Enough Already!


There's a saying that a lie becomes truth if repeated often enough, well the story about EU and the eggs gathered so much momentum that it had people who should know better believing it without doing any sodding research. It has actually reached the stage where the EU has had to put out an official press release explaining something that was already in a press release but which had been ignored by the feverish right wing press in the U.K (and the stupid is as stupid does BBC) without anybody even thinking about for a minute.

Now I don't blame Iain Dale or Span for picking up on the story but it's the second time in two days that a story has spread around the interweb and media outlets without anybody actually going back to the source. Everybody involved has picked up on the article in The Grocer magazine and nobody did the very journalistic basic exercise of double checking the source. So, for the record here is the statement from the EU:

"MEPs are neither trying to ban the sale of eggs by the dozen nor the sale or marketing of Nutella. MEP Renate Sommer, who is steering legislation on food labelling through the European Parliament, said, "There will be no changes to selling foods by number. Selling eggs by the dozen, for example, will not be banned."

Selling eggs by the dozen will not be illegal under the terms of the amendments adopted by the European Parliament to EU food labelling proposals. Labels will still be able to indicate the number of food items in a pack, whether of eggs, bread rolls or fish fingers.

Reports that claim the new rules will not allow both the weight and the quantity to be displayed are also wrong. The new food labelling regulation does not affect existing EU rules on the size of eggs: There are four official sizes of eggs: very large (73g and over), large (63g to 73g), medium (53g to 63g), and small (under 53g) - this will not change.

The proposed legislation will only be approved if and when it is agreed by the European Parliament and EU Member States. Parliament voted a series of amendments on food labelling legislation on 16 June in first reading. Discussions are ongoing and no agreement is expected before mid 2011. The rules would come into effect three years later for businesses (or five years for small businesses) to allow them time to adapt, so this will not affect supermarkets and grocers until 2014 at the earliest."

Now that statement has had to be issued because nobody had gone back to check the source i.e the EU before publishing the story. Now I don't even blame The Grocer because a monthly magazine can be produced up to six weeks before its cover date but surely somebody on one of the newspapers who picked this up and ran with it could have done some follow-up work. Don't Fleet Street (or its modern equivalent) employ junior staff anymore?

Two days a report began to gather momentum that the 2.5% increase in VAT announced in the Budget would lead to 200,000 job losses - this it was claimed was because when VAT had increased in the Netherlands unemployment rose by 20,000 and the working population of the UK is ten times that of the small country to our South East and it therefore followed...... It's complete bollocks, in fact so annoyed was I by this story becoming 'fact' that I have written to the person responsible asking for an explanation. The story has now appeared on several websites, mainly employment companies but crucially the shadow employment minister has also quoted the figure.

The figure of 20,000 is based on an economic 'what-if?' model, not real life. It began as a white paper by the EU called 'The Social Consequences of change in VAT.' It didn't take much digging to find it, and in fact the paper concludes that unemployment levels could be anything between zero and 20,000 and that "under the assumption of budget neutrality employment effects as a result of VAT changes are small."

This really gets me annoyed and is a symptom of the age we live in where proper investigative journalism no longer exists and where one source is regarded as the only source. Anybody with even an iota of intelligence would have smelled a rat when they came across the table that presented three scenarios and saw that the U.K had VAT rates of 13.1 15 and 18%, now when was that exactly because I've been in the accountancy profession for 33 years this August and I'll be buggered if I can remember VAT being charged at 13.1%!

By the way, I love the idea that somebody should consider banning Nutella, come on people please.