Overview: Politics

The virus is compelling our leaders to alter their habits, even their beliefs, in real time... a global battering of ideology. Proudly liberal democracies are instituting police states and economically conservative governments are applying de facto socialism... Brexit... derived its entire force from privileging political ideals over economics.…

taking on the BBC in the complaints framework is not for the faint-hearted... set-piece responses ... ‘we get complaints from both sides, so we must be getting it right’, or, ... you are not taking into account that seven weeks previously we broadcast a balancing item’... summarises the basic BBC stonewall approach...‘due’ impartialit... that not …

42% of the country see the BBC as ... pro-Remain ... just 25% who disagree... When was the last time that the BBC sought to explore the opportunities available to a post-Brexit Britain?... fits in with a general sense that the people are up against the establishment... Just 19% feel that the Commons is doing a good job of honouring the vote... two…

Gavin Hunt... Question Time... tracked the 25 editions of the programme in the series running from January 2017, and found that 22 had panels which contained a majority of EU Remainers... Ofcom... turned the complaint down... Damian Green expressed the Hard Brexit perspective, and ... in Ofcom’s judgment, host David Dimbleby ensured that debate wa…

Question Time, Politics Live and Any Questions… Since ... September, 72% of the official panel guests across the three shows have been Remainers, while a mere 28% have been Leavers...87% of the panels had a Remainer majority – only 13% of shows had a panel equally balanced between Leavers and Remainers. Not once have Leavers outnumbered Remainers.

Brexit coverage during, before and since the Referendum has been skewed in favour of Brexit... isn’t ... flagrantly biased or unbalanced: it is more subtle... because of the polarisation of views over Brexit, the BBC would attract criticism from both sides almost whatever it did...Nigel Farage stated ... BBC’s coverage had been “fair and balanced”…

monitored thousands of hours of radio and TV shows dating back to 1999... Of 4,275 guests on Today between 2005 and 2015 who talked about the EU, only 132 were Brexiteers... think-tank Civitas ... with the group News-watch, also found that Left-wing Brexiteers have been consistently excluded ... Clarke and Heseltine were given nine times as much a…

recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics...Labour Party argued that it can be used for good... Conservative Party claimed that politics is bad... promised to... ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it ...wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewild…

despite this being an election defined by Brexit, there is no substantive discussion of Brexit...Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like... the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan...the real and difficult choices ... Johnson would immediately face over Brexit... from one of the c…

A workshop proposal for EuroPCom 2018 with @albawhitewolf, Mike Galsworthy (@Scientists4EU) and the original Captain Europe, reposted to Facebook by popular demand.

The most powerful engine of elitism is the European Union... Founding Fathers of Europe deliberately removed a great deal of decision-making from the hands of the (nation-bounded and short-sighted) public... Confronted with popular revolts against the rule of experts they have simply dug in their heels... For the EU, technocratic decision-making …

Cambridge Analytica conducted data research for one of the leading Brexit campaign groups and then misled the public and MPs over the work ... the work with Leave.EU involved analysis of data provided by Ukip... Nix has repeatedly denied there was any involvement... "We have not undertaken any paid or unpaid work for them, OK?”... Leave.EU did no…

Wylie ... the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.... In 2014 Steve Bannon ... was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer... Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor... to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then t…

‘Vote Leave Take Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’... future-focused, inspirational and told a sufficiently broad story for enough people to see a reflected image of themselves and their country that they could feel good about... get out of rebuttal mode, ditch the anaemic, snore-inducing, negative messages ... and go all in with a muscular…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

An MP blaming his own failings ... on evil Russians ... without a slither of evidence. Post-truth much? ... Remainers cannot accept that a majority of people are simply rationally opposed, to ... the EU.... he’s so stunned that there are people out there who think differently to him that the only way he can make sense of it is by imagining thes…

foolish to assume that “experience” is an unalloyed asset ... In this age of rage against anything or anyone that can be depicted as “the establishment” ... a handicap to be an “insider” and a great advantage to be an “outsider”... calling them dangerous did not amount to an answer to the grievances driving substantial numbers of voters ... tell…

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming.... both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.

voters feel let down by the BBC’s coverage being hampered by impartiality rules... we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”

Cognitive ease is the concept of which when you hear something repeatedly, your brain starts to form connections around it, thus making it easier for you to process later. And since we prefer things to be simple and easy, things that are easy to think about generally makes us feel happier... for newspapers it’s part of the problem that we all face…

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer... Cameron ... and George Osborne believed... “It will be about jobs and the economy and it won’t e…

an organization dedicated to "ever closer union" has never faced a setback as profound as the looming departure from the UK, and it’s natural to wonder if this doesn’t mark the beginning of a larger unraveling.... Rather than a prediction or a hot take, here’s a way to think through the different alternatives.

In 2007 I tangled with the UK’s Eurosceptic movement when it was nothing more than a lunatic fringe. Post-Brexit, Welcome to the New Normal.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

One of the main arguments of British eurosceptics is that the EU’s trade policy is not serving United Kingdom trade interests properly, and if Britain went it alone it could trade more with other countries and negotiate its own free trade agreements. For anyone who is familiar with actual contemporary trade and trade policy... In this context it …

it's fair to question whether the average Brexit supporter is grounded in reality.... This mass separation from reality also represents a parallel to what is going on with our strange, sad election in the United States... Trump... has ridden a wave of distaste for the more buttoned-up masters of the universe... the leave campaign has painted the…

"watch leading European politicians and experts carry out actual, real-time negotiations over the UK's relationship with the EU in a so-called war-game." Clever idea from Open Europe.