Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away | openDemocracy

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, bewildering and stressful, then ask voters to make it go away... a campaign of disinformation and deceit... According to independent fact checkers, 88% of Conservative party Facebook adverts in the recent UK election contained lies, while none of Labour’s did...

"all these facts flying around on social media – you don’t know what to believe... Sod the lot of them – I don’t believe any of it... ‘it’s just a pack of lies"...

the rage with politics has more of an impact on the left: the idea that the state can be used for the public good dissolves in a vial of distrust...

UK Policy Group ... British arm of (US) Definers Public Relations... famous for running the smear campaigns against Hillary Clinton... hired to spin for Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal...connected to the Super PAC America Rising

the European campaign group CitizenGO... connections with far-right parties across Europe... smearing their opponents...

Tories and their supporters launched an armada of outriders...previously unknown groups, attacking Labour... presented themselves as grassroots ... links to Britain’s organised right, to the public relations industry, and to the UK’s nexus of dark-money funded think tanks... designed to drive down turnout and up support for the ‘strong man’ who ... pledged to get politics out of your face...

Trust in the BBC fell by 7% ... less than half of British views now seeing it as impartial... to cover politics as though it is reality TV... the most significant way that the media drives alienation and disengagement...

Say there's a rally somewhere... we'll register all the phones ... follow those phones home... we know who they are, and what they do... your Netflix unique ID... your Facebook unique ID... OK, this guy likes Stranger Things... CatholicVote... tracks who goes into church, via their phones, and extracts data... to target ‘get out the vote’ adverts.