It may have been a great night for Little Englanders. But it was a bad one for the conspiracy theorists among them.
After all, according to the sillier voices on the internet, last week’s historic vote to take Britain out of the European Union was impossible.
You may have sidled away from somebody with views like this in a pub. You know the kind, red-cheeked fellas with beery breath who oh-so-knowlingly joke that “if voting changed anything, they wouldn’t allow it".
Such old fools are harder to avoid online. They were out in force on social media on the eve of the Brexit vote. Remember to take your own pen in to the polling booths, they said. Why? Because, presumably, an army of Brussels stooges was poised to rub out all those little crosses next to “Leave”.
Two years ago similar internet wackadoodles (different cause, same hysteria) issued the same stern warnings. Yessers, of course, got a different result than Brexiters. Some, a hardy few, think they were diddled out of the vote, despite the protestations from their own leaders that this is, well, preposterous.
No doubt there have always been such paranoia after a campaign in which mysterious Scottish nationalist websites peddled surreal myths about secret oil fields hidden by the UK Government and angry British nationalists happily retweeted bizarre lies that the SNP was spending £26 million on Gaelic road signs.
But the fames of paranoia were fanned after 2014, fanned by supporters of a Russian government with its own reasons for casting doubt on the quality of British democracy. It was Kremlin observers who raised the greatest concerns that Scotland’s independence referendum was rigged.
Their aim? Essentially, to resort to the language of social media, they wanted to "troll" the UK; it was a diplomatic wind-up. Why? Well, there are those close to the regime of Vladimir Putin who rarely miss an opportunity to sow doubt about the legitimacy of western institutions.
Moreover, our independence referendum coincided with a controversial plebiscite in Crimea, held while the Ukrainian peninsula was effectively occupied by Russian troops. This was whataboutery, post-Soviet style.
Last week the respected Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported concerns of a renewed bid to allege vote-rigging in the UK, this time over Brexit. It didn’t happen: messy democracy got in the way.
Pity then Mikhail Delyagin. This unbelievably inaccurate Russian polemicist on the eve of Thursday’s vote declared Brexit “impossible” on a servile pro-Kremlin news site. “The political decision,” Mr Delyagin said, “has already been made.” Why? Because Scotland would quit a post-Brexit UK taking "half" of British industry with it.
Now for the conspiracy. Mr Delyagin writes: “Given how votes are counted in Great Britain (and we saw the quality of the count not so long ago in the referendum in Scotland), we can be sure neither those who count the votes nor those who report the news will allow Brexit to take place.”
That is not all. In Mr Delyagin’s Britain Jo Cox was the victim of the country’s first ever political murder – by a fanatic, he claimed, supporting the European Union. Cue talk of the "manipulation of public opinion". Apt, no?
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