I generally avoid political discussions with, well, pretty much anyone. It was one of the topics no one ever raised at work, along with religion and salaries. So this week, when I unexpectedly found myself talking to a neighbour who bluntly stated his views about a very contentious topic, it rather took me by surprise.
The neighbour in question passes our gate occasionally, sometimes walking his dog (whose name I knew long before his owner's, which is normal isn't it?), sometimes jogging, and he often stops for a chat. Usually it's smalltalk - how are the family, how old is his dog now and is he keeping well, routine polite trivia. This time however he was talking about how run down Bournemouth has become, a once-prosperous seaside resort town, its commercial centre is now comprised of vape shops, Turkish barbers, pound shops, pub chains (the kind where young people go to drink standing up and be deafened by loud music) and populated by homeless beggars and youths in balaclavas. This is mostly true. Bournemouth is not at all like it was 40 years ago when I moved there, when it still had a bit of mid-20th century charm and refinement about it.
This led him to talking about asylum seekers and the small boats bringing them across the English Channel, and how he was thinking about voting for Reform (the right-wing populist party). My expression must have told him how I felt about that and he starting qualifying his statement, claiming that no other party had solved the problem and why not give Reform a chance? I could have given him a long list of reasons not to, but instead I just pointed out that the number of crossings is down almost 50% compared with last year, and that the French authorities are being more proactive - last week the BBC news showed film of the police slashing inflatable boats with knives before they could be launched, for example.
He dismissed both of these points out of hand. How could anyone believe the figures were really down and in fact the official numbers were probably not true. And the French police slashing the boats was just one day, what about all the other days when the BBC cameras weren't there, and wasn't that a suspicious coincidence? I like my neighbour and I really didn't want to be having that kind of conversation, so I changed the subject, but later I thought through the logic behind his suggestions. Firstly, that the official figures on migrants crossing The Channel in small boats were falsified, and by implication that no one had noticed, that none of the right-wing newspapers had discovered and reported this, or perhaps that they are also part of the establishment which sought to create a cover-up. Secondly, that the French police had set out to mislead the media and had staged an intervention on the day when the BBC were there, or had colluded with the BBC for that purpose, and again that no one else had discovered this and reported it. Both of those ideas suggest collusion within or between 'establishment' organisations for the purpose of misleading the public, which makes them a kind of conspiracy theory.
My neighbour was a policeman for 40 years, which is perhaps the most surprising thing about this. And yet he seems unable to see that secret conspiracy is the least likely explanation. You don't even have to have heard of Occam's Razor to use it in practice, just to have a reasonable level of critical thinking ability. I don't use much of the internet, certainly not social media of any kind, nor any video sharing, where I understand this kind of thing is rife. What drives it? Why are plain, mundane facts dismissed in favour of more colourful explanations and why do otherwise sensible people fall for them?
Ultimately, populists seek to create and exploit division and one way to do that is persuade disaffected people that reality is not what it appears to be, that unseen hands are on the tiller, that democracy has been subverted (which it has, just not by the people they claim), that the only solution is to vote for their party (and by the way, to overlook the £72 million of donations this week from crypto-currency billionaires, who absolutely don't expect anything in return, how could you possibly think they would?). And of course to be angry about it, because anger drives clicks, and that leads to repetition of the same 'alternative facts' over and over again.
I'm old enough that I still sit and watch the 6 o'clock news (when I can bear it) and perhaps the most depressing thing is the extent to which young people, those under 35 or so, rely entirely on TikTok or other similar sources for anything resembling news. So they are primed for algorithmic manipulation, of having these kinds of ideas presented repeatedly, with no proper review or editorial policy or control in place to carry out even the most basic of fact checking. My neighbour is a few years older than me, but it seems age alone is not a reliable indicator of where someone sources news or what they prefer to believe is reliable.
This seems to me to be the toxic interaction of politics and technology, and we have nothing to expect in the future except more of the same. All I can do is vote, tactically if necessary, to try to keep the bad actors out of government. That probably isn't going to be enough.
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net