“Strategic Lying”: The Case of Brexit and the 2019 U.K. Election

Introduction

Accusations that politicians lie are far from new, but the intensity of such accusations has increased. As Koc-Michalska et al. (2020) note, “Democratic public spheres now present people with falsehoods to an extent that is likely unprecedented since the rise of modern media systems” (461). This paper argues that an overt form of “strategic lying” emerged in the United Kingdom during the 2016 Brexit Referendum, the 2019 U.K. general election, and Trump's presidential campaigns, which has taken “spin” to a new level. As summed up by Alastair Campbell, former Press Secretary and Director of Communications to British Prime Minister, Tony Blair:

I am afraid we have entered a post-truth, post-shame world. The Washington Post says Donald Trump tells 12 lies a day. His predecessors would have been hounded out of office for one in a term. Boris Johnson won a referendum by lying. His reward? He was made Foreign Secretary and he is now going to be the Prime Minister. There is no shame! ¹

Focussing on the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the 2019 U.K. general election, this paper draws on agenda-setting theory and cross-disciplinary literature to theorize the concept of “strategic lying.” In doing so, we suggest it is a new feature of contemporary political campaigning that presents serious challenges to the liberal democratic model. While the impact of political disinformation generally on voting behavior is unresolved (Karpf 2019), we contend recent events in the UK and US demand examination of the phenomenon of “strategic lying” and its impact on democratic engagement.

Liberal democracy is based on the principles of rationality, access to reliable and accurate information, and electoral accountability, as safeguards against corruption and tyranny (Jamieson 2015; Sanders 2009). Without the provision of reliable information, voters are not able to make an informed decision at the ballot box. In “post-factual democracy” (Allen and Stevens 2018: 11), this task becomes harder for electors to perform because political lying undermines trust in politics and politicians and misleads the public. Although there is debate about whether there has ever been an attentive or informed public, the ideal is a central norm of democracy that separates democracy from other political systems (Karpf 2019).

We argue that “strategic lying” is located in the continually transforming practices of “spin.” “Strategic lying” is defined by both its misleading content and its strategic use within the context of a political campaign in which parties battle to control the campaign agenda (Scammell 2014; Semetko et al. 2011). The goal of the “strategic lie” is to set the agenda and prime the issue, achieved firstly by the attention-grabbing lie itself, and secondly by the rebuttal which ensures that the lie is widely disseminated and its salience amplified by social media users and the mainstream media. The essence of the strategic lie is that its veracity, or lack thereof, is irrelevant; indeed, the more outlandish the claim, the more likely it is to attract widespread attention. The Trumpian “election steal” is the most overt example of this phenomenon.

In contrast to other scholars who have attempted to interpret political communications in a “post-truth” environment, we argue that “strategic lying” is not a “radical departure from the idea of political spin” (Garland 2018: 333), but an evolution of political public relations tactics over decades. This evolution has been facilitated by a range of factors, including the expansion and increasing professionalization of political communication professionals (Davis 2007; Lees-Marshment 2001), and the strategic use of traditional and digital media to exploit the intersecting information flows across platforms in a fragmented and polarized political environment (Chadwick 2013).

Agenda Setting, Priming, and Framing

The goal of “strategic lying” is to have an impact on the salience of issues. As Kiousis et al. (2006) explain, this is a central objective for all political public relations messaging, particularly during an election campaign. Agenda-setting theory is a useful tool for discussing this strategy. Agenda-setting research begins with the work of McCombs and Shaw (1972). It refers to the impact that news media have on the salience of issues for the public. The basic premise of this first level of agenda setting is that the more attention the mass media gives an issue or “object,” the more important it becomes in the eyes of the audience. The attention one media outlet pays to an issue also influences others. Intermedia agenda setting theorizes how “the media agenda is shaped by sources and whether a media agenda shape's other media agenda's” (Kim et al. 2016: 4554). As Groshek and Groshek (2013: 16 in Kim et al. 2016: 4554) explain, in the digital age, agenda setting is “no longer conceived of as only a top-down process from mainstream print and broadcast media to audiences.” Instead, intermedia agenda setting is based on interweaving, and interactive information flows between online and traditional mass media, which enables amplification of messages across platforms by different sources, including politicians, citizens, and the media. The related concept of priming, which is often seen as an extension of agenda setting (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007), also deals with the cognitive impacts of news on voters’ opinion formation. By focussing on certain issues an individual's memory is primed by the news coverage, which influences that person's evaluation of political issues and representatives. This process also has an affective dimension, whereby emotions evoked during political campaigns also influence public opinion (Kühne et al. 2011). Second-level or “attribute” agenda setting, which is often likened to framing, means certain aspects of an issue or characteristics of a person are presented in a particular way, to make them more salient, and thereby influence people's perceptions of it. Each of these strategies is employed in the successful execution of “strategic lies.”

Propaganda, Spin, and Strategic Lying

We contend “strategic lying” is an increasingly common form of political campaigning located in the continually transforming practices of “spin.” Spin developed in the public relations industry which sought to turn the use of propaganda into a legitimate form of corporate and political communications.

According to Mearsheimer (2013: 16-7), there is a difference between spinning and lying:

Spinning is when a person telling a story emphasises certain facts and links them together in ways that play to his advantage, while at the same time, downplaying or ignoring inconvenient facts … The basic story being told is distorted but the facts are not put together so as to tell a false story which would be a lie.

In theorizing the concept of “strategic lying,” we contend we have identified a new tactic arising out of the phenomenon of spin. The nearest characterization is the concept of “wicked content” developed by Jack (2019: 435). She used the term to describe online content that is “recognizably problematic” (Jack 2019: 435). The term can apply to online material that is circulated “despite the fact that it cannot be verified because it is inaccurate, fabricated, misleading, or unsupported” (Jack 2019: 441). In the context of this paper, “strategic lying” would fall under this broad umbrella; however, we take it one step further by contextualizing “strategic lying” within the framework of the evolution of spin rather than as an ad hoc online phenomenon.

“Strategic lying” is not to be mistaken for “fake news.” This term has become problematic due to its broad application, particularly when used as a form of abuse to attack the mainstream news media (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017). “Fake news” usually refers to online content that mimics the form of conventional news, but with an intention to deceive (Waisbord 2018). In contrast, “strategic lying” is a form of rhetorical spin in which the intention to deceive is more important than the appearance of veracity.

A near relative of the strategic lie is the so-called “dead cat strategy” (Clarke et al. 2015: 91). The tactic is invoked when a politician finds him or herself in an indefensible position and introduces an entirely new, usually fictitious or near-fictitious topic, into the political conversation, to divert attention and shift the news agenda back to their preferred topics. The “dead cat” strategy differs from the “strategic lie” in that it is reactive, devised on-the-spot to meet a particular situation, rather than a planned, proactive strategy. The metaphor of the “dead cat” is, who remembers what you were talking about when a dead cat suddenly drops on the table? One example occurred during the U.K.'s 2015 general election when the polls suggested that Labour was ahead; a leading Conservative suddenly accused the Labour leader of planning to scrap Britain's nuclear deterrent. No such plan existed, but the intervention successfully diverted the news agenda away from Labour's polling lead toward one of the Conservatives key campaigning themes of defense and led the Tory-supporting magazine The Spectator to ask: “Is the Tory Trident row an example of a ‘dead cat’ strategy?” ² In the United States, Lewandowsky et al. (2020) demonstrate how Donald Trump has been using his Twitter posts to distract the mainstream media's attention away from unwelcome news.

Social Media and Strategic Lying

The rise of social media has increased the attractiveness of “strategic lying” as a campaigning tactic. While traditional campaigning methods, including the use of the mainstream media, continue to play a significant part, social media networks enable the “strategic lie” to have an impact far beyond its first iteration. Based on the network logic of social media, the strategic liar can expect his or her misleading messages to be spread widely via social media. A Labour Party report characterized this phenomenon as “distributed spin” in its analysis of what went wrong during the 2019 campaign. They observed:

The Conservatives’ core message “Get Brexit Done” lent itself easily to the “distributed spin” approach, whereby supporters can pick up and disseminate frames and messages and help to shape audiences’ views of the campaign and related news stories (Labour Together 2020: 94).

Another advantage of social media to the strategic liar is that statements of dubious factual accuracy are now subject to less scrutiny, or at least to a different type of scrutiny, than when the traditional media performed the role as the dominant gatekeeper. Because of the sheer volume of information flowing via social media it is virtually impossible for either experts or specialist journalists to check and challenge every controversial tweet or post. Though, there are “citizen” verifiers who offer a particular form of fact checking. However, this fact checking of any type is of limited utility. Nyhan et al. (2019), for example, found that correcting inaccurate statements online in real time, by either journalists or a fact-checking organization, has little impact on the way people vote. Those sympathetic to the original message reject the correction, discounting it as coming from a partisan source, or they barely notice it in the first place (Garrett and Weeks 2013).

Furthermore, people's memories of corrections faded rapidly although they did retain a memory of the original lie (Swire et al. 2017; Thorson 2016). This tended to occur because the lie reinforced their political position. For voters dissatisfied with the political establishment, “a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests” (Hahl et al. 2018: 3); or as Swire-Thompson et al. (2020: 21) put it: “They might be a liar, but they are my liar.”

By accepting the lie, the voter avoids cognitive dissonance—the emotion people feel when forced to confront information that contradicts their existing understandings and predispositions (Taddicken and Wolff 2020). In turn, cognitive dissonance leads to “confirmation bias,” the bias that arises because people only notice and retain information that reinforces their own worldview (Nickerson 1998). The other key finding in the behavioral science literature is the tried and tested power of repetition, partly arising from simple reinforcement but also because we tend to be cognitive misers (Begg et al. 1992; Taraborelli 2008). In other words, we find it easier to accept information that we have previously processed instead of processing something entirely new. The profound emotional commitment evinced by supporters of President Trump in their belief that the election was “stolen” is a vivid exemplar of these phenomena.

Manifestations of this phenomenon have been linked to the rise in populism (Kalpokas 2019). Dragoman (2014: 102) suggests that claims by populist leaders to “speak for the people” conceal contempt for the people and a related lack of concern for telling them the truth. They can do this, argues Dragoman, because of what he terms “demolatry” (104). This refers to those who follow and believe in the populist leader and are so shorn of any doubt about what he or she says that lies can be disseminated without apparent cost. Alonso-Muñoz and Casero-Ripollés (2018) suggest social media increases the ability of populist leaders to carve out their own political agendas irrespective of the mainstream media. Through direct communication, the populist leader claims to be in an unmediated dialogue with their followers which increases the resonance of the messages, which are then retransmitted through their networks (Ernst et al. 2017).

In the United States, Donald Trump is a dramatic exemplar of a populist leader employing social media with an apparent lack of concern for the truth. In May 2020, the Washington Post ran a headline: “In 1,226 days, President Trump has made 19,128 false or misleading claims”—almost ten a day. While much of his mendacity would be more accurately be described as “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005), there have been occasions when Trump has also mobilized the techniques of strategic lying. For example, the “birther” controversy, and most vividly, his false declaration of victory in the 2020 presidential election based on his unproven assertion that the election had been stolen from him by widespread electoral fraud.

His first most obvious strategic lie came in 2011 when he claimed to have “proof” that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (making him ineligible to occupy the White House)—the so-called “birther” controversy. Trump went as far as to say that he was sending a team of private investigators to Hawaii to learn the truth and promised to donate $5 million to charity if anyone could convince him Mr. Obama was born on U.S. soil. There is no record of any such team arriving in Hawaii, nor of Mr. Trump donating $5 million to charity following the publication of Mr. Obama's birth certificate. Notwithstanding, over the next three years Mr. Trump continued to raise the issue despite the lie being comprehensively rebutted. Trump repeated it not because he expected people to believe it but, as a “strategic lie,” it kept the issue of Obama's origins and his “otherness” on the mainstream news agenda. It is no coincidence that a similar “birther” controversy was mounted against Kamala Harris shortly after she was nominated as Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign. In the last days of the campaign, Trump constantly reiterated the charge that the Democrats could only win by fraudulent means. When Biden overtook Trump in the electoral college, his supporters were primed to believe that this could only have been because of electoral fraud; a belief that only intensified in the days leading up to President Biden's inauguration, culminating in the attack on Congress in January 2021.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to deepen our understanding of contemporary spin tactics in the age of digital and social media by theorizing the emergence of the “strategic lie.” Using two U.K. case studies, we have argued that the misleading messaging used by the Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum, and by the Conservatives in the 2019 U.K. election campaign was more than just a case of over-enthusiastic spinning, it was deliberate “strategic lying.” The claims that the United Kingdom sent £350 million to the EU every week and that Turkey would shortly be joining the EU were lies designed to deceive and shape the news agenda. The “strategic lies” were made in the knowledge that the original false statements and the rebuttal would be widely disseminated by both mainstream and social media—particularly to those likely to be sympathetic to the Conservative or Leave cause. Just as importantly, the lies served to keep the national debate close to the Conservative's agenda. Polling after the Brexit referendum (Prosser et al. 2016) showed the two major reasons people gave for voting to leave the EU were concerns about sovereignty (which underpinned the notion of the £350 million figure) and immigration, which was underpinned by the prominence of the Turkey “threat.” No direct causation can be established in such matters, but the correlation is hard to ignore.

Similarly, in the 2019 general election, despite growing concern about the state of the NHS, the public continued to tell pollsters that Brexit was the most important issue facing the country (YouGov 2019). We are not claiming this was a direct result of the Conservatives’ campaign of “strategic lies,” but we can observe that it clearly did them no harm at the ballot box. We contend the concept of “strategic lying” has emerged from the evolution of political spin tactics in a post-truth online environment. We argue it represents a contemporary trend that is being skillfully exploited by political communication professionals who understand how the affordances of social media turbo-charge the “strategic lie” in setting, framing, and priming of news agendas to suit their campaigning ends.

But perhaps “strategic lying” was best described, not by a scholar but by journalist Dawn Foster who observed during the 2019 election campaign:

…slash and burn and lie with impunity. Tell whatever falsehood you fancy, especially one that has a propensity to go viral. Get your smear heard as widely as possible, and if you’re challenged, just lie. Far more people will see your initial lie than the follow-up correction, and few people will take the time to research any statistical embroidery or rewriting of the party's stance or record. ¹⁵