Goebbels was right. The Nazi propaganda minister’s advice for winning elections was to repeat the same short messages over and over again. It worked for him and now it’s worked for Johnson with a landslide victory in yesterday’s election. When challenged about the health service, he replied “Get Brexit done”, when questioned about the economy, his response was “Get Brexit done” – Immigration, education, transport…same answer. It was tedious, dishonest and irritating, but it worked. The reality is that Brexit is not done even when we officially leave next month. It will be followed by months and probably years of negotiations as we work out the exact nature of the UK’s future relationship with other EU countries. People are not stupid. They know this. But it seems that if you say things often enough, people will be convinced enough to put the truth to the back of their minds.
This was a deeply depressing election especially for those of us living in and around London who don’t want to leave the EU. Very few people want Johnson as their PM, believing him to be mendacious, unprincipled and caring only for his own personal advancement. But the alternative of Corbyn was even less popular because of his far left wing policies which very few people support. So we were left with voting for the candidate we least disliked and went into the polling stations firmly holding our noses.
The sad thing is that the people who really swung this election for Johnson, the working classes in the Midlands, Yorkshire and north-east are the ones who will probably suffer the most. As foreign investment dries up, unemployment increases, employment protection vanishes and human rights are ignored, Get Brexit Done will get a very different response. For me, a slightly longer six word phrase keeps going through my mind, “My God, what have we done?”
