We’ve been hearing a lot lately about fake news. It’s even been suggested that false stories circulating through social media helped swing the Brexit vote and the US presidential election. I can believe it.

Even for seasoned journalists, it can be difficult to sift out the facts from the heap of misinformation that happens to support whatever you already believe. Others can be taken in by the most preposterous tales.

I’ve seen “news” items from sources such as the Southend News Network and the rather classier Suffolk Gazette passed on as if they were genuine. This is on a par with treating Monty Python as a documentary series, yet some people, it seems, are fooled.

But if the output of these spoof websites is (mostly) fun, there is a much more serious side to the deliberate spreading of  lies and distortions.

Not that it’s a new phenomenon. Certain national newspapers have always been at it – though they do seem to have got more blatant lately.

As a trainee journalist I was taught that the boundary between reporting and opinion had to be very clear at all times. Now that boundary has been smudged to the point where a reader cannot tell news from opinion, fact from fiction.

The selection of what’s considered worth printing – and where – is a crucial factor in swaying public attitudes, too.

The Daily Mail ran its report about Thomas Mair’s conviction for the murder of MP Jo Cox on page 30. A white neo-Nazi jailed for the politically motivated (i.e. terrorist) assassination of a British MP. Page 30. Tucked away between a dull picture story about I’m A Celebrity and one about a Christmas advert.

Might it, perhaps, have made the front page – news-stand visible – if the killer had been a black, Muslim or immigrant terrorist? You know the answer to that.

Where’s the balance here?

But an addiction to supposed balance has its drawbacks too. To put it mildly. Again, the line between fact and opinion – sometimes lunatic opinion – becomes dangerously blurred.

I can’t put it better than one of the world’s finest reporters, Christiane Amanpour of the US news channel CNN.
“I believe in being truthful, not neutral,” she told fellow journalists at the Press Freedom Awards in New York last week.

And she made this vital point: “We cannot continue the old paradigm – let’s say over global warming, where 99.9 per cent of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.”

I can’t think of a more important subject. Or one where supposed media “balance” has done more drastic harm.

I came in for some flak elsewhere last week for appending Donald Trump’s name to a list that included Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Mugabe and Putin. This was unfair of me, apparently, because Trump has not ordered, or otherwise been responsible for, mass murder. A cynic, or perhaps a realist, might add the word “yet” to that statement.

The point I was making was that all those gentlemen were inflicted on the world by democracy. That system Winston Churchill described wittily – and maybe generously – as the worst way of choosing a government “except all the others”. 

But the fear of Trump is a rational one. Evidence-based, unlike almost everything Trump says, at least publicly.

Hitler, Mussolini et al were not yet mass murderers when they first came to power. The worst they had yet said or done at that point was not notably worse (or very different) than Trump’s idea of a wall between the USA and Mexico. Or his threat to deport three million “illegal immigrants”.

The foul tide of racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-intellectual abuse that his election has opened the floodgates to is, sadly, no invention. At least two friends of friends of mine have received death threats based on their race, sexuality and job titles. 

The unleashing, the entitlement, of the bullies has real overtones of Hitler’s brownshirts. In fact it’s all horribly reminiscent of revolutions and coups everywhere.

I am reminded of a quotation from the 1970s BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius: “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.”

And of the philopher John Stuart Mill’s observation: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

The question that begs is: What should we do?

We can perhaps pray for legal moves and re-counts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But even if the election result were to be overturned – and that’s surely a  long shot – there’s no easy way of burying all those poisons back in the mud.

There are many ways in which this looks like a Doomsday scenario. And no shortage of intelligent, well-informed people ready to tell you so.

Perhaps, though, in focusing on the danger Trump represents, his opponents risk making it more real. Just as by joining the Trump-crazed media in concentrating on his outrageousness, Hillary Clinton’s campaign succeeded only in making him fatally attractive to a lot of voters. In making the abnormal normal.

There is an alternative, slightly more reassuring, view of Trump. It’s the one put forward by David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University.

Writing in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, he says: “In a country that has seen more bad presidents than good ones, Trump isn’t such an outlier. Not even if he is the nastiest of them all.”

Runciman describes the president-elect, aptly enough, as “the naughtiest kid in the class”. And says that in voting for him the US public was throwing a tantrum, “safe in the knowledge that the grown-ups will be there to pick up the pieces”.

Reassuring only if you trust the grown-ups and are confident they’re up to the job.

It's something of a tradition in British politics to bury bad news on days when public attention is elsewhere. So it was that while the horrified eyes of the world were all turned Stateside, the government quietly slipped its Investigatory Powers Act through Parliament. 

A bill the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who knows about these things, calls  "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy".

In the words of Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group: “The UK now has a surveillance law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. The state has unprecedented powers to monitor and analyse UK citizens’ communications regardless of whether we are suspected of any criminal activity.”

There seems to be a prevailing attitude here that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from surveillance. But this rather depends on what the definition of "wrong" is - and who exactly is defining it.

How much wrong have the vast majority of America's Muslims done? How much wrong had Germany's Jewish population done in the 1930s? Or the Communists? Or the homosexuals? Or the Gypsies?  Or the disabled? Or the mentally ill? How much wrong were those who spoke out in the defence of those groups doing?

The surveillance powers now to be handed to the police and intelligence agencies have been a favourite policy of Theresa May's since she was Home Secretary. But they can't be written off as just a typical Tory policy because the basic plan was drawn up under Tony Blair's supposedly Labour government.

Which may be one reason opposition to the Bill was half-hearted at best. Another, perhaps, is that people have assumed for a long time that spying on the public was routine anyway. 

Have you ever felt that Big Brother wasn't watching you? The suspicion is that the new law merely makes legal the sort of thing that's been going on in secret for decades.

And, of course, if you're in the habit of putting everything there is to know about you on social media you really have nothing and nowhere to hide.

You may even feel this doesn't matter too much. That you trust the British government to do the right thing with whatever information it can get its hands on.

But Lib-Dem Lord Strasburger, one of the few Parliamentary voices raised in protest, makes a good point about that. A rather chilling point.

“We do have to worry about a UK Donald Trump," he says. "If we do end up with one - and that is not impossible - we have created the tools for repression."

And he adds: “The real Donald Trump has access to all the data that the British spooks are gathering and we should be worried about that.”

Indeed we should.


----


My neighbour stopped me in the street the other day and asked: "What do you think about that Donald Trump, then?" Don't think he reads this blog, my neighbour.

"Oh, please," I said. "I'd rather not think about him at all."

But here we go again. More thoughts about America's president-elect. And if you're sick of the subject, believe me, you cannot wish any more than I do that it would just go away. Sadly -  tragically - it's unlikely to be going away any time soon.

I won't waste your time or my emotion reciting again here all the reasons why Trump's election is a major catastrophe. If you've been paying attention at all lately, you know that already.

But Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of humanity's descent into hell in a handcart. And if we really are heading for some very dark times indeed - as I fear we are - it shouldn't seem so hard to believe.

The recent decades of relative affluence and comfort here in what's called the West are the anomaly. Our generation, and the one above, are arguably the most fortunate people the world has seen - or we have been up to now.

History is full of periods and places when life has been nasty and brutish by the standards you and I think of as normal. The new normal, like the old normal - and the normal now in many parts of the world - is not as pleasant as our normal.

People may tell you we owe our relative comfort to democracy. But democracy brought us Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Putin... and Trump. 

"I'm more worried about Brexit," my neighbour told me.  "Brexit's the destruction of my country forever - Trump is only for four years."

But an awful lot of damage can be done in four years (see the list of names above). 

As I explained last week, I don't expect Trump personally to preside even that long. But there's no guarantee at all that the sea change he represents isn't the start of something much longer-lasting. Something capable of seriously harming the whole world, not just the USA.

So what will President Pence be like? That’s the question we should be asking now. The one American voters should have asked themselves before last Tuesday.

It’s not that I expect President Trump to be assassinated in office - or while he’s still merely President-elect. Though in the land of the gun that clearly can’t be ruled out.

And while it’s entirely possible that his health may fail - at 70 he will be the oldest person ever to become US President – that can’t be assumed. Though Trump’s unnatural colouring, and his general demeanour, suggest to me someone who’s a prime candidate for a heart attack.

The FBI, who did so much to put him in office by smearing his opponent, can’t be expected to do anything to remove him. Probably.

The Republican Party, which he supposedly represents, is another matter. 

Plenty of senior Republicans find Trump as repellent as most of the world does - though not necessarily for the same reasons. Those who distanced themselves from him when they thought he couldn’t win the presidency may now be racing to kiss his hand, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t plotting behind his back.

House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to share a campaign platform with Trump. He now credits the tycoon with “the most incredible political feat that I have seen in my lifetime”. Which is probably about right. 

Ryan’s probably right, too, when he credits the Trump effect with enabling the Republicans to retain control of both chambers of Congress. He talks now of “working together”.

But Trump is anything but a conventional Republican. In fact, it’s hard to say he’s a conventional anything. Since he seems to change his mind every time he opens his mouth, it’s hard to know what he stands for. If anything. Especially as his relationship with the truth is somewhat rocky.

With the Democrats now out of power in Senate, House of Representatives and White House, you might think the Republicans can go ahead and do whatever they want. But what Trump wants may not be what the party wants. Indeed, if it is, he will very rapidly disappoint the masses who swept him to power. The last thing they want is more of the same domination by the big-business interests that have always pulled the Republican strings. 

That leaves the Republicans in Congress as the only possible true opposition to the man they put in the Oval Office. Fur will fly – some of it of an improbably orange hue. Republicans who fear the man at the top could yet destroy the party he has twice quit – in 1999 and 2011 – may have an incentive to topple him.

But the real reason I predict Trump’s presidency will be short-lived is the man himself. 

He has said in the past that he’s like a kid who loses interest in the toy he always wanted once he’s unwrapped it on Christmas Day. 

Running for the presidency as the most unlikely candidate ever was a great game. One he probably never really expected to win. But will he really want the responsibility of actually doing the job? Maybe at first, but I suspect the novelty will wear off pretty darn fast.

Which is why we need to know something about Pence, who only got to be vice-president because he was the only vaguely leading Republican who was prepared to stand alongside the maverick outsider.

So what’s he like? In the succinct phrase of one of my American friends, “even worse than Trump”.

The election result has unleashed a nasty wave of racist, sexist and homophobic abuse across America. Rather like the Brexit vote here, it seems to have given bigots a sense of entitlement to behave in ways that have long been considered unacceptable.

And if – as has been seriously suggested – Trump was only pretending to be a complete bigot in order to win the vote, it would seem that Pence is the real thing. Except that he has spoken out against Trump’s “unconstitutional” proposal to ban Muslim immigrants.

Like Trump, he’s for gun ownership. Unlike Trump, he’s for military interference with the rest of the world, including “getting tough” with Russia. 

He’s for cutting taxes, especially for big business, and against welfare. In that, as in so much else, he’s a far more typical Republican than Trump, who has already stepped back from scrapping every aspect of Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Possibly Pence’s most offensive act as Governor of Indiana was in denying women access to abortion services, even on health grounds. 

Probably the greatest danger he would pose as Presidentis his denial of climate change and enthusiastic support of environmental destruction for cash gain. A madness he apparently shares with Trump.

This may be what revolution looks like, or it may just be that the Democrats screwed up in making the personification of Establishment complacency their candidate. There’s probably truth in both views. 

Either way, whether it’s the dangerously unpredictable Trump or the perilously predictable Pence at the wheel, it’s going to be one heck of a bumpy ride.

For months I've been plagued by a waking nightmare, and it's been getting worse. The same terrifying spectre has been haunting people everywhere. Today could be the day the nightmare comes true.

At best, we will wake tomorrow to find that things are merely bad, not utterly catastrophic.

While the world peeps through its fingers, not everyone in the United States shares the sense of horror - though those who do have most to lose.

No one, not even Donald Trump, could seriously have imagined when it first started rolling that his bandwagon might roll all the way to the White House. Yet here we are on election day with that possibility still horribly alive.

How the Democrats must wish they had chosen Bernie Sanders, rather than Hillary Clinton, as their candidate. Trump couldn't have played the anti-establishment card then, because his born riches and TV familiarity make him more of an establishment figure than Sanders. Clinton, former First Lady, friend of Wall Street, Washington insider for four decades, is about as anti-Establishment as the Queen.

Of those standing, the Green Party's Jill Stein would make much the best president. But you - and the great American public - could be forgiven for not knowing she was in the running. 

In the US it's never really more than a two-horse race. And such is the fascination of the media with Trump that it's been all about him this time - for him or against him - as if it were all nothing more than just another reality TV extravaganza.

Trouble is, it matters rather more than who wins the Strictly vote, or who gets fired from The Apprentice.

On his very first day in the Oval Office President Trump could preside over a bonfire of everything Barack Obama has achieved in the last eight years. 

Because Obama has been opposed by a Republican Senate, he has had to rule largely through executive orders - and the trouble with those is that the next president can simply overturn them.

Trump has promised - or threatened - to crack down on immigration and to order the building of a 50ft wall to keep out Mexicans "in his first hour in office". He may find it hard to finish the wall. He may find it harder to make the US a Muslim-free zone, but as one of his aides says: "He can ban anybody from Egypt, from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi Arabia."

He would certainly make it easier to buy and tote lethal weapons in a land where the verb "to carry" already bears the unspoken added word "guns".

He might well ramp up rivalry with China into full-blown enmity. And though Vladimir Putin is his best buddy right now, we all know what can happen when good buddies of that kind fall out. 

Perhaps most worryingly of all, Trump will be able to renounce the Paris agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. Which would be disastrous for global efforts - already far too puny - to stem climate change.

I say "perhaps" because here is a man who has said he doesn't understand why nuclear weapons shouldn't be used. And who will have plenty of them at his disposal. Enough to terminate life on Earth even if no one fires back.

Another star of reality TV, Joey Essex, said the other day: "I don't know who I want to win. I don't really care. For me it doesn't matter because it's not going to affect my country."

Wrong, Joey. If Trump wins today, the world will be a very different place next year. Different, and scarier. Not just America, but everywhere - including Essex.

Trump's racism, his misogyny, his boasting of sexual assaults - real or not - his alleged financial irregularities, his bare-faced lies make Clinton's alleged naughtiness with an email server look insignificant. Where his sins are many and sordid, hers are incomprehensible to most people, which is probably why he has been able to big them up so successfully.

But all these are petty matters when you think who might soon have his finger poised over the button marked "Armageddon".
 


Meanwhile, back in the Brexit ranch...
 
 
I could fill the paper these words are written for with thoughts occasioned by last week's High Court ruling and the hysterical reaction that followed it. But you're probably sick of the whole thing by now, so I'll restrict myself to a couple of points.

So far from betraying the people - as some papers claimed - the judges placed responsibility where it belongs, in the hands of the people's elected representatives. Those in Westminster, not Brussels. Not an attack on our democracy, but a necessary defence of it.

It will be interesting now to see how much courage and integrity those representatives show. A majority of them were opposed to Brexit before the referendum. And it's generally regarded as a sign of weakness for politicians to change their minds - especially by those pillars of the press who now want them to do just that.

I don't seriously expect the craven bunch collectively known as Parliament to block Britain's departure from Europe. But they should at the very least have some credible say in where we go next.

Remember Fukushima? It was big news in March 2011 when the nuclear plant was overwhelmed by a tsunami, causing multiple reactor meltdowns. The world’s attention has turned away since then.

But there’s still a no-go area where 150,000 people used to live. There’s still at least several decades of work ahead decommissioning the devastated plant. And the wider long-term effects are still incalculable.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company originally estimated that dismantling the plant would cost about £16million. Last week the Japanese government revised that figure to £82billion – plus another £20bn to remove radioactive topsoil, trees and buildings.

As soon as those figures were released, experts were warning that they were still over-optimistic. But all this playing with numbers is really just evidence of our obsession with money ahead of anything that actually matters.

As science journalist Madhusree Mukerjee says: “I find it hard to believe that this plant can be cleaned up at all, no matter how much they spend on it.

“The molten cores will be too dangerous to get near to for half a century at least. Plus, Japan has no repository for high-level nuclear waste, and given the earthquake danger, it is unlikely to ever have one.

“All that contaminated topsoil – where will they put it? It just sits around in plastic bags and gets dispersed again each time there is a typhoon.”

Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s this news, which was not as widely published as it might have been.
Since 2000, convoys carrying nuclear weapons along UK roads have had 180 “mishaps and incidents”, including collisions, breakdowns and brake failures.

Not a lot of people know that. The fact that you now do is just one reason to be grateful for the Freedom of Information Act.

You may think I’m being ignorant or ingenuous here in linking a story about nuclear power with one about nuclear weapons – but I’m not. The two are inextricably linked, and not just by the dangers that apply to both.

There is really no plausible reason to invest in nuclear energy other than its covert role in making material for weapons. Which is why if we’re to calculate the true cost of Trident renewal, we should also factor in the enormous sums the government seems willing to pour into Hinkley, Bradwell and Sizewell.

Though that, of course, is to repeat that potentially catastrophic error of trying to put a cash value on things too big and dangerous to be measured in terms of mere finance.