I've written before about the spectrum of porkies, from selective use of statistics and use of stats and quotes out of context, through to dissembling, obfuscation and downright lies. But what about exaggeration or using forecasts that you don't actually believe or are bordering on impractical? Like JFK proposing to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s or Boris getting a changed deal with the EU by the end of October, for example. When these things were said most people thought they were barmy, but they proved to be ambitious targets that were achieved.
So what constitutes a lie? And how do you prove the culprit knew it was? It's as subjective as deliberate handball. So it's impossible. But it's also important - many remainers claimed lies undermined the EU membership referendum to the point where it wasn't valid. Which is a statement I've always found disingenuous in itself. But what about the recent general election?
When I listened to the campaign and inspected the leaflets and broadcasts with this in mind I began to feel there were dodgy statements all over the place of so many types. Indeed, I stopped trying to keep track of fibs and contentious assertions in the TV debate between Johnson and Corbyn. Some of the statements were subsequently fact checked by the BBC and others. While many were found to be dodgy, none were outrageous, generally having an element of substance, as a good fib must.
Living in a marginal constituency we were bombarded with literature. We got 10 addressed to Mrs H, 2 for me. (Is that sexism? Or because her initial is earlier in the alphabet?) Some came from the parties but tried to look a bit different to draw you in. This Tory one was probably the best done of it's kind.
If you don't live in a marginal you may not have got leaflets like this, very different as it was from the traditional political flyer/window poster. Made from one thick piece of A3 it opened out to 3 more pages like the one above and one huge fold out page on the other side. You can see it was labelled from the Conservatives in print almost too small to read in the bottom corner of the front page. It used lots of text, photographs and lurid colours in blasting out about 8 key messages besides the "Let's get Brexit Done" mantra, a warning on the perils of voting SNP or LibDem and a reminder of how small a swing the Tories needed for a majority. Whatever your political persuasion it was clever and well thought out. It made all the other leaflets look old fashioned, monochrome and, ironically, focussed on a narrow range of policies. It was full of promises that might get broken but I couldn't see anything contentious, let alone a lie.
I inspected all the election communications closely to see who they actually came from as I've read about arms length organisations set up well before an election that then sends out messages that don't count towards their party's spending limit: dodgy practice but hard to legislate against. I don't think we got any of those, but we got this from the National Education Union, the largest teachers' union.
Full of contentious stuff on (relative) poverty rather than outright lies it didn't say who to vote for but to vote "for education". The message wasn't clear - otherwise it would have counted as a Labour leaflet - but somehow I don't think they wanted you to vote for the Tories.
But with so much dissembling, misrepresentation and plain lying which were the biggest porkies? Where to start?
Was it a lie for Johnson to promise a trade deal by December 2020? It seems unlikely but I don't doubt he means it and he did deliver a deal with the EU by the end of October which most folk thought was impossible. I thought it was ridiculous when people accused him of lying and invited him to go to his ditch when he'd done everything he possibly could to achieve his goal. But I did feel queasy about his insistence that there would be no border controls or inspections between the mainland and Northern Ireland under his exit deal, as that's not what most commentators think the agreement implies. This one smelt very fishy to me. We'll see.
Do practical obstacles mean a statement is a lie? David Smith pointed out that Labour couldn't possibly spend money on infrastructure at the rate they were promising. Is that a lie? Or just pie in the sky?
The biggest lie for me, because it was on an important issue and was repeated so many times, was Labour's shibboleth about the NHS being for sale. It's frequent repetition began to get me worried in case it had an effect but fortunately the electorate saw it for what it was - blatant, groundless scaremongering. The only tangible point Labour made, based on the leaked document about preliminary trade talks with the US, was that the US might want to talk about the length of patent protection for drugs which could increase prices. The fact that when you're buying things you aren't selling anything was obvious to nearly everyone. I'm not sure if it was obvious to Jezza as he would put on that pained face which seemed to say "I don't really understand what you, I, or anyone else is talking about but they are Tories so they must be evil". It still makes it a lie, Jeremy. Or is it just a slur? Well, there is no evidence in anything the Tories have actually done in over 75 years, or anything they've said in recent elections that they do not totally support the basic principle of a standard, universal health service free at the point of use, controlled and predominantly provided by the state. Indeed, their comitment has been absolute. But you could say almost anything about what you claim someone intends to do in the future - and then when they don't do it say you obviously made them change their mind. Which shows how problematic it would be to legislate in this area. Nevertheless for me this was as clear a lie as you'll find in political debate.
Since proving that what you say someone else intends to do is a lie is difficult, let's switch to the funniest lies. For me, they were Corbyn pretending that he watches the Queen's broadcast live on Christmas Day morning and Rebecca Wrong Daily's claims in her election leaflet about how her outlook as a politician was shaped by her experiences, like watching her father Jimmy worry about losing his job on Salford Docks. "I grew up watching him worrying when round after round of redundancies were inflicted on the docks". But the docks closed for good when Becky was two years old. Is that a a lie, a false memory or just poetic licence to make a point, a bit like a script writer sexing up a story line to make it work better? More worrying for me is the thought that Ms Long-Bailey, who either can't decide or doesn't care whether there's a hyphen in her surname, is the sort of politician who wants to prop up failing enterprises indefinitely. Which worries me more than the exaggeration (or lies if you prefer) in her pre-politics CV, that she'd spent 10 years in the legal profession fighting for the NHS, when she was actually in private practice for less than 7 years including a small element of work on NHS contracts. When will folk realise that tweaking your CV always gets found out? Calling her Wrong Daily is proving to be a very apposite jibe.
I watched out for the lie that would have won my prize for the most awful porkie hands down had I seen it repeated during the campaign (though I suspect it must have been). This was the LibDems truly appalling statement made by Jo Swinson at the start of her speech against the EU Withdrawal Bill on 27 October (Parliament voted for the general election the next day). Swinson said "The government's own assessment..... of a free trade agreement .... would mean that our economy would shrink by more than 6% - greater than the amount that the economy shrank during the financial crash". (My italics and I promise the editing here doesn't change the meaning one iota). The claim was repeated by Chucky (aka the not much lamented Chuka Umunna) and Caroline Voaden, a LibDem representative on Question Time around the same time.
Why is that so egregious? Well, it's a classic misrepresentation of statistic that doesn't say anything like Swinson was claiming. The Treasury assessment actually said the British economy would be about 6% smaller in 15 years time than if we remained in the EU. But far from shrinking, it is expected to be 18% bigger instead of 24%.
Why is this so important? Firstly, if you size the economy at 100 now there's a lot of difference between it being at 118 in 15 years time instead of 124 and it immediately shrinking to 94. The latter would be pretty disastrous in terms of impact and evident to everybody as a result. The former? No-one other than economists would realise, since you don't miss what you haven't had and might never have had. So it's pretty shabby scaremongering as well as wrong. But secondly, it is pretty well exactly the type of misrepresentation the LibDems and other Remainers accused Johnson and Vote Leave of with the £350 million a week stat on the infamous bus and that's what really riled me, especially since the LibDems have plenty of their own form on this type of falsehood over the years.
The daftest statement? That prize goes to my local Lib Dem candidate. This was one of his many leaflets and it gave his party's five "national priorities":
Four of them the LibDems could deliver if in government, but "end climate change"? There was a deafening silence about how such a huge "priority" could be achieved. I can only presume that Jo Swinson, in addition to being sure she could be PM, had great confidence she could steamroller Trump to sign up to the international agreements, Xi Jinping into stopping burning coal and Brazilian president Bolsonaro into preserving the Amazon rainforest. In that case, we might have missed out on one of the greatest leaders the country has ever seen......
My conclusion is that it would be very boring if politicians didn't dare to push the boundaries a bit, what Alan Clark called being "economical with the actualite" in his statements on the Matrix Churchill affair in the 1990s and Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, using the long standing phrase attributed amongst others to Burke and Mark Twain, called being economical with the truth in the Spycatcher trial in 1986.
Far better to leave the electorate to judge. There's plenty of evidence that they can tell when they're being spun a yarn, promised the earth, patronised or fibbed to. Politicians will always try to pull cotton wool over our eyes. They haven't figured out yet that most of us don't have it between our ears.
P.S. Was the Boris bus statement really a lie? I thought it was. Indeed, I called Boris a bare faced liar in my post David Cameron is reckless but Boris Johnson is a liar on 19 June 2016. But, leaving aside the fact that Johnson was acquitted of misrepresentation in a public office for standing in front of the bus (which doesn't mean it wasn't a lie, it was because the judge found false statements relating to publicly available statistics wasn't in the scope of the relevant law) there are those who argue it was essentially true in the context of the referendum. The £350 million figure was the gross figure we pay in before the Thatcher rebate. But Tim Condon argues* that the rebate is resented across the EU and seen as a relic, it had never been built in to the arcane treaty formulae which determine contributions and, had we voted to remain, it would have been for the chop. The net figure of around half the £350 million is also after "public sector receipts", money the EU spends in the UK. But that's the point, they control what it's spent on not us. Hardly any of it is spent in England (only Cornwall and the Scilly Isles qualify) and most of the spend in agricultural areas is on things that don't produce anything - after all the EU wouldn't want to give us any competitive edge against continental farmers when they can give us a bung to set aside and not produce. Congdon argues that the £350 million was arguably a naughty exaggeration, not an untruth which could easily have come true in the not too distant future. Indeed, when the £350 million was briefly referred to in his BBC debate with Corbyn, Johnson implied in an aside it would soon have been true: "they'd need a bigger bus" he muttered, almost under his breath and without further explanation. I assume he'd been warned to steer clear of this potential rabbit hole but couldn't resist that much bite back.
* Congdon's article was in the centre-right publication Standpoint on 26 June 2019: https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/july-august-2019/the-350-million-wasnt-a-lie-heres-why/
Someone once said to me that politics is about playing to the voters prejudices and you need to know what those prejudices are to be effective. In other words find out what voters think then selectively target them with messages that they'll want to agree with. For example if you find out someone is a Catholic send them messages about abortion being bad. If they're racist tell them there are too many immigrants etc. etc. The more unscrupulous the candidate/campaign manager the worse this can get of course! This is why canvassing is done; it's to find out your likes, dislikes and prejudices so you can be targeted. The real issue here of course is that detailed information gathering and subsequent targeting requires a lot of money and often that will be coming from those who really run our politics; those who pay the party political piper so to speak.
ReplyDeleteFor me the other big issue these days is the demise of local press/newspapers who would often call out lying politicians. Now the local press will often be a part of the problem by them cutting and pasting party political press releases with out any checking or even the local knowledge they once had to smell out political fibs.
In many ways the electorate needs to be far more sceptical of politicians than ever before but whilst voters say they are the reality is that they are not and their prejudices are very much played to.
Just think about all those leaflets that came to Vardre Lodge, who paid for them, how the senders would know things about those living there, how they found that it out, how other voters in your same locally may well have been getting differing or completely different messages (because of what was known about them) from the same political party etc. etc.
A good (or that should be a bad) politician will tell you the lies you want to believe and if you want to believe it you won't even consider you are being filled with utter rubbish and possibly the exact opposite to your next door neighbour is being told.
Makes you think does it not or in the case of most voters no it does not sadly.
Some interesting stuff here, mate. I don't think we got any leaflets by post that were targeted to any harvested data we've allowed to escape, they all looked very generic and scattergun. I've managed to avoid getting electronically targeted messages but I understand they are usually single issue. As, by definition, we don't see what others get put in front of them few folk have the vaguest idea what is being said to target segments of the electorate which does make me uncomfortable. A small part of the digital minefield but maybe an important one.
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