• I WAS quietly enjoying a couple of “emulsified high-fat offal tubes”, egg, tomato, mushrooms and chips while reading the Tribune when I came across Stephen Horne’s excell­ent letter in which he mentioned that we’ve had 40 years of lies and smears about the EU, (The leavers have given us 40 years of misrepresentation and lies, November 2).

Of course, “emulsified high-fat offal tubes”, or sausages, was a joke from Yes Minister about bureaucratic meddling by Brussels. One of the longest-running complaints has been over the metrification of our weights and measures.

Metrification was actually introduced by Harold Wilson’s government in 1965, but is incorrectly associated with the EU, or EEC. The complaint is often coupled with hackneyed tropes about “bananas being too bendy” or even, as Boris Johnson alleged during the referendum campaign, “you cannot sell bananas in bunches of more than two or three”.

Johnson built his career on telling porkies about the EU, making up stories headlined “Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that euro-manure smells the same”, “Threat to British pink sausages” and “Snails are fish, says EU”. He wrote about plans to standardise condom sizes and ban prawn cocktail-flavour crisps.

Other lies proliferated, such as “Queen may be dropped from UK passports”, “Corgis to be banned by EU”, “Revealed: EU’s secret plot to ban Britain” and, of course, “Euro threat to kill the British banger”, from The Sun.

So, how to judge true stories about the EU? Brexiteers tell us the EU has stifled our growth but the Institute for New Economic Thinking tells us that, since we joined in 1973, “per capita GDP of the UK economy grew by 103 per cent, exceeding the 97 per cent growth of the US.

Within the EU, the UK edged out Germany (99 per cent) and clobbered France (74 per cent)”. Far from being held back, our economy has doubled in the EU.

RICHARD ROSSER
Richmond Grove, N1