Monday 25 March 2024

The rise and rise of the political liar

Gerhard Schnyder publishes his ‘Brexit impact tracker’ every few weeks, usually with interesting observations about the project which has divided the country and continues to inflect damage on just about every sector of the economy. This week he focuses on how lies have become an acceptable feature of current political discourse, weaving it into Kemi Badenoch’s claims of having negotiated ‘trade deals’ with individual US states, which are no such thing, merely non-binding memorandums of understanding that we could have signed as an EU member state. 

She is a prime example, telling gullible readers of The Daily Express that “Brexit has reignited Britain’s standing as a global trading nation.” The trade secretary has also told MPs that talks with Canada on extending temporary arrangements were 'ongoing' when she had personally stopped them four days before.

She has been accused of misleading parliament over the reasons for dismissing Henry Staunton as chairman of the Post Office. Nevertheless, she is one of the candidates to be the next leader. It hasn’t damaged her prospects at all.

Even the person at the head of the pack to take over from Sunak, Penny Mordant, is guilty of it. She insisted in 2016 that Britain didn’t have a veto over Turkey joining the EU. Of course, Johnson, Gove, Mordant, Cummings, and the Vote Leave bus started the party’s journey down the slippery slope during the referendum campaign but others have now discovered you can lie with impunity. That genie is never going back into the bottle.  Truth has been devalued to junk status.

So Schnyder is certainly right about lies. Ministers now routinely mislead Parliament without repercussions. Mendacity has become so commonplace that nobody bothers.

He doesn’t mention social media although I for one am convinced this is at the heart of the rise of lies, misinformation, and disinformation. Everyone has become their own publisher and ‘fact’ checker which means you tend to get incredibly outlandish comments appearing online and endlessly repeated alongside factual reports from respected news organisations and official sources. So now nobody believes anything that doesn’t reinforce their own beliefs, right or wrong. I plead as guilty to it as anyone else.

There are thousands of social media users, plenty of them decent and well-meaning, whose hearts are in the right place but they're just as happy to put out falsehoods as Putin’s troll factory in St Petersburg. They do it inadvertently or for good reasons while Russia and others do it knowingly, deliberately, and with malice but the result is the same. Nobody knows what’s true anymore.

And now we have Artificial intelligence (AI) which is rapidly destroying the old adage about the camera not lying. We can’t even rely on that any longer. Images are easily manipulated to provide whatever 'reality' you like and bad actors are already very adept at it. 

This morning I noted the UK government is expected to link China to a cyber attack in August 2021 on the Electoral Commission's (EC) website where it obtained copies of the UK electoral register. You and I are on it and I assume are now wondering what Beijing intends to do with it. The Commission says it had no "impact on any elections nor anyone's registration status."  Why did they do it then?

Mr Schynder also touches on Lee Anderson's cry about wanting his country back and connects it to Badenoch’s reference to "a Britannia that rules the waves" which he says illustrates a key feature of Brexitism, a belief in "British exceptionalism and supremacy as illustrated by a glorified past."  He says - rightly - that this is rapidly becoming the only thing left of the whole project.

It’s time someone said enough is enough to Brexiteers, Schnyder suggests, you’ve had eight years to deliver and have comprehensively failed. However, many of those who voted for Brexit and have grown disillusioned with the Tories haven’t switched to Labour but to Reform who are even now nipping at the heels of the Conservatives in the latest polls. They are one of the reasons Sunak is going to be annihilated in the next election.

But more than that, it shows there is a significant section of the population who think Reform should be given a chance to try and restore Britain’s great power status using the newfound freedoms of Brexit. Of course, Tice and Farage would be faced with exactly the same issues as Sunak. They might try more radical solutions to which the markets would react even more badly than they did to Truss and Kwarteng in 2022 and would ultimately fail. 

And when that happened, no doubt a smaller minority would want to give an even more extreme party another go. This is how countries descend into fascism.

The West is being led down this path by America and Trump whose strings are being pulled by Putin.

The former Employment Secretary under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich, has an explanation showing how close Trump is to turning the USA into a fascist state in five steps using something called Project 2025:

Step 5 is control of the press. Trump has relentlessly attacked the mainstream media over the years to such an extent that his supporters now believe he - probably the most untruthful person on earth in its entire history - is their most trusted source of information.

Let's be frank, there are plenty of people on the right and in both the Conservative and Reform parties who think Trump is great or at the very least preferable to Biden.  Worrying isn't it?

Polling

To try and reassure us, Schnyder points to the latest polling showing the Tories on 19% of voting intentions and Reform on 15% giving a total of 34% intending to vote for far-right parties, which he says is nearly 10% less than during the 2019 GE.

More importantly in our FPTP system, it means the right-wing vote is divided and neither party is going to get anything more than a token number of seats. The Tory party may not even be the main opposition. Is this a good thing?  Probably not. When extremists are denied a voice in parliament they tend to go outside and we could all regret that.

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