Wrong, wrong, wrong
From Christopher Booker Sir: No critic likes to be caught not having read a book he has reviewed, but John Laughland (Letters, 13/20 December) only confirms my point. In defending himself over our book The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union, he actually repeats several of the 22 factual errors and misrepresentations contained in his original 'review'. Not only has he not read the book properly, it seems he does not even read what he himself has written. He supports his claim that we said there were 2 million pages of EU 'legislation' by quoting our statement that by 1997 the EU had published nearly 2 million pages of 'documents'. 'Legislation' and 'documents' are different things. Had he read our book he would have seen that we twice quote the Commission's latest figure for legislation as '97,000 pages'.
I'm afraid Mr Laughland has let down Spectator readers on two counts. Firstly he concealed that a significant reason why he might have wished to discredit our book is that it exposes the historically dubious basis on which his own book The Tainted Source attributes the intellectual ancestry of the EU to the Nazis. Secondly, by so grossly misrepresenting our own account, he may have dissuaded people from read
ing a serious work of history which contains much new documentary material they might have found useful and interesting.
Christopher Booker
Litton, Somerset
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