Of course people blame a ‘distant elite’ when politicians are often distant and elitist. But MPs must tackle misinformation
Over the past five years or so, one aspect of talking to the public about politics has become more and more pronounced. In the wake of some story or other, I will be dispatched to determine people’s views about it. For a while, the conversations will largely be pretty straightforward, touching on politics and power, people’s lives and the relationship – or lack of it – between them. And then, without warning, somebody will tip the conversation into altogether more exotic territory, centred on a conspiracy theory.
Not long after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I was in the South Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe, listening to a somewhat earnest young man’s views about how the deceased monarch had been fond of drinking babies’ blood. On a visit to Birmingham in 2022, I listened to two loquacious pensioners talking about how Covid-19 was a fiction invented by the world’s rulers, and global death figures had largely been made up – opinions that blurred into a general sense that a lot of people still did not believe a word of what they had been told about the pandemic. The previous year, in fact, I had reported from parts of the city where community organisations were trying to get people to be vaccinated, in the face of large-scale public scepticism and hostility.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
