‘My conclusion from this is that the single most important thing in this month’s UK election is to stop this Trump-like popularism gaining an overall majority.’ Photo: Steve Houghton-Burnett / Unsplash.
‘Just how cynical do you have to be to exploit our anxious desire for objective truth?’
This election is full of tricks from the Donald Trump playbook, says Jessica Metheringham. So how to vote?
Three years ago, British people were stupefied to see Donald Trump come from the political outskirts to win the US presidential election. Up and down the country, and across the political spectrum, I heard people asking how could it possibly have happened. How had people across the Atlantic collectively made this choice?
This was perhaps the most important job in the world, and it was now being done by someone who appeared so obviously unfit for such an office. Had people in the United States lost self-respect to such a degree that they would give the position to someone who seemed to hold it in contempt?
It seems three years is a long time. Britain has gone from disbelief to imitation. In France, Le Monde calls our current prime minister a ‘mini-Trump’ whose election would be ‘a calamity for his country’. The New York Times says he ‘resembles President Trump’, not physically but in his ‘barrage of distortion, dissembling and disinformation without precedent in the country’s history’. There are further parallels, from avoiding scrutiny over Russian interference to unethical personal relationships (though, in the latter case, Donald Trump’s had no conflict of interest over public funds).
The similarity that I believe really matters though is right out of our core testimonies. It is truth and integrity. I recognise that, at election time, considerations must be personal. Indeed, elsewhere in this magazine is an alternative view on this subject, from a supporter of the prime minister’s party. But, for me, the resemblance between the leaders of these two countries reaches its most dangerous point when we consider their willingness to say things that are misleading, disingenuous, or simply not true. Further, these expressions seem to be made without shame – and, because of a general failure in our politics to hold them to account – without consequence.
In this general election more than one party is denying things that are demonstrably true, while compelling assertions are made to listeners who know immediately that they are false. This brazen attitude makes it very easy for political campaigners to embrace these falsehoods as truth. In the best of these cases some supporters are inclined to believe their candidate without knowing the details. But at other times campaigners have chosen to accept what they know is not the case for the good of the team. A senior Conservative told The Atlantic about Boris Johnson: ‘He lies and cheats, but I trust him.’ The big picture is considered so important that supporters deliberately turn a blind eye to the (small and individually inconsequential) lies it is built on.
The corruption spreads. Other senior politicians are expected to repeat and defend these claims with conviction, and to spread this misinformation, equally shamelessly, on their own account. Some parties have doctored videos and set up a fake fact-checking Twitter account. Just how cynical do you have to be to exploit our anxious desire for objective truth in all this fraudulence? When confronted with these offences those involved laugh it off and keep at it. Even well-intentioned media struggle to broadcast reliable news.
My question for voters, therefore, is this: what do we do when the prime minster is carefully and deliberately portraying himself as flexible with the facts? Trust in politicians is nearly at its lowest since records began, according to Ipsos Mori’s November poll. What would five years of unrestrained Trump-like popularism do? Our democratic systems are already seriously struggling to cope, and we desperately need a citizens’ convention on our unwritten constitution. What do people who get into power through unashamed deception do with that power? If democracy depends on trust, what becomes of it when you entrust it to someone who cannot be trusted?
My conclusion is that the single most important thing in this month’s UK election is to stop this Trump-like popularism gaining an overall majority. There will be no end of questions of policy and personality that we can legitimately disagree on, and almost certainly do. But unless I’ve seriously misjudged my Friends in the Society, you’re not the kind of people who look at someone running for office on shameless misinformation and soul-deep falsehood, and think, yes, that’s what we need. Please vote for those candidates who are trying to resist politics of this nature.
Our electoral system is both unfair and much misunderstood. The idea of ‘voting tactically’ makes the assumption that political parties are no more than lists of policies, and that you will wholeheartedly agree with one of them. Neither political parties nor our electoral system works like that. We vote for individuals, who make up broad churches – the Labour Party has been led by both Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn, for example. I have voted in five general elections, in five different constituencies, for five different individuals representing four different political parties. Usually my consideration is finely balanced between the individual candidate and the impact my constituency has on the national picture. This time the national impact is far more important.
Before the 2016 election, Boris Johnson considered Donald Trump ‘frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States’. Perhaps he saw that that unfitness was rewarded at the ballot box. Perhaps we have all learned too much from this. There are too many echoes in this campaign of the Donald Trump playbook.
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