“If someone says it’s raining & another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the f**king window and find out which is true.”
Jonathan Foster (possibly)
I’ve yet to hear an apology from John Redwood following his astonishing on-screen battle with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel Four news this week. I’m not holding my breath. Rather, Redwood, like a lot of politicians in these days of Fake News has learned that all that’s required to get away with a lie is to bury it in one or two layers of molasses.
KGM was absolutely right to call the liar out. Its time more journalists did the same.
Except, of course, if you were already pre-disposed to side with KGM, Redwood was lying whether he was or wasn’t. And if you were pre-disposed to side with Redwood, you believed him when he said the polls were saying ‘a majority’ of UK citizens wanted a No Deal exit from the EU. Irrespective of how true it was. The problem with a population as divided as the UK now is, is that Confirmation Bias dominates everything. We only listen to what we already agree with. Helped in no small part by Facebook and Social Media, which all serves to reinforce the effect by only feeding us stuff that is consistent with our existing Bias. It’s a horrible vicious cycle that isn’t going to end well. And I think people like John Redwood not only know it, they see it as part of their role to actively encourage it.
Redwood’s thousand-yard-stare through most of the interview, meanwhile, was a clue that he knew he was lying. The problem of proof, however, is somewhat more troubling. There was indeed a recent poll that sort of confirmed Redwood’s assertion.
It was a poll conducted by Sky News. This is what they reported:
“Forced to choose between no deal, Theresa May’s deal or a long delay with EU elections, 41% prefer no deal, 35% a long delay with EU elections, with just 16% favouring the prime minister’s plan – nine percent answered, ‘don’t know’.”
At the bottom of the article, readers were then told:
“Sky Data interviewed a nationally representative sample of 1,295 Sky customers by SMS on 5 April 2019. Data are weighted to the profile of the population. Sky Data is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.”
What this basically all means is that a biased, bullshit question was asked through a bullshit medium to a bullshit sample.
So where was the lie?
Was it Redwood? Did he use deliberately weasel-y words to cover his back? Did he take the time to investigate the validity of the Sky News survey?
Was it Sky News deliberately formulating a survey question where the majority of possible answers were omitted and then posing it in a dumb way?
Or was it someone behind the scenes, recognising that there was a need for more pro-Brexit ‘balance’ in the political discourse, who commissioned such a disingenuous survey? Someone, perhaps, being paid by someone to do bullshit-science, safe in the knowledge that the people who’s biases the results confirmed wouldn’t dream of challenging? Or could, at a convenient later date, say was ‘a mistake’?
The only meaningful answer is that it was all of them. Redwood included. He might at some point in the future, when the dust has finally settled on this seemingly never-ending Brexit pantomime, claim that he couldn’t have known that the survey was bullshit. If, however, you are a public figure living a public life, just like the law for Company Directors and other members of society living in the real world, ignorance is no excuse. You have a moral obligation to the public you serve to do your homework. You have a moral obligation to ‘own your shit’. And you have a moral obligation to get beyond your party-political Confirmation Bias and tell the truth.