The Mail on Sunday's glaring front page lie

Boris Johnson's latest ruse to distract attention away from the corruption, incompetence, and degeneracy of his regime is to stoke up a load of culture war bullshit over imperial weights and measures and crown symbols on pint glasses.

Appealing to the nostalgia of a bunch of tabloid-addled geriatrics is a simplistic distraction tactic, but it's one that Johnson and the Tories have played before with blue passports, and the right-wing propaganda rags are once again enthusiastically helping him out with this trivial nonsense.

This time it's got so bad that the front page of one of Britain's most widely read newspapers is blaring out the absolute lie that the EU banned crown symbols on pint glasses.

What the EU actually did, if you're interested in the actual facts, was to pass directive 2004/22/EC to introduce the CE mark on pint glasses in order to protect European citizens from undersized measures.

There was never anything in the CE rules to say the crown symbol had to go. In fact the EU commissioner Günter Verheugen explicitly stated that the crown symbol could be kept "as long as it is done in a way that is not confused with the CE marking".

Not only did the EU not ban the crown symbol, they explained that Britain could keep using it if they wanted to. But the UK government decided that they couldn't be bothered pointlessly duplicating the certification process, and scrapped it from 2007 onwards.

If the Tory party really cared so much about crown symbols on pint glasses they could have brought them back at any time between coming to power in 2010 and the present, because they were never banned by the EU.

So why is the Mail on Sunday pushing this brazen front page lie that the EU forced Britain to remove the crown symbol from our pint glasses, and that plucky Bodger Johnson is bravely bringing it back?

Daily Mail propaganda hacks know perfectly well that aside from corporations and the mega-rich, who vote Tory out of self-interest, the Tory party's core demographics are the far-right ultranationalists they nicked off UKIP and the BNP, and other low-information voters.

Tory propaganda hacks love to appeal to the nostalgia, nationalism, and anti-European xenophobia of their readers by portraying trivial and archaic stuff like blue passports, crown symbols on pint glasses, and ludicrously over-complicated imperial weights and measures as quintessentially British things that have been banished by the evil EU.

It doesn't matter to Daily Mail readers that the UK could actually have kept blue passports for the entire time it was in the EU.

It doesn't matter to them the EU never forced UK retailers to stop using imperial weights and measures if they wanted to.

And they literally don't care that the EU never actually banned anyone from putting crown symbols on pint glasses.

Tell them that the European Union forced Britain to get rid of these beloved things, and low-information voters quiver with rage.

Tell them that brave Bodger Johnson freed Britain from the EU tyranny in order to bring this stuff back, and they're supposed to jiggle with delight.

We've entered an age in which people are actively encouraged to ignore the facts, and evidence, and experts, to believe whatever the hell they want.

And it's got to the point now that the newspapers feel emboldened to tell outright lies on their front pages, in order to help Johnson push this absurdly vapid culture war bullshit.

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