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The present UK government needs to lie because it has to say that outcome X is ‘thanks to Brexit’, regardless of whether it really is, and it has to pretend that obvious undesirable outcome Y (such as the hard border in the Irish Sea) "is not due to Brexit" even though it is due to what Johnson et al claimed to be part of the "oven ready deal" that they campaigned for. Yet Brexit is in turn the result of a long-running stream of disinformation about the EU (from certain sections of the media and the Conservative Party) and the failure of other parties and other sections of the media to push back against that disinformation. A significant section of the population came to believe that the EU imposed rules and regulations on the UK (and failed to understand that these were rules and regulations that the UK had agreed to and (in the case of the Single Market) had invented itself. A significant section of the population came to believe that they were poorer because of FoM rather than austerity. Russian disinformation was a minor factor; disinformation from the Murdoch press was the big factor, plus the failure of the rest of our media-politico class to call out that disinformation.

There was an interesting article in "International Affairs" late last year (the academic journal of Chatham House) by Denis MacShane in which he expressed frustration that when he was Minister for Europe he couldn't get Tony Blair to make any speeches or statements to set the record straight about the EU. Apparently Blair was quite open that he was afraid of the reaction of the certain sections of the press if he tried to push back about the myths being put about about the EU.

Johnson is a bullshitter who thrives in a culture of lies, but he isn't the one who created that culture. That culture stems from a powerful section of the press that trades in disinformation and another section of the politico-media system that is incapable of (or afradi of) sifting out the lies from the truth.

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Can't disagree with any of that

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