October 26th, 2018: Speaking in the House of Lords, Lord Sugar has said that Boris Johnson
and Michael Gove should be imprisoned for the “the £350 million lie they put on the red bus” during the Brexit referendum. Video: UK Parliament TV
Future chroniclers will in fact have to distinguish between three kinds of
ignorance
Fintan O’ Toole. Irish Times. Dublin. Tuesday, November 13, 2018.
When future historians try to understand how Britain ended up with a choice between chaos and
becoming a satellite of the European Union, one question will stump them. Were these people
telling deliberate lies or were they merely staggeringly ignorant? Where does mendacity stop and
idiocy begin? Historians generally have to assume that people in power have a basic grasp of
what they are doing, that their actions are intentional. They may use deception as a tactic and
they may be deluded in what they think they can achieve. But they must, at least at the
beginning, have some grasp on reality – otherwise they would not have achieved power. Yet, for
the poor historians trying to make sense of Brexit, this assumption will be mistaken.
There is, of course, plenty of straightforward mendacity for them to identify. Boris Johnson’s
whole journalistic and political career has been driven by his talent for taking minor regulations
and distorting them into wildly exaggerated claims of oppression by the Eurocrats. This can’t be
done by mistake. For example, you cannot by accident take, as Johnson did, a Council of Europe
(not EU) convention on the repatriation of corpses and turn it into a repeated claim that “There
really is European legislation on the weight, dimensions and composition of a coffin”. There
isn’t. This is not ignorance – it is a knowing falsification of the truth. So let’s leave that aside.
Historians will know it when they see it.
A spotter’s guide
Their problem will be, rather, with the shades of obliviousness. Here our future scholars will
have to try to distinguish between three kinds of ignorance: deliberate unknowing, crass self-
delusion and what we can only call pig ignorance. So, for their benefit, here is a brief spotter’s
guide.
Deliberate unknowing is when you are fully aware of something but then choose to suppress that
consciousness. A good example is Theresa May speaking about the Irish border on June 21st
2016, just two days before the referendum: “Just think about it. If we are out of the European
Union with tariffs on exporting goods into the EU, there’d have to be something to recognise
that, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And if you pulled out of the EU and
came out of free movement, then how could you have a situation where there was an open border
with a country that was in the EU and has access to free movement?” So she knew full well that
a Brexit that involved leaving the customs union would create a hard border. And then, as prime minister, she insisted on the opposite: that a hard Brexit was perfectly compatible with no return