It’s illegal to lie in other areas of public life. Why should politics be different? A return to public trust in officials is cited as the catalyst for the ban, supported by 72% of Westminster citizens. UK wants to prevent their leaders from reaching the point of politics in the U.S. where Trump was able to lie over 30,000 times as President.
Editor:Could you imagine the U.S. banning lying in politics? It would definitely help with the issue of Americans’ lack of trust in government. I would be all for a new law like that.
Members of Congress are there because a community (district) or state came together and chose that person to represent them in government. The concept is good, but the lack of follow-through is what causes it to fail. When your elected Representative or Senator does nothing for you, or does the opposite of what you want them to do…
that’s when you kick them out and choose someone else. The only reason we have elected officials, whom I call “dinosaurs,” in their seats for decades is because their constituents keep re-electing them. Over and over again. I don’t know if it’s a form of laziness where you get used to someone and don’t want to have to learn about new candidates and start over with someone different representing them, or if it’s more about people not following politics closely enough to know what their representative is up to. C-Span is your friend!
As I talked about in Get Money Out of Politics, we’ll never get to a point where our politicians work for us instead of their donors unless voters start by holding them accountable for what they do or don’t do for them while on Capitol Hill. We must get back to a place where they get fired if they aren’t doing the job voters sent them to do.
A Representative in the House, for example, represents a smaller group of people in a district. If a vote is coming up on a piece of legislation and a number of people in their district call in expressing how much the bill would hurt them and ask their Representative to vote “No” on it… and they vote “Yes,” that person is failing in the job of representing that community and should be voted out in the next election.
Tips: Use what I call our “secret weapon.” Congress.gov is a website where you can read what’s actually in a piece of legislation as well as view how each member of Congress voted on it. That, coupled with OpenSecrets.org, is the weapon. Open Secrets lets you see who is donating to your Senator and how much they’ve donated. If your Senator votes “No” on a bill to combat school shootings, you can look at your Senator and if they’ve taken hundreds of thousands from the NRA, you’ll know they aren’t representing their constituents, but their donor(s) (At least when it comes to that particular issue).
The process of getting back to a government “for the people,” would certainly be helped by a law that prohibited politicians from lying. While I realize the chances are next to zero that something like that would ever happen here, seeing other countries do it has to make you wonder, “Why can’t we?”
Here’s the article on the new push to outlaw lying in politics in other governments from Positive.News, Hannah Partos
As the Welsh government commits to making lying in politics illegal, could Westminster and other governments follow?
“Always ask yourself: Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Perhaps these blunt words of advice for journalists interviewing politicians, attributed to the late foreign correspondent Louis Heren, have endured because they are seen as self-evidently true. That politicians lie is viewed as established fact.
Public confidence in lawmakers plunged to a record low last year in the wake of Partygate and other scandals: only 9% of British adults polled by Ipsos said that they trust politicians to tell the truth. Without trust, says Jennifer Nadel of the lobby group Compassion in Politics, faith in democracy is undermined. “If we can’t trust what politicians are saying, how can we decide who to vote for? We need to be able to rely on our politicians to tell the truth,” she explains.
Compassion in Politics has long been campaigning to introduce criminal penalties for political lying, with a petition launched in 2019 attracting more than 200,000 signatures. In a surprise move two days before the UK’s general election, the Welsh government committed to passing legislation that would make lying illegal for Senedd members and candidates, having previously opposed the measure. Under the plans, those found guilty of deliberate deception by an independent judicial process would be disqualified from office.
We’re excited and optimistic,” Nadel says. “It’s unprecedented that the government has agreed to take this measure forward.” Although some countries have limited penalties for politicians who lie during election campaigning or when giving evidence to committees, Wales is the first in the world to propose legislation that would apply more broadly to lawmakers and candidates.
Compassion in Politics’ next challenge is to persuade Westminster to follow suit by banning MPs and parliamentary candidates from lying.
The campaign sprung from concern at the rapid normalisation of lies in politics. “We are slipping at an alarming speed into a post-truth era,” says Nadel. “We only have to look at what is happening in the United States.”
Fact-checkers at the Washington Post found that Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidency, averaging about 21 a day. “America is a warning of what can happen if this problem is allowed to go unchecked,” Nadel believes. “[Our proposals] are designed to stop [the UK] from getting to that stage.”
Polling shows wide public approval for the measure, with 72% backing criminal penalties for politicians found guilty of deliberate lying in an Opinium survey conducted for Compassion in Politics in May. Though it is not yet clear whether Wales would make lying a criminal offence, Nadel says: “If the same goal of disqualifying politicians who deliberately misrepresent the facts can be achieved through using the civil law, then we’re happy.”
A private member’s bill to ban lying in Westminster, introduced by Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts in 2022, had cross-party support. “We will be looking to build [on that] and win the support of the Labour government to introduce the measure,” Nadel says.
A key obstacle is concern that it could impinge on MPs’ free speech. However, Nadel argues that, in a climate where “the vast majority of politicians do tell the truth but a tiny few bad actors pollute the water for everyone,” the law change would in fact protect free speech. It would act as a deterrent to the bad actors, she says, while giving the public assurance that the honest majority – tainted by association – is truthful. “If we can’t rely on speech to be honest, then there is no point in having free speech. Just as we defend free speech from hate crimes, and other forms of incitement, we need to protect it from dishonesty.”
We’re excited and optimistic. It’s unprecedented that the government has agreed to take this measure forward
In an address to the Senedd, Plaid Cymru member Adam Price cited the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “[She said] that when political lying becomes normalised, it’s not that the people actually believe the lies the particular politicians tell … It’s that they stop believing in truth in general.”
“You couldn’t function as a society if you constantly distrusted others,” says Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University. “If you walk out of your front door, and you don’t trust that there’s a pavement to walk on, you’ll never get anything done. When intentions to deceive become normalised, people start to question the trustworthiness of all entities … You can’t believe anything you hear.”
There is a danger, he says, when it comes to supporters of populist demagogues, “that if you try to police the truth, it just provokes a reaction among those communities that entrenches their views.” However, while much will still depend on the detail of the legislation, he believes the Welsh government’s commitment to ban lying is a “brave move.”
“I think it’s important to signal a different set of norms, and try to arrest a slide towards the acceptability of attempts to deceive in public life.”
For Compassion in Politics, another challenge is persuading doubters that banning lying in politics is even possible. “There’s this belief that it’s too complex to stop,” says Nadel, who qualified as a barrister. “But the law prevents fraudulent misrepresentation in other walks of life. This is something that courts adjudicate on all the time. Why shouldn’t it apply to politicians?”
With a new government in office and “proven liars” she would rather not name entering Westminster for the first time, the change is urgently needed, she says. “Keir Starmer stood on the steps of Downing Street and spoke about the need to rebuild trust. And we think this is a key ingredient in doing just that.”
This article was originally published on Positive.news and was republished here, with permission, under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Learn more about third-party content on AntifaHQ.com.
