Media radicalisation in the US and UK

 

Perhaps many people outside the United States do not realise how dangerous the attack on the United States Capitol was. The views from outside the Capitol, which is all the media could immediately show, seemed harmless enough. The reality was very different. Five people died, including one policeman. As one Republican described, seeing the faces of those trying to force their way through a police barricade to get into the House Chamber

“I saw this crowd of people banging on that glass screaming. Looking at their faces, it occurred to me, these aren’t protesters. These are people who want to do harm. What I saw in front of me was basically home-grown fascism, out of control.”

We now know that this was a well organised attempt to capture leading politicians. We don’t yet know, as some Democrats have alleged, whether the attackers had inside help from some Republican politicians. What we do know is that the attackers believed that the elections had been stolen from them, and these claims were repeated and acted on by a majority of the Republican politicians even after the Capitol attack. As there is not a shred of evidence that Biden’s election was illegitimate, those Republican members of Congress are guilty of supporting a democratic destroying lie that was behind the attack on Congress.

There are a minority among Republican politicians that would like to break from Trump. Liz Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, said

“There’s no question the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame”.

But only 10 Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump, while the remaining 201 abstained or voted against. It is very unlikely that enough Republican senators will find him guilty in the Senate. A key question is why.

It should be in the interests of Republicans to impeach Trump, because that is the only certain way to stop him running again in 2024. Republicans shouldn’t want Trump to run again because his behaviour has put off a minority of Republican voters. That was true before the election (Trump did worse than the party in Senate and House races) and it is even more true as a result of his behaviour since. The two seats in Georgia, which looked like going Republican, voted Democrat after the events at the Capitol and Trump campaigned there. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol many Republican politicians disowned Trump.

But then the Republican base fought back. The reason why Republican politicians will not impeach him is the support he still enjoys among Republican voters, and particularly Republican activists. 64% of Republicans support Trump’s recent behaviour, and 57% want him to run again in 2024. As many Republican voters approved the attack on the Capitol as opposed it. There is a history of extreme Republican candidates defeating moderate candidates in primaries, so few Republicans want to upset the Republican base by opposing Trump, even after the attack on the Capitol. Trump himself is ready to finance campaigns against his critics in the Republican party.

So the Republican party are trapped by their pro-Trump base, and there is no obvious way out for those who oppose Trump. The Republican party therefore remains the party that does not respect democracy. A key question for the future of democracy in the United States will be whether voters understand that when they vote in two and four years time. Do they understand that a vote for the Republicans could be the last time they get a real choice in who governs them? As I argued some time ago, the only way you can rescue right wing political parties from the extreme place they have got to in the US and UK is to defeat them time and time again, or to change what is keeping extremism going.

Academic analysis of how the media influences people has normally focused on elections, and all of the studies I have seen suggest a strong influence on voters. I think their influence on party activists on the right is just as important. The traditional and respectable media in the US was clear that there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, and that Biden won fairly. It was the extreme right wing media, including Murdoch’s Fox News but also One America News, Rush Limbaugh and numerous social media outlets, that pushed the idea that Trump had really won.

This media is crucial in allowing many Republicans to believe what Trump was telling them. I think this is the key difference between now and when the last Republican president was impeached. For a long time voters were reluctant to have Nixon impeached, but eventually they agreed it should be done. But back then there was no significant media pretending it was all a giant conspiracy. Back then there were no significant people or organisations with money threatening to bring down any politicians who voted to have Nixon impeached.

I doubt if Biden has the votes to curtail the ability of Fox News and others to continue to radicalise the Republican base, even if he was minded to do so. We therefore have to hope that voters will continue to vote against this Republican party. The danger is that the mainstream media begins to normalise the Republican party once again, and a President with a Senate that blocks many of his reforms finds his popularity falling, and ends up in the position Obama was for six of his eight years.

In the UK we do not have primaries, so the direct power of the Conservative Party base is much less. The way the authoritarian right was able to win power in the UK was through a new party of the right that threatened the hegemony of the Conservative party, and through a referendum. Yet voters still had to be convinced to vote for a Prime Minister that illegally suspended parliament. That happened in part because the media landscape in the UK is much worse than in the US. I thought otherwise when I first started this blog, but that was before the Conservative party started turning the screws on the BBC. While in the US both the Trump supporting press and broadcast media are in a minority, in the UK the right wing press is a majority of the printed media and the BBC finds it difficult to deviate from the lines pushed by the government and that press.

However the situation in the UK may be about to get a lot worse, with GB News headed by Andrew Neil and the Murdoch owned News UK TV. Both new channels look like they are pitching to a right wing audience, and both are funded by people or organisations that have funded other right wing endeavours. Ofcom is supposed to ensure balance in broadcasting, which is why Sky News has never become Fox News. But with comment rather than news outlets like LBC and Talk Radio, Ofcom has taken a less strict view about what balance is.

The danger is that the two new TV channels will try and push that boundary further to the right. This is the context in which totally unfit Paul Dacre’s rumoured chairmanship of Ofcom should be seen. The danger is the creation of a right wing media bubble, where people who read the right wing press do not watch BBC News but one of these two new channels. Coupled with a FPTP system which favours social conservatives, and a Conservative party that exploits that and a social liberal vote which is divided among many parties, if these new media outlets are successful such a right wing bubble could ensure Conservative governments for a very long time.

Coronavirus and the consequences of a compliant media

This hasn’t been the new government’s first nationwide crisis. That was widespread flooding hitting many regions of the UK. As I explained here, that was partly a disaster created by the Conservative party (with a little help from their coalition partners). Journalists had their chance to make a story out of this by using the hook of Johnson’s non-appearance at any of the flooded towns, but it didn’t happen, just it didn’t happen on all the previous occasions we have had widespread flooding. Which is why spending on flood defences continues to be inadequate.

Lack of criticism encourages a certain laziness, but also gives politicians the courage to do things that those in democracies with more accountability would not do. I think we can see both in the coronavirus crisis.

In the initial phase of the UK pandemic, where cases were mainly coming via contact from abroad, the NHS were trying to prevent infections by tracing and getting those who had contact with the virus to isolate themselves. For that phase to have any chance of working, the Prime Minister needed to impress upon the country the importance of voluntary social distancing, so that cases the health service missed did not pass the virus on. Instead the Prime Minister continued to shake hands as if nothing had happened. He even suggested the media was overreacting to the virus.

That was a very personal example of laziness. But more generally the government needed to get across the seriousness of the situation without creating widespread panic. The best way to do that is to create social solidarity and trust in government. You create trust in government by openness. It is not good enough to say you are following the science and not be honest about the science and the alternatives available, so everyone can understand why you are taking a particular course. .

The government started from a difficult position because its actions elsewhere had created a very divided society. There would always be those that questioned what they were doing. But if the government really was following the science, and it was obvious to anyone who investigated the literature the government released that it was following the science, then that politicising of the government’s approach would have been limited.

You can see this in the behaviour of the opposition. They initially did not question or criticise what the government was doing. In a crisis they were prepared to give the government the benefit of doubt. But if that was to last it required bringing the opposition alongside as part of a national effort, by for example including an opposition minister or the mayor of London in COBRA meetings.

None of this happened. One of the reasons it didn’t happen is that the government knew it faced a largely compliant media. On social media there were enough friendly voices to try and shut down those who “questioned the science”. Blunders came and went with no consequences, such as Hancock’s premature claim that he was working with retailers, the 111 service giving the wrong advice and with too few staff to take calls, and delay in checking at airports and getting people to quarantine themselves.

The government’s strategy, of keeping information tight and endlessly repeating that they were following the science, might have been enough if it hadn’t been for many other countries following a different path to the government once it was clear that the containment phase was not working Other countries seemed to be introducing more stringent measures to ensure social distancing than our government. A few, like Italy, were doing so because the pandemic was uncontrolled and they had no choice. But other countries, like Ireland on our doorstep, did it from choice. It seemed clear that the UK was following a different path and it wasn’t clear why. When people like the editor of the Lancet started questioning the strategy, news programmes like Channel 4 News and Newsnight began to ask questions. And those questions were not answered.

People started taking their own actions to ensure social distancing. Universities started teaching online and large events were cancelled. Then Scotland jumped ship and suspended large gatherings, and later the football league suspended matches. At that point the government, which was supposedly following the science, seemed to panic and follow Scotland’s lead. Rather than the government leading a national effort, it appeared to be playing catch up.

I think it is fair to say that the government’s communications strategy has been chaotic. You cannot communicate to people in a crisis like this with occasional press conferences and off the record briefing to the odd journalist, or with your health minister writing behind paywalls in the house newspaper. You cannot pretend that you are aiming to protect the vulnerable and elderly when you offer no guidance to those groups to limit social contacts. You cannot keep saying you are following ‘the science’ when most other countries are doing something very different, because science is international. And you cannot tell people questioning your approach to be quiet to stop panic when you brief a journalist to say

“What keeps ministers and officials awake at night is the fear that if the epidemic becomes too great they would have to make appalling decisions, such as that the NHS would stop treating people over a certain age, such as 65.”

Alot of this is laziness encouraged by the belief that most of the media will back you come what may. But I also want to talk about risk taking, and a good way of introducing this is to look at this clip from the Irish media talking about how they see the UK strategy. Please also read James Meadway’s comment, which is very pertinent to the subject of this blog. Please view and read it before continuing.

In this Irish view, and many who have tried to work out why the UK strategy seems more laid back than elsewhere, the UK idea is to generate widespread immunity before winter hits the NHS and social distancing no longer works. The idea is to flatten the curve, but not too much. It is the only explanation I can come up with for the comparative lack of action in the UK compared to elsewhere, including Ireland. So let us suppose that is the strategy.

Other countries are trying to flatten the curve by much more, and perhaps even with the aim of eventually being to make the ‘contain phase’ work. That seems to be the idea in China. I don’t want to speculate on which strategy is right or wrong, because I don’t have the skills to do so (although this is a strong critique of the UK approach). What I think is worth noting is that the UK strategy is very brave from a political point of view. In the short term it is quite likely that a lot more people will die in the UK than in other countries. And while the UK strategy may be proved right in the longer term, there will always be a risk that this will not happen.

Many politicians, subject to a reasonable and fearless degree of internal scrutiny, would reject the UK strategy as just too risky - for them. However if a politician is not subject to strong internal scrutiny, they might be tempted to take a greater risk. That may be what is happening in the UK, as it is happening with Brexit. With Brexit it is people getting poorer, but with this crisis it is people dying.

This is particularly the case when the UK more than other countries has a health service that has been stripped to the bone, working at more than full capacity at normal times. This may be the reason that the government has adopted this strategy - it is trying to avoid a larger crisis developing at the worst time for the NHS at the beginning of next year. Capacity constraints in the amount of testing it can do may have caused the government to abandon widespread testing so soon, including testing NHS staff. The government doesn’t believe it can keep enough social distancing going until this time next year, even though it would have six more months to prepare.

Here we come to the major reason why weak media scrutiny puts this country at far greater risk than elsewhere. We have had 10 years where the NHS has been starved of resources, and the media has been shamelessly repeating the government line that the NHS has been protected. Every medic knows that you cannot keep spending on the NHS constant (even in real terms) and not end up with an NHS crisis. Yet this government spin has been repeated ad nauseam. And then of course we have had Brexit which has robbed the NHS of invaluable doctors and nurses. The government took a huge risk with the NHS by implementing austerity and Brexit, and they could do so because of a largely compliant media. Now many people my age and older could end up paying the ultimate price.

Update 17/03

So yesterday, if you listen to the BBC, “the science changed”. Yet in reality a good bit of why the advice changed was obvious to many before it changed: just look at this clip from Irish TV. More detail here and here. That it took those advising the government longer than many outsiders to see what was wrong should be the subject of an inquiry once this is all over. We can only guess what happened. Plans drawn up for a more serious than normal flu pandemic became part of internal government groupthink, when in fact we should have been treating this pandemic as something we should suppress rather than control. It also seems, incredibly, that not enough time was spent telling politicians about the risks involved in following their original strategy.

Even now I worry that the government is being too 'British' about this, with lots of advice and recommendations. When is travel essential? Here and here are examples of what happens when that advice is not followed, because no sanction is attached to not following it. Three other points that are now clear. First, the government did not prepare for all this early enough, and the media should be giving them hell for this failure. (Most of the media won't, for reasons described in the post.) Second all those who said people had no right to criticise because the government was following the science now look extremely foolish, and they need to admit their mistake.

But third and most importantly, the majority of the media that gave very little time to the concerns of others need to reflect on how many lives their inaction may have cost. As James Meadway reminds us, it was Amartya Sen who suggested that a free press meant less deaths in famines, and now we can see why.    

Guardian article on flooding

A very short post linking to my article in the Guardian on flooding. Long time readers will probably remember that I have written about this before. I even naively thought at one point, after the floods at the end of 2013, that this would be Cameron's Katrina. It wasn't, and my naivety was about the UK media. That is why my Guardian article talks not just about a political failure of successive Conservative governments, but also a failure (with only the occasional exception) of the broadcast media.

Some on the left might dismiss this as political bias in the broadcast media, but it is more complex than that. In the article I write

“An obsession with breaking news has crowded out memory and background research. Flood victims ask why this keeps happening to them – but ministers simply respond with statistics that their interviewers have not been briefed about. No interviewer asks ministers why they have ignored the Pitt review, because they don’t know that the Pitt review ever existed.”

You cannot hold politicians to account if the broadcast media collectively forgets the past. Each episode of flooding will be treated as if nothing like this ever happened before. In addition there is an inability to handle numbers. Any reporter who looks at the numbers on flood defences (available here) should immediately notice the large increases in spending in 2008/9 and 2009/10. Why is that they should ask. That in turn should lead them to the Pitt review, or they can just ask someone who knows about this stuff.

That process does not happen. The journalist doing the interview has been sent off at the first opportunity to a flooded area, and crucially no one has been feeding them background research. As a result any minister that is available for comment will talk about how the money allocated for flood defences has increased, and the interviewer knowing no better will move on. If by chance any journalist is reading this, the killer fact is that spending in 2018/9 is a lot lower as a share of GDP than at the end of the Labour government, when it should have been much higher given the correct predictions in the Pitt review.

What has happened, it seems to me, is that broadcast media has farmed out background research to the press. Which might work, if the press was unbiased and was not battling to stay afloat. This is all part of a process of disconnecting the media from any source of expertise. As the last line of my article says

“If much of the media is bereft of the information that can hold the government to account, then don’t be surprised when people elect governments that ignore experts.”

The result of this media failure is countless flooded homes that might have been kept dry, if the media had done its job in holding the government to account.

Who to blame for Johnson winning?

When I wrote this in July I desperately wanted to be wrong. (Of course I was wrong about a lot of the details but alas not the main point.) But it soon became clear that, compared to 2017, the press had had two more years to paint Corbyn as marxist, unpatriotic and racist, and for enough people that would be a reason not to vote Labour. Among others who supported Brexit, they really did believe that Johnson was the man to get Brexit done.

Many will say that Labour lost badly because they had a left wing manifesto. They always do after each election defeat. I doubt that has much to do with this defeat, although the large amount of giveaways to the wrong people was probably a factor. The problem was Corbyn, not Labour’s manifesto. And while many voted against the media image of Corbyn more than anything else, it has to be said that Corbyn’s past and his failures over the last three years made the media’s job very easy.

We should of course blame the media. The right wing press became part of the Tories propaganda war. The Tories lied like never before, just as some of them did in 2016. The BBC was even more careful not to do anything that might upset the government, and it has a real problem when ‘accidents’ keep advantaging one side. But the moment the BBC played a key role in electing Boris Johnson was very specific, and it goes back to the day Johnson got his deal with the EU.

What the media should have asked at that moment is why Johnson had accepted a deal that was essentially the first the EU had proposed, but which he and other ERG members had said at the time was unacceptable. Why had he capitulated? Was it all just a ruse so he could become Prime Minister?

Nobody thought a deal was possible, gushed Laura Kuenssberg, repeating one of CCHQ’s lines to take. No sense from her of what had actually happened. As I noted here, the BBC’s Brussels correspondent got it about right, but the tone of the reporting was set by Kuenssberg. Whether this misrepresentation of Johnson’s deal was deliberate or the result of ignorance I don’t know, but it was critical.

Of course the Tory and Brexit press also took CCHQ’s lines to take. The BBC is the only chance most voters have to get a check on what their newspapers say. It did not provide any such check on this occasion. And it is critical because it allows Johnson to say, as he has, that it was his unique abilities that helped him achieve a deal that everyone said was impossible. No doubt he will say the same when he refuses an extension in July next year because the EU have refused to give him the deal he wants.

Voters who still believe in leaving the EU were left with the impression, thanks to the BBC (and of course the Brexit press), that Johnson was the person who could deal with the EU and get Brexit done. They were not told the truth that he was the person who had helped waste almost a year in squabbling in part so he could get to be Prime Minister. So Leavers are left with an image of competence rather than the reality, which is that Johnson is quite prepared to damage the economy and the workings of democracy just for his own personal gain.

But there is little that Labour or the Liberal Democrats can do about media bias while they are out of power. Undoubtedly a key reason Johnson won was because the Remain/anti-Johnson vote was split. It is depressing and very worrying how many people voted for Johnson, our own Donald Trump, but while the Electoral College gifted Trump his victory despite losing the popular vote, so First Past The Post (FPTP) gave Johnson his victory. A lot of people voted tactically, but not enough.

Both Labour and Liberal Democrats are to blame for not cooperating. While Labour’s failure was not a surprise, I had hoped the Liberal Democrats would take the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and not put up candidates in Labour marginals like Canterbury. It didn’t, and instead it spent too much of its time attacking Labour in the futile belief that this would win over some Tory voters. I suspect they would have been much more successful if they had been honest that the best way to stop Brexit was through a minority Labour government dependent on LibDem votes.

The ultimate responsibility for the split vote must nevertheless rest with Jeremy Corbyn.

The big surge in the Liberal Democrat vote from below 10% to over 20% at its peak began in the Spring of this year, and it coincided with a collapse in Labour’s vote. This quite remarkable change in fortunes cannot be put down to a biased media, but is obviously a Brexit effect.

Throughout 2018 Labour had managed to stay the obvious choice for Remainers, as it had been in the 2017 election. But as soon as May finalised her Withdrawal Agreement it was clear triangulating would no longer work, and Labour would have to take a position. The polls suggested Labour would lose votes by not supporting Remain, but as I noted in December last year too many within Labour were in denial.

Labour entering into talks with May to get Brexit done was I suspect the final straw for many Remainers. They didn’t go to the new and short lived Remain party but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The European election was a disaster, but shifting Labour’s policy seemed like trying to get blood out of a stone. I really think if they had moved at the beginning of 2019 to where they ended up things would have been rather different. Instead the Labour leadership single-handedly created the revival of the Liberal Democrats. That, as well as his failure to deal with antisemitism and some of his intolerant supporters, are major factors behind this defeat.

Easy to say in hindsight? Not really. I said these things in 2016 in the second Labour leadership election that Corbyn won. I said it throughout late 2018 and early 2019 was the Remain vote became disenchanted with Corbyn. But the behaviour of Labour MPs made an alternative to Corbyn impossible in 2016 then, as it had been in 2015, and after the 2017 general election result he was never going to be removed.

Could we have stopped Johnson if Labour had not allowed the Remain vote to split. To be honest I don’t know. That is how negative the media’s image of Corbyn has been. Some Lexiters will say it is all Remainers’ fault, but that is a nonsense position. As a result of this defeat we have reached the end of the line for the Remain cause. It has been three years of experts and people who made themselves experts trying to explain why Brexit was such a bad idea, but nothing we could do was able to counteract the propaganda of the Brexit press and the knowledge as opinion attitude of the broadcast media, and particularly the BBC. The really striking finding after three years when the truth about Brexit became crystal clear to anyone wanting or able to see it is that the number of people wanting Brexit changed only a little, and that is what gave Johnson his majority.

Now that we have elected our own Donald Trump, I’m reminded of a talk Paul Krugman gave after Trump won. At the time I wrote a post about it, and I ended it like this:

“We can, and should, continue to rage against the dying of the light. What is difficult, in this time of crazy, is being able to put that rage aside, and engage in a form of quietism, a retreat from the here and now of political discourse. Not a retreat into any kind of acceptance of where we now are, but instead into asking what and why, and from the answers to those questions to planning for the time when facts get back into fashion. But more than that. Using the answers to the what and why to prevent us lapsing back into our current post-truth world.”

I will continue to rage, but not quite as often as I have done since the blog began almost exactly eight years ago. It is time for deeper thought about how we get back to the light and ensure that we never again lapse into a post-truth world.

Journalists’ own pact with the devil

While Dominic Cummings is no genius, he does have a good understanding of how the UK media works, and therefore how to manipulate it. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most obvious is to use privileged access in return for uncritical coverage. This is how it works.

One of the prizes journalists most aspire to is being first with the news. To get an ‘exclusive’ story. In the political world the biggest generator of news stories is the government. This gives the government the potential to act as the devil to which journalists can sell their souls to. The value of access increases when the government reduces the amount of information it supplies for free in other places like parliament. The price journalists pay to be given privileged access to news, or more generally some insight in government strategy, is to report what is fed to them without the critical eye that this same journalist might normally apply to this information if it was released publicly.

Of course not all journalists are prepared to do this. But if their personal views are sympathetic to the government, or more importantly if their employer likes to take lines that are helpful to or supportive of the government, it is much easier to sell your soul in this way. It is a phenomenon that all journalists understand, and it is an art that all governments practice to some extent. What is now clear is that Dominic Cummings is willing to buy as many souls as he can to counter bad news or his own mistakes.

The result is that some journalists that have not sold their souls have begun to speak out about what is going on. One is (not surprisingly) Peter Oborne, who details here (HT Jon) many of the (often false) stories that Cummings has generated which have allowed the press and the BBC to hide bad news for the government. (Short interview version here.) Perhaps more surprising is this from Adam Boulton of Sky News, who effectively supports Oborne and adds another example from the BBC. He writes

“In 25 years as Sky News' political editor I never sought favours and was never given them, perhaps because I worked for challenger companies rather than the legacy duopoly of ITV and BBC. I am expressing a personal view here, not speaking on behalf of Sky News. But I can confirm that I and my Sky News colleagues still work with the same "no favours" impartiality.”

My personal impression that Sky journalists are better in this respect than the BBC in particular is backed up by the latest Ofcom survey (figure 11.5), where Sky News does better than the BBC on being accurate, trustworthy, and particularly unbiased. However such surveys may be distorted by the huge campaign in the Brexit press to suggest the BBC is biased.

That journalists from particular right wing newspapers act as agents for a right wing, pro-Brexit government should hardly be a surprise. You only need to look to the same newspapers' coverage of the Johnson domestic incident earlier this year to see this in operation. But these newspapers power becomes much stronger when the line they take is not contradicted by the broadcast media.

The BBC is who really matters here, as it is watched by far more people for news than Sky, which makes what the BBC does much more important than anything Sky does. The importance of the BBC is underlined by a new report by Dr.Richard Fletcher and Meera Selva for Oxford’s Reuters Institute. It shows that Leavers are less likely to use non-MSM sources than Remainers. Equally, few Leavers rely on their pro-Brexit newspaper alone: they also typically watch the BBC. Indeed 51% of Leavers say the BBC is their main source of news, with just 30% saying their main source comes from online, while the equivalent figures for Remainers is 38% and 45% respectively. This is not too surprising given that Leavers tend to be older and Remain voters younger.

The report interprets the importance of the BBC for Leave voters as implying they get their news from one impartial source. I would dispute that. Of course the BBC is not a shameless propaganda organisation of the kind we see in the Brexit press, but instead it works to support the Leave case in a number of subtle and not so subtle ways. Many of these are detailed by one of the best Brexit commentators around, Chris Grey.

I have argued many times before (see here for example) that during the referendum the BBC acted in a way that was very helpful to Leave by treating their (obvious) lies as opinions, to be balanced against the opinions (which happened to be truths) of the Remain side. The BBC most often excluded experts, and when they were included they were balanced with someone from the Leave side. This is a view shared not only be nearly all economic, trade and legal experts, but also some journalists e.g. Peston quoted here. That continued after the result. Claims made by the Leave side, and by the government, that were at least questionable would often go unquestioned.

Some of this comes from simple ignorance. The BBC has some very good journalists who understand the issues around Brexit, like like Katya Adler who reports on the view from Brussels, but most prime airtime is given to political generalists who at least appear not to understand the issues involved. I remember the moment that Johnson finally got his deal with the EU. Laura Kuenssberg gushed that few people had thought it possible to get a deal, while it was left to Katya Adler to explain that Johnson had essentially just accepted the first proposal put forward by Brussels over a year ago. No one asked why Johnson had effectively accepted a deal that his predecessor had said no UK PM could make.

Some of this apparent ignorance comes from perceived necessity. The pressure from the Brexit press and Leave politicians on the BBC is relentless, and there is little to balance this on the Remain side. The obvious conclusion that too many BBC journalists draw is that keeping out of trouble means not giving Leave politicians a hard time. Some acute media observers like Roy Greenslade conclude that the BBC does a great job standing up to this pressure, and of course given this pressure it could be a lot worse, but I think it does take a toll.

The structural problem can be stated fairly easily. The Leave case is essentially fantasy. Beyond a concern about immigration the Leave side have nothing that can justify the great harm they intend to inflict on the UK economy. Yet when the Leave side talks about taking back control, few BBC journalists ask obvious questions, like what EU law that the UK voted against are the Leave side objecting too, or how can trade with countries we hardly trade with compensate for the trade we will lose with the EU? If the BBC allows the Leave fantasy bubble to remain unpricked, you are in effect giving credibility to that fantasy, which is to support it. Another way of making the same point is that the BBC has allowed the Leave side to control the Brexit narrative for three years.

Unfortunately the BBC’s problem goes beyond being cowed by fear of the Leave side, or the liberal guilt that Grey mentions. There is little doubt that some of those now working in the BBC are, consciously or otherwise, pushing the Leave cause. For example Question Time sometimes has audiences that are clearly unbalanced towards Leave, while its selection process is supposed to produce a more balanced audience. The number of appearances of Nigel Farage has raised questions.

A more specific instance was the BBC’s shameful attempt to first ignore and then attempt to rubbish the evidence on the Leave's referendum spending scandal, discussed in detail by Peter Jukes here. Or the unmediated coverage of Farage’s Brexit party launch that was the last straw for one BBC war reporter. Or Humphries on their flagship political radio programme. Or the reluctance to interview non-politicians involved in successful legal challenges to the government. Or the publicity they gave to recycled 'Economists for Free Trade' nonsense. And so on.

The BBC has an obvious way of refuting these claims. They could explain their behaviour over issues like 2016 referendum spending. They could commission independent research that looks at the kind of issue that I mention here. Just quoting YouGov polls that obviously reflect the Brexit press campaign against the BBC does not remove the evidence that the BBC is shifting its reporting in response to that pressure and in some cases actively supports the Leave side.

Is this good for Johnson, whether he wins or loses?

I have no idea whether Johnson will get his deal through on Saturday. As the broadcast media is obsessed by headcounts I will leave it to them. What I will say is that the idea that MPs will be taking a decision that has a profound influence on everyone in this country (in which will do such serious economic and political damage to the UK) on the basis of only two days of scrutiny with no assessment of its impact is just absurd, and typifies everything that is wrong about Brexit.

Who knows why Johnson changed strategy during or before his meeting with Varadkar. Maybe it was fears about security in Northern Ireland after No Deal created a border. Maybe he always had the idea in mind of going back to the EU’s original plan to keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union and Single Market. It seemed to be the obvious thing for Johnson to try, as I suggested in August. Maybe the suggestion came from Varadkar. But whatever it was, there is a huge irony in where we are now.

What Johnson has agreed to is basically the first deal the EU proposed. It is a deal that May said no UK Prime Minister could accept, and the deal condemned by Johnson a year ago. The backstop has now become the deal. No wonder Varadkar looked so pleased after his meeting with Johnson, and no wonder European leaders look so pleased when the deal was finally agreed. Of course the EU could agree to something they had already proposed.

Why has the ERG apparently agreed to this, when they said they could not possibly support it first time round? Unfortunately (or perhaps not) I cannot put myself in ERG shoes and answer that question. What does annoy me is when the BBC’s political editor praises Johnson for having got the EU to drop the backstop, when in reality he has forgotten all ideas of alternative arrangements and made the original backstop the deal. Indeed the BBC in lavishing praise on Johnson, and failing to point out his earlier rejection of almost the same proposal, is doing its bit to get the deal over the line on Saturday.

If Johnson fails on Saturday to get parliament to vote for his deal, he has got himself a very strong Brexit line to take into any General Election. Winning a General Election has always been Johnson’s prime goal. Before that walk among the trees with Leo Varadkar, Johnson’s election strategy had been to formally argue that he could get a deal (to keep Tory MPs on board), but hope a sufficient number of Farage inclined Leavers took this to mean he would leave with no deal.

Johnson's new deal is also a better election strategy. Few English voters care about Northern Ireland, regrettable though that is, and so they will feel no qualms about giving Johnson enough MPs to drop his DUP alliance. For Leavers, the idea of voting to get Brexit over the line will seem irresistible. Of course if Johnson does win and gets his deal through parliament Brexit will continue in the form of negotiating an FTA, but we will be out of the EU.

The risk that Johnson always had in actually finalising but not passing a deal is that Farage would convince enough voters his deal was not true Brexit and that they should therefore vote for him. However I suspect that will be very hard for Farage with this deal. What part of the deal can Farage use to convince Leavers it is not a real Brexit? As I noted above, talking about the EU annexing Northern Ireland is unlikely to impress most voters.

Does it make sense to hold a People’s Vote (PV) on Johnson’s deal vs Remain if Parliament can find the votes for that? Here the calculation is very simple. Unlike the PVs I talked about in earlier posts, which would have almost certainly led to a Johnson boycott, it will be much harder for him to boycott a vote on his own deal. However much he says that a second vote betrays the first, running away from a vote on your own deal just looks bad. So I suspect we would get a proper PV, even if Johnson resists it in many ways beforehand.

The main reason he will eventually agree to it is that he thinks he can win. He may well be right. Remainers should not put too much faith in the small majority in polls of Leave versus Remain. It could well be 2016 all over again.

Alasdair Smith goes through some of the lines that Johnson/Cummings will take. It is classic disinformation of the type that some of us can still remember from 2016. They will claim that the deal ensures that Britain will be free of EU laws and regulations, and now free to strike trade deals of our own. In reality this is true only if the UK does not sign a trade deal with the EU. Trade deals are all about harmonisation of tariffs and regulations, and there is no way the EU is going to harmonise on anything other than their own.

Nor is abandoning a level playing field made real until it comes to negotiating a FTA with the EU. The EU will certainly insist on one if there is tariff alignment, because tariffs are the EUs weapon against a country undercutting the EU by lowering standards. The reality has always been that complete sovereignty, in the sense of having nothing to do with EU laws and regulations, is only true if the UK is prepared to avoid an EU FTA completely. Indeed that possibility remains open to Johnson with this deal. If he does not get any FTA's this deal will morph into No Deal, except that Northern Ireland is safe.  

The alternative to a PV is an election, which parliament is sure to get. If Labour forms a government after that election then it is almost certain Brexit is dead. The Tories will vote against a soft Brexit as not a ‘real’ Brexit, and Remainers will vote for Remain. So the critical variable is the probability of that election outcome. I suspect most people would put the probability of a PV win for Remain as higher than Labour winning the election, simply because in the latter the Remain vote is split by the Liberal Democrats.

If Johnson does get his deal through parliament, or wins a PV, he will enjoy at least a week of media adulation that will be unbearable for Remainers. I had wondered if there might be a sting in the tail for him. With Brexit out of the way, he will have lost his main weapon against his opponents in a General Election. He may suffer the fate of his idol Churchill, and (in leavers eyes) win the war only to lose the peace.

However I can think of countless reasons why winning on Saturday will hand Johnson the election on a plate. There is the adulation from Leavers and the media of course. Remainers will also not quickly forget, and they will be looking for someone to blame, and many will blame Corbyn. That feeling may be intensified if it turns out, as it may well do, that it was Labour MPs who were critical in getting Parliament to approve the deal on Saturady. In short, whether he wins or loses, Johnson is set pretty for the General Election.

Why did the UK become a failed state?

‘I should be the leader of a government of national unity’. ‘No you shouldn’t, someone else should’. I’m afraid if you were hoping I would write about this nonsense you will be disappointed. It seems to me right now nothing more than just another way for those who really dislike Corbyn to attack him and those who support Labour to attack everyone else. Rebel Tories will be hoping a crash out Brexit can be stopped another way, and if that fails or in the unlikely event that Johnson ignores parliament, who has the relatively unimportant job of leading a caretaker government will be decided days before it needs to be decided, and not before.

The discussion is one illustration that the UK has become a failed state, where a government about to do great harm to those it governs draws comfort from opposition parties arguing with each other. This post is about how a policy (crashing out of the EU) that will do nearly everyone harm and some great harm seems to have considerable, albeit still minority, support. I wrote in January about how the rest of the world thinks Brexit is utterly stupid, and leaving without any deal looks beyond stupid. When a country does something as idiotic as this, and it has popular support, there is something deeply wrong with that country.

Arguments that people really believe they will gain something worth the cost of the pain and suffering of crashing out merely shifts the question, because we will gain nothing that comes near compensating for the costs. Most supporters of Brexit cannot name an EU based law that has a significant negative impact on their lives, let alone a law that the UK opposed at the time, let alone compare that to the many EU laws that have brought benefits. Nationalism alone is not an answer: few think football fans would be better off if our teams stopped playing in the Champions League, or if our national teams could no longer buy overseas players.

What we have is an information failure, where warnings of the dire consequences of crashing out are not believed but fanciful stories that being outside the EU will allow us to improve ourselves are believed. It is no surprise that the government is furious about the leak of the Operation Yellowhammer (predicting immediate shortages of medicines, food and fuel after we crash out), but what is more surprising is that a third of the population believes politicians that say these worries, documented by the government's own civil service, are unfounded. Politicians that are normally quick to assert that the machinery of government is incapable of organising anything well on this occasion are pretending that same machinery can work wonders.

One of the lessons I learnt from working on the economic impact of a different kind of disaster is that consumer reaction can seriously magnify its impact. In this case as soon as stories of shortages occur people start ‘panic buying’ and those shortages are magnified tenfold or more. It is this reason that the leaked documents talk of dealing with law and order problems, including riots.

That no government minister will guarantee that no one will die as a result of crashing out is revealing. That the NHS is prevented from voicing its fears tells you even more. Yet many of those who believe it is right for us to crash out of the EU are also older and depend the most on the NHS. Again this makes no sense unless you see this as an information failure where these connections are just not being made.

The broadcast media is obsessed by recessions (and in particular the technical definition of a recession), but those freely predicting one should learn from what happened after the 2016 referendum. On that occasion many consumers responded to higher inflation cutting their real wages by saving less, and the same could happen again. We also saw in 2016 that predicting a recession that does not happen can distract from the real cost of Brexit. What we have seen instead since 2016 has been a steady gap emerging between UK growth and growth elsewhere, together with a collapse in investment. 

Too often short term shortages are presented in war like terms: we will get through it and it will be worth it once it is over. The truth is that by making trade with our biggest trading partner much more difficult will ensure that the UK grows more slowly. We will be permanently and substantially worse off as a result of crashing out. The bumpy road is going downhill. Those who tell you this is just another forecast do not know what they are talking about. One of the basic ideas in economics is that trade makes people better off, because if it didn’t why would people trade? Making it harder to trade with the EU means less trade with the EU. There are no sunlit uplands when it comes to crashing out of the EU, which is why of course other countries think we are utterly stupid to try. With less income comes less public services: a worse health service, higher taxes or both of these. There will be thousands of firms like this one, strangled not just by tariffs but the greater bureaucracy that comes with Brexit.

Leave politicians understand this, which is why they talk about all the marvelous trade deals we will get now that we are free from the EU. The reality is once again the opposite of this. The EU is in fact very good, and very experienced, at doing trade deals with other countries, and we will lose nearly all those when we crash out. Once that happens politicians will be desperate to do two things: sign a trade deal with the EU and with the US. Negotiations about a trade deal with the EU will not even start for some time, because the EU will insist on the backstop staying in place along with a level playing field in terms of competition, neither of which a Tory government will accept until they have to. The compromises that our current government thinks it can avoid by crashing out will be made at some point, and so all the pain of crashing out will be completely pointless.

Donald Trump supports Brexit because he knows the UK will be desperate to do a trade deal with the US when it leaves, and he knows people desperate to do a deal are vulnerable to exploitation. In this case no deal may well be better than a bad deal, but the government will sign it anyway because it will look good at the time, and the harm it does can be delayed or fudged. [1] This illustrates a basic political point. Countries are much stronger as part of a group than they are on their own. We have already seen how the EU has backed the Irish government in trying to keep to the Good Friday Agreement alive, and when the UK crashes out just watch the EU’s efforts to diminish the economic costs on the Irish economy.

What the EU cannot prevent is the creation of a hard border on mainland Ireland when we crash out. Pretending otherwise is another Brexit fantasy. That will see the end of the peace process that was so painstakingly won decades ago. Along with the kinds of terrorism we are already used to, we can add a revival of Irish terrorism. A belief that crashing out represents political gains at the expense of economic pain is nonsense, because the political costs of a No Deal Brexit are just as serious as the economic costs.

Are people really aware of this when the say they are in favour of crashing out? You either have to assume that a third of the population has gone mad, or instead see this as a fundamental failure of information. The UK is a failed state because the producers of information have made it fail. 

All the information on No Deal outlined above is readily available for anyone who wants to find it . But so is ‘information’ suggesting exactly the opposite: that all these warnings are Project Fear and our lives have been made much worse because of the EU. Only people like those who are reading this are likely to be able to sort out which are the more reliable sources. Many more people will not have the time or inclination to even look. They will rely on the mainstream media: newspapers and broadcasters.

Over half of newspapers read (hard copy or online) are pro-Brexit, and their combined print and online reach is huge, with a monthly reach of 29 million for the Sun. (Figures for daily newspapers based on circulation only are much smaller and more pro-Brexit.) But there is a key difference between the coverage of the pro and anti Brexit press. Just compare the coverage of the Sun or Mail on the Operation Yellowhammer leak with those in most other newspapers. Their headlines talks of the document being scaremongering, rather than focusing on the content of the leak itself. On Brexit at least half the press are acting at the moment as if under the control of the state, or you could equally say that the state is following a policy pushed by that section of the press.

This could be offset if the broadcast media was fact based, but normally it is not. Their model is not to tell the truth and expose lies, but instead to present balance, which in the case of Brexit involves balancing lies with truth. So those consuming Brexit propaganda from their newspapers will not find this corrected by the broadcast media.

Once you combine this with how important the media is in influencing opinion, then the key role of the media in explaining the information problem revealed by widespread support for crashing out is obvious. A large part of the consumers of information are reading propaganda which is not contradicted by broadcasters.

But there is another route where media coverage is important, and that is the media’s influence on party membership. Party membership is by definition partisan, and so will look at sources of information that are also partisan. The overlap of the Brexit press and the right wing press is very large. As a result, Conservative party members are likely to be even more influenced by the Brexit press. If I am right about the pivotal role played by the media, then we should expect the proportion of party members to be more in favour of crashing out than the population at large, as indeed they are.

The relationship between the press and politicians is not straightforward. Both are influenced by each other. The ring wing press was much more pro-Brexit than Conservative MPs as a whole, and through both routes (the population as a whole and through party members) this has influenced MPs. The 2016 referendum accelerated this process, as did the 2019 Tory leadership contest, because in both cases it strengthened the role of the Brexit media.

Ideas and policies normally come from politicians, and the partisan press will normally go with that. But occasionally ideas are initiated by the press, and politicians find it difficult not to run with them, as we have seen with Brexit. As the line newspapers take on major issues is normally decided by their owner, this is obviously undemocratic. But more generally it does not seem right that any major player involved in the means of information should turn their information provider into a propaganda vehicle. When that happens, you can end up with policies that suit the newspaper owner but for nearly everyone else are utterly stupid.

Stopping Brexit is only half the story, if we want the UK to stop being a failed state. We also need to tackle the causes of Brexit. Normally politicians dare not talk about reform of the media, because they fear the consequences. (Since Thatcher every leader of the Labour party except one has been unpopular with the public, and that one did a deal with Rupert Murdoch!) Corbyn’s Labour party has reform of the media as a key part of its manifesto. The proposals are modest, but by making the BBC more independent they may represent a start at ending the power of a large section of the press to misinform.

[1] The deal may not be signed by the US anyway, because Congress will require a backstop