Elections used to bring us solutions. The 2019 general election won’t
First up is to rubbish:
the attention still paid to opinion polling: on Sunday, reports suggested the Tories were variously leading Labour by eight, 16 and 12 percentage points.
Why is this silly?
What is it all actually about? As in 2017 [and all elections?] , there are at least three elections going on at once: the contest about Brexit – and the ludicrous idea that we will soon “get it done” – conceived by the Tories and pounced on by the Liberal Democrats; Labour’s great debate about austerity and inequality – and the mixture of both, woven through with the question of independence, defining the battle in Scotland, and centred on the Scottish National party...The extent to which the public buys into these narratives is open to question
Harris just knows about public opinion, more surely than any mere pollster. But he also goes back to the polls himself using the old principle-- if you don't like the results, choose another poll:
nearly half of us might switch to a different party from the one we backed in 2017.
The link goes to a Times article written by one of those new dark arts pollsters. Harris is less certain about the other dark arts though:
Thousands – millions? – of personalised micro-campaigns are already unfolding on people’s social media feeds, defined by many forces and voices way beyond the party machines and the traditional media, and often beyond anyone’s control....Two years ago, a big part of Theresa May’s undoing was the way that an avalanche of mocking memes quickly rendered her a laughing stock; similar things will happen this time, but it is not yet clear who they will affect, and how.
The trouble is that the Gru has relied only on old-fashioned printed mocking memes? This time we need to worry about:
subterfuge of bots, fake accounts, and all the rest. We know that CTF Partners, the lobbying firm run by Boris Johnson’s confidant Lynton Crosby, was recently caught overseeing pro-Brexit Facebook ads purporting to be the work of grassroots activists. We know too that the Conservative party has hired people closely connected to CTF, well versed in the most slippery online campaigning techniques....It’s clear that the Tories are prepared to use falsehoods in their online campaigning: in September, they put ads on Facebook presenting a BBC report about £14bn of schools funding as if it was a fact, when the report in question actually criticised the figure’s credibility.
There you go! Proof! Politicians do not have the same high standards as journalists.There is something in the modern zeitgeist (We would have called it postmodern until recently. OK Late Capitalism then):
The accelerated, saturated culture we now live in fosters so much irreverence and cynicism that the very idea of people and parties claiming they have all-encompassing solutions to the country’s problems can easily look absurd...in the digital age, capitalism has constructed ways of blindsiding its opponents and distracting the public at large way beyond the old opiates of the masses, and it is an onerous task to even begin to shift them.
It is that threat to conventional journalism that worries him most:
the cacophony hosted by the big platforms scrambles meanings, promotes the worst kind of discourse, and sows confusion. This is less about messages than the medium: once politics moves online, it tends to operate in a context of disbelief, cynicism and the kind of endless tribal warfare that rarely achieves any resolution. No one really wins....As Trump and Johnson prove, politics may now be more about camp, performance and the imperative to crash around the right online platforms than the idea of actually achieving anything
Poor old Graun. All those solemn editorials and opinion pieces, all that scarey bad news -- and now they suspect no-one has been listening except the converted.
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