2 days ago
The mask of Davos Man has slipped. The elites will do anything to discredit Brexit
Former President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker famously said: 'When things get serious, you have to know how to lie.' Policymakers in multiple settings have taken this message to heart in recent years – consciously telling untruths in the service of a perceived greater good. There's even a term for it going back to Plato's The Republic: the 'noble lie'.
The latest revelations in this spirit concern Klaus Schwab, founder of the Davos conference and the subject of innumerable online conspiracy theories. It appears from reports today and previously in the Swiss press that he did allegedly conspire to misrepresent the UK's ranking in international competitiveness leagues. The UK ought to have been fourth in the 2017/18 report, but Schwab apparently feared this would be interpreted as some kind of endorsement of the Brexit vote in the EU Referendum and is accused of having instructed his staff to make sure the UK did not rise – meaning the UK fell from 7th to 8th in the final report, with Schwab's World Economic Forum warning that the Brexit vote would inevitably undermine UK competitiveness.
This was, of course, on top of numerous warnings ahead of the Brexit vote about how dire its impacts would be – not only from the UK government but from other international politicians and agencies as well. We now know for certain that many of these predictions were false – e.g. the Brexit vote did not trigger an instant year-long 'RECESSION' in the UK as the Treasury ominously warned. But how many of them were lies, policymakers saying things they didn't even believe to be true themselves, in the hope of manipulating the public into acting in the manner they felt promoted a greater good?
A popular online meme mocks Michael Gove's much misquoted statement during the EU Referendum campaign that 'the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.' But it's more than simply that these 'experts' get it wrong by accident. They often say things they don't believe themselves to be true or that they know are incomplete, in the hope of manipulating the public.
In the US that practice is widely believed to have extended to the mainstream media, with many in the public regarding 'fake news' as an accepted norm. This belief has devalued truthfulness in politics to the point that those on the Trump side appear to consider blatantly lying themselves as just 'playing the game' and everyone appears to accept this as normal.
In the UK accusing a politician of 'lying' in Parliament is forbidden, leading to all kinds of famous circumlocution to avoid using that word. Some commentators argue that we should avoid calling politicians liars because it degrades political debate. But that attitude requires a norm of good faith – that politicians will almost always be trying to be as truthful as they can be and even when unable to tell the full truth will go out of their way to avoid actually lying. But the public belief in that good faith is almost gone.
Integrity takes a long time to build up but can be shattered quickly. And once it is shattered it is very hard to repair. It could take decades before the public believes they can take statistics, modelling results or the public statements of experts, let alone of politicians, at face value again. Being unable to tell the public difficult truths and have them believed may have dire consequences for decades to come.
