Who Is Selling the Snake Oil?

Sometimes it feels as though we have politicians without politics, campaigns without policies, and promises without plans. Snake-oil salesmen stand before applauding crowds, selling certainty where they should be explaining choices.

The performance becomes the policy. The slogan becomes the answer.

This is an old temptation. The Leveson Inquiry examined Rupert Murdoch's relationships with British politicians and the wider problem of excessive closeness between the press and political power. ^[13] Silvio Berlusconi entered politics from the leadership of Fininvest and became Italy's prime minister in 1994. ^[14] In Citizen Kane, Emily begins, “Really, Charles, people will think…” Kane interrupts: “What I tell them to think.” The exchange captures the arrogance of someone who confuses owning a newspaper with owning its readers' minds. ^[1]

We are a curious species. We are also frightened, hopeful and easily distracted. Faced with uncomfortable evidence, we can retreat into denial or into nostalgia for a world that never quite existed. A convincing story can pass from hand to hand long before anyone checks what backs it.

Nostalgia can also be staged. In Le Puy du Faux (2022), historians Florian Besson, Pauline Ducret, Guillaume Lancereau and Mathilde Larrère argue that the Puy du Fou, founded by Philippe de Villiers, distorts history to promote a political vision. Their criticism concerns its claims to historical authenticity, not simply theatrical anachronisms. ^[18]

The objection is not to having a good day out. It is to mistaking the emotional force of a performance for the authority of evidence.

I am not telling people what to think. I am telling them to think.

That includes questioning this argument. Check my sources. Challenge my conclusions. Agreement is not the measure of critical thought.

Critical judgement takes time. Political spectacle thrives on our impatience.

Brexit still sticks in my throat. I remember the promises, the certainty, the suggestion that national renewal was waiting just beyond the European door. What followed gave us ample reason to question the sales pitch.

The red Vote Leave bus made the sales pitch tangible: “We send the EU £350 million a week” and “let’s fund our NHS instead.” But the rebate was deducted before money left Britain, and EU spending returned money to the UK. On 27 May 2016, before the vote, the UK Statistics Authority warned that presenting the gross figure as money available to spend elsewhere was misleading. ^[19]

In this fast-moving world, we don’t need Brexit-bus bullshit.

There is a serious counterargument. People could value sovereignty and democratic accountability more than the economic gains of EU membership. An economic forecast cannot decide those values for them. But a legitimate preference does not make a misleading sales pitch legitimate. Voters deserved an honest account of the trade-offs.

The Office for Budget Responsibility assumes that leaving the EU will reduce Britain's long-run productivity by 4 per cent compared with remaining, and that imports and exports will each be around 15 per cent lower than they otherwise would have been. These are estimates against an alternative future, rather than a claim that the economy literally shrank by those percentages. Their implications are serious enough without exaggeration. ^[2]

A 2019 Bank of England working paper estimated that anticipation of Brexit reduced investment by about 11 per cent over the three years following the referendum. This is the authors’ estimate against a no-Brexit scenario, not an official measurement of a permanent loss. ^[3]

Home Office analysis identifies a spike in police-recorded racially or religiously aggravated offences in England and Wales following the referendum. It attributes much of the longer-term increase in recorded hate crime to improved recording and identification. Both findings matter: neither justifies treating Brexit as the explanation for every social problem. ^[4]

Nor should sewage in British rivers and seas become another convenient slogan. The Environment Agency attributes England's unacceptably high storm-overflow spill counts and durations to longstanding underinvestment and poor asset maintenance. ^[15] That does not establish Brexit as their cause. If we demand evidence from our opponents, we must demand it from ourselves.

My objection to the referendum is not that ordinary people should have no voice. It is that leaders can invite a vote on a vast, complicated question while evading responsibility for explaining its consequences and carrying out the result.

Crowds can be manipulated. They can also organise solidarity, defend rights and demand justice. The question is what information reaches them, what fears are cultivated, and who takes responsibility afterwards.

Who is stirring the crowd—and why?

France now approaches its 2027 presidential election. ^[16] At times, the contest looks like an episode of Wacky Races: personalities jostling for position, grand announcements, engines roaring, and too little explanation of where the road leads.

That makes media independence as important as media freedom. A newspaper may be free from government censorship while its journalists still face pressure from owners, advertisers or commercial interests.

The connections between powerful French families are documented. Xavier Niel and Delphine Arnault, Bernard Arnault's daughter, are partners. Alexandre Arnault married Géraldine Guyot, whose brother Charles married Martin Bouygues's daughter. Yannick Bolloré married Chloé Bouygues, Martin's niece. These relationships form a network of family ties across fortunes with significant media interests. ^[5][6]

Nicolas Sarkozy belongs within the wider social and business picture. Bernard Arnault and Martin Bouygues were witnesses at his marriage to Cécilia; Bouygues is godfather to their son Louis. Sarkozy holidayed aboard Vincent Bolloré's yacht after his election in 2007, and Lagardère lists him on its board. ^[7][8][9]

Business connections reinforce the picture. LVMH bought Paris Match from Lagardère on 1 October 2024. ^[10] In November that year, Le Monde reported that Arnault's Financière Agache and the Bolloré family's Compagnie de l'Odet participated, alongside other investors, in the acquisition of the business of ESJ Paris, a journalism school distinct from ESJ Lille. ^[11]

This accumulation of proximity deserves scrutiny. It does not prove that every newsroom takes instructions from the same room.

There are meaningful differences in ownership and safeguards. Le Monde says Niel transferred his acquired holdings into the Fund for Press Independence and retains only one share through NJJ Strategy. Its ownership structure must be described accurately if we want to judge its independence fairly. ^[12]

Our task is to ask who owns, who appoints, who funds, and what protects journalists when their reporting becomes inconvenient.

Technology platforms help determine what appears before us, what attracts attention and what disappears beneath the next wave of coverage.

Inequality, ageing populations, climate change, pollution and war demand sustained attention. Instead, we are repeatedly summoned to the latest outrage.

I once had a manager who changed jobs every three years—department, position, sometimes region.

“It's hard to hit a moving target,” he told me.

It was his way of avoiding the snipers. I think of him when public figures move on to the next announcement before anyone has assessed the last one.

Politics requires priorities, institutions, budgets, compromises and the willingness to be judged by results.

I am not convinced that Macron gave environmental questions the attention they demanded, or that he built a sufficiently fair France. But dissatisfaction with his record does not make his successors' promises credible. They too must show how their plans would work.

Earlier generations built institutions worth defending: public education, healthcare, workers' rights and social protection. None was perfect. Each represented the difficult conversion of an aspiration into something people could use.

Sometimes we seem to stand before those achievements watching them burn.

When Notre-Dame's spire fell, I was heartbroken. When the restored cathedral reopened in December 2024, I felt hope. ^[17]

The fire was real. So was the work of repair.

Europe needs that capacity now. In an interconnected world, I believe our strongest practical sovereignty is European: the capacity to act together. Ukraine makes the need for allies painfully concrete. But shared power must be democratic, accountable and open to challenge.

Who was picking the ties apart—and why? We should examine their interests without assuming every critic of Europe wants to destroy it. I am not asking Europe to remain suspended in the aspic of bureaucratic machinery, with more rules than sense and more lobbying than direction. It needs reform and a new vision.

A bundle of sticks is harder to break than one alone. Yet the ties must be neither too tight nor too loose: loosen them and the bundle falls apart; tighten them too much and the branches break. Europe must be strong enough to act together and flexible enough to accommodate difference.

I worry about factions turning every discussion into a test of allegiance. The red-and-blue image of American politics is a warning: “you think differently” must not become “you are wrong”. Diversity gives us possibilities, but cooperation determines what we make of them.

Giving a claim airtime does not make it evidence. The European Commission’s radicalisation-prevention knowledge hub identifies the “grand remplacement” as a white-nationalist conspiracy narrative. ^[21] Nor does blaming immigrants explain public debt. The OECD’s 2021 study, covering 2006–2018, found immigration’s net fiscal impact generally small in most countries, with results depending on employment and the allocation of costs. That is a dated budget analysis, not a measurement of today’s accumulated debt. ^[22] Migration policy deserves debate; scapegoating is no substitute.

Rosling’s IKEA boxes challenged the old division between the West and the rest. ^[20] My reading is that Europe need not remain at the top of the pile to matter. Other people’s progress is not our failure.

Like a plant, Europe needs room to grow, support where it is fragile, and thoughtful pruning of outdated rules and institutions. We must uproot falsehoods and corruption while protecting the diversity of the people who share the garden. People are not weeds.

Finding a shared path across such social and economic diversity is difficult. We pick our way between foxholes left by past wars and potholes of our own making. That is a reason to repair the road together, and to remember why we began walking together.

When we read, watch or listen, we should ask: what is the source? What evidence supports the claim? Who benefits if I believe it? Can the journalist challenge the owner? Can the politician explain the cost?

I am not asking you to think as I do. I am asking that we make room to think.

We rebuilt the spire. We can still repair what holds us together.