Punchy stuff from Channel 4’s FactCheck, who have accused Boris Johnson of lying in his resignation letter about EU safety regulations. Would be pretty embarrassing if Factcheck got it wrong…

Boris wrote:

“If a country cannot pass a law to save the lives of female cyclists — when that proposal is supported at every level of UK Government — then I don’t see how that country can truly be called independent.”

FactCheck took exception to his assertion that the UK government supported the proposal, telling their readers: “he’s wrong… he’s left out some key details… the UK government explicitly did not support the proposals”. FactCheck emailed Team Boris telling them: “as you’ll know, the government did not support the EU regulation on the matter”. Yet it turns out it is FactCheck who “left out some key details”…

In 2013, the European Commission published the proposed change to the regulation. FactCheck are right that the UK government initially signalled it would oppose the change – indeed in January 2014 Boris expressed his concern about the UK position. Yet what FactCheck don’t mention is that the UK government’s actual decision, when it came to the European Council vote in April 2015, was to vote in favour. The UK government did support it…

So when FactCheck said to Boris that “the government did not support the EU regulation on the matter”, they omitted to mention that, actually, it did. Boris was calling for this change to be made a year before the EU passed it – if the UK was a sovereign nation in control of its laws we could have implemented it ourselves. Yet another example of the media’s blind hatred of Boris resulting in basic factual errors… 

NB. Of course this is the same Channel 4 whose editor last year liked a tweet calling Boris a “c**t”.

UPDATE:

.@GuidoFawkes – You say we omit UK’s European Council 2015 vote in favour of the law.

Our article states: “The European Council, which includes representation from the UK government, later adopted the directive”

Please amend. Regards @FactCheckhttps://t.co/eDtfA4g1IV

— C4 News FactCheck (@FactCheck) July 11, 2018

Doubling down on their stupidity. The European Council is made up of heads of government of the EU’s 28 countries. Its job is to provide political direction. It is the Council of the EU which deals with legislation.  They are two different institutions.