*The following article contains 10 examples of utter bollocks.
It is truly one of the great modern wonders — not the pyramids, not the moon landing — but the sheer, unflinching human ability to swallow absolute, unmitigated nonsense. We live in an age where facts are optional, expertise is suspicious, and the loudest voice on Facebook is apparently the oracle of truth. The spectacular capacity for people to believe utter bollocks has reached Olympian levels.
*1. “Asylum seekers get free luxury hotels and endless benefits.”
The lie: They’re all sipping lattes in four-star hotels at taxpayers’ expense.
The truth: Most are housed in temporary, often dire accommodation with minimal allowances (around £49 per week). The few placed in hotels are there because the Home Office can’t process claims quickly enough — hardly anyone’s idea of luxury. This was due to the dramatic reduction in staffing by the previous Conservative government.
Take, for instance, the endless hysteria about asylum seekers. According to a depressingly large section of the public, they’re all living in five-star hotels, being chauffeured around in taxpayer-funded limousines, and collecting more benefits than a cabinet minister’s expenses account. In reality, most are housed in cramped, substandard accommodation and receive less in weekly allowance than many Britons spend on takeaway coffee. But why let facts get in the way of a good bit of xenophobic outrage?
*2. “Immigrants are taking all the jobs.”
The lie: “They’re nicking our jobs!”
The truth: Immigrants fill critical labour gaps — NHS staff, care workers, delivery drivers, agricultural workers — jobs that locals often don’t want or aren’t available to do. Without them, half the country would grind to a halt.
The “asylum seeker in a luxury hotel” myth has become modern folklore — passed around social media like a chain letter from the 90s, fuelled by tabloids whose commitment to truth is roughly on par with a pantomime script. It’s always “someone’s cousin’s neighbour’s mate” who saw it, and always with an air of righteous fury. The irony is that those shouting loudest about “our money” being wasted are often the same people who wouldn’t notice if their own taxes actually went towards something useful, like education — which, come to think of it, might be the cure for their ignorance.
*3. “Climate change is a hoax.”
The lie: “It’s just the weather changing, like it always has.”
The truth: Over 97% of climate scientists agree that human activity is heating the planet. The data’s overwhelming. The only “hoax” is the fossil fuel lobby funding doubt to protect profits.
But it’s not just asylum seekers who suffer under this tidal wave of twaddle. Consider the conspiracies that people cling to like comfort blankets. The moon landing was faked, apparently. Climate change is a hoax invented by scientists for grant money (because, yes, scientists are clearly raking it in). Covid was a plot by Bill Gates to insert microchips into our veins. The Earth is flat, vaccines are evil, and 5G causes everything from headaches to moral decay. There’s always a bloke on YouTube in a tracksuit “just asking questions”, and a legion of the credulous waiting to nod along.
*4. “5G causes cancer and COVID.”
The lie: “The government’s using 5G to control us.”
The truth: 5G is just faster internet. It emits non-ionising radiation — the same type as your Wi-Fi router or TV remote. There’s no credible evidence linking it to illness. But facts don’t go viral; paranoia does.
We’ve become addicted to outrage, allergic to nuance, and utterly incapable of saying the three hardest words in the English language: I was wrong. Instead, we double down, repost memes, and sneer at “the mainstream media” — conveniently forgetting that the bloke in his bedroom vlog is also media, just without the fact-checking or accountability.
*5. “The moon landing was faked.”
The lie: “They filmed it in a Hollywood studio.”
The truth: The Soviets tracked it, astronauts brought back lunar rocks, and we’ve since photographed the landing sites from orbit. If NASA faked it, they’d have to fake thousands of independent pieces of evidence. They didn’t.
Social media, of course, has turbocharged this epidemic of bollocks-believing. It’s no longer enough to have an opinion; one must have a tribe. And if that tribe’s mantra is “everyone’s lying to us except Dave from Facebook who knows the truth,” then so be it. Algorithms don’t care about accuracy; they care about engagement — and nothing engages quite like righteous indignation over something that doesn’t exist.
*6. “Vaccines cause autism.”
The lie: A dodgy paper said so once, and it stuck.
The truth: That study was fraudulent and retracted. Dozens of large-scale studies since have found no link whatsoever. Meanwhile, vaccines have saved millions of lives.
We’re also living in a time when experts are mistrusted precisely because they know things. The populist cry of “they think they’re better than us” has replaced any semblance of critical thought. Imagine going to a surgeon and saying, “No thanks, mate, I’ve done my own research.” Yet that’s the modern condition: an unholy blend of arrogance and ignorance, served warm with a garnish of resentment.
*7. “The government gives lazy people endless freebies.”
The lie: “People on benefits live better than those who work.”
The truth: Benefits barely cover essentials. Most claimants are either in low-paid work or physically unable to work. The real freeloading happens at the top — through tax loopholes, not Universal Credit.
And while people believe this drivel, genuine issues go neglected. Public services crumble, politicians dodge accountability, billionaires hoard wealth — but let’s not talk about that, eh? Let’s talk about how someone on a dinghy supposedly got a free mobile phone.
*8. “Britain was better in the old days.”
The lie: “It was all simpler, safer and more decent back then.”
The truth: You mean when there was lead in the paint, polio in the streets, and women couldn’t open a bank account or get served at at a bar? Nostalgia’s selective. The past wasn’t golden — it was just badly lit.
The truth, for many, is simply too boring. It lacks the drama, the tribalism, the emotional kick that comes from being righteously angry at imaginary injustices. Facts are grey and complicated. Lies are colourful and simple. And so the bollocks thrives.
*9. “You only use 10% of your brain.”
The lie: “Imagine what we could do if we unlocked the other 90%!”
The truth: Absolute drivel. Brain scans show that almost every part of the brain is active at some point, even during rest. The myth probably came from a 19th-century misunderstanding of neuroscience — and Hollywood ran with it because it sounds clever. You’re already using 100% of your brain; it’s just that some people use it poorly.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this isn’t stupidity in the traditional sense — it’s wilful. People don’t just believe nonsense because they’re fooled; they believe it because it feels good. It fits their worldview, flatters their biases, and gives them someone else to blame. It’s intellectual junk food — cheap, tasty, and slowly rotting the collective brain.
*10. “Goldfish have a three-second memory.”
The lie: “They forget everything immediately — poor little things.”
The truth: Goldfish can remember things for months, recognise their owners, and even be trained to perform tricks. The “three-second memory” myth is pure pop-science nonsense — probably invented to make us feel clever about our own short attention spans.
So here we are: an island of proud sceptics who will doubt centuries of science but trust a meme with Comic Sans text. A nation where the most outrageous claims travel faster than truth can lace its boots. And as long as we continue to reward outrage over accuracy, the spectacle will go on — people believing utter bollocks with absolute conviction, while the rest of us watch in horrified amazement.
