Prof John Corner
Professor Emeritus in Communications and Media at the University of Liverpool and a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds. His publications include work on media history, media audiences, documentary, political communication and cultural analysis. This work has appeared in international journals and in books, authored, co-authored and edited.
https://johncorner.com
UK Election 2024
Section 8: Personality politics and popular culture
87. Ed Davey: Towards a Liberal Populism? (Dr Tom Sharkey, Dr Sophie Quirk)
88. Why Nigel Farage’s anti-media election interference claims are so dangerous (Dr Lone Sorensen)
89. Nigel Farage and the political circus (Dr Neil Ewen)
90. Binface, Beany and Beyond: humorous candidates in the 2024 General Election (Prof Scott Wright)
91. What Corbyn support reveals about how Starmer’s Labour won big (Prof Cornel Sandvoss, Dr Benjamin Litherland, Dr Joseph Andrew Smith)
92. “Well that was dignified, wasn’t it?”: floor apportionment and interaction in the televised debates (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
93. TV debates: beyond winners and losers (Prof Stephen Coleman)
94. Is our television debate coverage finally starting to match up to multi-party politics? (Dr Louise Thompson)
95. Tetchiness meets disenchantment: capturing the contrasting political energies of the campaign (Prof Beth Johnson, Prof Katy Parry)
96. “We’re just normal men”: football and the performance of authentic leadership (Dr Ellen Watts)
97. ‘Make the friendship bracelets’: gendered imagery in candidates’ self-presentations on the campaign trail (Dr Caroline Leicht)
98. Weeping in Wetherspoons: generative Al and the right/left image battle on X (Simon Popple)
99. An entertaining election? Popular culture as politics (Prof John Street)
100. Changing key, but keeping time: the music of Election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
101. Truth or dare: the political veracity game (Prof John Corner)
Elections bring increased attention to ideas of political truthfulness and the many and varied manifestation of its absence, as previous publications in this series have discussed. Certainly, the scale of ‘non-truthfulness’ in public circulation, ranging from the slippery to the downright deranged, is seeing a continuing increase due principally to online flows and their permeation of traditional media, at the same time as politicians expand their own already extensive repertoire of dishonesty. In this election, things got off sharply and early, with Sunak’s claim concerning the “independently assessed” £2,000 annual tax rise to follow from a Labour victory and the charge of lying which this claim generated. The tax rise became one of the principal themes of his campaign, returned to emphatically in the final debate.
Complicating the issue of truthfulness is the fact that elections are at their very core festivals of distortion, in which the players strategically misrepresent opposing political accounts and national narratives in the projection of their own. In this exchange, the Conservative Party is of course greatly helped by the huge and growing imbalance in the political allegiances of UK media, including the new talk-radio and TV companies, together with the alignments of elite political commentators. This is already showing its post-electoral continuation in the range of vigorously negative coverage of the new Labour government’s people and policies.
However, moving beyond generalized distortion into making statistical claims which are then widely judged to be untrue is a ‘tactical dare’ that carries the possibility of damaging your opponents but also the risk of being positioned in public space as a liar, thereby potentially forfeiting the advantages that can accrue to the quieter forms of dishonesty. One might have thought that Boris Johnson provided ample warning against taking this risk.
Sunak’s tax claims hit trouble straightaway, their false or misleading nature being confirmed both by the UK statistical watchdog (OSR) and the BBC’s Verify team among other bodies. In addition, the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury had sent a note of caution along with the figures, confirming that the assessment was not (as Sunak subsequently claimed) independent but was based on data supplied to the Treasury from Government and Conservative Party sources. The Conservative push-back contested these evaluations, albeit with rather nervous bluster. However, one strand of commentary, harking back to the Brexit campaign, pointed to the way in which figures given prominence but then widely shown to be false could still exert a framing influence on public perception. The details of disproof could become secondary at best alongside the impact of the publicity given to the initial claim. Ivor Gaber called this ‘strategic lying’ in the 2019 election study of this series, describing a practice in which provoking a charge of falsehood was calculated-in from the start.
The practice of vigorously ‘gaming’ falsehoods with a sense of indifference as to subsequent disproof is far more direct in its implications for information flow and democracy than the continuing strand of abstract speculation about how we can know what is true anyway. Trump has, of course, carried it to new levels of effectiveness.
Following Sunak’s early claims about the £2,000, the press generated a running theme of disclosures and shock revelations (“bombshells”) concerning tax. Its distortive calculations of benefits and losses, of private and public impacts, was only marginally countered by other inputs. As in previous elections, the level of fear factor put to work here was pushed to its highest.
Of course, this year the veracity game was given a new dynamic by the late entry of Nigel Farage as the new leader of Reform UK. His self-consciously Trumpist approach to facts initially enjoyed the latitude it has regularly been given by the media before more negative coverage was generated by his comments on Ukraine and the remarks of some of his followers. His ambition to build a new party of the Right from his five-seat success (based on a share of the popular vote instrumental to the scale of Labour’s victory!) is likely to bring further waves of deception and distraction. This will be generated from a full-on populist position aided by that under-regulated propaganda agency, GB News.
Elections are, of course, special periods of political communication, but they alert us to wider issues concerning civic health. They do this as strategic falsehoods backed by corporate and often international interests become ever more deeply woven into a volatile political culture.
Among the many things that emerge from this election is further confirmation that a stronger input of public service media flows is vital to counter further degradation of the range and quality of public knowledge about the true condition of the UK and the real options for its future.
