Brexit and Euromyths

Three years ago, writing for The Telegraph, Boris Johnson, now the prime minister of the United Kingdom, once again referenced the E.U.’s “great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp.” The problem with his statement was that this war did not exist in the first place. The European Union had created a list of artificial flavorings and had forgotten to include the prawn cocktail flavoring. There was never any mention of a ban, and the mistake was quickly fixed. Articles by many leading “Brexiteers” (a person who supports Britain’s move to leave the E.U.) are often rife with misleading statements, or sometimes even bold-faced lies. In fact, such claims are so common that a term has even been created to refer to them: a “euromyth” (a false or misleading statement regarding the European Union, more often than not, portraying them in a negative or overbearing light). Euromyths can seem so unbelievable that it can be baffling that they make it into print. Some well-known examples include “the cabbage memo” (a supposedly 26,911 word document about regulations on cabbage sales), a false ban on custard creams, and an incorrect claim that people would be required to call types of fish by their Latin names. Trying to navigate this unexpected landscape of fake news is so difficult, it’s hardly surprising that so few people actually knew what they were voting for when they chose to leave.In surveys from Ipsos MORI, it was found that many U.K. citizens are misinformed regarding immigration and the E.U. While the percent of E.U. immigrants in the country’s population is only 5%, those polled, on average, guessed that the number was 15%. One in seven Brits believe at least one Euromyth. 24% of people believe that banana’s that surpass the E.U.’s accepted amount of “bendy-ness” are banned from being imported. The creation and influence of Euromyths raises some questions: Is the press responsible for stopping the circulation of these claims or must the people themselves be more careful with the media they consume? How are we supposed to keep up with current events, in a world in which what we see in print may be wildly false? Regardless of the integrity of the newspapers, it’s clear that citizens themselves must also carefully consider what they read and fact-check for themselves. While there were many factors playing a role in the Brexit vote, the sheer volume of Euromyths does show a problem in the way people consume news. Without looking further into it, people just accepted the cabbage memo and the custard cream ban as fact, and let themselves be tricked into considering the E.U. to be an enemy. Perhaps, if people had been more careful with what they accepted as fact, the outcome of the Brexit referendum would have been much different.