“Politicians avoid responsibility by blaming Europe.”

The claim asserts that politicians avoid responsibility by blaming Europe (the EU) — i.e., that EU membership provides a convenient scapegoat that lets politicians deflect blame for unpopular outcomes onto Brussels. **Assessing the evidence around the interview date (December 2011):** A Guardian commentary from November 2011 explicitly describes a deliberate "blame Europe" strategy by David Cameron and George Osborne, noting that "the political beauty for the Conservatives of blaming Europe is big" — it goes down well with Tory activists, frames their EU engagement as that of "candid friends," and provides "a ready-made and not entirely specious excuse for the failure of the government's economic strategy." This is direct contemporary evidence that blaming the EU was a recognized and deliberate tactic for deflecting domestic responsibility at the time Farage made the claim. Multiple subsequent sources reinforce this pattern. Jean-Claude Juncker (2017) complained that "Brussels" had been "constantly blamed in British political discourse for things for which the EU is not responsible." Michel Barnier criticized Farage himself for "scapegoating Brussels to explain all the British difficulties." Analysis from Africa Analyst and other commentators documented how successive UK governments found it "politically expedient to blame the EU for unpopular policies or domestic challenges," even when the UK had played a role in shaping the relevant EU rules. On the academic side, Hobolt and Tilley's 2014 book *Blaming Europe?* (LSE/Oxford University Press) found that "neither politicians nor the media assign much blame to the EU" across the EU as a whole. However, their data was drawn primarily from the 2009 European Parliament elections and covered all 27 member states — the UK may well have been an outlier, and the political context shifted significantly during the eurozone crisis of 2011. Their work also acknowledges that "politicians at both levels may exploit the existence of complex institutions... to shift blame to other institutions." **Assessment:** The causal mechanism is straightforward and well-documented: EU membership creates a multilevel governance structure where responsibility is genuinely diffuse, making it possible for national politicians to attribute unpopular outcomes to "Brussels" rather than themselves. Contemporary reporting from 2011 confirms this was a recognized political strategy at the time Farage spoke. The academic evidence complicates the picture somewhat by suggesting that, across the EU as a whole, politicians do not systematically blame the EU as much as one might expect — but the UK context, particularly during the eurozone crisis, appears to fit Farage's observation. The claim is broadly supported as a description of political behavior, though it is a generalization rather than a precisely quantified phenomenon. Sources: - The Guardian, "Cameron's 'blame Europe' strategy is full of holes – but so far it's working" (November 2011), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/10/cameron-blame-europe-strategy-eurozone - Hobolt, Sara B. and Tilley, James, *Blaming Europe? Responsibility Without Accountability in the European Union* (Oxford University Press, 2014), https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/86734/ - The Guardian, "UK can't blame EU for problems that led to Brexit, says Juncker" (March 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/24/uk-cant-blame-eu-for-problems-that-led-to-brexit-says-juncker - LBC, "Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier tells LBC it's time to stop blaming Brussels for UK's problems," https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/michel-barnier-stop-blaming-brussels-5Hjdc4b_2/ - Africa Analyst, "Before Brexit, Everything Was Blamed on the EU," https://africaanalyst.com/before-brexit-everything-was-blamed-on-the-eu/