David Cameron and Political Lying

by redosiris

David Cameron’s speech to his party conference was littered with lies and untruths throughout. It was not the “left wing establishment” that tried to block the imposition of free schools in places like Hammersmith, it was in fact local schoolchildren’s parents who decided they didn’t want free schools imposed upon them. Similarly his rhetoric about borrowing and Labour being the party of borrowing was a lie since this government is set to borrow 22% more than they originally forecast this year. They are borrowing more now to pay for benefits for those workers they have sacked, instead of using that money to create jobs and bring forward infrastructural projects. His comments on lazy people claiming housing benefit were wrong since 93% of new claimants are in work, and the money they receive goes to pay for extortionate prices charged by landlords at rates which remain uncapped, unlike benefits.

The biggest lie of all is that borrowing money in the first place caused this financial crisis and now double dip recession. Labour borrowed steadily within limits before the collapse of Lehmann Brothers and borrowed money to bail the banks out after their illegal profligacy became apparent. The Tories and their chums in the media have managed to twist this in to the poor being culpable. Benefits were too high, wages too high, pensions too generous, the sick and disabled are just workshy, immigrants are stealing jobs. All of these are lies

The main point about lying is that it isn’t against the law, and nor should it be. So all David Cameron has to do, rather than tell the truth is to make the lies sound believable. This is why political speeches are so stage managed these days, and make up has to be just right as the words are gone through with a fine tooth comb and some boot polish. Not to wheedle out inaccuracies or falsehoods, in fact to insert them, but in the right places and be delivered with the correct level of humility and grace.

The art of political lying is the foremost asset an aspiring politician can manufacture for his or herself. This is why the majority of our politicians now come across, at least to those with a modicum of intelligence, as snake oil salesmen and women. Could someone as hopelessly flawed and incompetent as Jeremy Hunt or Michael Gove be employed in any other profession? Banking maybe would be the only other option, or PR as so many of these people have done.

Political lying is nothing new, writers from Cicero to Arbuthnot and Jonathan Swift along with our own contemporary Peter Oborne have wrote of its devilment, but it does no good. These people are never held to account for their lies, even in the House of Commons where such behaviour is in fact illegal. Lies are told daily in the House by all sides with Prime Ministers Questions being the worst culprit without any retribution handed down. This is where we are truly “all in it together”, or rather not us but the elite class of politicians. If they were suddenly held to account for their words in a public forum, and if any were genuinely called out on their wilful inaccuracies and terminological inexactitudes the veil would lift and we would see them all for the brazen husks of human beings they really are.

So David Cameron will continue to lie and people will continue to be taken in by his bare, narrative truths of artistic licence and burnish before doing the same thing in their own work and lives as an homage to spirit of Walter Mitty, after all, if you yourself believe your own lives then surely they become the truth?