Far right

If you’ve taken part in enough online discussions with a diehard Brexiter, a Trump supporter or any other species of fascist, you may have noticed certain phrases cropping up with tedious regularity. The wording doesn’t vary much; it’s almost as if the phrases were lifted directly from a playbook – or a Paul Joseph Watson tweet.

The thing is, they’re all rubbish. While some of their lines are superficially valid, they’re all predicated on either on a logical fallacy, or false information. And even though most of these lines of reasoning have been demolished time and time again, there are still plenty of basement-dwellers smugly regurgitating them as if they’re the last word.

So for those of you still fighting the good fight, I thought I’d put together a handy reference guide – a liberal playbook, if you will – setting out exactly why the far right are wrong, on basically everything, and how you should respond.

“Stop trying to overturn the democratic result, you anti-democratic democracy-hater!”

Referendums are about the closest thing we have to true democracy – government by the people. However, the western world worked out long ago that true democracy is not a very effective system. For one thing, we don’t all have the time to be voting on every single issue. For another, people aren’t, on the whole, very well informed about things. This is why we have politicians; we need people who know their stuff, or can designate other people (the civil service) to find out about the stuff. That way, they can make what they think to be the right decision based on the best evidence available.

The belief that a view must be correct because the majority of people hold it is a fallacy called the argumentum ad populum, about which I’ve already written at length. In brief, crowds are not famed for their wisdom. You think a million people can’t be wrong? Well, there are 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and they sure as hell can’t all be right.

For this reason, the system of government we’ve ended up with in the west is not true democracy, but parliamentary democracy, under which the people appoint representatives (MPs) to make decisions on their behalf. And as systems of government go, it’s worked pretty well. Most of the world has tried to emulate it.

For much of its history, the UK has fought shy of referenda, for the exact reasons above. They’ve also been banned in Germany since Hitler used them to arrogate so much power to himself. Plebiscites violate the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.

In referendums on matters of great constitutional importance, a supermajority is usually required – a minimum turnout, and a minimum threshold for change (say 66%). This makes the result binding. But no such parameters were set for the Brexit vote – a simple majority only was required – which means it was only advisory. Someone (*cough* Steve Baker MP *cough*), somehow, lowered the bar for a Brexit vote, but then insisted that the result be imposed as if the bar had been higher.

That, plus a bit of gerrymandering – banning 16- and 17-year-olds from voting, plus EU citizens and UK expats (what was the criterion for eligibility? Residence, or nationality? How can you justify excluding people on both?) – was enough to drag Leave over the line.

As news emerges every day of further suspected tampering with the result – funding restrictions broken, illegal cooperation between campaign groups, Russia-sponsored disinformation campaigns, harvesting of data and microtargeting of voters – one has to ask: was this really democracy in action?

Democracy of any stripe only works when the decision-makers are properly informed. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the level of information going into the June 23 vote was risible. The Leave campaign was a snot-soaked tissue of lies, and far too many people swallowed it.

“But Remain lied too.”

The EU referendum campaign is likely to go down as one of the dirtiest of all time. But the hardcore Brexiters insist that, since both sides were as bad as each other, the Leavers can be excused their shameless lies.

First off, most of the Remain “lies” weren’t lies at all. Most were simply attempts to predict what would happen if the UK left the EU. Some may turn out to be inaccurate (although that looks increasingly unlikely), but that doesn’t make them lies; it makes them inaccurate predictions. Why would you even campaign for Remain if you didn’t believe the consequences would be awful?

Leave, meanwhile, were cynically and systematically mendacious, saying things they knew to be untrue. Turkey is not about to join. The EU didn’t ban bendy bananas. We don’t always get outvoted in the European parliament, and we sure as hell won’t have £350m a week to spend on the NHS. (There’s a more comprehensive, authoritative list here.)

“What happened to world war three? Instant recession? Austerity budget?”

Contrary to popular belief, David Cameron, almighty dickwad that he is, never claimed that a Brexit vote would lead to an apocalyptic global conflict. That was, in fact, Leave campaigner Boris Johnson, straw-manning Cameron’s much more reasonable point. (Don’t just read the headline – read the story. Idiot subeditors.) Although it’s salutary to note that within hours of questions arising over the sovereignty of Gibraltar, a former Tory cabinet minister was on a war footing.

Most of those who forecast a recession said it would happen after we left the EU, not the day after we voted to leave it. That prediction is looking increasingly safe.

As for the austerity budget, you may or may not have noticed that the man who threatened to impose it was sacked.

“We’re leaving! Get over it!”

The “There is no alternative” fallacy in action. As often as not, this is literally the only argument Brexiters have, and it’s not even an argument.

Of course Brexit can be stopped; if it couldn’t, your tone wouldn’t be so histrionic. There are a number of ongoing legal cases, and we might yet get a referendum on the exit deal with an option to remain. Even if we do leave, there’s nothing to stop us rejoining soon afterwards, and the demographics suggest that’s exactly what we’ll do.

“You lost. Suck it up.”

If this is Brexit (or Trump) we’re talking about, and you’re not Arron Banks or Donald Trump or any of their billionaire friends, so did you. We’re all going to be poorer, many of the brightest and best minds are already leaving or cancell
ing plans to work here, and the UK and US’s global reputations have taken a hammering from which they could take decades to recover.

So, as long as there’s any prospect of Brexit being reversed and Trump being impeached, or at least of the damage being reduced, that’s what all true patriots – those who stay, anyway – are going to continue to fight for. Resisters gonna resist. Remoaners gonna remoan. It’s called democracy.

Besides, the ardent Brexiters didn’t shut up for the 40 years of our EU membership, and arch Republicans bitched about Obama from day one. Why should the losers this time round conduct themselves any differently?

“Now we’ll be free to trade with the world!”

We are already free to trade with the world. Who do you think accounts for the other 56% of our exports?

“They need us more than we need them.”

I find it hard to believe that there are still people out there still regurgitating this bilge, but apparently there are –

– so here goes:

The UK exports around £240bn worth of goods to the EU every year. The other EU member states, meanwhile, export £290bn of goods to the UK (2015 figures).

This means the UK has what economists call a trade deficit with the EU (of £50bn). We buy from them more than they buy from us. And Ray, along with a few others of Leave’s clueless wang elite, seems to conclude from this (after some nudging by the Daily Express) that the EU has too much to lose to permit trade barriers to spring up.

True, the loss of our custom would be an annoyance to the continentals, and doubtless they would rather avoid it. But however glorious our empire may once have been, Ray, we are far from essential.

See, it’s not the absolute figures that matter, here, Ray; it’s the relative ones. The £240bn works out at 44% of the UK’s total exports. The £290bn, meanwhile, is just 10% of the EU’s total. Who’s going to suffer more if trade ceases, Ray? The country that just lost half its trade, or the 27 countries that lost a tenth of theirs? (Especially when you consider that they have dozens of pre-existing free trade agreements in place with which they can replace our custom, while we will have none, and that much of our services industry is relocating to EU countries as we speak. Come Brexit Day, our exports will already be significantly lower.)

Let’s run with an analogy you might understand, Ray. Say you join a club with 27 members, bringing the total to 28. The time comes for the whip-round for the Christmas do. The other 27 members put in £3-£4 each, raising a total of £100. When the hat reaches you, what amount do you put in? By your bizarre reasoning, because “you” and “everyone else” are somehow equivalent entities, you’d put in £100.

The UK and the EU are not equivalent entities, Ray. The population of the UK is 64 million people. The population of the 27 other EU states is 444 million. They can spread the pain more thinly. A cessation in trade between us would damage the EU, but it would crucify the UK.

Oh, and while I’m here: the German automotive industry, despite what the Express may have told you, does not even set German foreign policy, much less that of the EU. Here’s evidence, from the, er, Express.

Besides, if businesses really have so much political clout, how come the UK voted to leave despite the fact that twice as many British businesses were in favour of remaining in the EU as against it?

“We’re taking back control from the EU dictatorship! SOVRINNTYYYY!”

The UK was never a subject of the European Union. It was a fully fledged member – and among the most influential of them, to boot.

The UK had a hand in drawing up most EU legislation, and a power of veto over the stuff it didn’t like. We were very rarely on the losing side of a vote, and we always had the threat of leaving as a last resort. (Now that we’ve played that card and are on our way out, we no longer have any such clout.) It wasn’t about 27 other countries telling the UK what to do; it was about 28 countries deciding together what to do, and then abiding by that decision.

In any case, the legislation passed by the EU was generally trivial, technical stuff. Laws about industry regulations, manufacturing standards, safety protocols, environmental targets. Little of it was controversial (unless you were a Daily Mail leader writer); it was oil for the wheels of commerce. We’ll still need to pass equivalent laws in our own country – by ourselves. Now we’ll be footing the bill for that (this work accounted for a lot of our annual membership fee).

In no real sense is anyone in the UK “taking back control”. We’re simply taking it from one set of faceless bureaucrats (the EU commission and parliament) and handing it to another (Westminster – to all intents and purposes, the Tory party). And of those two sets of bureaucrats, I know which I believe has the interests of ordinary working people closer to their heart.

“But look at what the EU has done to Greece!”

Greece’s financial problems date back to long before its membership of the euro. Its economy was in poor shape when it joined the then European Community in 1981, a fact that successive governments went to great pains to conceal. Structurally weak and plagued by corruption and waste, it would have tanked during the economic crash of 2008 whether it had been in the EU or not. Things may not have been managed as well as possible since, but the fact remains that Greece would be in just as much financial trouble, if not more, if it had stayed outside the EU.

In any case, Greece’s fate is irrelevant to any discussion about the UK’s place in Europe. The UK has not adopted the euro, has a stronger economy, and was much better placed to ride out the recession, as a quick glance at any statistics will tell you. While Greece has record youth unemployment, the UK is currently enjoying its highest employment levels ever.

Finally, if the EU really has made things so bad in Greece, how do you explain the fact that the majority of Greeks consistently want to remain a member?

“Trade with the EU is declining!”

No, it isn’t.

“Ask the young people in Europe what they think of the EU!”

The Pew Research Centre did, in July 2017. Across the 28 EU nations, support for the union among 18-29-year-olds stood at 73%. All other surveys of the same subject have reported similar figures.

“The floods are the EU’s fault!”

The recent (February 2020) flooding across the west of England and Wales prompted a predictable outpouring of complaints that EU laws prevented the UK from dredging its rivers, which would have alleviated the problem. Two points.

1) Dredging of waterways falls within the purview of member states, and in the UK’s case is a matter for the Environment Agency. The EU Water Framework Directive (2000) does specify some restrictions on its application – if the operations pose a significant threat to local wildlife, for example – but these can be overridden in the event of imminent flooding or drought. Besides, if dredging in the EU is banned, why is the European Dredging Association celebrating its 27^th year?

2) There is no consensus that dredging is even particularly effective at easing or preventing flooding. While it may stop a river from bursting its banks in one area, that floodwater is just going to barrel further downstream and cause problems in another – probably a larger town, with less drainage, and more structures along its banks.

“We only joined a trading alliance! We never signed up for closer political union!”

Yeah, you did. You just didn’t read the small print. Or, indeed, the large print. The goal of closer political union has been made explicit in every major ECSC/EEC/EU treaty since the Schuman Declaration of 1950.

Closer political union was the entire raison d’être of the European project. It was specifically designed to bring nations closer together, in order to prevent a repeat of the second world war. Trade was just the means to that end.

And as numerous records of comments by Britain’s leaders prior to the 1975 referendum campaign prove, this was repeatedly made clear to the British people. If you prefer to absorb your information via Twitter threads, then this is the link for you.

“Have you got some sort of crystal ball?”

Frequently offered as a mocking retort to any suggestion that Brexit may have adverse effects (even though it’s now beyond any doubt that Brexit is having exactly the adverse effects Remain campaigners said it would). As an analogy for Brexit predictions, however, it suffers from one fundamental flaw: fortune tellers are full of shit. While crystal balls offer zero useful information regarding future events, the predictions of economic, political and social problems after Brexit were based on sound and thoroughly researched analyses by the most eminently qualified people in their fields.

“These warnings about a hard Brexit are Project Fear. Look at the scaremongering about the Millennium Bug!”

I’ve been hearing this particular “argument” from a suspiciously wide range of sources lately (August 2018) – almost as if it’s on some official briefing paper being distributed to everyone with an IQ below 70. It is so colossally, obviously flawed as an argument that I scarcely know where to begin, but since it’s being wheeled out as an attempted smackdown so frequently, I suppose I had better.

Bug: About 20 years ago, a number of IT experts raised concerns about the possibilities of some older computers experiencing problems with their internal clocks as the date changed to 01/01/00. This might, they pointed out, cause some issues with things like flights, hospital equipment and power plants. Because ordinary folk knew nothing about computers, they trusted the experts’ view – even though said experts had much to gain from the emergency, and might have been overstating the danger for their own gain. As a result, somewhere between £300bn and £500bn was spent fixing the problem worldwide. In the end, disaster was averted, although the “bug” did still have some adverse effects.

Brexit: A number of experts in the fields of economics, trade, business, science, politics and diplomacy raised concerns about massive damage being done to the UK’s businesses, economy, international relations, and world standing. They stood to gain nothing from such an emergency. Few people fully understood the issues at hand, but, after decades of the rightwing press undermining faith in intellectualism, only a minority trusted the experts’ view. As a result, nothing was done to avert any negative consequences.

Apart from the fact that experts issued a warning, there are no similarities between the two situations. The people involved were different. The conditions were different. The entire realm of knowledge was different. The problem was different, and the possible solutions are different. (Perhaps the most worrying divergence is that between the amount of preparation completed in each case.)

Next time someone squeals “Millennium bug!” in response to the sounding of the Brexit alarm, try gently pointing out to them a few of the occasions when experts issued warnings, and were right: the Titanic. Fukushima. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s. The Lusitania. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. The 2018 Genoa motorway bridge collapse.

Experts are not always wrong. In fact, they are rarely wrong. That’s why they are occupying their positions, and not you.

“Your patronising attitude is exactly why we voted out”

Really? You voted to wipe out 10% of GDP, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of jobs and turn the UK into a global laughing stock because a stranger on social media was insufficiently sensitive while schooling you in economics 18 months in the future? Come on. That’s kind of petty. If quantum-mechanically impressive.

(What they’re really doing here, of course, apart from flailing pathetically, is attempting to tone-police you: to shoot down your argument on the basis of its character, rather than its content. Because they can’t find any obvious flaws in the content to attack.)

“Britain managed just fine before it joined the EU!”

It really didn’t. You, my friend, are guilty of rosy retrospection: a common cognitive bias that leads us to remember things as better than they in fact were. Sure, you were younger then, with hopes and dreams intact, and still enjoyed occasional sex.

But the blunt truth is that in the early 1970s, the country was up shit creek. As the last tendrils of its empire withered, growth and productivity were slipping, industries declining, poverty increasing. Strikes left large parts of the country paralysed. Power cuts were commonplace. For over two months in 1974, the UK was operating on a three-day week.

The new members of the European Economic Community, meanwhile, were surging ahead, leaving the UK with the “Sick Man of Europe” dunce’s cap. Successive British governments, Conservative and Labour, begged to join. Charles de Gaulle vetoed the British application twice, warning that it would lead to the breakup of the union. Membership, when it came in 1973, was a huge relief – and marked the beginning of a new era of prosperity for the UK.

But more importantly, in 1973, the UK had its own trade arrangements and supply lines in place. It has spent the 45 intervening years frantically reshaping its economy to function as part of a frictionless trade bloc. If those arrangements are ended, and no substitute system is introduced – fat chance of that in six months – then the country will, quite simply, cease to function.

“I can’t be racist. Islam isn’t a race.”

If you’re being face-achingly pernickety, then yes, attacking a religion does not technically make you a racist. However.

Strictly speaking, no one can be a racist, because there is no universally agreed definition of the set of characteristics that constitute a race, or where to draw the lines between them. It’s pretty obvious, however, that plenty of people treat others differently based on the colour of their skin, that they discriminate, and it’s generally agreed that these people are scum – hence your strenuous objection to being called racist. (Let us also note, in passing, that the overwhelming majority of followers of Islam are brown.)

Second, those who set out to discredit Islam might have a different target from a racist, but their methodology – or rather, their error – is identical. They’re still discriminating, just on the basis of religion instead of colour.

English speakers haven’t quite settled on the right word for this yet – I’ve seen “faithism” and “religionism”, but those give us the rather clunky derivatives “faithist” and “religionist” – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. On far right websites the world over, it clearly does.

You may not, by the strictest definition, be a racist for demonising all Muslims because of the actions of a few of its adherents, but you’re no better than a racist. You may not be a racist, but you most certainly are a cunt.

“I can’t be racist. I have a black friend”

You only have one black friend, and you claim you’re not a racist?

“The Nazis were socialists. It was even in their name!”

The full name of the Nazi party was, indeed, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German National Socialist Workers’ Party. But things don’t always do what they say on the tin. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea isn’t democratic, run by or for the people, or a republic; Panama hats aren’t from Panama; and tin cans aren’t made of tin.

This is just a ham-fisted (albeit remarkably persistent) ploy by those with evil far-right views to distance themselves from the evil far-right demagogues of the past.

Hitler had a different definition of socialism from the one we understand today, as this quote from him explains: “Communism is not socialism. Marxism is not socialism. The Marxists have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take socialism away from the socialists.”

That’s exactly what he did, and the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands were the first opponents he took out; he banned them the day after he won absolute power. His actions in the summer of 1941 were also a subtle hint as to his true feelings towards those on the left wing of politics.

The Nazis may have paid lip service to socialism in order to appeal to a wider demographic. But they were first and foremost, and far and away above any other consideration, nationalists. And it is that evil, not cosmetic socialism, that we face again today.

For a more authoritative explanation, see Mike Stuchbery’s consummate demolition of alt-right urethral swabs Paul Joseph Watson and Ian Miles Cheong on the same issue.

“Liberals. You’re all such hypocrites!”

I’ve dealt with this point before, but here’s a recap.

Accusing liberals of hypocrisy is probably the far right’s favourite pastime. “Do as I say, not as I do,” they sneer, despite having no clue as to how you spend your day. Apparently, because they lack even a scintilla of empathy for their fellow man, everyone else must be similarly handicapped.

Well, this may come as a surprise, buster, but a lot of us actually back our words up with action. We give to the homeless and to charity; we raise awareness of, and funds for, good causes; we volunteer; some of us even actually take in refugees.

But even those who don’t spend every minute of their spare time doing disabled veterans’ shopping are not wrong to speak their minds in the hope of influencing public debate. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what all the alt-right seems to spend all its time doing; I’ve yet to see one of them putting his money where his mouth is and jetting down to the Levant to fight Isis, or unilaterally deporting a family of Muslims.

I’ll continue to “virtue signal” as much as I like, thanks, if you’re going to carry on evil signalling.

“How many refugees have you taken in?”

The most tiresomely common example of the above. Again, I’ve talked about this. We cannot physically do all the things we wish were done, and it’s not up to us anyway. We can, however, draw attention to problems we think are not being allocated sufficient resources (in fact, it seems to be Twitter’s sole raison d’être these days).

“Everyone who disagrees with you is a fascist.”

I’ve disagreed with plenty of people. Muslims, Jews, socialists, conservatives, doctors, teachers, plasterers, feminists, vegetarians. And none of them were fascists. (OK, maybe the doctor was a bit of a prick.)

The difference was, they made their arguments politely and reasonably, and were willing to listen to what I had to say. We usually found some common ground, and learned something from each other.

The far right, meanwhile, for all their bleats of “free speech”, do everything they can to silence opposition. They make (ahem) liberal use of ad hominem and smear tactics, they lie, they fabricate stories, and when given half a chance, they kill. I have yet to learn anything from a fascist, except a creeping disillusionment at the coldness of some of my fellow men.

“Ha, liberals, they say they’re so tolerant, and yet they won’t tolerate any views that don’t agree with theirs.”

AKA “Liberals are the real fascists”. Occasional variation on the above. Liberals can, and do, and have, for years, tolerated differences of opinion. There’s only one view that we won’t tolerate, and that’s any view that involves silencing others’ views. Such as, for example, fascism.

“‘Racist!’ That’s the only argument you have.”

It’s really not. It’s just the most obvious, important one, and often the only observation of substance I can fit in 140 characters.

If you fancy a change of insult, I also have unimaginative, unoriginal, gullible, backward, reductive, simplistic, binary, ill-informed, mendacious, misleading, and utterly lacking in compassion.

“We voted Leave to regain control over immigration.”

The UK government has always had full control over immigration from countries outside the EU. It simply failed to invoke those powers. The vote to leave the EU will have precisely zero effect on the numbers of, for example, Pakistani Muslims coming to live and work in the country. (It might even lead to an increase, as if EU migrant numbers fall, certain sectors will still need a workforce, and many trade deals, such as the ones we hope to strike up with India and the Philippines, are dependent on visa quotas and/or free movement of labour.)

It’s true that under freedom of movement laws, any EU citizen can come and live in the UK, and many have chosen to do so; but even they are under restrictions. They can only claim benefits for a limited period, for example; they can be asked to leave if they do not find work within three months or otherwise have means to support themselves.

What’s more, EU law does not prevent us from deporting criminals from outside the UK. Anyone considered a sufficient threat can be chucked out, and those powers have been beefed up in recent years.

Why did the government not make more of an effort to reduce immigration? Because, along with just about every economist, it knows that immigration benefits the economy. Attracting the best minds from all over the world has a hugely positive effect on GDP.

“Immigrants are benefit scroungers.”

Bollocks. EU immigrants pay far more in tax than they take out in benefits. As I mentioned above, their access to welfare is limited. In fact, the proportion of UK natives claiming benefits is higher than the proportion of EU citizens doing the same.

“Immigrants are stealing all our jobs.”

Let’s gloss over the fact that this assertion totally contradicts the last one. Immigration is not a zero-sum game; the number of jobs to go round is not fixed. The more people come into the country and earn and pay taxes and spend, the more jobs get created. It’s no coincidence that two of the most migrated-to countries in the world, the United States and the United Kingdom, are also two of the richest; or that the most insular – North Korea, Cuba, Somalia – rank among the poorest.

By way of illustration, unemployment in the UK, now host to more immigrants than at any point in its history, is at an all-time low.

“Immigrants are driving down wages.”

The data is not conclusive, but on the whole, this seems to be a myth. One study found that large-scale immigration can exert a slight downward pressure on pay in certain sectors, but most think the impact is negligible. For the most part, what’s kept workers’ salaries down in recent years is spiralling executive pay, rising rents, and the economic crash of 2008.

“Immigrants put a strain on social services.”

The great majority of immigrants – from all countries, not just the EU – are young, healthy net contributors to the economy. If services are under strain in certain areas, that’s the government’s (or the local council’s) fault, not the immigrants’ (and it certainly has naff all to do with the EU).

In any case, given that so many immigrants work in the very social services they are allegedly destroying, our infrastructure would be a lot shakier without them than it is with, as we are seeing with the mass exodus of EU nurses and doctors from the NHS.

“Those Syrians aren’t refugees, they’re economic migrants.”

Really? They’ve abandoned their home country and everyone they love, given their life savings to people traffickers, risked death several times over and lived in a filthy camp for months, just so that they can claim £60 a week? Isn’t it more likely that their homes have been turned into warzones and their loved ones have been killed, or they’ve been the victims of religious persecution, and that their only choice, if they want to live any sort of worthwhile life, is for a fresh start in another country?

“Why don’t the ‘refugees’ stop in Saudi Arabia?”

They do. The reason official statistics list Saudi Arabia as having taken zero refugees from Syria is that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE never signed up to any UN protocols on refugees. Ergo, it has a different classification system: anyone from a nearby state who turns up seeking a haven in Saudi is not registered as a refugee, but as an “Arab brother or sister in distress”. It’s estimated that around 500,000 such distressed siblings from Syria are currently benefiting from Saudi hospitality.

“Why don’t they stop in Poland or Germany or France?”

Again, many do, but not many of them speak Polish or German or French. One of the side-effects of being a great commercial and cultural power is that a lot of people abroad learn your language, and it just so happens that English is the most widely spoken European language in many parts of the Middle East. Furthermore, some of the refugees have friends or family already in the UK, so it makes sense for them to head somewhere they have contacts and support.

“All the refugees from the Middle East are men of fighting age.”

In a bid to stoke up fears of terrorist infiltration, or of “white genocide”, the far right are for ever banging this drum: “If all these people trying to get into the country are genuine refugees, why are they all young and male?”

They’re not. According to UN figures, 50.5% of all refugees worldwide are women, and a further 17% are aged under 18. Males aged from 18 to 59 make up just 22% of all refugees worldwide.

It’s true that a higher percentage of recent refugees from the Middle East to Europe appear to be male; a UNHCR report estimated that 72% of the 400,000 people known to have crossed the Mediterranean in 2015 were male. But this isn’t so sinister when you think about it for a second. How many children, women and old people do you think could survive that perilous crossing, a walk of thousands of miles, and countless nights without shelter and food?

It’s also worth remembering that because of the lower life expectancy, a higher proportion of Syrians are young males. The average age of a man in the UK, with its relative peace and prosperity, is 39.3. The median in Syria is 23.7.

“Mohammed was a paedophile.”

According to the Qu’ran, when he was in his 50s, the Prophet married a nine-year-old girl. Extremist rightwingers take inordinate glee in repeating this point at every opportunity, using it as “proof” that Islam is a corrupt and evil religion.

First, debate is still raging among Muslim scholars about the actual facts behind this story. Mohammed certainly seems to have been betrothed to a girl, but no one knows when the relationship was consummated.

Second, this is seventh-century Arabia we’re talking about. Times were different. Puberty was regarded as the onset of female adulthood. Marriage to, and sexual intercourse with, young girls were commonplace – and not just in the Middle East. Here are a few examples of other historical figures who are believed to have had what would today be considered improper associations:

Joseph, “stepfather” of Jesus (married Mary when she was 12)
St Augustine, father of the Christian church (betrothed to a 10-year-old girl)
Edward I (his bride, Eleanor of Castile, was eight, according to Britannica)
Isaac II Angelus, Byzantine emperor (took a nine-year-old wife)
Richard II (married his second wife, Isabella of Valois, when she was seven)
Giralomo Riario, Lord of Imola (took a 10-year-old wife)
Thomas Jefferson (strong evidence that he had a relationship with an underage slave)
Even in the modern era, we have Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin, Elvis Presley dating a 14-year-old Priscilla, and Bill Wyman preying on the 13-year-old Mandy Smith. As recently as 1984, the Paedophile Information Exchange was an active campaigning group in the UK. Times change. You can’t judge yesterday’s men by today’s standards.

“Islam is a religion of hate.”

Trust me, if Islam were a religion of hate, and all 1.6 billion of its adherents were hellbent on destroying western society, I would not be here to write this, nor you there to read it. Most respected estimates put worldwide membership of jihadi groups at about 100,000. That’s 0.006% of the Muslim population. Almost all of them are in their native lands or nearby, and the battle with Isis in Syria and Iraq will have put a dent in that figure.

For the record, the vast majority of liberals hate those evil bastards just as much as the far right do. We just don’t want to tar the 99.994% with the same brush.

“Muslamic rape gangs!”

A proportion of men commit sex crimes, and Muslims are no different. But some high-profile cases, such as the Rotherham child abuse scandal, which involved abuse on a huge scale from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, have given fascists plenty of ammunition for their anti-Islam smear campaign.

True, the proportion of Muslims in UK jails (15%) is higher than in the civilian population (4%), but that corresponds almost exactly to the profile for black people (12% versus 3%). Muslims are more likely to go to prison largely because they’re statistically more likely to be from poor areas with higher crime rates, and they’re more likely to be stopped and searched. The authorities may have turned a blind eye to wrongdoing in Rotherham, but the wider pattern, it seems, is one of racism as usual.

It’s also probably worth a reminder at this point that a lot of the stories of rapes of white women by Muslims are either exaggerated, endlessly repeated to make them seem more common, or just plain made up.

The fact remains that most sex offenders, by a huge margin, are white men. And no one is proposing to deport all white men.

“Hillary Clinton took part in ritual sacrifices and ran a paedophile ring from a pizza parlour.”

There is literally no evidence to back up this ridiculous assertion. If there were, Donald Trump would have been able to follow through on his promise to “lock her up”.

“But Benghazi.”

Mistakes were undoubtedly made in the run-up to the attack on the US embassy in Libya, but a hearing at the House of Representatives in October 2015 largely cleared then secretary of state Hillary Clinton of any direct responsibility for the tragedy.

***

Next time you catch anyone trotting out any of this guff, don’t waste time Googling and copy-and-pasting. Just reply “BS” and paste a link to this page. (If you right-click on the relevant link in the intro and select “copy link address”, it will link them directly to the relevant entry.)

I’m sure I’ve missed a few out, and that more will arise. Please chip in if you have any far-right bollocks you’d like debunked – I’ll keep this updated, and maybe, if I get enough time, some day turn it into a wiki.

Immigration: the pros – and the big con

It’s way past time we had a grown-up, informed conversation about freedom of movement

I’ve made the case for migration being an intrinsic part of what it is to be human. That does not, of course, necessarily make it a good thing. Human instinct is not the most reliable moral compass. And since purportedly liberal voices have recently joined the far-right tub-thumpers in talking about “tighter controls”, and even the Guardian has to use “actually” in the headline of a positive story about immigration, there are clearly issues yet to be settled here.

So here’s a cost-benefit analysis: a comparison of the (alleged) benefits and drawbacks of human resettlement.

The downsides

Prior to 1066, most arrivals in the British Isles were invaders or raiders rather than true migrants. The relative calm that followed the Norman Conquest paved the way for the first peaceful settlers – and the slurs the natives have lobbed at them have barely evolved in a millennium.

‘They’re stealing our jobs’

Twaddle on every level.

It was never “your” job to begin with. It was a job advertised in the country where you happened to be born. It was the employer’s job, to give to whomsoever she chose.
The migrant is in no sense “stealing” the job; she is merely competing fairly for it. If you’re finishing second best to someone whose first language isn’t English, you might want to think about a different line of work.
The majority of immigrants take jobs that Britons simply don’t want to do, such as cleaning, fruit picking and social care. Many more take roles that Britons cannot do: the UK has huge skills shortages in a number of sectors, notably engineering, IT and healthcare.

(Incidentally, the racists who trot out this line can rarely back it up with evidence. When they do, it’s anecdotal: “It happened to me” or “It happened to my mate”. Sorry to break it to you, Socrates, but the value of anecdotal evidence is precisely diddly-squat. All the large-scale data says otherwise.)

Besides, the number of jobs available is not fixed (this common misapprehension is known as the lump of labour fallacy). Immigrants earn and pay taxes, pay rent, buy food and clothes and phones and all the other things natives do. This indirectly creates more jobs. Furthermore, many of them start up their own businesses (indeed, immigrants are twice as likely as locals to do so), thus directly creating more jobs. If there were a fixed number of vacancies in an economy, then unemployment after years of mass immigration should be stratospheric. It’s not. The latest figure is 4.1%, or 1.38 million people – among the lowest of all time.

It’s true that living in an economic union of 550 million citizens means there’s 10 times as much competition as when the UK’s borders were closed. But it also means there are 10 times as many job opportunities. That’s the whole point of an expanded labour market: more choice for employers, more for employees.

‘They’re driving down wages’

Not according to 99% of all research into this issue, they’re not. Some studies have found marginal evidence of a slight depression in pay for the very lowest-paid, but the picture is far from clear-cut, not least because it’s impossible to know what would have happened to wages in the absence of freedom of movement.

At worst, according to the Migration Advisory Council’s calculations, a 10% increase in the number of non-natives entering the services industry may have resulted in a 1.9% decrease in wages for those employed in it – most of whom, traditionally, were migrants already.

Besides, any short-term losses are more than made up for in the long term by overall growth in the economy due to immigration, which benefits everyone.

‘They’re all scroungers’

This argument, in conjunction with the above, conjures the image of Schrödinger’s immigrant: a shadowy figure simultaneously stealing people’s jobs and lazing in front of Jeremy Kyle while wallowing in the opulence conferred by the UK welfare system.

It’s also bollocks. Government figures show that foreign nationals are far less likely to claim benefits than people born in the UK; while they make up 17.6% of the working population, they account for less than 7.4% of benefits awarded.

This is largely because the law grants foreign-born citizens less access to the welfare system in the first place. Under our arrangement with the EU, no EU citizen can claim benefits for the first three months of their stay, and they can be deported if they have not found work after three further months on benefits (or cannot otherwise support themselves).

Besides, it makes no sense. Who in their right mind would give up their friends, family and culture, uproot everything and go to all the trouble of building an entire new life in a country with unfamiliar food, customs and language, with the sole aim of pocketing the princely sum of £73 a week?

‘They’re all criminals’

Jewish usurers, Gypsy thieves, Italian mobsters, Irish thugs, Asian grooming gangs: virtually every wave of foreigners to set foot on these shores has endured systematic accusations of wrongdoing. While every cart has its bad apples, it simply isn’t true that immigrants are more likely to break the law than natives.

There are just under 10,000 foreign offenders in British jails and NOMS-operated IRCs, a fraction under 12% of the prison population, and they make up 9% of the population overall. “Whoa!” you cry. “That’s above the national average! Immigrants are more criminal than the average Brit!”

Unfortunately for your argument, Mr Racist, IRCs are … immigration removal centres, which hold people awaiting deportation, almost exclusively for immigration violations. They generally hold around 3,000 people. So the number of foreigners detained in English and Welsh prisons, for actual crimes, is only 8% of the total. Or below the national average.

In some cases, it appears that immigration actually lowers crime. One research paper, for example, found that the incarceration rate among foreign-born US citizens was a quarter of the rate for those born there.

Criminals, like benefit scroungers, are lazy. It’s their defining quality. The reason they commit crimes and sign on, rather than getting a job, is that they want maximum return for minimum effort. But (as any British plumber allegedly put out of work by a Polish counterpart will tell you) most migrants work hard.

It stands to reason. Is someone who has the get-up-and-go, organisational skills and commitment to do the necessary research, learn a new language, fill out all the paperwork, leave behind home, career and family, travel hundreds of miles, set up a bank account, etc, really going to turn into a slob on arrival? Is a rapist-in-waiting really going to go to all that trouble merely because he fancies raping British women?

Blackguards and wastrels are more likely to ply their “trades” nearer home, where they have established criminal networks and understand the local markets and loopholes, than to trudge halfway across the world to an alien land with a firmer rule of law.

It’s worth mentioning – because most Leave voters sure don’t seem to know – that under EU law, the UK already has the power to deport criminals of EU origin. It can also prevent known offenders from entering. In the year ending June 2017, 5,301 EU citizens were deported from the UK, and in the period 2010-2016, the Border Force refused entry to 6,000 EU nationals.

“But look,” say the racists, linking to a single story about an EU immigrant who committed a crime, or a handful of bad guys. Again, they’re generalising from isolated incidents to a broader pattern that the figures just don’t support.

“I don’t care if only 0.25% of foreigners commit crimes,” bleat other racists. “Ten thousand is too many! Get rid of them all!” That’s like banning all cars because 0.6% of them are involved in serious accidents every year, or banning all doctors because 0.4% of them have criminal convictions. Madness.

When racists attempt to support their claims with evidence, they invariably cite the Quilliam report, just about the only vaguely authoritative investigation into so-called grooming gangs conducted to date in the UK. Close analysis, however, reveals it to be no such thing; its assumptions, methodology and conclusions have all been rubbished by other commentators.

As a footnote, I would remind you that Britain’s departure from the EU threatens its participation in the European Arrest Warrant, under which almost 7,000 criminals were removed from 2009-2016.

‘They’re putting pressure on housing and social services’

There is some logic behind this one. Unlike the labour market, a country’s resources and services are, at any given point, finite. If more people arrive, there will be fewer houses, school places and GP appointments to go around.

However, governments always have the option to build more houses and schools, just as they have done to accommodate population growth throughout history. And as it turns out, immigrants disproportionately take jobs in education and healthcare, and, being younger and healthier, use these services less. As the UK is now discovering, if you create a hostile environment for foreigners, the teachers, lecturers, doctors, nurses and carers will be among the first to leave, and services will come under yet more strain.

“Why can’t we just train our own?” whine the racists. We can; but in the first place, it’s expensive – it costs £70,000 to train a nurse from scratch, £479,000 for a general practitioner, and £725,000 for a consultant. Second, it takes time: four years for a nurse, nine for a doctor. And third, you can’t expect exactly the right number of British students to step into a particular role simply because The Country Needs It. Supply does not always meet demand (which is another argument for a common market; it creates a larger playing field over which such imbalances can be corrected).

By the by, the notion that “Britain is full” is risible. The population density of the UK is 272/km2. By comparison, Monaco has 19,009 people per square kilometre, or 70 times the concentration. The UK population would have to reach 4.5 billion before it was as full as Monaco.

‘They’re destroying our culture’

A couple of hundred years ago, English culture was cockfighting, bear-baiting, maypoles and Morris dancing. Few got out their hankies when they faded away to be replaced with football, pubs and Celebrity fucking Big Brother.

In any case, the speed of change in the UK is constantly being exaggerated by the media. The endless stories in the Daily Mail and Express about people forced to say “Happy holiday” instead of “Christmas”, the word “Easter” being omitted from chocolate eggs and pork products being dropped from restaurant menus are usually anecdotal if true at all: scaremongering designed to sell more papers. Oh, and there are no sharia courts. There are a few dozen sharia councils that consult on matters of marriage and divorce.

To those racists who insist that the British way of life is under threat, I say this: Welsh, Scottish and Irish cultures are all still pretty damned vibrant. If they can survive centuries of English dominion, why can’t English culture survive the arrival of a few million guests?

Culture is fluid. Like language, it’s a living, breathing thing. Any culture that stops changing withers and dies. And how do cultures change? By evolution, certainly, but mostly, like language, by borrowing from others. To illustrate this point, I’ve compiled a short list of aspects of “British” culture that aren’t actually British at all:

Fish and chips (Portugal, Belgium), roast dinners (France), full English breakfast (Germans popularised sausages and bacon, while baked beans come from South America via the US and their sauce is made from Mediterranean tomatoes), barbecues (Caribbean), beer made from hops (Netherlands), golf (ancient Rome or China, via pre-Union Scotland), April Fool’s Day (France, or the Netherlands; certainly not England), Christmas and all things Christian (Middle East), Christmas trees (Germany), Easter eggs (Africa via Iraq), New Year’s celebrations (Iraq), pantomime (Italy), curry (India/Sri Lanka), pizza (Italy) and St George (Turkey).

‘They don’t integrate’

Admittedly, some do so more successfully than others. Just two points here: 1) integration is a two-way street. If you demonise and/or intimidate immigrants and refuse to employ them or socialise with them, you can hardly blame them for sticking with their own kind. 2) I can state categorically that every one of my friends from the EU – the ones who are still here, as well as the ones driven away by Brexit – speak and write English to a far higher standard than the average Brexiter on social media.

‘Allowing free movement within the EU discriminates against non-EU citizens’

This laughable bad-faith argument is about migration from specific countries rather than migration in general, but I’m mentioning it here because it seems to have gained a lot of traction of late.

You can see its appeal. It allows Brexit diehards to paint Remainers as the bad, racist guys and by extension themselves as the angels. But the notion that, because certain people enjoy certain advantages and others do not, you must create a level playing field by removing them from everyone – “’S not fair!” – is absurd.

By this reasoning, Fitness First is discriminating against non-members by only allowing in paying members. Alice is discriminating against Jenny (and everyone else on the planet) by dating Brian, so she must remain single for ever. And you are discriminating against all other fruits by eating an apple, and so must starve.

It’s impossible to strike deals with everyone at once. This is just a cynical contortion of language in an attempt to mislead, one that smells very strongly of 55 Tufton Street.

‘They’re all riddled with disease’

What utter bastards! When they’re not stealing your job or raping your children, they’re infecting you with typhus and AIDS!

Accusations of uncleanliness have dogged migrants for centuries – the Irish and the Gypsies came in for a particularly hard time – and while this line hasn’t seen so much play in the Brexit debate, the fake news merchants at Fox News and the like are frantically pursuing the health emergency angle in their rush to demonise the central American migrant caravan.

The claim is, to put it politely, a bunch of arse.

‘They’re replacing the native population’

The more hysterical nationalists are convinced that if immigration persists at its present levels, white British people will soon be in a minority, or eliminated altogether.

This is the slippery slope fallacy in action: the assumption that a trend will continue unchanged. But trends never do. Rates of migration rise and fall. The UK has recently experienced a peak in new arrivals, as a result of the accession of the eastern European states. As those states’ prosperity approaches that of the UK, the number of people moving here will decline.

Other racists point to the fact that immigrants “outbreed” the native population – new arrivals tend to have larger families. This is quite true. However, it is also true that natality among subsequent generations tends to subside to local levels (pdf).

The upsides

They fill skills shortages

No one’s seriously going to dispute this, are they? I’ve already mentioned the high levels of foreign-born staff in the NHS and the education system, but they also make up a disproportionate chunk of the workforce in catering, construction, fruit-picking, food preparation and technology. Food is already rotting in fields and patients dying alone in hospitals since the number of immigrants began to fall after the Brexit vote.

They’re great for business

Immigrants bring energy, dynamism and ideas. Immigrants are responsible for one in every seven new startups in the UK, and their ventures create 14% of all British jobs. Here’s a far from complete list of great “British” brands that were in fact founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants: Dollond & Aitchison, M&S, Tesco, Rothschild & Co, ICI, General Electric, Burton, Selfridge’s, Barings Bank, Barnardo’s, Mme Tussauds, GlaxoSmithKline, British Petroleum, Reuters, Schroders Asset Management, Moss Bros, Triumph, Lion’s soaps, Shell, Easyjet, Cobra Beer, Acorn Computers (ARM), WPP, Cafe Nero, DueDil, RationalFX, Deliveroo, Transferwise, Kano, Carwow and Hassle.

They enhance our culture

New food, new music, new fashions, new words. You can draw up your own fucking list this time.

They boost the economy

If you can find me a single authoritative, peer-reviewed study that shows that immigrants to the UK have a net negative effect on the economy, I’ll shag Katie Hopkins.

Immigrants put more in than they take out; natives’ net contribution is negative

Cultural homogeneity has a positive impact on GDP growth

Influxes of asylum seekers increase per-capita GDP, reduce unemployment and boost tax revenues

Migration has no negative impact on employment outcomes; increases productivity

But you don’t have to trawl through academic papers for proof that freedom of movement is an economic boon. You just have to draw up a list of the richest cities and countries in the world and then look at their respective levels of migration.

They compensate for falling birthrates

Indigenous Brits are not reproducing at a sufficiently high rate to replace the existing population. British-born women have an average of only 1.7 children each, and a further 200,000 Brits leave these shores every year. Without immigration to make up the shortfall, the British population would decline by 417,000 every year.

And a shrinking population, as China is discovering, is catastrophic for the economy, because there are fewer people to pay tax and thus fund healthcare and pensions for the older generation.

They enhance our personal lives

As well as giving us access to a wider employment market, migration – inward and outward – vastly increases the choice of friends, business partners and lovers available to us. As this is hard to quantify, there’s little in the way of hard research on the subject, but I know I am not alone in having made dozens of wonderful, life-changing connections that would never have come to pass without freedom of movement.

They make war less likely

Last and foremost, freedom of movement between the nations of Europe has – exactly as it was intended to – increased mutual reliance, cooperation and understanding between peoples, tempered nationalist tendencies, and led to the longest spell of uninterrupted peace in the continent’s history. I’m in no hurry to throw that away.

So that means …

“Tottenham has turned French” – Unnamed Londoner, early 16th C
“A certain preacher … abused the strangers in the town, and their manners and customs, alleging that they not only deprived the English of their industry, and of the profits arising therefrom, but dishonoured their dwellings by taking their wives and daughters” – Sebastian Giustinian, ambassador to Venice, 1517
“A congregation … of distressed exiles growne so great and yet daily multiplying, that the place in short time is likely to prove a hive too little to contain such a swarme” – W Somner, 1639
“The nation it is almost quit undone//By French men that doe it daily overrun” – Anonymous, 1691
“Why should we take the bread out of the mouths of our own children and give it to strangers?” – John Adams, US president, 1800
“The Jews of the lower orders … have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830
“Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are – some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?” – Donald Trump, 2015

I feel ashamed to be a human being when I’m reminded of how little we have learned through the ages.

When debating Brexit with Leave voters on Twitter, I used to concede the point that “having concerns about mass immigration is not racist”. I take it all back. It’s racist as fuck.

The reason I’ve liberally peppered this post with the word “racist” is that, after looking at material from hundreds of sources and weighing the matter long and hard, I’ve concluded that there is no argument against immigration. The benefits are enormous, the costs negligible. The only possible reason left that anyone could have for objecting to immigration is xenophobia, English exceptionalism, Fear of the Other: in a word, racism.

Immigrants are people. Just like us. In fact, usually, better than us; more industrious, less likely to commit crimes, younger, healthier, brighter. If you deny or dismiss the fact that migration is a fundamental part of human nature; if you wave away the proven benefits; if you insist on stressing the downsides to the exclusion of all else, even though there is scant (if endlessly repeated) evidence to back up your point; then you, my foe, are a racist.

Most people who have actually encountered large numbers of immigrants are not afraid of them; they know from experience that the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. The only reason people think migration is a bad thing is that power-hungry populists, rightwing media and, increasingly, trolls in the employ of enemy powers tell them that it is.

Historically, there have been some problems, but it’s invariably the migrants who bear the brunt. Locals might have been mildly inconvenienced by the unsanitary conditions in an Irish ghetto, or the din generated by Italian ragamuffins playing barrel organs on the streets of 19th-century London; meanwhile, the migrants themselves were starving, dying from cholera, being shunned and deported and lynched.

Robert Winder put it so eloquently in his book on migration, Bloody Foreigners, that I’m shamelessly going to quote him in full:

“Illegal immigration is a fine-toothed comb. The system catches the clumsy or the clueless; only the best, the bravest and the luckiest slip through. It should never surprise us when migrants prosper; nearly all of them have passed an exacting extrance exam.”

All this fearmongering about immigrants and minorities has no basis in reality; it is the tool of dangerous demagogues. It is they, and not the targets of their false fury, that we should be deporting.

Swarms, red tape and shackles: deciphering the Brexit code

The Leave campaign won chiefly by lying and cheating – but also through the cunning manipulation of metaphors

You may have heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the theory that language determines thought. Benjamin Whorf, building on the work of Edmund Sapir, suggested in his 1940 essay Science and Linguistics that what and how we think are at least partly shaped by the words and grammar that we use to conceive and express those thoughts. (Whorf’s preferred term for the theory was “Linguistic Relativity”.)

He reached his conclusion after noticing huge systemic differences between languages: how different peoples divided up the colour spectrum in different ways; how the Hopi language lacked a word for time, or any recognisable tenses; how Eskimo languages had multiple words for snow.

The idea was revolutionary, hugely popular, and ever so slightly racist. Could our perception – and therefore our behaviour – really be determined by the place we were born? By the 1960s, however, after a number of rebuttals, the hypothesis, in its strong form at least, had fallen out of favour. How could form really affect content? Surely, even if your language doesn’t have a word for a particular colour, you can still perceptually tell the difference?

***

All my life, I’ve loved language. Like Stephen Fry (but not as well as Stephen Fry), I’ve savoured it, sploshed in it, flossed with it and galoshed in it. I kept my first diary at seven. I was writing stories at 11, scripts at 13, and soon studying English, German, French and Spanish. At university, I dipped into Hopi, Swahili and Inuktitut (and Whorf). And as an adult, virtually every penny I’ve earned has come either from writing, or from editing other people’s writing.

And all this time, I never considered language to be that important. Ultimately, while it was a useful tool, a fascinating area of study, an enjoyable way to earn a crust and a handy icebreaker at parties, it didn’t butter many parsnips. It was a passion that paid the bills.

But the events of the last couple of years have prompted a rethink. Seismic changes in the political climate and public mood have been engineered in the blink of an eye – and language, particularly as used in mass media, seems to have been one of the main vectors of this change. Perhaps Mr Whorf wasn’t so far off the mark after all.

***

Whatever else you think about the people who are dragging the UK out of the European Union, some of their wordsmithery has been astute. While most have relied on untruths and logical fallacies, subtler tricks have also played a part.

The peerlessly sinister MP Steve Baker engineered the wording of the EU referendum, persuading David Cameron to change a YES/NO vote to LEAVE/REMAIN. (“Yes” tends to attract more votes from the undecided because of its positive overtones; meanwhile, “Leave” is muscular, active and Anglo-Saxon, while “remain” is languid, passive and Latinate.) And we know that it was charmless Jack Skellington clone Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, who came up with the viscerally appealing but meaningless slogan “Take back control”. And the use of terms like “swarms” and “cockroaches” by the likes of Katie Hopkins and the Daily Mail to describe refugees entering Europe is well documented.

The turns of phrase used by the Brexit mob are deliberately selected to provoke an emotional, rather than a rational response. “You’re being attacked!” they bellow, or “You’re being held prisoner!” This triggers the fear centres in the brain and bypasses the rational circuits. Because all rational circuits conclude that the better course of action is remain in the EU.

Here are a few instances of linguistic chicanery that have become far too deeply embedded in far too many consciousnesses.

Protectionist

One spurious argument you’ll hear quite often from Brexit diehards is that the EU is protectionist; that it discriminates against non-member nations by imposing tariffs on their goods but not on those of member states.

They have, of course, got things (deliberately?) arse about face. Before the EU, tariffs and non-tariff barriers applied to all trades between all nations. The EU was created precisely to abolish those barriers, but obviously only for those who signed up, paid their dues and contributed to the legwork. In any case, these benefits don’t just apply to EU members; the Union has agreements in place with 47 countries or trading blocs which drastically reduce the impediments to trade, with many more in the pipeline.

In leaving the EU and withdrawing from all these treaties, it is the UK that becomes the protectionist, isolationist party. A bold few are advocating that the UK should unilaterally drop all its tariffs, but there are no end of potential hazards to this, not least the fact that a) there is no guarantee that other countries will reciprocate, and b) such a move would flood the market with cheap foreign produce and inevitably destroy British manufacturing and agriculture.

Red tape

One of the earliest of the Brexit mob’s clarion calls. “We need to slash all this EU red tape!” they wailed. “It’s strangling British business!” Of course, what they mean by “red tape” more often than not is regulations that benefit consumers and workers: safety standards, consumer protections, workers’ rights and environmental safeguards. The only people this red tape is “strangling” – or, to put it more clearly, “denting the profits of” – are megarich CEOs and shareholders.

Dictatorship

As absurd as it may sound, this is probably the Brexit fanatics’ most popular way of describing the European Union. For their benefit, let’s compare concept and the metaphor and see how apt the comparison is.

A dictatorship is defined by most dictionaries as “a government by a ruler with absolute power, typically one who has taken power by force”. Britannica elaborates: “Dictators usually … maintain power through the use of intimidation, terror, and the suppression of basic civil liberties. They may also employ techniques of mass propaganda.”

The imagery falls down on every count. The EU does not have anything close to total power over its members; it is concerned largely with trade, agriculture and the environment. Defence, taxation, welfare, education and healthcare all fall within the purview of individual states. Moreover, member states have a say in those laws (and the UK has been disproportionately successful in this regard). The EU did not seize power in a coup, it does not intimidate or terrorise, and no one has had any rights removed. In fact, British people enjoy more rights and protections as a result of EU membership than they otherwise would.

Shackles

Of all the Brexiters’ misleading metaphors, “EU shackles” has undoubtedly gained the most traction. I see it dozens of times every day. But how exactly does EU membership resemble a pair of fetters connected by a chain used to bind prisoner’s legs together?

The UK’s relationship with the EU is a bond, but it is one that was entered into voluntarily.
It is a bond of friendship and cooperation, not one of indenture or servitude.
It is also one that the UK can leave of its own accord. Sure, leaving is a complex matter, because we’ve spent 45 years integrating our economy with 27 other countries’, but no great feat of escapology is required.
It is a mutually advantageous agreement, not one designed to restrain or oppress one party.
It grants both parties more freedom (of movement, of trade, lower prices, simpler travel, worker protections), not less. It doesn’t prevent us from doing anything that we wouldn’t otherwise have to do ourselves. 55% of the UK’s trade is already with the rest of the world, and Germany, for example, does plenty of importing from and exporting to other countries.

Alas, this tiresome pairing is now imprinted on millions of impressionable minds, and undoing it will require the work of generations, or at least several years of penury and global humiliation.

Other commonly used terms that feed into this fraudulent narrative of subjugation and freedom include colony, vassal state, yoke, escape the clutches, independence and, of course, betrayal.

Freedom of movement

There was one big obstacle to the Brexiters’ messaging plans. They had banged the immigration drum so loudly during the campaign that when they won, they had no choice but to deliver on it – by ending freedom of movement. But when you’re running on a platform of “emancipation from oppression”, how on earth do you sell the removal of people’s freedom to travel, study, work and retire across 31 countries?

Their solution, as ever, was to turn things on their head. So you’ll rarely hear Brexit supporters talking sheepishly about taking away your freedom of movement (except the staggeringly inept, like Jeremy Corbyn). Instead, they will rhapsodise about how we are gaining control of our borders. Never mind that the UK already has control of its borders – it’s going to gain even more luvverly control over them!

When they are not twisting words and metaphors for their own nefarious purposes, of course, the Brexit wrecking crew are twisting the words of Remain campaigners in an attempt to undermine their validity. The outstanding instance of this was Boris Johnson’s shameless reductio ad absurdum of David Cameron’s point about 70 years of peace in Europe, but it happens on a daily basis. Any attempt to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, for example, is met with a murderous “You defend terrorists! You love paedophiles!”

I don’t have the space here to begin on Donald Trump’s linguistic abuses, except to note that while his misrepresentations are considerably less sophisticated, they appear to have been no less successful. Might may not make right, but shite certainly seems to.

People armed with enough time and enough critical thinking skills can generally see through these cheap conjuring tricks. The trouble is, in this era of instant gratification and limitless diversion, that’s a rapidly dwindling band. Meanwhile, a growing number of people who cannot (or will not, because the message resonates with their animal fears) question the platitudes that feed their lizard-brain’s fears are fortified, emboldened by them, and ever more convinced of their righteousness.

***

How do you fight back against this? I welcome all suggestions, because the only plan I have right now sounds far too much like hard work. Call this language out wherever you see it. Challenge people to justify their metaphors. Exactly how the UK’s relationship with the European Union like a shackle? “Protectionist”? You mean, abolished all barriers to trade with its partners? Copy and paste in the dictionary definition of the chosen metaphor, to highlight the absurdity of their point.

And let’s hope that we get through to enough people to prove Benjamin Whorf wrong, and reverse the catastrophe of Brexit before it’s too late.

For more examples of semantic skulduggery, check out the Dictionary of Brexitese – the bespoke dialect of English developed by the far right to mislead the easily misled.

Twitter was great, until people decided it was the best tool with which to destroy civilisation

One Twitter user calls another one a defender of paedophiles. The accused rejects the accusation — and is banned. Is this what you dreamed of, Jack?

Heads up, Jack.

The information wars have been raging online for two years now, Jack, and so far, the far right (and their sponsors, speculation as to whose identity is a matter for another day) are winning. Mostly, this was down to the element of surprise. People — and by people, I mean the left, the centre, and the centre-right — hadn’t realised how influential social media could be in forming opinions among the general public, the media, and thus, ultimately, in the corridors of power.

Then Brexit and Trump happened, Jack, and people woke up. They started fighting back. They started calling out the lies they had previously assumed no one else had been stupid enough to fall for. They identified the lines from the playbook, the logical fallacies that were being deployed, and developed counterarguments. The tide began to turn back.

As this unfolded, the social media giants, Jack, started to panic about their (unwitting?) role in the affair. They introduced tougher policies, with the aim of rooting out hate speech — or at least of whitewashing their role in propagating it. And at first, the new policies worked well. Hate preachers began to disappear from the public domain.

But of course, Jack, people — even far-right knuckledraggers — eventually learn, and adapt. And so it was that a few weeks ago, the friendless little incels on Gab.ai worked out a way of twist these new, stricter rules to their advantage.

My old Twitter account, Jack, was permanently suspended two months ago. I was never abusive or threatening; except, on isolated occasions, towards Nazis.

(A peculiarity, for those who have not experienced this: when Twitter suspends you permanently, they don’t actually give you a reason why. They don’t tell you which tweets constituted violations of the terms and conditions. My best guess? A particularly slimy Nazi — name available on request — threatened to post my personal details on the internet. They had probably got them from the who.is entry on this blog. I responded by suggesting that it might not be the best idea to threaten someone when you have no idea who that someone is; I know people at Twitter UK, I know senior detectives, I know private detectives, I know journalists, I know hackers, I know actual spies. It was a fair warning, and one that remains operative.)

I hadn’t abused anyone or stalked anyone or harassed anyone or directly threatened anyone or violated any terms or conditions. I had merely given as good as I had got.

I appealed against the ban. I got a form letter. “Go away.”

And then this turned up as a comment on the blog last week:

The most amusing aspect of this gloat? It didn’t even have the wit to mask its IP address. Now I and you know that this little Nazi prick lives in Dulverton Avenue, Coventry. And bonus! Because it replied to another comment from a different node, we know where it works as well. How proud and brave are these white supremacists in the flesh, I wonder?

(Incidentally, honey, my other accounts — see if you can find them— have got 40+ of your kind banned in a month. Mwahh!)

But now new tactics are afoot. Some accounts, such as @robesonblogs, are baiting people with the explicit aim of getting them suspended or permanently banned. The particular exchange I was told about went more or less as follows:

A: [Random political point]

B: [Islamophobic comment]

C: “That comment was Islamophobic.”

B: “Why do you support child rape?”

B: “You are a child rapist.”

B: “Why do you support child rape and rape children?”

C: “I do not support child rape or rape children. Why are you so obsessed with child rape?”

*C’s account reported and suspended for a week*

This was the exact wording of the tweet that earned the suspension:

Name: Isabel
Current job: guardian of empty blog*
Sole interest: rapes of white children by brown people (white rapists may continue raping with impunity, and brown kids can go hang)

*The blog linked to in the account bio contains only dummy text. It’s one of the more transparent troll accounts I’ve seen. I can tell you that as of 1.30am on Saturday 12 May, the account @robesonblogs has also been suspended. It remains to be seen whether or not it will return. C’s account has now been restored after a weeklong ban.)

Does this tweet — in response to multiple accusations of paedophilia and support for paedophilia — really constitute a suspendable offence, Jack?

Regardless of what becomes of this particular case, or of my old Twitter account, you should know this: people are exploiting Twitter’s rules in the exact opposite way from that which you intended. Nazis are successfully removing anti-Nazi voices from Twitter. They are exploiting loopholes in your rules in order to silence opposition and facilitate the reintroduction of fascism.

Was this what you envisioned, Jack, when you launched Twitter in 2006? Was this how you imagined making the world a better place? Do you really think permanent bans should be issued without any consideration of the context in which tweets were posted? Is it maybe time for a tiny rethink?

Poisoning the well-educated: how the far right are waging war on knowledge

The demagogues can’t win the debate with intellectuals, so instead, they’re trying every trick in the book to shut it down

The western world is some way from being a technocracy. But there is no doubt in my mind that those sectors that are run on the basis of expertise – the judiciary, the civil service, academia, the creative sector – are under ferocious attack.

Intellectuals, however, are no pushovers, because – well, they’re bright, and they usually hold influence and power. When ideologues face experts on a level playing field, they tend to have their arses handed to them – see the epic owning of alt-right bilemonger Paul Joseph Watson by teacher Mike Stuchbery over the question of racial diversity in Roman Britain. So if a fair fight is out, how is this war being prosecuted?

Wherever possible, extreme rightwingers steer clear of direct confrontations. Jeremy Hunt declines Ralf Little’s offer of a live debate about mental health provision; Chris Grayling refuses to appear on a radio chat show with Andrew Adonis.

They’re assisted in this by the dumbed-down clickbait culture that’s consuming our media. The coverage of science in most newspapers these days is woeful: research findings are published without caveat, rebuttals added too late, if at all. And on news programmes, it’s increasingly rare to see a genuine expert consulted on any issue of note. You can understand why: academics can be a little dry and stuffy, their arguments detailed, nuanced, full of ifs and buts.

Watch the BBC or Sky next time there’s a debate about gun control: guaranteed, there’ll be someone from the NRA, spouting the usual inflammatory bilge, and as a counterpoint, if you’re lucky, you might get the relative of a shooting victim. They don’t want people who know about guns; they want people who care about guns (and who generally add little of substance to the debate). Similarly, in any discussion about the EU, do the producers summon a professor of European history or an economics journalist? Good God no, haul in a rabid Remainer and a batshit Brexiter and watch the sparks fly!

This sidelining of rational voices is even easier on Twitter, where Brexiters can obliterate all those who post inconvenient truths with a tap of the block button.

If a showdown with someone who knows their stuff is unavoidable, far right-demagogues have several ploys. The crassest is simply to prevent their opponent from getting a word in edgeways, as Nigel Farage did to Femi Oluwole on his LBC show, and Julia Hartley-Brewer to Heidi Alexander on Talk Radio. It seems the freedom of speech they profess to hold so dear only matters when it’s theirs.

Another part of their arsenal is the logical fallacy. I don’t want to regurgitate my entire post on the subject here, but to recap, they’re non-arguments masquerading as arguments – underhanded attempts to deflect or reframe the debate, or throw the opponent off balance, rather than address the topic at hand. The ones you’ll come across the most are the argumentum ad populum (“17.4 million people can’t be wrong”), the false dichotomy (“You’re either for freedom of speech or against it”), the appeal to emotion (any tweet by Daniel Hannan), tu quoque or whataboutery (“But Hillary’s emails”), tone policing (“Typical condescending Remoaner”), and Boris Johnson’s favourite toy, the straw man (“So what you’re saying is …”).

But the populist’s standard-issue weapon is the ad hominem: the personal attack. Play the man and not the ball, and hopefully you can forget about the ball.

I’ve written before, too, about the revival of the art of the smear. Essentially, Leave and Trump advocates, like fascists throughout history, love to sling mud. In logic speak, this is known as poisoning the well: an attempt to discredit the target such that people will no longer believe or trust them. Thus, no matter how wise their words today, Tony Blair (Iraq), Nick Clegg (tuition fees), Tim Farron (homophobia), Hillary Clinton (crooked, although no one has yet produced any evidence to support this assertion) and Jeremy Corbyn (IRA, Palestine) can, in some eyes, never be taken seriously again.

(The reason ad hominem works, of course, is that it is not entirely without foundation. Some people or publications are habitual liars or fools and, if shown to have been so often enough, probably should be ignored. Into this category fall most of the UK tabloids, Fox News, Hannan and many of his Brexit conspirators, and most of the alt-right – but also plenty on the far left. Generally speaking, however, people should not be permanently written off on the basis of one or two lapses of judgment.)

Intellectuals – and for the purposes of this section we can scale right down to passably intelligent liberals debating on Twitter – represent a particular challenge for the ad hominist. They don’t tend to be well-known, so their every past mistake and foible is not in the public domain. Populists will still take every opportunity to play the man rather than his argument, but where that’s made difficult (eg by the anonymity conferred by the internet), they’ll go after his sources, or his motives, instead. And in my experience, they tend to do so in one of six ways.

1) Fallible

You may have more information than me, but you were wrong once before, so you may be wrong now.

The argument that someone’s opinion shouldn’t be trusted because she doesn’t have a 100% record in her field is idiotic, but it’s one that’s trotted out with tiresome regularity, most often, in the context of Brexit, in respect of economists.

Yes, they goofed up once. (Or rather, a different group of economists did; that was 10 years ago.) But those economists were appointed to their jobs over thousands of hugely qualified rivals. If they weren’t generally good at their jobs, they’d have lost them long ago. They’re still far more likely to make accurate forecasts about the UK’s future outside the EU than Kev from Castle Point.

Say you find out the cardiac surgeon who’s going to perform open-heart surgery on you lost his last patient. Would you rather he operated on you, or a bricklayer? Someone’s past failings have no bearing on the credibility of their statement today.

2) Biased!

You may have information, but that information comes from a compromised source.

The word “biased” is tossed around by arch-Brexiters almost as freely as “democracy” and “Get over it”, and yet it’s far from clear whether they know what it means.

Bias is not a synonym for preference. You can prefer something to something else instinctively, or having considered both options carefully. “Bias” specifically means a predisposition to like or dislike something because you have a stake in the matter. I’m not biased against wasps; I’ve just weighed up the pros and cons of wasps and concluded, as I imagine most have, that they are a bad thing. If I argue that 1 + 1 = 2 and you argue that 1 + 1 = 3, I’m not biased towards the result 2. I’m just right.

Similarly, I don’t have a holiday home in Florence and I don’t have a crush on my Latvian barista. I have no vested interest in the future of the EU. I’ve just researched the issue, calculated the likely fortunes of my country within and without it, and decided, overwhelmingly, that within is better.

More commonly, this accusation is levelled at any source you use to back up your claims. There’s more justification for this – after all, the Mail, Express, the Canary, and fake news sites like Westmonster, Breitbart and Infowars are notorious for their partisan views and casual relationship with the truth. But a number of other news providers – the “mainstream media” – are also regularly rubbished.

There’s a lot of contempt for the Guardian, for example (mostly from people who haven’t opened it since 1981). Sure, it probably has more commentators from the left of the political landscape than the right, although most are tepidly centrist these days. But it provides a forum for voices from across the spectrum. It follows due journalistic process: it names its sources where possible, and allows those mentioned in its stories a right of reply. It has subeditors and lawyers and its staff routinely discuss the most balanced way to word headlines. On the whole, it uses neutral language in its news pieces, with minimal value judgments. It keeps its news reports separate from its opinion pieces. And above all, it is accountable to its readership, to its own ombudsman, and to the wider public. It responds to all complaints, and when it is incorrect, it publishes retractions and apologies.

The likes of Infowars, Fox News and the Express, meanwhile, are bound by no such constraints. They publish only stories that promote their narrow, ultra-right conservative agenda. News and opinion are an inseparable morass: their stories tell you not just what happened, but exactly what you should think about it.

Crucially, the established free press doesn’t routinely make shit up. Yes, it makes mistakes, and yes, it has been known to put a mild spin on things; but it doesn’t falsify footage, invent quotes, misidentify pictures, or blatantly publish provable falsehoods.

So next time someone plays the “MSM” card, stand your ground. Ask them: “What’s that got to do with anything? The BBC/Guardian is the fourth/seventh most trusted news source in America. (Fox News is 29th.) Which specific details of the report I linked to are wrong?”

3) Brainwashed!

Yes, you have more information than me, but it is false information imparted to you by another. You are a dupe; a stooge.

I love it when Brexiters pull the pin on this one. “You’ve been brainwashed into loving the EU.” As if, through some preposterous sequence of accidents, I had only ever been exposed to pro-EU messages. And it really would have to be preposterous: most of the tabloids (and the Telegraph) have printed nothing but negative stories about Brussels for decades; the quality papers, meanwhile, never said much positive about it because – well, come on, European politics. (If the EU really is a dictatorship, it must surely go down as the dullest in history.)

The circulations of the Guardian and Independent, the only unabashedly pro-EU papers left, are, as the right never tires of pointing out, dwindling rapidly. Personally, I can barely recall coming across any positive messages about the EU, even from the Remain campaign during the referendum. Am I missing something? Euro-conversion booths on our high streets, perhaps? The only real advertisement I ever saw for the EU (before I went looking for information) were EU citizens themselves – valued contributors to our economy and our culture, to whom I cannot apologise enough for the shitstorm Brexit has visited upon them – and the general impression that the country was more prosperous and culturally rich than when I was a boy.

Perhaps sensing the absurdity of that argument, some Brexiters shift the blame to an institution that, to them, is shrouded in mystery: university. Our places of higher learning, some seem to believe, are hotbeds of communism, cranking out rows of malodorous, long-haired men and short-haired women who love immigrants and homosexuals and quinoa and hate white people and Britain and America.

If any of these deluded souls had ever been within a country mile of a campus, they’d know the truth was more mundane. With the exception of the politics faculty and the student union offices, universities are not especially political places. Some right-on loon might make the news every few weeks with a call to ban music from campus because it’s discriminatory against deaf people, but most courses don’t even touch on politics (students of history and the social sciences make up 8% of the corpus) and membership of political groups is low. Most students aged 18-21, like most non-students aged 18-21, are more interested in beer, sport and sex than they are in social welfare budgets or the privatisation of the Land Registry.

Besides, how the hell is this monumental operation being conducted? Are there posters on every wall depicting a smiling Jean-Claude Juncker with the slogan, “Your country needs EU?” Is Ode To Joy piped into student halls of residence while they sleep? Are the student union canteen lunches laced with brie?

If there were some sort of conspiracy to indoctrinate western students in leftist ideas, you’d think someone would have produced some definitive proof. But 49% of Britain’s young people go into higher education. That’s half a million people a year. Surely one of them – or a rogue lecturer, or cleaner – would have recorded some footage on their mobile by now?

There’s a far simpler explanation for young people’s attachment to the EU: their minds are more idealistic, more plastic, more open to new ideas. In addition, university teaches them to think critically, and introduces them to people from a far more diverse range of backgrounds than they were exposed to at home. It’s not the current education system that makes people liberal; it is education itself.

And ask yourself this. Who is more susceptible to brainwashing: the person with at least three years’ extra education, who has been trained to question and critique everything she reads; or the person who never once raised his hand in 10 years of school?

4) Bribed!

You may have information, but it is information that you have been paid to disseminate.

We’re fully into wackjob territory now. I know George Soros is rich, but to fund every Remain vote and leaflet and march and pro-Remain MP and academic and research paper and CEO and judge and economist, and keep it all a secret … You know what? If that did turn out to be the case, I’d remain a Remainer, because I’d want to be on that man’s side.

5) Brideshead

You may have information, but it is esoteric information, irrelevant to everyday life.

Alongside the soap-dodging, sickle-wielding snowflake, another university stereotype stubbornly persists: of Rupert and Sebastian, foppish, entitled aristocrats lounging louchely in their double set while Mrs Miggins meekly serves them tiffin and opium. Entitled, effeminate, with alabaster hands that have never been in the same room as a screwdriver, they can solve complex equations or recite passages of poetry or critique Leibniz’s theory of monads, but when it comes to the business of getting by in life, they’re all at sea. And yet, on graduation, Daddy will fix them up with a cushy number in the civil service or on the board of a big bank.

This, I think, is the image the tabloids are trying to conjure up when they use phrases like “out of touch” and “elite” (the American equivalent seems to be “coastal elite”). They’re trying to foster this idea that students (and academics, judges, civil servants, and anyone else who may have touched a book by someone other than Danielle Steel or Andy McNab) are sheltered from hard reality and therefore unqualified to speak on real-world issues.

Loath as I am to break the devastating news to you, Brexit fans, things have moved on a lick since the 1930s. Ninety per cent of UK students are now from state schools. Daddy’s more likely to be a bookie than a landed gent. And contrary to your belief, the laws of the universe apply as much at university as they do in the “real world”. You still have to work hard, you still have to pay your way – most undergraduates now do regular temporary work on top of their full-time course – and the social competition from your peers is, if anything, more intense. All that, plus the crushing spectre of tens of thousands of pounds of debt hanging over you, and no guarantee of a job at the end of it. Small wonder that suicides among students have doubled in the last decade.

A greater number of students than ever are studying hard vocational subjects, in science, IT, agriculture and journalism, with clearly defined careers at the end of them. In any case, education isn’t about what you learn. It’s about how you learn, how to develop a curiosity about the world, how to question and understand and predict and follow chains of logic.

Besides, if people are so implacably opposed to a pampered, nepotistic elite, they’ve chosen a decidedly odd bunch of champions to rid themselves of the scourge. Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton and Oxford), Daniel Hannan (Marlborough and Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford); and in the US, Donald Trump (wealthy businessman), Steve Bannon (Goldman Sachs financier and media executive) and Reince Priebus (corporate lawyer).

6) Boring!/Bollocks!/Bullshit!

You may have information, but it is … bollocks. Because I say so.

Probably the most common responses from Brexit fanatics to any point I make, or any post I write, are one-word answers: “Rubbish”, “Nonsense”, “Bullshit”, “Bollocks”. They go silent when you ask them to elaborate. I can’t begin to imagine why.

So much, then, for the strategy behind the war on intellectuals. In my next post, I’ll look at the war aims.

I’ll never be a ‘re-leaver’

There has never in my lifetime been a more clear-cut case of light versus dark

Just a little post on why I am such a passionate Remainer.

I wasn’t actually all that pro-EU when all this referendum business started. I mean, I knew it was expensive, and could be more efficient, and sometimes seemed a little in thrall to the neoliberal economic model. But I also knew that it conferred huge benefits, in freedom of movement and trade and cooperation with our European neighbours. That was, frankly, enough to decide the matter for me.

But what made me so rabidly pro-Remain, so determined to stop this, was the breathtaking, unabashed wrongness of the Leave campaign. The sneering. The abuse. The lies. The threats. The casual, carefree use of logical fallacy. The racism. The ignorance. The creeping suspicion of foreign interference.

And as if that weren’t enough, look at the Leavers themselves. Gove. Johnson. Hannan. Farage. Banks. Duncan Smith. Rees-Mogg. Hoey. Even May, when she switched sides, went from steely, sensible woman to bitch from hell. Can you think of one person associated with the Leave campaign with a scintilla of compassion or wisdom?

For me, this is no longer about clinging on to the status quo, or protecting against personal loss (although Brexit has already been costly to me not just financially, but in terms of opportunities lost and friends forced to leave).

No, now this is just about making sure the bad guys don’t win. There has never been, in my lifetime, a more clear-cut case of light versus dark. And I’m not about to step into the darkness, or even the penumbra, in the interests of an easy life.

Fuck you, Farage, and Banks, and Cummings, and Putin. For as long as there is breath in my body, I shall fight your perfidious Brexit.

***

Footnote: the Tories, the Daily Mail and their cabal of piss-breathing liars would have us believe that half of all Remainers have suddenly changed their minds and thrown their weight behind Brexit. This just three weeks after another poll by the same firm showed that people who thought Brexit was a bad idea outnumbered those who supported it for the first time.

Of course, this claim, like pretty much everything else that comes from a far-right source these days, is bollocks. I was going to devote a post to explaining why, but handily, @HelenDeCruz, bless her cotton socks, has saved me the trouble. (TL:DR; the questions were poorly phrased and the headlines were misleading.)

We’re not going away any time soon.

From Russia with hate

An epidemic of abuse is threatening to tear western civilisation apart. Who stands to benefit?

In my last post I wrote the epidemic of abuse sweeping the western world – against individuals, but also against entire groups, including immigrants, liberals, “experts”, academics, Muslims and the mainstream media. I mostly talked about the how. Now I’d like to focus on the why.

When public debate consists almost entirely of ad hominem attacks, it does far more than create an unpleasant atmosphere. Let’s follow ad hominem reasoning to its logical conclusion. (It may be that only 10% of the population are thick enough to swallow this logic, but as Brexit and Trump have shown, 10% is enough.)

Tony Blair, because he took the country to war against Iraq, cannot be trusted on anything ever again. Hillary Clinton, because she conducted some government business on a private email server and happened to be secretary of state when terrorists attacked the US embassy in Benghazi, can never run for public office. Tim Farron, because he avoided, as a Christian, saying that gay sex was not a sin, is the embodiment of evil. Jeremy Corbyn, because he once spoke to members of the IRA and Hamas, is a “mutton-headed mugwump” whose every word must henceforth be disregarded.

Furthermore, according to the guilt by association fallacy: because a handful of immigrants claim benefits, they’re all at it. Because the EU once passed a slightly fussy law about bananas, the entire institution is corrupt, from root to branch. Because the Guardian once published a column in favour of feminism, the entire media is irrevocably biased. Because you haven’t personally taken in a displaced Syrian family, you’re not allowed to advocate for the humane treatment of any refugees.

And at least 598 people seem to agree with the sentiment that because Yvette Cooper is a member of the Labour party, which happened to be in power for part of the period during which a group of men of Asian origin were found to be running a child abuse ring in Rotherham, she has no right to talk about the dangers of internet grooming.

(Donald Trump, on the other hand, can misspell basic words, mishandle legislation disastrously, go bankrupt four times, lie through his teeth, mock a disabled reporter, make openly racist comments and boast about sexually assaulting women, and still be allowed to run the most powerful nation on the planet.)

Quite apart from being the logical equivalent of – well, bollocks, frankly – this speaks to a fantastically grim view of human nature. A single misdemeanour, or error of judgment, renders your entire existence invalid. Make one mistake – or even have a fleeting association with someone who once made a mistake – and you forfeit all right to express an opinion again. (Except if you’re Donald Trump. He can screw up as badly and as many times as he likes.)

We all make mistakes. Human beings are flawed creatures. And as I argued last time, we’re all, inevitably, hypocrites. But by the reasoning of the far right, this means that no one in the entire world should ever be listened to again.

Thus, there can never be any laws. No decision can ever be taken by any authority, because no one on this earth is perfect enough to have authority. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” a chap called Jesus once said, knowing full well that no man born is without sin.

There’s more. By ad hominem logic, no one is ever allowed to change her mind. People do not learn from their mistakes. No one can grow or become a better person. No more Martin McGuinnesses; once a terrorist, always a terrorist. (Everyone you ever had a drink with is a terrorist too.) Every feud is eternal, every war unending. In this universe, apologies are pointless, redemption impossible. Thou must not forgive. Rehabilitation? Ha.

I’ve straw-manned a little here, but I hope it’s clear that this way of thinking is more than just deluded; it’s destructive. The tribalism produced by the guilt by association fallacy, by demonising entire classes of people at a stroke, entrenches opinions, feeds resentments, and creates deep and damaging divisions. This assumption that the acts of a few in a group reflect the disposition of all of them breeds distrust, intolerance, hate. Ad hominem reasoning, combined with the guilt by association fallacy, undermines trust in the system in a way that threatens the very stability of society.

And yet the far right (and, to a comparable extent, the far left) seem to be pushing this exact agenda. Who on earth stands to benefit from this?

‘And you are hanging blacks’

There’s been quite a lot of speculation as to whether the Russian government has meddled in the US presidential election, in the French presidential race, and in Brexit. There are stories of armies of Russia-sponsored Macedonians and bots generating and disseminating fake news and “astroturfing” – creating the impression of grassroots support for far-right ideas, when in fact the number of people subscribing to those ideas is far lower. There are allegations of shady political deals between Donald Trump’s team and Russian operatives, mysterious donations to anti-EU groups, and connections between Russian entities and and Leave campaigners. There’s also, as a footnote, a growing trail of bodies of Russian diplomats.

It all sounds a bit tinfoil-hat, until you remember that it is Vladimir Putin’s plainly stated aim to disrupt and undermine western society. The sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine are biting. Russia is suffering economic hardship, is concerned about Nato, has imperial ambitions in central Europe and the Balkans, and Putin, a KGB officer when the Soviet Union fell, is still smarting over the defeat. Russia doesn’t have the will or the military might to declare open war on the west, but it does have the wits.

People better qualified and connected than I are exploring the diplomatic and economic avenues. What turned my eye eastwards was the methodology being used: ad hominem. Because if anyone can be said to have made ad hominem an art form, it’s the Russian government and the various iterations of its intelligence agencies.

Russia’s love affair with whataboutery dates back to a diplomatic exchange in 1905. After Moscow was criticised over the Kishinev pogrom, its US ambassador responded: “Well, Americans recently lynched blacks.” For reasons that we’ve been through, the point was irrelevant, but it successfully moved the focus of the debate away from indefensible ground. So successfully, in fact, that the appeal to hypocrisy became the central plank of Russian foreign policy for the next 115 years.

For 115 years, whenever someone in power in Russia has taken a dislike to someone, their first recourse has been the smear. They’ll bring up the lynching thing. They’ll set up a secret camera and film their enemy having sex with his mistress, or catch him taking a sauna with some women. If there isn’t enough real evidence, they’ll make some up; a favourite tactic is to install child pornography on the target’s computer.

So enamoured are Russians of this strategy of digging up and inventing incriminating evidence that they have their own word for it: Kompromat. (Here’s all the legit dirt you’ll get on me, by the way, far-right fucks. You’re welcome.)

In Vladimir Putin, we have possibly the finest practitioner of the dark art of the smear ever to have walked the earth. When Putin – or Russia, and by extension, Putin – is criticised, he unfailingly responds in the same way. Instead of answering the charge – he never, but never, directly addresses negative questions – he will point the finger at his accuser. Tu quoque. Whataboutery. Tu quoque.

The day after the arrest of Julian Assange, when Putin was asked about the lack of democracy in Russia, he replied: “As far as democracy goes, it should be a question of complete democracy. Why then, did they put Mr Assange behind bars? There is an American saying: ‘He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones.’”

When the Panama papers came out, and an associate of Putin’s was implicated in the shadowy global money-laundering operation, the Russian president’s reaction was yawnsomely predictable: “There was no corruption involved at all. Besides, we now know from WikiLeaks that officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this.” Translation: “No, you farted.”

This was all a bit of a joke before the internet took such a big role in our lives. Now it’s a clear and present danger, because social media allows people to pursue this strategy on a previously unimagined scale. Now it’s not just a bloke on the telly momentarily dissing you. That bloke can pay people to run multiple accounts and create automated accounts – bots – to boost his signal, and mobilise what appears to be millions of people to discredit you.

People don’t generally alter their opinions much if they hear one negative comment about something. But it’s a different story when they hear thousands, or millions. And this is exactly what’s happening. Tabloid newspapers, far-right demagogues and internet spambots have been systematically smearing immigrants, liberals and the EU in a bid to tear up the very fabric of western society. The Russian Method ™, honed over a century, has finally found its perfect attack vector: unlimited voices at instant speed, all reading from the same hymn sheet. Even better, it’s all untraceable.

It’s not for me to say whether Russia is orchestrating the far-right resurgence, merely colluding with it, or that alt-right nutsacks like Paul Joseph Watson have simply torn a leaf from Putin’s playbook. But at the very least, the convergence of interests here is extraordinary. Whichever way you slice it, the far right in Europe and America are using Vladimir Putin’s tactics to further Vladimir Putin’s agenda.

There may be no smoking gun as yet, but there are a hell of a lot of fingerprints.

I’ll finish by suggesting a few things we can try to do to stop this in a couple of days. In the meantime, here are some solid reads on related topics.

Five ways to spot fake news
How Trump’s following grew out of a teenage chatroom
Carole Cadwalladr meets Arron Banks, director of Leave.EU
Is someone “Putin” cash in Ukip’s pockets?
Russia accused of clandestine funding of anti-EU parties
The Russian sponsorship of the European far right
The Kremlin’s Trojan horses
Post-truth and the “metropolitan elite” feminist
How Russia is hijacking western politics (read the whole of JJ Patrick’s #Snowman series if you can)
The Russian “firehose of falsehood”

The art of the smear: how the far right destroyed public discourse

Online debates these days unfold with all the dignity and decorum of a stag do at a Reading Wetherspoons

“Whoever first hurled an insult at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization” – Sigmund Freud

Insults are nothing new. From the 4th century BC ding-dong between Demosthenes and Aeschines, to Shakespeare’s “You starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!”, to Noel Gallagher’s laceration of Robbie Williams as “the fat dancer from Take That”, incivility is as old as civilisation. We start calling each other names in the playground and, if the Leave voters I’ve encountered online are any guide, there’s no upper age limit on abuse.

But suddenly, it’s Ragnarök out there. Get involved in an online discussion about anything from topiary to the Tweenies and the chances are you’ll be set upon within minutes. Political “attack ads” were once frowned upon; now they’re the norm. There’s hardly been a single positive message in the UK general election campaign thus far; it’s just been smear after slur after slight. Most modern debates – usually online, but increasingly in real life – unfold with all the dignity and decorum of a stag do in a Reading Wetherspoons.

It’s all rather odd, because as I’m sure you already know, attacking a person in this way, instead of the substance of what they’re saying (or in the case of political debate, their policies), is a fallacy: a failure of reasoning that renders a claim invalid. In this case – the argumentum ad hominem fallacy – abuse is invalid because the truth of a person’s statement has nothing to do with their character, past behaviour or friends. Just because it’s Tony Blair saying, “Two plus two equals four”, that doesn’t mean the real answer is five. Much as it pains me to quote Margaret Thatcher, on this point, she had it right: “If they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

Civilisation is supposed to be advancing. We are devising ever better theories to explain the world, sending more kids to university, sharing more information, faster, than ever before. The use of logical fallacies should be declining, not increasing.

So why the recent explosion of invective? Some blame the global climate of fear since 9/11 and the ensuing jihadi atrocities. Some say it’s deindividuation: when we’re online, or part of a large group, we enjoy anonymity; our actions have fewer repercussions for us, either because we are untraceable, or we because we share responsibility with others. When we are at one remove from the consequences, our actions tend to be less inhibited.

Others point to the bubble effect, the fact that people tend to assort themselves into groups of like-minded people. If we spend too long in these echo chambers, hearing only what we want to hear, then we are likely to react more aggressively when someone attacks them.

These theories all have merit, but I don’t believe they are enough to explain the extent of the poisoning of discourse, or the speed with which it’s happened. Echo chambers have always been with us – we’re a tribal species – and abuse is less effective online than in the real world, because while we may be anonymous, our opponents often are too, so we don’t have as much informational ammunition.

There’s something else going on. I have a theory of my own, but before we go into that, it would be helpful to look at abuse in more detail. First, a key distinction. There are two broad classes of ad hominem, which serve different purposes. The first is relatively innocuous and is largely accepted as a legitimate debating tactic.

“You, sir, are drunk.” “And you, madam, are ugly … but at least I shall be sober in the morning.”

Winston Churchill’s zinger to Lady Astor is a regular chart-topper on “Top 10 Putdowns” lists – but like all ad hominems, it’s a fallacy. From a purely logical perspective, Lady Astor is in the right. Churchill’s comeback is fallacious; as well as being offensive, it’s irrelevant. He’s also drawn a false equivalence. While he is quite capable of controlling his level of inebriation, poor Lady Astor has no such dominion over the shape of her face.

But if Astor wins on substance, Churchill wins on style. This is a class of ad hominem that you might call a joust. It’s usually found in the context of the cut and thrust of repartee, and its purpose is to throw the opponent off balance. If your interlocutor has the upper hand in a discussion, a droll, well-targeted personal attack can move the debate to surer ground. Since people’s natural reaction to being attacked is to defend themselves, they’ll often attempt to defend the slight instead of driving home their advantage.

Jousts take place in real life, in real time, in the real world. If they hit the mark, they earn kudos for the wielder. Churchill’s comment may have been mean, but it was quick, it was (presumably at least partially) accurate, and it took some courage – presumably Dutch – because the target of his tongue-lashing was standing right next to him. Above all, it was funny.

Many of the greatest literary minds in history have been able practitioners of the joust. Chaucer, Swift, Pope, Voltaire, Johnson, Twain, Byron (“Posterity will ne’er survey/A nobler grave than this:/Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:/Stop, traveller, and piss”), Wodehouse (“She’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need”), Wilde (“I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result”) and Orwell (“He is simply a hole in the air”) all earned their stripes partly by tearing others off a strip. We excuse these slights, applaud them even, because they show qualities that we aspire to: intelligence, originality, speed of thought. Besides, there’s often a sense that the target had it coming. Who are you going to side with – the guy who won the second world war, or some judgmental fuddy-duddy?

The second class of ad hominem is the smear. It too is rapidly becoming an ingrained part of public discourse, but it is, I will try to argue, far more dangerous, and has no place there. Smears come in four main varieties.

1) Character assassination

There’s really only one contender for the title of World’s Bigliest Trash-Talker. As of March 2017, Donald John Trump was estimated to have slagged off no fewer than 320 different people, organisations and … items of furniture. Yeah, he dissed a table.

Trump’s gibes have the same drawback as jousts – they’re irrelevant to the discussion – and none of the merits. They’re not funny. They’re inane, unoriginal, and, as often as not, false. They do not signal a quick wit, because for the most part Trump delivers them via Twitter, or in prepared speeches to adoring crowds. And they are anything but brave, because Trump’s opponents are rarely in the same room when he vilifies them. To compare the US president’s infantile taunts to Shakespeare’s eloquent excoriations is to stick a Lego staircase next to the Taj Mahal.

Trump tweet about reporter — The “reporter who no one has heard of” was David Cay Johnston, winner of the Pulitzer prize for journalism.

And yet here he is, signing poorly drafted executive orders like baseball cards, merrily topping up the swamp with the contents of every septic tank in America, and hooking his drives ever closer to the nuclear bunker. How so?

When you look at the Mango Mussolini’s modus operandi, all becomes clear. Shower your enemies with insults; see which gains the most traction (ie likes and retweets); then use it again and again, until it becomes irretrievably associated with the target. So Hillary Clinton becomes “Crooked Hillary” at every mention; the New York Times “the failing NYT”; and rival for the Republican nomination Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted”.

These remarks are not designed to artfully throw Trump’s opponents off balance or to enhance his comic credentials. They’re not really directed at his opponents at all; they’re aimed at the wider world. Trump is not trying to undermine what his rivals are saying now, but everything they have ever said. These are cynical, systematic smear campaigns. And incredibly, through sheer force of repetition, they worked.

Most people are smart enough to realise that, just because a hay clump stapled to an overripe satsuma repeats something over and over again, that doesn’t mean it’s true. Unfortunately, it seems there are just enough credulous idiots out there for Trump’s bullying tactics to pay off. By means of a million gutless, leaden, charmless, bogus backstabs, Trump managed to destroy the credibility of everyone who stood in his way.

TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because you are rubbish.

2) Tu quoque

“L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a la vertu.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

The tu quoque – Latin for “you also” – is a special case of ad hominem also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. Here, instead of trying to undermine the target’s argument by maligning their character, you are attempting to do so by pointing out things they have said or done in the past that contradict their current position.

A tu quoque often feels somehow more cutting than a basic ad hominem, because, well, no one likes a hypocrite. However, it is just as invalid as a criticism, because it too fails to disprove the premise. Whether your past or current actions are 100% consistent with your view or not is completely immaterial. Let’s take a recent example.

On March 22 this year, the UK’s esteemed prime minister, Theresa May, stood up in parliament and delivered a broadside against Labour frontbenchers who had sent their children to grammar and private schools. The aim, of course, was to expose the hypocrisy of Labour, who as a party oppose the creation of more grammar schools. But as well as being unfair, May’s point is entirely without merit.

We live in a world where personal and public interests do not always align. (This is why we need governments; to balance private freedoms against the general good.) Politicians aren’t just politicians. They are also, despite appearances, human beings, and many of them are parents.

When you’ve got your MP’s hat on, grammar schools are a bad thing. Most studies have concluded that while they might benefit the few who attend them, they have a deleterious effect on other schools; they suck in all the best pupils and the best teachers, and regular schools suffer as a result.

But now look at the question from the viewpoint of the MP as parent. Grammar schools exist. The kids who go there do better. Given the choice between sending them to a grammar or to a comprehensive, which way do you swing? The effect of your decision on other people is infinitesimal – but it could make a huge difference to your child. You’re technically a hypocrite if you choose the grammar, but it doesn’t mean your opposition to the principle of grammars is wrong.

When Lily Allen and Gary Lineker spoke out in defence of refugees last year, they were bombarded with incandescent messages along the lines of “Well, how many are you taking into your mansion?”

Like May’s tirade, the detractors were missing the point. It isn’t Lily Allen’s job to look after refugees. There are lots of childless couples who’d probably be more than happy to take in a Syrian orphan, for example. The alt-right are constantly frothing at the mouth about the atrocities committed by Isis – but how many of them are donning combat fatigues and heading off to the Levant? If Allen and Lineker are hypocrites, so are they.

Few of us have the time, the equipment or the expertise to devote our lives to solving all the world’s problems. There are others better placed to tackle these matters: police, governments, charities. All we can do is flag them up, perhaps donate some cash, or if we’re lucky enough to have a free weekend, organise a trip to Calais to hand out clothes and food.

The fact is, we’re all hypocrites on a regular basis. Have you ever sat in gridlock and moaned about the traffic? You’re part of the problem! Ever merrily sucked on a fag while gravely warning a young relative never to take up the habit? Pot, meet kettle! Worried about overpopulation – and you have two kids? You’re a fine one to talk!

TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because not every single thing you have ever said and done in your entire life has been 100% consistent with it.

3) Circumstantial ad hominem

The implication that a person has taken a position purely because it suits their agenda; they cannot be trusted on a particular issue because they have a horse in the race, or their judgment is otherwise clouded.

There’s sometimes something to this one. Most prisoners on death row insist that they are innocent, because it’s hugely to their advantage for others to believe them. However, by strict logical criteria, their claim is not automatically untrue simply because it is in their interest. We just need to take it with a healthy pinch of salt.

TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because you are biased.

4) Guilt by association

Fetch the Nurofen. We are now entering the realms of spectacularly twisted logic, where the cognitive gymnastics can induce migraines in the unprepared.

4) is essentially 3) on steroids. The association fallacy is the most egregious and toxic of ad hominems, since it attempts to invalidate someone’s point by smearing them on the basis of her membership of, or tenuous association with, a particular group.

It’s become depressingly common practice, in online discussions, for your opponent to try to dig up dirt on you. They’ll read your profile, scan your previous tweets or comments, even Google you in their quest for incriminating evidence. Failing that, they’ll use whatever they find to try to pigeonhole you.

Why? Because then they can write off your opinion on the basis that they have already written off the opinions of everyone in your group. “Aha, you live in London! Of course you’d parrot pro-EU propaganda – membership benefits the metropolitan elite!” (Forty per cent of Londoners voted Leave.)

As well as committing the same logical misstep as the other smears – implying that a person’s identity is somehow relevant to their point – the association fallacy asks us to accept two further false propositions: a) that the entire group’s views and values are without merit; and b) that everyone in that group thinks and acts in exactly the same way.

Loath as I am to cut the hate-fuelled shitrag that is the Daily Mail any sort of slack, the continued attacks over its historic sympathy for Hitler and the Blackshirts make no sense. For one thing, everyone involved with the paper in 1934 is dead. New office, new owner, new staff. The words “the Daily Mail” now refer to a different entity; there is no immortal “Daily Mail soul” that inhabits everyone who sets foot in its offices. (True, the current team is starting to look more and more like its historic incarnation, but from a logical standpoint, there is no reason why this should be so.)

The guilt by association fallacy effectively means that no one can ever be right, because it holds that your view is worthless if you, or any group you have ever been associated with, have ever done anything wrong.

Telltale phrases: “Typical Leaver”, “You liberals are all the same”, “Just what I’d expect from a Muslim”.

TL;DR: your argument is rubbish because I consider (erroneously) that everyone in the group I have assigned you to (erroneously) is wrong about everything.

I used to think that humanity was slowly waking up to the preposterousness of generalisations like “All men are bastards”, “All Jews are stingy” and “All Gypsies are thieves”. But suddenly, writing off entire cross-sections of society at a stroke is enjoying a renaissance.

I picked the Daily Mail example for a reason. Of all the smear campaigns mounted in the last few years, one of the most sustained and successful has been the coordinated effort to discredit the entirety of the world’s journalists – or, to use the dismissive alt-right term, the “MSM” (mainstream media).

Organisations like the Mail, Express and Fox News haven’t helped the cause with their rabidly partisan headlines and editorials, and it’s true that the Independent, for example, has a strongly pro-EU slant. But the far right demagogues would have you believe that every journalist in every media outlet in the world is part of some huge conspiracy to deceive you, to keep a boot on the throat of the working classes and maintain the status quo.

The alt-right pursue this narrative by seizing on any and every mistake, oversight or lapse of judgment from any publication or broadcaster and magnifying it to ludicrous proportions. So, because the Guardian once ran an erroneous story about Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the floor of a train, we now cannot believe any Guardian story we read. Because Buzzfeed runs listicles and fluff pieces on its site, its investigative journalism is worthless. Because the BBC once published a news item about the negative effects of Brexit, it is irredeemably biased in all matters. The fact that Nigel Farage – an MEP for a party with no representation in parliament who only bothers turning up for work to sour the UK’s foreign relations – gets more airtime than any other politician in the UK is neither here nor there.

Yes, the mainstream media have made mistakes. And yes, some lean in a particular political direction. But on the whole, they try to give a reasonably balanced view of things. They are bound by ethical standards and libel laws, and subject to the oversight of a regulator. When they get things wrong, they apologise, they retract, and they print corrections.

Again, most people don’t buy into the alt-right’s absurd narrative. But a small, significant section of society have swallowed the lie, and now routinely reject any facts from mainstream sources as “biased” or “fake news”. To them, all of the media – from the Independent to the Guardian to the Mail to the BBC to ITV to CNN to the Times to Al-Jazeera to Buzzfeed to the South China Morning Post to the Dumfries & Galloway Standard – are all part of some vast conspiracy to prop up the metropolitan elite. We have now reached a point where a Brexiter, in a discussion about Brexit, will demand that you provide evidence to back up your point – and then, when you do, airily dismiss it because it happened to be published in the Sunday Times.

So if no conventional news sources can be trusted, who are these people listening to? Who has stepped into the information vacuum to expose The Real Truth? Blow me down with a feather, if it isn’t those selfsame alt-right demagogues! The alt-right demagogues, whose newsgathering resources generally stretch to a Twitter and YouTube account and a camcorder in their mum’s basement. The roving-reporter alt-right demagogues, like Paul Joseph Watson, who openly admits that he hardly ever leaves his Battersea flat, Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for five years, and Katie Hopkins, who broke her world exclusive that there were quite a few Asian shops in London by going to the shops.

(This post is plenty long enough without a diversion into the shameless mendacity of the alt-right, but I’ve posted a few examples here, and there are plenty more at Snopes, FactCheck.org and FullFact.)

It wasn’t enough, of course, to smear the media. They are, after all, just mirrors to majority opinion. If a new order is to be imposed, all the traditional institutions must be undermined.

Dominic Cummings’ “Take back control” was very clever. The NHS promise on the bus probably did it for some people. The Breaking Point poster, even though immigration from outside Europe had precisely jack shit to do with the EU, undoubtedly won over a few racists. But for me, the real stroke of genius from the Leave contingent, and the turning point of the whole campaign, was Michael Gove’s “People have had enough of experts.”

Never mind that he was told to say that by one of the exact same metropolitan elite experts he was maligning. Never mind that he apologised abjectly for the comment the next day and retracted it altogether months later. In one pithy phrase, Gove manage to articulate the fury of millions of underachievers. He also single-handedly destroyed the last scrap of trust the public had in the system. Suddenly, the opinion of the man in the street was just as valid as that of someone who had spent years mastering her subject.

Gove’s (or, rather, Cummings’) ludicrous argument, that, because some trusted individuals once made an incorrect prediction, all their predictions are worthless, was the final justification for a Brexit vote among a decisive group of waverers. This arrant nonsense, combined with parallel whispering campaigns – Boris Johnson merrily defaming the EU in his columns for the Telegraph and Spectator, and the relentless demonisation of immigrants and Muslims in the Express, Mail, and far-right “news” sites – was what dragged Leave over the line.

For years, liberals ignored all this mudslinging, I guess because they assumed no one was gullible enough to believe it. Hopefully, they’re waking up to the fact that they can’t afford to ignore it any more.

(I’ve got more to say on this subject, but I’ve already wittered on for too long. Part two will follow shortly.)

Just fucking vote.

The European elections on Thursday 23rd May are a referendum on the future of your country as you know it

Person voting You might not have been planning to vote in the European elections on Thursday. You might not think it will make a difference; you might not give a toss about European politics; you might have a Really Busy Day. I’m going to beg you to reconsider.

Some are calling these elections a second referendum on Brexit. Perhaps so. But they are also a referendum on something orders of magnitude more important: the future of your country as you know it.

Nigel Farage and the rest of the far right certainly don’t think these elections are meaningless. They are throwing everything at them – and it’s paying off. Violent racist Tommy Robinson is standing as a candidate in the north-west, as are assorted UKIP scumbags, and the Brexit party is currently polling at between 30% and 35%.

One-third of the country is planning to vote for a party with no policies. If these results are replicated on Thursday, the Brexit party will have more MEPs than any other party in Britain. And they, and many of the appeasers in the country’s mainstream parties, will take that as licence to railroad through more of their regressive, populist agenda.

If Farage and his thugs are triumphant on Thursday, you can certainly expect hard Brexit, and all the economic and social damage that will bring. But you can expect a lot worse.

You can expect a Tory government run by lazy, cheating, self-serving liar Boris Johnson in coalition with the Brexit party – and Nigel Farage as foreign minister.
You can expect a referendum on capital punishment within five years.
You can expect the privatisation of the NHS to be accelerated.
You can expect every public service and asset in the land to be sold to the highest bidder.
You can expect the transformation of the BBC into Fox News to be completed, before it too is auctioned off to Conservative ministers’ friends and financiers.
You can expect a ramping-up of anti-migrant rhetoric and a further rise in racially motivated attacks.
You can expect the present torrent of disinformation to become a Biblical deluge.
You can expect progressive laws on abortion, LGBT rights, and anti-racist laws to be rescinded.
You can expect the clock starting to turn back on environmental protections and climate legislation.
You can expect increasingly virulent attacks on our liberal institutions: the judiciary, the (already gravely compromised) media, universities.
You can expect increasingly clamorous calls for relaxations of the UK’s gun laws. In short, you can expect the creeping Americanisation and Trumpification of Britain.

Those who know me or have been following my blog know my theories on why all this is happening, but the why is of no consequence right now. What matters is what you can do to stop things getting worse.

I am not being hysterical when I say that in democratic terms at least, this could be the last stand. We already have well-organised, well-funded bands of yobs on our streets. We already have politicians lying without shame or consequence. We are already swamped with disinformation, our social media spaces festering sewers of hate speech and death threats. If Nigel Farage’s Brexit party wins on Thursday, that will only get worse. He and his kind will be further emboldened, and those fighting his evil will be despondent.

So please, please, in the name of God, or whatever person or idea or crisp packet you hold most sacred, if you want your society to remain a tolerant, welcoming, evidence-based one, go out and vote against the far right on Thursday (and yes, that includes the Conservative party in its current form).

If you’re worried about who to vote for to maximise your chances of keeping the fascists out – Lib Dem, Green, Change UK, SNP? – you could do worse than consult this page, which has good advice based on the latest polling.