Sunday, April 23, 2017

John Simpson claims that Brexiteers are as intolerant as Erdogan

Last week I listened to a report from Istanbul by John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor,  with a mixture of alarm and disbelief. Maybe it was my own sensitivity regarding the ongoing Brexit debate, but he seemed to put undue emphasis on the 48% who rejected  President Erdogan's proposal to extend his powers in Turkey's recent referendum. In fact, there was so much emphasis on this minority and Simpson's expressed belief that President Erdogan must listen to them, having only received a slim majority thus a questionable mandate, that I suspected an ulterior motive, a veiled message specifically designed for a British audience and, in particular, a pro-Brexit one.

In my view, he was mischievously using the tenuous and entirely coincidental parallels between Brexit and Erdogan's referendum victory to confirm his own prejudices and question the Leave vote's legitimacy. He wanted his audience to believe that last summer's victory was some kind of moral equivalent to Erdogan's rigged vote and corrupt, autocratic regime.

The fact that 48% rejected Erdogan's argument, the exact same as the percentage who wanted to remain in the EU, was too delicious a coincidence to ignore. He thus set out to extract greater meaning from it than it deserved. If Erdogan must listen, so too must the Brexiteers, it said. 

Okay, I thought, perhaps I'm the one extracting too much meaning from a short news report by an experienced and highly respected journalist. Perhaps I'm suffering from 'reds-under-the-bed' syndrome. But then I read John Simpson's article in this week's New Statesman. I wasn't imagining it, after all. My suspicions were correct. On this occasion, though, he was less subtle. He explicitly, unashamedly used Erdogan to denounce and delegitimise Brexit: 

'It's been impossible not to be reminded of...Brexit...during the past week or so,' he said. 'Like the Brexiteers, he only just managed to squeak through; like them, he and his allies are shouting loudly about the will of the people and the duty of everyone else to accept the result. And like them, his instinctive response in victory is to be aggressive.'

So let's get this right: Brexiteers are indistinguishable from Erdogan's administration and supporters. They crush dissent, rig elections and play lip-service to democracy whilst undermining its defining precepts.

Pull the other one, John. You're meant to be an intelligent man. The only aggression in this country is coming from the forever whinging, forever whining Remoaners who control the airwaves through the all-powerful BBC - a fact ironically demonstrated by you this week. I don't see Erdogan's opponents controlling Turkey's primary media outlet, do you? Nor do I see thousands of Brexiteers marching on Parliament and angrily accusing their opponents of racism and xenophobia. The amusing irony is that John Simpson has more in common with President Erdogan than any Brexiteer. He has used his privileged position to make entirely false comparisons and angrily denounce his opponents. Hard to believe and very alarming indeed.