Britain Plays to Win

by Jason Michael McCann

NEVER IN our lives have we witnessed a British election quite like this. Not even the last few desperate weeks of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign came close to this in terms of the London political establishment’s willingness to pull out all the stops, to plumb the greatest depths, and to play to win at any cost. Giving evidence to the Oireachtas recently, to the Irish Senate’s Joint Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News,’ the English journalist Carole Cadwalladr set the scene for how the Conservative Party would fight this campaign. She explained how, in the months before Westminster was suspended, the British government’s own Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee had “painstakingly detailed the risks” posed by fake news and disinformation to elections, and how the British government called the general election having done “absolutely nothing” to address these serious concerns.

“We know,” she explained, “that the Brexit vote was fraudulently and illegitimately conducted.” She went on to show in detail how tech platforms, particularly Facebook, “facilitated multiple campaigns to break the law.” Britain’s failure to bring those responsible for this wholesale criminality to account has led to a situation in which Boris Johnson, the man who led one of these illegal campaigns – “the single biggest electoral fraud in our country for more than a century,” is now Prime Minister, and the “man who masterminded this scheme [Dominic Cummings] is his chief advisor.”