I suppose what crystallised it for me was a middle-aged woman at the edge of the pro-Brexit crowd that gathered outside the Palace of Westminster on the first occasion when the UK was supposed to leave the EU, but didn’t. She was shouting “I didn’t even know we were in the European Union! All those murdered children!” For a moment the mental dissonance engendered by what she was saying threw me. Did she really believe that the European was some clandestine child-murdering cult? Apparently. But then again, why not? People believe all sorts of things.

Since then we have had the elevation of Boris Johnson to the post of Prime Minister and a general election that saw the Labour Party crushed but, believe it or not, neither of those is what has troubled me most, politically speaking, since that moment in March. That is why, on the threshold of a new decade - the seventh I’ve known - the hope I have for the future for this country is that we seek something less tangible but altogether more important than the delivery of Brexit or this or that political programme.

People believe all sorts of things. Over the last twelve months, in following the course of Brexit  on a variety of internet discussion sites such as the BBC “Have Your Say” pages, I have heard some remarkable untruths. I have been told, many times and in all seriousness, that there is a ‘secret’ version of the Lisbon Treaty that comes into force today which will strip member nations of the EU of their veto rights, will force those who currently do not use the single currency to adopt it and will combine the armed forces of all member countries into a single European army to which our children could be conscripted. Forgive me if I risk being accused of hyperbole if I am reminded of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Maybe people believed these things and maybe they didn’t, but alongside countless falsehoods that have been printed in the more right-wing parts of our printed media they have provided the mental muzak for many people in this country for the last couple of decades. Whether they have been frankly unbelievable assertions that the EU would be banning electrical appliances or overly bent bananas, people may have not have listened, but the poison has been poured into their ears nonetheless. The result was that, for some of those I encountered in the ether, the EU was a ruthless foreign empire under whose jack-booted heel this country had been subservient, rather than the most successful example of peaceful international co-operation this sad old world - so often riven by war and factional hatred - has ever seen. 

People believe all sorts of things. That became obvious again during the general election campaign. The number of times I heard the Labour Party labelled ‘Marxist’ was, frankly, astonishing. From Boris Johnson’s article citing the fate of the Kulaks in Soviet Russia to any number of references to ‘bolsheviks’ in postings on social media, I got the impression that people thought that the Labour party’s programme for government was a retread of Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto”. In fact it proposed a mild recalibration of Capitalism that would not be thought extreme in such Marxist states as Switzerland and Denmark.

Not even that was what has troubled me most this year. In a year when a man who has, verifiably, lied over and over again and from whom, in real life, you wouldn’t buy a used car, became our Prime Minister; in a year when it became obvious that our social media sites had become populated by bots that were telling us lies; in a year when honest politicians were monstered in our press what troubled me most was this: lots of the people I communicated with simply didn’t care. They shrugged their shoulders and said, “All politicians lie”. They reposted lies without checking their veracity and didn’t care that they were spreading lies. They took the view that, if it ‘gets the job’ done, what does truth matter?

According to the Gospel of John when Pilate met Jesus he asked him, “What is truth?”. In a democracy truth is, perhaps, the most important thing there is. In a democracy we are called on to make decisions that affect the course of our nation. How can those decisions be informed ones if we cannot rely on the things that our politicians and our news media tell us to be the truth? If we do not insist on truth from our politicians - and hit them hard at the ballot box when they lie to us - we disempower ourselves. If we do not insist on truth from our news media - and hit them hard in their circulations when they lie to us - we disempower ourselves. We disempower ourselves and simply put ourselves at the mercy of the rich and the powerful. We enserf ourselves.

So, my hope for the years ahead? That we relearn something as simple as a lesson we teach our children: lying is wrong. Truth matters. Honesty matters. If we want honesty from the people we live with, why should we not demand it from the people who write the laws that confine our lives? Why should we not demand it from those who claim to inform us? My hopes for the years ahead? That this country recommits to the principle that Truth matters.