Pro-Brexit voters knew what they were voting for...

...well, sort of.

Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.

Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.

I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.

So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave

The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.

It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.

In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.

"Oh, won't somebody PLEASE think of the polar bears?"

White supremacist does self-parody

If you take aggressive right wingers at face value, they're all about autonomy, self-reliance and individual responsibility. Suggest measures to reduce inequality, or positive discrimination to level up the playing field for disadvantaged minorities and they're outraged.

"People should stand on their own two feet", they cry. Policies to mitigate inequality and discrimination are just handouts to scroungers, they encourage a "dependency culture." Recipients are "welfare queens" (in the USA) or lowly vassals of the corrupt "Nanny state"* (in the Mary Poppins-loving UK).

In short, you, and you alone, are responsible for how your life turns out. Quit making excuses about where you came from. It's where you're going that counts.

Which is superficially attractive. Nobody likes a moaner, everybody admires people who make it against the odds. But I'm beginning to think that some of the most vocal of the rugged individualists don't really believe in the uncompromising message of personal responsibility that they preach.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a recent outburst from right-wing tough guy, Stefan Molyneux:

"White privilege” was 50,000 shivering winters while others in endless summers danced and sang and had easy eats year-round.

East Asians had it even worse. Siberia. Snow tigers.

You fantasize about “privilege.”

No.

It was suffering.

So pipe down.

 Our ancestors earned it."

 

O-kaay.

On one hand we're supposed to ignore a well-documented history of racism, systematic oppression, slavery and discrimination going back solidly for at least four centuries, which still obviously affects the life chances of people living today. The US Civil Rights movement and "No dogs, no blacks, no Irish" signs in rented rooms are lived history for baby boomers on both sides of the Atlantic. Black Lives Matter and the Windrush scandal are current. All this deep-rooted disadvantage, according to people like Molyneux, would just go away if poor non-white folk just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. We live in a meritocracy where disadvantaged groups are personally responsible for the continuance of their own misfortune.

But also, according to Molyneux, pale-skinned folk deserve their breaks, not because of what they've done. Not because of what their parents did, or their parents, or even their great, great, great, great grandparents. No, If you're white, you're born with bragging rights because you're distantly related to somebody who lived somewhere cold in the stone age. Extra credit for that less than 5% of neanderthal DNA you might be carrying. Award yourself a medal, why don't you?

The mask really slipped there, didn't it, Stefan? It's not really about taking personal responsibility for what you, as an individual, do in the here and now at all. It's about spreading a message of inherited, ineradicable superiority carried down through bloodlines over tens of thousands of years. It's racism, pure and simple.

So pipe down about personal responsibility. That's not what you really believe in at all.








*I've said it before and I'll say it again - it really is weird how the most vocal opponents of the Nanny State are people who literally have nannies.

"Policy based evidence making"

Simon Wren-Lewis, on what comes out of the wrong sort of think tanks:

The Knowledge Transmission Mechanism (KTM) is how knowledge produced by academics and other researchers is translated into public policy. Evidence based policy is the result of this mechanism working...

...There are two types of think tank. The good kind can be a vital part of the KTM. There is often a genuine need for think tanks to help translate academic research into policy. Sometimes these think tanks will be very like universities (like the IFS for example). Other times they will be think tanks that have a broad left or right orientation. These think tanks are an important part of the KTM, because they can establish what the academic consensus is, translate academic ideas into practical policy, and match policy problems to evidence based solutions. The IPPR is an obvious example of this type of think tank. They are part of evidence based policy making.

The bad kind are rather different. These produce ‘research’ that conforms to a particular line or ideology, rather than conforming to evidence or existing academic knowledge. Sometimes these think tanks can even become policy entrepreneurs, selling policies to politicians. This is often called policy based evidence making. It would be nice to be able to distinguish between good and bad think tanks in an easy way. The good type seeks to foster the KTM, and ensure policy is evidence based, and the bad type seek to negate the KTM by producing evidence or policies that fit preconceived ideas or the policymaker’s ideology.

I would argue that transparency about funding sources provides a strong indicator of which type a think tank is."

As Business Insider's Ben Moshinsky wrote last year:

A group called Who Funds You? has rated think tanks based on how much information they provide on where they get their money, assigning an A, B, or C rating to those who publish details of their annual income and a lower rating for those who don't...

...And here's how they stack up:

Think tank warfare:
"There's definitely nothing dangerous being covered up here, nothing at all to see, move along..."

A special nation, just like all the others

"Just after the referendum someone predicted that the brexit negotiations would be a process of 'controlled capitulation'. Which has come to pass. At least our egregious sense of national exceptionalism is being nailed ever deeper into the cross of astounded leaver righteousness."

Perhaps the most egregious thing about the United Kingdom's sense of national exceptionalism is that it's almost exactly like everybody else's sense of national exceptionalism. This, for example, is what "taking back control" looks like in Viktor Orbán's Hungary:

A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd.

Those eejits might have been wearing the Magyar version of the MAGA hat but, from the UK, this sort of thing  looks depressingly familiar. Remember this story from 2014?

Nigel Farage’s local Ukip branch has rebuked the BBC for its ingrained liberal bias in holding a straw poll on the party leader in front of a London mosque. The mosque in question was Westminster Cathedral...

...This isn’t the first-time a rightwing party has got its buildings confused. The English Defence League mistook Brighton’s Royal Pavilion for a mosque last year.

Different flag, same stupid.

Lose that flag and other people's national exceptionalism starts to look a whole lot like our own:

The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes. Groups that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration — those looking after Hungarian citizens’ human rights, advocating education and prison reform, representing the homeless and ethnic and religious minorities, etc. — will be persecuted [Brits may not be able to get a decent cup of tea on the Continent, but at they'll at least have enough of a "hostile environment" to make them feel right at home]...

...Orbán’s semi-dictatorship ... unlike its post-Stalinist predecessor, is not statist or centralizing. Its guiding principles are arbitrary, capricious rule and, above all, informality. The real centers of power in Orbán’s Hungary are formally independent institutions (state foundations, semi-private companies, purportedly private firms living on state credit) that are outside the control of normal government administration and of judicial control as well [in the UK, think how policy is shaped by a shady spider's web of obscure, unaccountable interest groups - the Legatum Institute, the European Research Group, the TaxPayers' Alliance, Migration Watch, the Adam Smith Institute...]. Meanwhile, regular administration is being dismantled and well-trained civil servants are being thrown out in droves ["Brexit minister fuels conspiracy about 'rogue' civil servants"] . Drafting of bills happens behind the backs of ostensibly leading politicians and bureaucrats, and rushed through parliament [Henry VIII clauses, anybody?] — usually without discussion.

There's nothing special and unique about people insisting that they're special and unique.

Pestilence unpopular with public, apparently

When I wrote this, I wasn't asking a serious question, just being sarcastic:

These people [Brexiteers] have really taken the "never waste a good crisis" idea and run with it. I wonder how long it's going to be before one of them comes out as pro-global pandemic, given the widespread historical view that the Black Death gave medieval society the biggest stimulus to get its butt in gear that it had ever had?

But, once again, I fought Poe's Law and the law won. So, just under two years after I wrote this, Paul Oakley, Ukip’s general secretary, said this:

"Think of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It comes along and it causes disruption and then it goes dormant, and that’s exactly what we are going to do. Our time isn’t finished because Brexit is being betrayed." 

Bless Oakley, he's even gone one better than me - not just "We love the plague" but "We are the plague." Which invites the obvious thought that voters should probably avoid them like the plague. Oh look, they just did. Like they did last year.

There's dancing in the streets as the people of the UK prepare to exit the European Union and celebrate their Independence Day...

Data guru for hire

Back in 2014, somebody in the Labour Party thought they'd been very clever when they out-bid Ukip for the services of a freelance "election guru":

The Labour party has hired a Bolton-based betting expert to be its general election data guru after a bidding war with Ukip.

Ian Warren, 44, a self-taught election forecaster, spent the past 10 years working as a sole trader betting on election outcomes in the UK and the US.

Just like blogger Nate Silver across the Atlantic, Warren correctly predicted the electoral college in the 2008 and 2012 American elections, earning big money for his secretive corporate clients and funding his PhD in statistics and criminology at the University of Manchester.

Maybe the phrase "secretive corporate clients" didn't ring any alarm bells in the days before Cambridge Analytica became a household name. So when the guru came up with a cunning plan to outflank Ukip, nobody thought to ask why a supposedly progressive party was being advised to ape a gaggle of extreme nationalist single-issue fanatics with a grand total of one MP who, as we've since discovered, never even had a workable plan for achieving the single goal they were set up to achieve.

No, the "Blue Labour" tendency lapped it up and duly added "very real concerns" about migration to Labour's austerity-lite offer, leaving Ed Milliband to crash and burn:

“While many retain their loyalty to Labour, a sizeable proportion is moving to Ukip,” said Ian Warren, an election data analyst who contributed to the Fabians’ research. “In many constituencies that Labour is targeting in 2015, almost half of all households are comprised of these groups… when asked whether they are comfortable living in close proximity to people from different cultures and backgrounds, they are more likely to say no.”...

...[Tom Watson] said it was very important for the “Blue Labour” agenda championed by Lord (Maurice) Glasman and Jon Cruddas, the policy chief, which is based on “faith, flag and family”, to be an element in its election manifesto.

Yeah, trying to out-Ukip Ukip really worked out well for everybody, didn't it? Thank you, o guru, we are not worthy.

Of course, it would take more than merely being disastrously wrong to dissuade a guru of Warren's stature from lecturing the Labour Party on the folly of not heeding his ineffable wisdom. Maybe the fact that he chose to deliver his lecture from the bully pulpit of Conservative Home should also have rung alarm bells:

One of the most important examples of ‘walking across the aisle’ comes from Mark Reckless in Rochester & Strood; a story which has largely been untold, but which I would like to speak to Mark about.

Mark’s back story is straight from Conservative central casting: Oxford, career as a barrister, Policy Unit at CCHQ, elected MP in 2010. However, in 2014 he defected to UKIP. All of a sudden, he was forced to canvass Labour streets in the hope of peeling voters away from them. I know this, because I did a report for UKIP at the time. The point being that he was now forced to take the time to see the world through the eyes of Labour voters in Strood – a demographic he hadn’t needed to win before.

I haven’t spoken to Mark, but I do know that the campaign team found this experience energising. It’s a pattern other UKIP candidates raised as Conservatives have seen. It’s powerful because, for those candidates and activists, it alters their perspective, forcing them to challenge their own preconceptions. Who knows, for some it may only serve to reinforce them but I know that, for others, the experience has been somewhat cathartic.

So when I witness the partisan and abusive nature of the election of Corbyn [because there's nothing partisan or abusive about Ukip, obvs], you’ll see me slowly walking away from the scene, shaking my head. Having advocated a listening and understanding approach for so long, I wonder whether it might be best to vacate the area for a bit and let both sides tear each other to pieces...

...Because if Labour thinks it can understand UKIP voters by hectoring them it’s going to continue to lose them, and will deserve to do so.

Fast forward to 2018. Mark Reckless has left the sinking ship that is Ukip, a turn of events which Ian Warren might find embarrassing, if he didn't have more important things to worry about right now:

Data based upon demographics, class, finances and ethnicity, was used to identify core groups of Labour voters to be targeted with UKIP-led messaging and was instrumental in deciding where Nigel Farage appeared to speak during the Brexit campaign.

Leave.EU, Cambridge Analytica, the RMT Union and Trade Unions Against EU, and Labour MP Kate Hoey – associated with Labour Leave – gained access to the information via Labour’s 2015 general election data guru before referendum campaigns were officially designated by the Electoral Commission.

Blue Collar workers, struggling families, students, and ethnic minorities were among those specifically designated valuable to tailored social media targeting and doorstep canvassing. The data provided specific postcodes to be targeted on and offline, in order to attract millions of votes across the country – enough to swing the divisive referendum result.

The postcode and demographic briefings are being released in full, in the public interest, to assist any concerned voters in establishing whether they were affected as Labour have remained largely silent on the issue of Cambridge Analytica and concerns over data profiling....

...The huge dataset, based on the information of millions of Labour voters across the country, was allegedly built using Mosaic demographics and the results of party canvassing. It is believed to have been amassed during 2015 by political consultant Ian Warren, before he passed it on in a series of detailed briefings and a postcode targeting spreadsheet in early 2016.

He first met with Cambridge Analytica to discuss the use of the information as part of Leave.EU’s campaign at the end of 2015.

Warren was head-hunted by Labour for the 2015 election campaign after his successful work with UKIP and continued to be closely associated with the party, polling members and working with Owen Smith on his leadership challenge during the remainder of 2016.

This is what Labour's privacy policy says about the personal information the party holds:

"We will never sell or share your personal information with other organisations for their direct marketing purposes without your explicit consent. We may share your data with third parties to perform services on your behalf and to help promote the Labour Party by serving you advertisements and content online about our politicians, campaigns and policies we think you might be interested in.”

Ian Warren insists that he's done nothing wrong, that the data he passed to Leave.EU was "bespoke" data created by himself and that "The data I used to inform this work for Leave.EU is NOT personal data; it is neighbourhood level data." But even if he is completely innocent of having breached data protection laws, it seems to me that he's guilty of having done more to help the people who put forward a failed bid for his services, Ukip, than he did to help the Labour Party, who were actually paying him.

They should ask for their money back, but I guess they'll have to make do with this uncharacteristic piece of humility from the great guru:

I am truly sorry to my friends in Labour for having to read this. There are some decisions I have made that I regret deeply; working with Leave.EU being one. But I have always acted professionally and in good faith, and will do so in the future. I am of course more than happy to speak with the party, and I am sure I will be soon. This whole thing is deeply embarrassing but the party should know one thing – neither I or the Labour party have done anything wrong here.

The cry of an innocent man, unjustly accused, or the squawk of chickens coming home to roost? Time will tell.

The great leader inspires the youth

20th Century authoritarian kitsch: Roses for Stalin, by Boris Vladimirski

21st Century authoritarian kitsch: Teach a Man to Fish, by Jon McNaughton

For a didactic, ideological painting with a clunkingly obvious propaganda message, Teach a Man to Fish sure poses a lot of questions. I'd add one more question to the list. Who's morally worse, Vladimirski or McNaughton?

You could say Vladimirski was worse, on the grounds that his painting was a fawning celebration of a mass murderer. Say what you like about Trump, but he can't come close to matching Stalin's body count, and probably never will (unless he pokes the nuclear button).

On the other hand, Vladimirski and his fellow socialist realists were churning out obsequious hack work in a society where dissent could be punished by a one-way ticket to the Gulag, or a bullet to the back of the head. McNaughton doesn't have the excuse of acting under duress when he churns out his obsequious hack work.

We don't need no stinkin' (Br)exit strategy!

From last week, but still pertinent, here's Tim Harford on how a chaotic, incoherent non-strategy can be a feature, not a bug - at least for a while:

The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.

This got me thinking about the parallels with the almost equally protean strategy that got the 2003 Iraq War on:

• Shock and awe your (domestic) enemies with an overwhelming blizzard of ambiguous bullshit* (imply that Iraq was behind 9/11, that its WMDs can be ready in 45 minutes, that we're wasting £350 million a week which could be going to the NHS)
• Include a grain of truth in the noisy matrix of nonsense (yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but we were specifically told this was about self-defence against an alleged imminent threat, not regime change), (yes, there were plenty of things actually wrong with European Union institutions, like the disastrous handling of the Eurozone crisis, but these had nothing to do with the claims on the Brexit bus, or the migration/border scares, the two central arguments which fuelled the Leave campaigns)
• Use fake urgency to move fast and break things ("...we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud", "UK faces millions more migrants as Turkey and its 75 MILLION people on brink of joining EU").
• Don't have an exit strategy, because that's just a hostage to fortune that your (domestic) enemies might use against you
• Mission accomplished!

We know how the 2003 decision worked out. The 2016 decision still has a way to run, but it's already brought us to the absurd paradox of being at the mercy of people who've spent decades developing their monomaniacal obsession with exiting the European Union, but never agreed a coherent exit strategy.

The poetic justice would be highly satisfying, if only the rest of us didn't have to survive "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology."

Catwoman: hostile, yet global

The "hostile environment" policy is a straightforwardly awful idea from straightforwardly awful people with straightforwardly awful consequences for the designated victims. But it also seems to form part of a wider agenda which is also awful, but not in quite such a straightforward way.

Exhibit A: 2012: Theresa "Catwoman" May "chooses her words with feline delicacy" as she tells her adoring Telegraph fanbase that "We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception":

Exhibit B: The sidebar of immigration stories which appears next to that same Telegraph interview. Nestling in among the stories about migrants rioting in Calais, swamping the country, stealing our jobs by working too hard, or being gypsies, there's an intriguing article headlined "New VIP visa service for wealthy foreigners", next to another pic of the kitten-heeled dominatrix:

Taken together, the two articles make very interesting reading:

...soon, she insists, [net migration] figures will fall, as restrictions on student and working visas are reflected in the statistics. “We are seeing the number of visas issued going down, but there is a lag between those and feeding through into the net migration figures...”

...Today though, her focus is on those who are in Britain illegally, and her language becomes uncharacteristically vivid. “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration,” she declares....

...Ministers are creating a new visa system for global business leaders amid concerns that moves to tighten immigration rules are deterring “high-value” individuals from overseas.

Around 100 wealthy foreigners will initially be invited to join a new “bespoke” visa service which the Home Office said will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth.”

Members of the “GREAT Club” will get a personal “account manager” at the UK Visas and Immigration service to deal with their travel plans. The manager will arrange visa services “tailored to each individual’s needs at no extra cost”, the Home Office said.

Personal account managers for oligarchs, a Kafka-style bureaucratic nightmare for the "lower value individuals" from the Windrush and the EU who settled here under the mistaken impression that this was a country ruled by decency and fair play, rather than a private club where the rich and powerful get to shove everybody else aside as they push their way to the front of the queue.

If you ever wondered what sort of hybrid abomination will emerge from the apparently contradictary goals of creating a "global Britain"* which is simultaneously a "hostile environment" for those guilty of being insufficiently British, and insufficiently rich, these two articles paint a vivid picture.




*Again, sorry Northern Ireland - blame the people who came up with the phrase "global Britain." Although it looks as if you'll be getting your revenge on the "global Britain" mob, as their misty-eyed Empire 2.0 fantasies are shredded on contact with your border with the Irish Republic. It's a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology". Or, as sombody once tweeted, rather magnificently, "there are unicorns as far as the eye can see. And many of them are eating cake":

“That’s not my Brexit! Its trade is too encumbered by tariffs.” pic.twitter.com/Fc1HssMZ3X

— Mike K (@mpk) 19 April 2018

On the road to Damascus

Throwback... pic.twitter.com/4fx9jAnuKu

— Matt Turner (@MattTurner4L) April 16, 2018

And Theresa went his way, and entered into the house; and putting her hands on him said, Brother Boris, The Donald, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales...

"Nudge, nudge, wink, wink..."

Let's run with that unstated assumption that "those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory [i.e. nudge theory]."

Nudgers are, by definition, more powerful than the people they nudge, and more powerful generally means richer. If the poor are nudged, for their own good, does that mean that everything is now OK, because their self-evidently superior betters can be trusted to act rationally and reasonably at all times? How's rule by enlightened plutocrats working out?

Then there's the outsized role that rich peoples' irrational prejudices play in the policy sphere: whether that's Wahabism and its systematic oppression of women, or American hydrocarbon barons' climate denial, Mike Pence's Dominionism, Gwyenth Paltrow's multi-million-dollar science-denial business, Putin's violent aggression against anyone who criticizes the Russian Orthodox church, or Prince Charles's absurd belief in homeopathy. When the richest of the rich can swing policy outcomes just by insisting that they're right and everyone else is wrong, evidence is unceremoniously dumped and we all have to survive the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology.

It's worse than that, actually, because when the shear occurs, the rich don't just admit they were wrong and move on. They jail people who point out their mistakes, get their paid-for lawmakers to defund research into their pet theories, and deny, deny, deny, until the seas rise and measles kill our kids.

Cory Doctorow

Either that, or they're wittering on about the urgent need to create a massive network of enormous pneumatic tubes, so people can travel in individual pods, because if you catch a bus, like normal people, you just might end up sitting next to a serial killer. Or falling for quacks who promise them eternal youth if they inject their ageing bodies with young peoples' blood.

It's almost as if unchecked inequality, which lets the irresponsible whims of the few trump the interests of the many, is more of a problem than the alleged fecklessness of the poor.

"...say no more!"

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Who nudges the nudgers?

Nobody, because they're rational and unbiased, honest:

It struck me during Chris Wylie’s commentary about the use of “behavioural science” that his language reflected the central ideas of nudge theories, he was using words like “heuristics”, “cognitive bias” and so on. He outlined the basic premise of nudge, too – the idea that humans are fundamentally ‘irrational’. (Yet curiously, those ‘choice architects’ claiming that they know what is best for society and individual citizens are exempt from that theory).

And if you believe that you're welcome to trust them.

Misleading £1 bus claim lacks ambition

Don't even think about making a dodgy claim about a £1 bus ticket. People will be outraged and you'll be forced to retract:

MEGABUS ads offering fares from £1 have been banned after the company admitted as little as one seat per coach was available for the price...

...Two people complained, saying they could not find fares at that price.

Megabus said the number of fares available at £1 varied due to factors such as the number of intermediate stops and whether tickets were booked for partial or full routes.

The Advertising Standards Authority said: ‘We noted in particular that only one of the £1 fares on the London to Bath route was for the full length.’ It ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form.

Plaster a dodgy claim about £350 million windfall on a bus and nobody can stop you driving the bugger around the country for months.

Herr Goebbels must be chortling in his grave:

"The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Fake news factory fooled fake intellectual with fake office

There's a rich vein of social comedy in the Cambridge Analytica affair. Here's how wily old Etonian cad, Alexander James Ashburner Nix, conned that gullible American pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon, by appealing to his philosopher king fantasies of dreaming spires and elite institutions:

So keen was the firm to impress Mr Bannon it opened a satellite office near the University of Cambridge after Mr Bannon expressed an interest in visiting the city.

"We created this fake office in Cambridge and brought a bunch of people to set up this office beside the university to make it look like 'This is our Cambridge site. Our Potemkin Cambridge office," Mr Wylie said.

"And later, when the Mercers bought in and they appointed Steve to set up the company, he decided he should call it Cambridge Analytica... as a tip of the hat to our deep links to the University of Cambridge. And so a false reality was infused into the name Cambridge Analytica."

It's not being fooled that hurts. It's being fooled by fools like this.

Afterthought - maybe Hobo Trump got fired because, for all Bannon's intellectual pretensions, his boss already knew more than he did about this kind of bullshit:

Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal describes a stunt in which he lured Holiday Inn executives into investing in an Atlantic City casino by directing his construction manager to rent dozens of pieces of heavy equipment, in advance of a visit by the executives, to move dirt around on the proposed casino site, creating the illusion that construction was underway.

The Register belts Cambridge Analytica with double whammy

1. Best headline: "ICO surprise Cambridge Analytica raid delayed: Nobody expects the information commissioner! Oh wait, yes they do"

2. Best response in the comments: "Anyone would think that the establishment are trying to give CA enough of a chance to clean their house* before they have a snoop around."

I'm sure that Arron Banks, who boasted about Leave.EU using CA, before changing his story and denying they'd ever used CA, will be following developments with interest...





*Update - of course, the process of Spring cleaning started waay before the ICO gave CA a head start, so they could get on with burying the remaining bodies...

Where can you go from there, Boris?

Boris Johnson has likened the way President Putin is promoting the World Cup in Russia to Hitler's notorious use of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The foreign secretary said Labour MP Ian Austin was "completely right" to say Russia's president wanted to "gloss over [his] brutal corrupt regime".

A man with an expensive classical education like Boris should really have a wider range of historical precedents to draw on. But no, if your opponent is thuggish, repressive, undemocratic, there's apparently only ever one valid comparison. Hitler, Hitler, always bloody Hitler. But the thing is, once you've turned your rhetoric all the way up to Hitler, where do you go from there? Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel could have told him:

Nigel Tufnel: ...You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly.*

And "Nowhere" is exactly these comparisons usually lead.

Anthony Eden wasn't afraid to talk the talk about Nasser being the new Hitler, but when it came to walking the walk ... well, let's just say that Suez wasn't exactly a replay of our finest hour. Then there was the drum beat to the Iraq War, when you were either with us or some kind of craven Munich-style appeaser. Surprise, surprise, it took more than overheated rhetoric and a dodgy dossier to liberate Iraq and victory, when it came, brought a settlement that was more Mad Max than Marshall Plan. And who can forget Boris's fellow ex-London mayor, Ken Livingstone, doubling down on his stupid comments about Hitler being a Zionist? That didn't exactly bring peace to the Middle East, or achieve anything, apart from indelibly staining Ken's reputation.

If you have to use the "H" word, save it for actual Nazis, like the sort of far-right Holocaust-denying cranks Putin's Russia has  been funding and supporting in its transparent, and relatively successful, efforts to destabilise Europe. That's about as close to a justified Putin-Hitler connection as you're going to get. Otherwise, Putin is just another one of the world's thuggish autocrats, in the same mould as Erdoğan, or the UK's best buddy, Prince Salman. They're all objectively horrible, but not in the same league as a mass murderer who gloried in killing tens of millions by war and genocide.

The more Hitler comparisons I hear, the more sympathy I have for the crudest version of Godwin's Law ("If you're the first one to mention Hitler, you lose").





*Of course, in Spinal Tap, they solved the problem of having nowhere higher than ten to go by painting the number "eleven" on the amp dial. I'm not quite sure how Boris could take it all the way up to eleven - maybe he could compare Putin to Darth Vader, who had a whole planet and its population blown up just for the evulz, which would sort of make him even worse than Hitler, if only he'd actually existed...

Never believe anything until it is officially denied

"Toxic nothingburger: Cambridge Analytica exposé is dangerous political attack posing as journalism" screams RT  (formerly Russia Today). "Apart from that, how did you enjoy your toxic nothingburger, Mr Skripal?"

"‘No Impact’: Cambridge Analytica Uproar Much Ado About Common Election Practices" insists Sputnik.

"THE Facebook data scandal is being wildly exaggerated for political ends." claims Pravda The Sun. .

Effective propaganda

This is bad:

Cambridge Analytica’s managing director Mark Turnbull was secretly filmed by Channel 4 News describing how his firm operates.

He said: “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control.

“It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘That’s propaganda’.”

But this is worse:

[Non-experts] will know very little about [the objective failure of Brexit] from reading the papers that campaigned so hard for Brexit in the first place. At best the information will be reported in a dismissive way with some reference to how economists always get things wrong... Against such reports will be a constant stream of comment and reporting extolling the imagined benefits of Brexit.

This propaganda could be countered by informed and informing reporting by broadcasters. Unfortunately, with the exception of Sky News, the standard of reporting by broadcasters on Brexit has been very poor. In particular the BBC treats Brexit like any other Westminster based issue, with an additional touch of nationalism. We hear a great deal from May, Fox, Johnson etc, with virtually no expert analysis of what the true state of negotiations are.

I’m not an expert on international trade, but because I read some of the now numerous people who write stuff on Brexit who are experts, or who have made themselves experts, I feel I am reasonably well informed. I have never seen the same level of expertise from the broadcast media. If I just listened to the BBC or read any newspapers bar two or three, I would know almost nothing about what was really going on in the negotiations...

...I also think this is not the first time in recent memory that the media has failed to accurately report what was going on and what experts thought. Before the 2015 election the media accepted the idea that getting the budget deficit down was the most important goal of macroeconomic policy, and that the economic fundamentals were strong. Few experts would agree with the former, and the latter was simply false.

The air time the BBC has allocated to repeating the demonstrable untruths and fantasies of the Brexit/austerity extremists, more or less unchallenged, has done more damage than anything a couple of dodgy tech firms could have managed. If you want an example of how to get propaganda past the public's radar without anyone thinking "this is propaganda", consider having a trusted public service broadcaster blandly reframe provable lies as legitimate points of view and objective policy failures as the story of a coherent plan coming together.

"Taking back control of our borders" Humpty Dumpty style

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

Apparently Humpty Dumpty and Chris Grayling have more in common than their shared resemblance to an egg:

The UK government is reportedly considering making Britain's borders completely open to the European Union after Brexit if it crashes out of negotiations with no deal in place...

...Transport Secretary Chis Grayling last night insisted there will be no additional checks on Britain's border no matter what form Brexit takes.

"We will maintain a free-flowing border at Dover, we will not impose checks at the port, it is utterly unrealistic to do so," the Brexit-voting Conservative minister told audience members.

"We don't check lorries now, we're not going to be checking lorries in the future."

They also both seem to live in Wonderland and appear to have been taking a few too many puffs of whatever it was that caterpillar was smoking: