Not #InFor this? Anti-Brexit graffiti in Bristol. Flickr/Duncan C. Some rights reserved.Days after the EU referendum result in June, SNP MP Alex Salmond — former first minister of Scotland — was asked on BBC Question Time whether the outcome of the referendum was valid given that many Leave voters had based their choice on lies. He said yes, that it had been a democratic decision and that the will of the people within all four nations of the United Kingdom must be respected. “All political campaigns, I’m afraid, have misinformation at their heart,” he stated.
It is time for progressives in both the UK and US to challenge this fundamental principle of political campaigning, to take action to guard against the blatant misleading of the electorate by all parties of government, and to work to change the opaque, elitist environment in which political misinformation is allowed to proliferate.
When I arrived in Philadelphia from the UK in February as a newly-admitted immigrant, I wasn’t worried about the outcome of the EU referendum, or indeed the political campaigns that would be fought on either side in the run up to it. I should have been; we all should have been, regardless of our political position. Now America should be too.
