Monday, June 08, 2026
A swamp of lies and disinformation
Freedland writes about Etonians working out their schoolboy rivalries, with nothing less than the destiny of the UK at stake, a recklessness with the future of seventy million people that remains unforgivable, the guilt belonging to Cameron and Osborne almost as much as to Gove and Johnson:
More important than the origin story, however, is the legacy. We see that around us every day. Start with the economy. The remain campaign was mocked at the time as “project fear”, spreading gloom by warning that Britain outside the EU would be poorer, to the tune of 6% of GDP. Yet here we are a decade later and, if anything, remain was not pessimistic enough. The drop in GDP is now estimated to be between 6% and 8%, with investment down by as much as 18%. Trade is on course to be 15% less than it would have been had we stayed in the EU, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, while a staggering 85% of those who import or export goods report problems that they didn’t have before. Remainers said that Brexit would be a slow puncture, as the air was let out of the British economy. So it has proved, except it’s not been that slow.
Brexit’s other legacy, besides upending the old Labour-Tory duopoly, is not measurable in pounds or percentages but is just as real. It is visible in the coarsening and darkening of the national conversation, in the aggression and even hatred that, previously pushed to the margins, now loiter in the centre of the public square. This week the leader of the party that brought us Brexit warned of civil war.
It would be wrong to cast the referendum as the sole cause of this shift – Brexit was, in part, a symptom of the change – and we can all see the role social media and the likes of Elon Musk have played in degrading the discourse. But Brexit both accelerated and intensified that process.
An insouciance towards the facts – recall that “post-truth” was Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016 – was an enduring gift of the leave campaign. Percy’s documentary lays bare the knowing dishonesty of the claim that the UK was sending £350m to the EU every week, a gross figure – in every sense – that did not include the more than £80m that came back as a rebate or the money the EU spent in the UK. Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings would later brag that “The point of using that really was to try and drive the remain campaign and people running it crazy” – deliberately tangling up his opponents in dry factchecking over stats, while he could press the voters’ hotter buttons. “Love that bus,” an unrepentant Johnson says now, describing it as “the bus of truth”. In 2026, we wade through a swamp of lies and disinformation all the time, especially online – but it was the referendum that drove us into that swamp and at top speed.
The currency of Cummings, Farage and the rest was fear and loathing. We see again Farage’s “breaking point” poster, with its brown-skinned men apparently massing on our borders, and the wholly bogus Vote Leave ad suggesting that 76 million Turks would soon be able to come into Britain via the EU, leaving a trail of dirty footprints behind them. These were racist and xenophobic messages, barely veiled – and they worked.
So it’s hardly a surprise that, a decade later, we have the man who could well be in Downing Street after the next election – and who, tellingly, speaks of Brexit only rarely these days – complaining of “anti-white prejudice” and calling for “pure cold rage” after the murder of a young white man, even as that man’s parents pleaded for his death not to be used to turn Britons against each other. Restore Britain, a party that is endorsed by unabashed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, is on the ballot in Makerfield and might win 10% of the vote. There has always been a far right in Britain, but it used to be confined to the fringes. Brexit invited it in.
By dividing us down the middle, leave or remain, Brexit polarised our politics in a new, starker way. Looking back, it’s clear that remain could never win a contest like that because it was never really about British membership of the EU. In effect, the question became: “Do you want things to remain as they are, or would you like to leave the current reality of your life for something better?” In that contest, there was only ever going to be one winner.
Farage and his fellow travellers are building their support by exploiting the mess that they created. That hypocrisy and opportunism needs to be exposed over and over again.
