Remoaners: Stop trying to scare us all to death

YOU can always tell when someone has run out of rational argument. They resort to screeching hysterically that unless you do exactly what they want, we are all going to dIE!!! do you hear me, you poor, deluded fools? dIE!!! I tell you! dIE!!!

Remoaners lost touch with reality months ago. But now they’ve left the planet completely. Their latest apocalyptic scare story is that cancer patients will die in droves when Britain leaves the EU. Presumably, kicking and screaming in agony.

The Royal College of Radiologists took a day off from complaining about the ‘savage Tory cuts’ to warn that post-Brexit the treatment of 10,000 patients will be put at risk.

This ridiculous and, frankly, disgraceful piece of scaremongering is based on an entirely false assertion that an outfit called Euratom — which regulates the nuclear industry — will ban the export to Britain of medical isotopes used in cancer scans.

No, they won’t. This is a blatant lie. The Royal College of Radiologists know it’s a lie. And so do the politicians who have seized upon the ‘story’ to shore up their campaign to stop Brexit. The agency places no restriction on exports to countries outside the EU. Even if it did, what’s to prevent us from producing our own isotopes, or importing them from other nuclear nations such as the U.S? Nothing at all. So it’s not news, it’s noise. That didn’t stop fanatically pro-EU newspapers pouncing upon it.

The London Evening Standard, now edited by embittered EU fanatic George Osborne, splashed the ‘ news’ on its front page, headlined: CANCER PATIENTS IN BREXIT SCARE.

Even for the architect of Project Fear, this was a new low.

PREdICTABLy,too, the BBC followed suit, making it the main item on Radio 4’s World At One programme yesterday.

Step forward Tory MP Anna Soubry, the Remoaners’ resident madwoman, who has managed to get her knickers in a terrible tangle over Euratom.

Since the referendum, radio and television producers have had her on speed dial. Soubry has been on all channels, all day and all of the night, peddling increasingly deranged doomsday scenarios about the scorched landscape which will be post-Brexit Britain.

How the heart sinks when the Soubry siren sounds. It’s a signal that you’re about to have your intelligence roundly insulted for the next few minutes.

My guess is that up until a couple of days ago, she’d never heard of Euratom. Still, when has that ever stopped her? yesterday, she was even prepared to scare the life out of people with potentially terminal illnesses to score a cheap political point. Let’s hope she doesn’t know anyone with cancer.

How would she feel if Brexiteers tried to scare them into believing they were all going to dIE!!! unless Britain leaves the EU? Precisely. It is a measure of the depths of their desperation that the Remoaners are prepared to seize any stick to beat Brexit, however fallacious.

I’ve been documenting their poisonous propaganda for months. Back in February, this column appeared under the headline: ‘don’t blame it on the sunshine, blame it on the Brexit’ — a play on The Jacksons’ old disco hit.

That followed a raft of absurd scare stories, accusing the vote to Leave of being responsible for everything from rising petrol prices and a shortage of iceberg lettuces

shrinking Toblerones and a reduction from a dozen to ten in the number of fish fingers in a packet. Since the election they’ve been cranking up the rhetoric. Some of it is hilarious, some less so.

All of it is based on the simple principle: never let the truth get in the way of a good scare story.

yesterday’s Evening Standard was a classic. Forget about the tedious gloating over Theresa May’s self- inflicted political implosion, or the utterly predictable pro-Brussels puffery which has become that paper’s stock-intrade under Boy George.

What made me laugh out loud was a report that an upmarket gastropub, frequented by Nigella Lawson and food writer Tom Parker Bowles (Camilla’s boy), was closing down because of — and I quote — ‘a disastrous slump in trade since the Brexit vote’.

Funnily enough, the pub had been there since 1829, so it had managed to survive the best part of 150 years before we ever joined what became the EU.

Maybe the punters just decided that the £10.50 they were being charged for a plate of bangers and mash these days was a bit steep (even with a red wine jus).

Whatever the real reason, proprietor Richard Fulford-Smith finds it convenient to blame Brexit, secure in the knowledge he’ll find plenty gullible enough to believe him.

He said takings had dropped since the referendum and he’d had increasing difficulty recruiting staff. Nothing to do with the 50 per cent increase in rent and above-inflation rise in business rates, then? Was Brexit also responsible for the closure of the other three pubs in his group, too? We’re not told.

No such sympathy, either, for the thousands of other, largely unfashionable, working- class boozers that have been forced out of business since the smoking ban was introduced ten years ago this month.

Interfering politicians and rapacious breweries, ramping up rents and flogging off pubs to property developers, have been responsible for most of the closures. Still, far easier to blame ‘Brexit’. First they came for the pubs, then they came for our pizza parlours. Another daft scare story this week came from the boss of a pizza chain, who warned that Brexit ‘is already affecting the availability of skilled European restaurant staff’.

david Page claimed the vote had hit Italian and Greek chefs ‘hard emotionally’ and made them more difficult to recruit. He predicted, you guessed, shortages and higher prices.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. you can’t move for pizza bars on our High Streets. One seems to open every time a traditional business closes. And why drag the Greeks into it? Round where I live, there are dozens of thriving Greek — and Turkish — restaurants. I haven’t heard that any of them are planning to shut up shop and leave Britain after March 2019. Why would they?

Plenty of Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants everywhere, too. The last time anyone looked, neither China nor Vietnam were members of the EU.

ASFOR being unable to find ‘skilled’ staff, how much skill does it take to make a pizza? Most of the big chains use frozen dough and pre-sliced ingredients anyway.

If there is a shortage of skilled chefs, it’s in Indian restaurants, who have been told by politicians to train up Romanians and Bulgarians. At least once we’re free of the EU shackles, we can end the restriction on bringing over proper curry chefs from the sub-Continent.

Oh, and while we’re talking food, the farming lobby — which just

lurves EU subsidies — warned yesterday that Britain could be flooded with cheap lamb chops from New Zealand after Brexit.

And that’s a bad thing, how exactly? There are dozens of these silly scare stories doing the rounds, most of which can be ignored or laughed out of court.

But when the Remoaners resort to telling cancer patients they’re going to dIE!!! because of Brexit, they’re not just scraping the barrel, they’re consigning the last vestiges of common decency to the political sewer.

They should be utterly ashamed of themselves and stop trying to scare us all to death.