid 1990s, you didn’t need to be a stereotypical reader to admire Ed Vulliamy. The two Duncan Campbell’s have consistently broken great stories. The Guardian sends off people to discover things and reports events brought to them by other people. So I’ll read it. Not because the words are left slanted but because some of the people care about facts.

I do not expect illumination from comment pieces. We may remember the glorious swipes for liberalism by Hugo Young in the 1980s but most of the comment pages were tripe. Some of the tripe writers are extant at the Guardian and Daily Mail. I care not for them.

“1. It is not a key part of the definition of a paper of record that Guardian readers find it an acceptable substitute for Left-slanted news.”

Translated means, “any right wing lies will do as liberals don’t matter.”

“”So we paid in £5,3billion, and got back around £4,7bn”"

Oh well, that’s okay then. We pay in more and get less back. Great.

If we had kept the 5,3bn of our own money we could have spent ALL of it on our country.
But that would not be communist enough.

And I notice Fungus’ post was ignored.
So really it’s worse!

“”So we paid £9,2bn and got back around £4,7bn”"

YAY!!!!
If we had kept the 9,2bn of our own money we could have spent ALL of it on our country.

Yeah…Nothing to criticise here.
Reds make me laugh.

We had to send our money to Poland so that they had more airports built to send more Polish people here to open more sausage shops that last for a few months only and sell dodgy jewellery outside Tesco’s while pissed on vodka…Fact.

Frankly, these days the Torygraph looks more like the BNPgraph. It was bad enough ten years ago, but of late it seems to be accelerating its decline into frothing self-parody with every hysterical piece of right-wing rabble rousing.

“”So we paid £9,2bn and got back around £4,7bn””

And if you object to that you are a racist right winger who can’t see what a bargain it is to pay billions more in than you get out.

I don’t care if the EU demanded, requested or begged. I am fed up with our money going to an organisation that can’t even get its own accounts signed off and which rips us off to the tune of billions each year.

Lordy – check out some of Simon Heffers comment pieces if you fancy a long disbelieving larf. He lives in this bizzare but vividly imagined world where venomous scottish people and pregnant teenagers terrorise middle english gents like himself, in between spending tax payers money on painting classes for lesbian immigrants. Its amazing – almost better than Melanie Philips