If you can’t tell the truth, lose the job

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/10/2024 (387 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been a busy few months in politics, so it’s easy to understand how a few things could slip by.

Sometimes, even good ideas pass by under the radar, ones that might inject a little more truth into our world.

Time was, a politician caught telling a deliberate and provable lie would see their career evaporate — cabinet ministers used to step down when they were caught in a lie, and politicians on the election campaign trail would skate tightly around the absolute edges of the truth, endeavouring to stay at least an inch or more away from the deep water of an objectively provable falsehood.

Then came the 2016 U.S. federal election and the world of “alternative facts,” a concept that was introduced in 2017 by then-president Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, when she was trying to defend statements that the crowd watching Trump’s inauguration was the largest one ever, when photographic evidence clearly proved it wasn’t.

Trump did not agree with the evidence.

“That’s why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there,” Conway said.

Now, it’s a virtual free-for-all. In the American presidential election, “alternative facts” — lies — abound, everything from suggestions that the Jan. 6 riots were a “peaceful transfer of power” to manufactured stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets. (When Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance was questioned about his decision to spread the rumour about eating pets, he replied, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)

Truth in politics, it seems, is an endangered species.

That could change following a legislative effort in Wales — and if we’re lucky, that change could spread.

The BBC quoted Welsh Counsel General Mick Antoniw in June as saying, “The Welsh government will bring forward legislation before 2026 for the disqualification of members and candidates found guilty of deliberate deception, through an independent judicial process.”

Candidates and politicians in the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd, would be disqualified from running or holding office.

As The Guardian reported, Adam Price, a member of the Plaid Cymru, said, “What has been announced is truly historic, globally pioneering. We have a commitment from our government that our democracy will be the first in the world to introduce a general prohibition on deception by politicians … We are at the beginning of a global movement. We are going to outlaw political lying.”

Price said the ability of politicians to spread lies undercuts the democratic process: “That is an existential threat. A democracy starts to break down if the electors can’t trust what the elected say. … We have to innovate, we have to try different things. It’s a small minority of politicians, populist demagogues, that deliberately distort the truth for their own political gain, but they poison the well for everyone. It is never acceptable for politicians to deliberately deceive.”

The transition wouldn’t be an easy one: politicians have grown used to parroting — without ever thinking of fact-checking — the instant “facts” that pop up on social media, and, frankly, have contributed their own falsehoods to the mix, virtually with impunity.

There are opinions, and there are things you’d dearly like to believe. And then there are facts.

Just facts.

It would be astounding if politicians had to stay within the bounds of truth to stay in office. It might make them just a little bit more circumspect.

Spout “alternative facts,” find alternative employment.