Burnham’s Russia Narrative Car Crash is Worse Than We Thought

It is a pervasive, powerful, insidious force, but rarely do we see ideology in motion to such a material effect. Something sends a rush of blood to the head, to push forward the wish for it to be true, to urge on the lie so as to overwhelm the better judgement of the most senior politician in the land. “I asked the question coming into Downing Street, well was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia,” claimed the Prime Minister on The Rest is Politics podcast, “and I’ve had the clear answer that yes there was.” As a clear expression of the chaos of Andy Burnham’s Government, which is only weeks old, this ideologically motivated nonsense must be taken seriously.

I typically write about climate. But my first major article for the Daily Sceptic was about the profound contempt for democracy shown by increasingly remote and intransigent European political elites. They were, I argued, through their struggles to overcome crises of their own making summoning up the very demons that they claim to be defending us from, namely, a departure from democratic norms. And though Russian misinformation is not the ‘climate emergency’, these bogeymen are not disconnected. I am fascinated by how ideology joins up dots to create pictures that are not there, but which somehow become the most cast-iron and most salient facts of all. The ‘climate crisis’, for example, explains all the bad stuff, and so solving it will create jobs, growth, equality, abolish prejudice and