CURRENT political debate acts as a time machine to my playground days. “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
That’s often your opponent’s best shot. Any dispute on any political topic will soon have the accusation creeping in. And this isn’t just happening in the private sphere.
You’ll remember in February Seb Dance, a Labour MEP, held up a sign behind the back of Nigel Farage in the European Parliament for the benefit of those watching. It read, succinctly: “He’s lying to you.”
Putting a kilt on this phenomenon, MP Mhairi Black, in response to her colleague Caroline Nokes, a Tory minister, mouthed in the debating chamber: “You talk s***e, hen.”
Do politicians lie? Of course, copiously. There’s a sliding scale from white to whopper with alternative facts floating somewhere in between.
In 2015 the Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael lied over the claim Nicola Sturgeon wanted David Cameron to stay in Downing Street.
Defending him, his Westminster colleague Malcolm Bruce said: “If you are suggesting every MP who has never quite told the truth or even told a brazen lie, including cabinet ministers, including prime ministers, we would clear out the House of Commons very fast.”
Back in the annals of time, a grand lie – “I did not have sex with that woman” – would have you impeached. Now a factually debunked lie – a post-Brexit £350million-a-week spending bonanza for the NHS – won’t even lose you a referendum.
Political untruths – or, as Alan Clark MP called it, being economical with the actualité – are not new. They are, however, bolder and brasher and utterly unashamed.
We have a new lexicon to deal with the New Lying: post-truth, fake news. The result seem to be quite rational people have no hesitation in promoting conspiracy theories while an emotional response to a subject is given as much weight as a considered, intellectual response.
The New Lying, though, has become so ubiquitous that it has hobbled the ability to have political conversations. In our post-trust world there’s much talk of fact-checkers, but how to know the arbiter is independent in this murky new dawn? Oh, for Pinocchio’s nose.
An accusation of lying is a blunt instrument. It’s embarrassingly childish. It forgets that there are few absolutes or certainties. Nuance is ignored and the personal responsibility to read around a topic and draw conclusions is shirked.
The lying culture makes people bluntly accept or discount an issue without really thinking it through. There are, for example, no dissenting voices against the family cap and rape clause narrative. How many people are asking for numbers – or even testimony – in the so-called “sex for rent scandal”?
An accusation of lying has become a get out of jail free card for the accuser, it’s a way of shirking the responsibility for critical thought at a time when critical thought is vital.
I hope the childish ease with which we throw about the word “liar” is a passing playground phase. What a pointless game it is, to believe in the certainty of lies and make no time for truth.
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