Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away

JVL Introduction

Labour Party argued that politics can be used for good, ‘for the many’; the Tories that politics is bad.

The strategy was simple: wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth, at the heart of which was a campaign of disinformation and deceit.

Here Adam Ramsay of openDemocracy shows how it worked. No-one knew what to believe and distrust in politics rose. In 49 of the 56 seats Labour lost to the Tories, turnout was down.

That distrust was consciously fomented on social media, involving the setting up of phoney grass-roots sites that spewed attack messages across the country – and a compliant media meekly accepting the disinformation it was fed.

Its complicity, for example, in killing the story about the boy left waiting for a hospital bed, described below, is truly frightening.

A long read but one that raises important issues.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy on Sun 22 Dec 2019. Read the original here.