I wanted to tell the story of austerity, the Eurozone crisis, the 2015 UK election and its aftermath, and Brexit and Donald Trump as I saw it at the time to emphasise that these were no accidents that we only understand in hindsight, but disasters that were obvious as they were happening. I wanted to call the book The Lies We Were Told because I became increasingly aware that expertise and knowledge that could have told us what was happening as it happened was being ignored or diluted.

During the period covered with these posts I increasingly saw the media as a kind of filter that distorted reality to suit a political received wisdom at the time. The coalition government in the UK wanted to tell stories of ‘maxed out credit cards’ and ‘clearing up the mess Labour left’, and both the partisan and broadcast media largely obliged, despite both stories being untrue and the majority of experts knowing them to be untrue. We would probably have had UK austerity whatever the media had done, but the same cannot be said of the 2015 UK general election. Mediamacro talked about a strong economy, when by any historical standards the economy was exceptionally weak, and it focused on the deficit rather than living standards, both of which were probably enough to swing that election to the Conservatives. With Brexit expertise was diluted and the lies told by the partisan media were not challenged by the broadcast media. That could well have been worth the 2% required to change the outcome of that vote. Someone totally unsuited to the White House became President in part because the non-partisan media wanted to talk about Clinton’s emails.

One of my great regrets is that, because this view of the power of the media appeared to be a minority view, I failed to be brave when it came to the UK general election in 2017. I have not included any posts on this period in the book because its importance is as yet unclear, but you will probably recall that since Corbyn’s election as leader Labour’s poll ratings had been very poor. As the election began they were even worse, and May was predicted to win by a landslide. But in the following three weeks we saw the most remarkable swing to Labour.