Monday 17 June 2024

Dealing with the lying liars

 

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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