Most politicians are liars – but every so often, someone exposes the truth

It’s widely accepted that politicians lie.  But if you say they’re all the same, you’re incentivising a race to the bottom.  I like it when a politician gets caught in a lie.  It’s a wakeup call to the others.

Politicians lie and lie and lie

Last week, I was a guest speaker at Paul Holden’s The Fraud book tour, along with his colleague Andrew Feinstein.  Paul meticulously documents the undeclared donations, leaks, lies and smears behind the Starmer project.  How they used smears to discredit anyone who challenged them, in cahoots with client journalists.  He demonstrates that Starmer is just a cog in the wheel. There’s a whole machine of dark money behind him.

Which led me to think: which do I hate most, the lies or the corruption?  Both, of course.  But if forced to pick, I think lies are more damaging.

Dante condemns the financially corrupt to the fourth circle of Hell.  It sticks in the craw that people like Robert Jenrick, one of the new ConForm party signings, got a £12,000 donation just 14 days after unlawfully letting the donor off a £40 million infrastructure contribution.

Or that Nigel ‘Nine Jobs’ Farage is making literally millions, including from telling people how to get dual citizenship to avoid paying UK tax.  He’s not a patriot or a man of the people.  If you think he’s on your side, wake up and smell the coffee.  He’s on no one’s side but his own.  And maybe Vladimir Putin’s.  He knows which side his borscht is buttered.

But I can understand the drive to acquire material comfort.  In a culture where everyone is flipping their second home, it takes people of integrity to say no to making a few quid.  I set myself a rule.  I claimed no expenses in my entire time in office.  If I took someone out for a meal to lobby them on behalf of the North East, I paid for it myself.

DoubleThink

Dante condemns liars and deceivers to the deeper eighth circle of Hell.  Lies destroy communication itself.  The very thing that makes us human is the ability to share knowledge and consider things we have not witnessed.  From there stems empathy and understanding.  I’m human and fallible, but I always try to verify facts and check context.  It’s educational, too.  A commitment to truth is a lifelong education.

George Orwell’s 1984 is basically about the mutilation of truth.  The Party apparatchiks think in DoubleThink and CrimeStop.  Orwell describes them as protective stupidity.  By justifying their lies for some greater purpose, they are freed from guilt.  Party loyalty – and self-advancement – are more important.

DoubleThink becomes a habit. Once you have divorced yourself from the truth, it is easy to justify anything.  You cut corners.  Tell white lies.  And before you know it you are criminalising non-violent protest and selling arms to war criminals.  Objective reality is coherent, but their world of lies makes no sense, so they end up performing U-turn after U-turn.  Lies don’t just make people dishonest.  They make them incompetent.

Imagine if we ran science as we run politics.  Where we did not check evidence and verify data.  Where we decided which inconvenient laws of physics to ignore when building bridges.  Even if we ran supermarkets that way – a store manager claiming there was loads of food on the shelves when plainly there’s not.  They’d go bust in days.

Yet the truth will out.

The truth will out

Hillsborough.  Orgreave.  The Iraq dodgy dossier.  A surprising amount does come out.  WhatsApp VIP lanes.  MPs expenses scandals.  Wes Streeting’s £372,000 bungs from private US healthcare firms.  Reform’s Nathan Gill is in jail for taking Russian bribes.

The strategy of the liars is to delay it as much as possible.  To make sure any investigations occur after they’ve left office.  But investigative journalists and campaign groups like The Good Law Project are on to them.  So the liars spout distractions and smears like a squid squirting ink.  Paul Holden tells me he’s gathering evidence on what laws the Starmer project broke.  The liars are trying to outrun the truth.

I was asked at the book event, “With all the lies, where is the hope?”

I said 82% of Britons think water should be in public ownership.  78% support a wealth tax.  Including 66% of millionaires.  75% of Britons support rent controls.  Including 44% of landlords.

For all the propaganda and dark-money funded think tanks, evidence intrudes on people’s everyday lives.  The more we challenge lies, the stronger truth becomes.  Do not throw up your hands and say they’re all the same.  We must incentivise truth and disincentivise lies.

A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has its shoes on.  If you want to trip up the liars and let the truth catch up, get yourself out door knocking in the Gorton and Denton by-election.  Or the upcoming council, Senedd and Holyrood elections.  If thousands of us go out just for a few hours each, we’ll change the result.

Featured image via the Canary