The EconomistDecember 7th 2019 Britain 35W
inston churchillonce said that “in wartime truth is so
precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard
of lies.” If Britain’s election is anything to go by, these days lies are
so precious that they need to be attended by a bodyguard of further
lies. This election has been marinated in mendacity: big lies and
small lies; quarter truths and pseudo-facts; distortion, dissem-
bling and disinformation; and digital skulduggery on an industri-
al scale. The public is so disillusioned with the political process
that, when a member of the public asked Boris Johnson during a
televised debate whether he valued truth, the audience burst into
laughter. Mr Johnson is the favourite by a substantial margin.
A popular parlour game in political circles is to debate which
party is the biggest liar. The answer is that the Tories are probably
the worst offenders and the Liberal Democrats probably the least
bad, though they have a troubling habit of producing fake local
newspapers. But this misses the larger point: that both the main
contenders have turned disinformation into an art. They both start
with big lies—the Tories that Brexit can be delivered quickly and
painlessly, and Labour that its gigantic spending plans can be
funded by a handful of billionaires (who anyway got rich by steal-
ing from the poor). They then reinforce big lies with smaller ones.
The Tories claim they are building 40 new hospitals. Labour insists
the Tories are planning to privatise the National Health Service.
Of course, both big lies and small lies have always been part of
politics. Anthony Eden told a barefaced lie to the House of Com-
mons in 1956, when he claimed that Britain and France had not col-
luded with Israel in the Suez invasion. Edward Heath sowed the
seeds of Britain’s current problems in 1972, when he insisted that
entry to the Common Market would not involve any loss of sover-
eignty. But there is something new about what is going on in this
election, and not just in terms of the sheer number of lies. It is a
post-truth campaign. The parties are behaving as if truth doesn’t
matter at all—they don’t regard themselves as lying, because they
exist in a world of spin. They continue to repeat the same menda-
cious talking-points even if they have been revealed to be bogus.
They accuse each other of peddling “fake news”, while peddling it
themselves. Their outriders release weird rumours into the politi-
cal atmosphere: one doctored newspaper article, primarily sharedby Labour supporters, falsely accuses Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem
leader, of slaughtering squirrels in her garden.
Why has Britain gone through the post-truth door? Some of the
blame lies with new technology. The most egregious examples of
distortion have taken place online. During one leaders’ debate the
Conservative Party renamed its Twitter account factcheckukand
used it to pump out partisan messages disguised as independent
evaluations. The internet has changed the rules of the political
game, weakening the power of gatekeepers in the old media (who
are bound by professional ethics and election rules) and opening
the battleground to cranks and fraudsters. It has also allowed cam-
paign headquarters to spin different tales to voters in different
parts of the country. Tory digital ads targeted at Leave-voting areas
such as Rother Valley (67% Leave) emphasise the party’s hard line
on Brexit, whereas those targeting places such as St Albans (62%
Remain) avoid the subject.
Some of the blame lies with the two main candidates. Jeremy
Corbyn is immune to the truth because he is in the grip of an all-
encompassing ideology about the evils of capitalism and imperi-
alism, and the wonders of socialism and people power. Mr John-
son is indifferent to the truth because he is in the grip of an all-con-
suming ambition. He has twice been sacked for lying—once by the
Timesover a made-up quote and once by his party over an affair—
but has nevertheless made it to the top. He is so worried about be-
ing held to account for his various claims that (so far and in con-
trast to other party leaders) he has dodged an interview with An-
drew Neil, the bbc’s most forensic interviewer. His slipperiness
has been given a sinister twist by his chief adviser, Dominic Cum-
mings, a Machiavellian ideologue who propagated the lie that
Brexit would generate £350m ($460m) a week for the nhs.Truth versus tribalism
But there is also a deeper force at work: the triumph of political
tribalism. In the Blair-Cameron era, politics was primarily about
policy. Politicians argued about what measure of economic open-
ness would stimulate growth or, after the financial crash, what de-
gree of austerity would keep the markets calm. Organisations like
the Office for National Statistics spoke with authority. Today it is
about tribalism as much as economics. The Tories are using Brexit
to win over Labour voters, while Labour is reasserting its identity
as the party of the working class. Experts have lost much of their
credibility with the public in large part because they are seen pri-
marily as members of a tribe (the London-based cosmopolitan
elite) rather than objective commentators. Even before this elec-
tion began its corrosive work, only 40% of voters surveyed by the
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said they trusted the
news. That number is much lower among working-class and
Brexit-supporting voters.
The combination of an epidemic of lies and a climate of mis-
trust is proving noxious. It distorts the selection process. The more
voters assume all politicians are liars, the more likely they are to
choose a liar to represent them. Mr Johnson is in many ways the
ideal politician for a post-truth age, because nobody expects him
to keep his word. He exists in a world of us-versus-them and of
emotion rather than reason, a world in which cheering people up
is more important than depressing them with facts. Liberal de-
mocracy depends on people doing something extraordinary:
choosing a handful of people to represent their interests and views
in Parliament. Without the glue of trust and truth, that extraordi-
nary process will sooner or later come unstuck. 7Bagehot Liar, liar
Truth has been the first casualty of this election