The British right’s propaganda is an affront to democracy

It’s easy to dismiss the Tory right as stupid: too easy if you wish to stop Brexit or limit the damage it will cause. As insults go, it is mild. The right has no plan beyond a desire to turn Britain into a Randian dystopia where regulations vanish and the state withers. It has no policy beyond a nostalgic hope that Britain will sail across the wide blue oceans and conquer new markets as our imperial ancestors conquered them before.

The right offers religion, not politics. Its faith is without blemish, the gospel runs. If Brexit fails, that is not because the faith is false but because heretical traitors, judges, civil servants and EU governments have schemed to defeat it. “He that doubteth is damned,” said St Paul. “For whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Boris Johnson agrees.

Thatcherism, Britain’s last revolt of the right, was preceded by years of hard planning in the Centre for Policy Studies and Institute of Economic Affairs. If you were around in the 1970s, you might have loved or loathed it. But you could not deny the right had built a programme for government. Today, there is no plan, no programme, no nothing. Instead of being populated by serious thinkers, Brexit’s thinktanks are filled with propagandists, tabloid hacks and tax-exile newspaper proprietors. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are columnists turned politicians. The Sun, Telegraph, Mail and Express do not just cheer on the cause while the grown-ups make the real decisions, as they did in Margaret Thatcher’s day. They are what brains the Brexit campaign possesses.

Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, demonstrated the frivolity of the enterprise last year when he wiped his own campaign’s website after the referendum. It as if he was admitting the promises Johnson and Gove had made to 17.4 million voters were worthless. Now the heist had been pulled, he would destroy the incriminating evidence.

A global movement against over-mighty states in Ronald Reagan’s America and Mikhail Gorbachev ’s Soviet Union sustained the Thatcher government. The Brexiters have no one beyond Donald Trump and they don’t really have him. Along with all his other faults – the racism, the narcissism, the incessant mendacity – Trump is an “America first” protectionist. He will never give us a sweetheart deal to make up for lost European markets, even if Congress let him (which it would not).

The Brexiters have no allies, only enemies. Men such as Daniel Hannan and Bernard Jenkin have been fighting their opponents in the Tory party for 30 years. The wounds are too deep, the scars are too thick, for them to admit now the other side may have a point. If they once had a conception of Britain’s interests and the welfare of its citizens, they forgot it long ago. Beyond the desire to create an isolated state in the Atlantic, where welfare and regulations are slashed and climate change denied, is a more primal impulse. They cannot concede an inch to enemies, who have belittled them for  most of their adult lives. Compromise in these psychological circumstances feels like a betrayal, even if the only compromise demanded of them is a compromise with reality.

So be my guest and say that Brexit is a movement of organised stupidity. But accept that as propagandists the Brexiters are anything but stupid. They have been the most brilliantly successful manipulators of public opinion in modern British history.

From the point of propaganda, their vices are virtues. During the referendum, the Remain campaign mocked Brexiters’ inability to offer the British a coherent account of our future. But laughter was misplaced. The inability to level with the public made the Leave campaign a moving target that never offered its opponents a clear line of attack.

The religious insistence that supporting Brexit is a matter of faith, not reason, has the propaganda benefit of keeping supporters in line. Despite the collapse in the pound and living standards, despite the descent of the negotiations into the mire, not one prominent supporter of Brexit has admitted to the smallest doubt. The normal arguments of politics no more exist on the right than they do in the Church of Scientology. Who will break ranks when they know a movement run by vicious hacks will denounce them as traitors? Newspaper proprietors have power without responsibility, Stanley Baldwin said, the “prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.

The harlot’s prerogative ensured that when Liam Fox said negotiating a deal with the EU will be “the easiest thing in human history”, or when David Davis promised in 2016 that by now we would have “trade deals with the US and China”, or when Johnson and Gove swore there would be £350m a week for the NHS, they never expected to be held to account. True democratic politicians are responsible for their words. The Brexit right never is.

Last week, the right showed how it is always two steps ahead of its opponents. It demanded the punishment of Phillip Hammond for refusing to shake the magic money tree and spend on new quangos and custom and excise bureaucracies in case we cannot reach a deal. It was a revealing tantrum. They know Brexit is going wrong. When it is revealed to be a bloody mess, they want to be able to say: “It’s not our fault. If only the government had listened to us in October 2017 we would be prosperous and free.”

The failure of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour frontbench to challenge the right is as irresponsible as the right’s failure to protect the national interest. Instead of listening to them, listen to the men and women who are prepared to fight in the Liberal Democrats, Scottish Nationalists and on the Labour backbenches. They know the best tactic is the simplest. “They hate it when you throw their words in their faces,” Labour’s Chuka Umunna told me. “They start shouting, ‘You want to refight the referendum’.”

To which the only response is, you promised to cut immigration, boost prosperity, secure global trade deals and restore parliamentary sovereignty. You can’t just wipe that off the web and pretend it never happened.

You do not win by treating 17.4 million people as stupid. You win by treating them as democratic citizens with the right to punish the men who made impossible promises. Once it is clear they will never be kept and were never meant to be kept, the question arises: is it time to think again?