Wednesday 28 December 2016

Challenge the Post-Truth Politicians


Michael Gove had plenty of air time this morning on the  BBC's Radio 4 to rehabilitate himself and try to appear more reasonable. His message during the brexit campaign could be summed up -"We don't need experts, they always get it wrong, forget the experts and just believe what I tell you and everything will be fine". 

Today he tried to qualify his rejection of expert opinion by saying that we shouldn't accept what experts say without question and what he wanted was fact based discussion in which experts could justify themselves by presenting their evidence. So I wonder why this was not how the campaign was conducted? Gove knows very well that any attempt to present complex evidence was rejected by him and his colleagues during the campaign in favour of the lies that were so much easier to promote. Evidence and facts went out of the window. The Today Programme presenter chose not to challenge him robustly and repeatedly on this point, like they usually do with politicians on this programme, why not?

I'm sure that Gove would be happy to accept the advice of medical experts, or even a plumber, should he have need of such trained and experienced people, but not "experts" who provide opinions which inconveniently contradict his own political beliefs. It's so much easier to rubbish the expert's advice, like he did during the brexit campaign, than to counter it with facts and expertise; but beware of following Gove down that road or you will end up in a morass of lies propagated by people like the brexiteers and Donald Trump. 

Go a little further in that direction and you will find yourself with autocratic leaders quite prepared to set up fake news websites, commit voting fraud, arrest journalists, judges and opposition politicians, or change the constitution to keep themselves permanently in power.

If you don't want that to happen, challenge every lie or sweeping statement that unscrupulous politicians of the post-truth generation, like Michael Gove, make when they rubbish people who disagree with them. Don't let them get away with a shrug of the shoulders or a humorous quip as a response.

This is the new front line in the fight to preserve western democratic values and if you think that I'm overstating the case look at the story of Turkey and its slide into dictatorship over the last fifteen years.

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