The era of post-truth politics is now in full swing

It must be exhausting. I mean, really exhausting, like running up eight flights of stairs or lifting a sofa above your head. To engage with, and believe even a fraction of, the stupefyingly stupid stuff on social media about the Labour party must be like being Eddie Izzard’s running buddy.

And yet, there is a growing army within the Labour party’s ever-expanding ranks who thrive on it. You know the kind of thing: Tony Blair lost five million votes (oops, that was careless); Ed Miliband did better in England than Blair; Jeremy Corbyn won the elections in 2016 by beating the Tories; the BBC, and specifically Laura Kuenssberg, is under the control of Rupert Murdoch; the ‘MSM’ is a giant conspiracy to prevent the ‘sheeple’ from waking up and seeing the truth.

George Orwell understood it well in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he describes doublethink as the ability ‘to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.’

For most of us, the temptation is to see this endless nonsense repeated and retweeted and shrug our shoulders, in the hope that no sensible person could believe it. The problem is that by ignoring it and hoping it will go away, it takes root, like bindweed. Surely, we say, it is obvious that from the high point of 1997, Labour’s vote slowly declined, not least because several million of those who voted Labour in 1997 were dead 10 years later, as Richard Angell has pointed out. But wait – is that not a prominent member of the shadow Treasury team tweeting the nonsense, feeding the beast?

Surely, we say, no one really believes that Labour did well in the local elections, when we lost seats to the Tories? And yet, here is a map on Twitter showing swaths of red and a graph with bars of red, and it looks like we actually won. Even Private Eye has got in on the act, with a bar chart showing that in 1816 Labour had no councillors, and in 1916 Labour had some councillors, and in 2016 Labour has loads of councillors, so we must have won.

In London, of course, Sadiq Khan won because of Corbyn. We know this because a Green-supporting ‘comic’ on BBC Radio 4 says so on Twitter. And talking of the BBC, was it not disgusting how they disguised the true numbers attending that demo in Trafalgar Square? Luckily the true picture, showing over 100,000 people blocking every route in and out of the square, was put around the ‘Labour Party Forum’ on Facebook and the other tellers of truth.

Thousands of people, with votes in the Labour party, now believe in these conspiracies. Their paranoia is stoked by daily shovel-loads of myth, echoed and amplified on Twitter and Facebook. They believe that Corbyn is a surefire vote-winner, if only ‘the PLP’ would fall into line; that the country is crying out for Labour, if only the newspapers stopped being published; that victory can be ours, and it is just an online petition and a red-coloured bar chart away.

It is not just that this dulls their critical faculties, making objective thought near-impossible. It is what Jim Murphy has called ‘post-truth politics’. It is not even that it distances them further from the electorate, who by and large quite like the BBC and do not think it is an organ of Tory party propaganda.

Worse, it excuses failure. When defeats can be explained as victories, why bother seeking victories? When deficiencies in strategy and tactics can be obfuscated by attacks on the media or ‘the Blairites’, why be self-aware? When you lose the general election, it can be written up on The Canary as a victory for socialism, with a graph by Eoin Clarke, and tweets blaming Nicholas Watt. That is what Tony Benn said about Labour’s catastrophe in 1983, by the way: ‘eight million votes for socialism.’ Unfortunately, on the same day, thirteen million people (oops, I forgot they are called ‘sheeple’) voted for Margaret Thatcher.

The only answer lies in Lenin’s advice to the Bolsheviks in his April Theses: patiently explain. Patiently explain that you win elections by winning more votes in the right places. That most journalists report what they see and hear, not what Murdoch tells them to. That the BBC is worth defending from the Tories, not undermining by stupid petitions. That, guess what, the Matrix is just a film. The Truman Show, just a film. The Edge of Darkness – just a film. There is no conspiracy, just people desperate for a Labour government. If you want to exhaust yourself, go and knock on some doors.