Boris treated 2019 like 2016

The argument

The claim that Labour lost because of lies rests on a difference in how the two main parties campaigned. Of the Conservative Party's most widely promoted social media advertisements, 88% contained lies or inaccuracies. By contrast, none of Labour's ads contained lies. The asymmetry is the point: this was not a campaign in which both sides stretched the truth and one did it marginally more, but one in which the overwhelming majority of what the winning party pushed hardest was untrue while the losing party's equivalent output was not. What was spread mattered as much as how much of it there was. The Conservatives fed voters claims about Corbyn's plans, among them that he would "extend the free movement of people," and then repeated them. Repetition is what makes the method work. A falsehood encountered once can be checked against what a voter already believes; the same falsehood encountered repeatedly, across the channels where people actually see political material, stops presenting itself as a claim to be assessed and becomes part of the background of what is taken to be known about a candidate. By the time a correction arrives it is arguing against something that has already settled. This is also why the comparison with 2016 is doing work in the argument rather than decorating it. The same approach had already been shown to succeed, so 2019 was not an experiment but a repetition of a method with a known result. Johnson treated the general election as the earlier contest had been treated, and on this account that choice is what made sure he was on the winning side. Labour did not lose a contest of competing programmes; it lost one in which the other side's most-promoted material was overwhelmingly false and was repeated until it stuck.

Context

The Conservatives lied to the electorate. Boris Johnson campaigned in 2019 in the exact same way he did at the 2016 referendum; by lying as often as possible and propagating the same mistruth repeatedly until people believed it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Everyone lies. It's politics. If your campaign isn't telling any lies you aren't doing it properly. Tony Blair told lies about the Iraq war. Gordon Brown told lies. Not only is everyone doing it, the public knows everyone is doing it. In the wake of the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the lies that were plastered across buses, if anyone thinks that the British electorate believed any of the promotional material coming out of either party they are insulting the public's intelligence. Nobody believed anything any of the political parties were saying about each other. The Conservative Party's lies persuaded nobody. Corbyn lost because the public did not want him or his party to run the country. It is as simple as that.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The public expects to be fed lies in political campaigns. Nobody was persuaded by any Conservative campaign material.