Last week saw the
publication of manifestos by most of the parties. On the basis of scanning
them, it is clear that amongst his first acts, in the unlikely event of his
being re-elected, Rishi Sunak is clandestinely planning to reintroduce
workhouses, award Vladimir Putin a peerage, and start a war with France. His
manifesto doesn’t say any of that, of course – but neither does it explicitly
rule any of it out. Given that the Tory attack on Labour is now largely reduced
to accusing them of planning a variety of tax rises on the basis that the
Labour manifesto doesn’t explicitly rule them out, why shouldn’t the same approach
be applied to their own manifesto? And why stop at taxes?
Objectively for
those who take the trouble to assess the different party statements, it’s a
pretty stupid and pathetic approach to electioneering, and it smacks of
desperation. But the lesson that they have learnt from Sunak’s predecessor but
one is that making stuff up and repeating it even louder when challenged can
work. The hope is that enough people remember the lie and forget the detailed
rebuttal to swing their votes in the desired direction, particularly if they
really want to believe the lie. (Although why keep these aims secret? Who, among the target audience for the Tories, doesn’t secretly like the idea of a decent war against France? Even
if that audience would probably prefer to take on Germany. Again.)
There are, as the
saying doesn’t quite go, lies, damned lies and political manifestos. The idea
that ‘politicians always lie’ is commonplace, and in the sense that what
governments deliver isn’t quite what their manifestos said they were going to
deliver, it has the ring of truth. And whilst that is sometimes down to lying,
it’s more often a case of exaggeration and wishful thinking – and circumstances
can and do change. But recent years – the Johnson/Trump era stands out as
marking the transition – have changed the nature of political lying. It’s no
longer ‘just’ a case of exaggerated promises, it’s now direct, repeated and deliberate falsification
of objectively provable facts. The ‘alternative facts’ are actively promoted by
partisan print media and grossly inflated by the echo chambers of social media.
The BBC have a reasonably good fact-checking service, but in their caution they
struggle to be as blunt in their assessment of lies as they could be – and even
after demonstrating the untruth of any given statement, they seem quite happy
to invite the liars back to repeat the same lies again the following day.
There was an attempt
in the Senedd recently, led by Plaid, to criminalise lying by politicians. It
was somewhat droll, to say the least, to see it supported by the Tories, given
that they have been the main culprits in recent years. It probably underlines
the fact, though, that they don’t really believe that the law can successfully
be applied to what they have been doing. I suspect that their assessment of the
probability of such a law being effectively used against a Johnson or a Sunak
is accurate, implying that they want the kudos from being seen to oppose political
lying but without any danger that it would actually restrict them from doing
so. They would hardly have supported it if it really meant that they would no
longer be able to refer to ‘blanket’ 20mph speed limits, for example. It’s a
problem to which there is no simple solution. In an ideal world, the miscreants
would be rewarded with ‘nul points’ when the
votes are counted. Sunak might be doing his best to move his party towards such
a scenario, but he won’t be around for long afterwards (his promise
to serve a full five year term on the opposition benches should be treated as
just another example of the genre) and finding a successor who won’t simply
double down on the same approach is looking like an impossible task. It looks
like a problem with which we’re stuck.
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