Achi news desk-
The best way to restore trust in politics is to make it a crime for politicians to lie, says Welsh parliamentarian Adam Price.
Price has introduced legislation in the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, which would make it an offense for a politician to deliberately deceive the public. Those found guilty would be temporarily disqualified from sitting in Parliament, or running for office.
Although some countries already have laws against lying to parliament, this legislation, if passed, would be the first to ban politicians from lying more generally.
Price, a member and former leader of the centre-left Plaid Cymru party, presented the proposal as an amendment to the election reform bill currently before parliament.
It has since been separated from that bill and sent to the standards of conduct committee for review and consideration. All four parties in the Senedd have come out in favor of the proposal, and Price says he expects there will be a vote on it within the next few months.
Price has made truth in politics the focus of his political career ever since called for the impeachment of the then prime minister Tony Blair in 2004, for doing what it turned out to be false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as he sent British troops to war.
Price spoke to As It Happens host Nik Köksal. This is part of their conversation
I have to ask you. You have to be honest. In all your years of politics, have you ever lied? Fibed? Even a white lie, just a little?
I hope not. I would be a real hypocrite if he had.
This has been part of a long campaign for me. It started with the Iraq War when I was an MP in Westminster. But, you know, here we are almost 20 years later, and I think the issue of truth in politics has never been greater in democracy around the world.
We have less trust in politics and in politicians. And the question is, what are we going to do about it? Well, here’s something we could do about it. We could make it a crime for politicians to lie.
So if there was one lie that triggered this for you, it dates back to the war?
For me, absolutely. And that shows, you know, that this can have the most serious consequences. Politicians make decisions every day that affect our lives, but they can be decisions of life and death, peace and war.
Setting a standard, a norm, that it is never acceptable for a politician to deliberately lie should be important to all of us. And that is something, unfortunately, we have not done.
Perhaps we have learned to accept the kind of madness, the kind of post-truth politics, the wave of deformation now that is really eroding the foundations of democracy. And we have to draw a line.
What you said there, though, that’s part of what would make it difficult to enforce, I imagine. How do you prove someone is lying on purpose? They could say they believed something at the time.
We have to get the balance right, don’t we? Because what we don’t want to do is undermine freedom of expression. That is obviously protected.
What we are talking about here is deliberate fraud. And, yes, that sets the bar high. You would have to prove intent to mislead.
But that’s what we do in fraud cases. That’s what we do in defamation cases. So there are plenty of legal examples where we do the same thing.
And in other professions. If a doctor lies, then he is eliminated. If a lawyer lies, then he is disqualified. Yet we seem to have tolerated a democratic culture where politicians can lie with impunity. Well, that has to stop.
At the heart of it, it’s a very simple principle. It is never, ever, acceptable for a politician to lie deliberately.– Adam Price, member of the Welsh Parliament
Under the amendment you are proposing, just specifically, how would it work? What would happen to Wales [member of Senedd] if they were found to have lied?
Like any crime, any person could make a complaint. It would have to be investigated, first, or considered by the police to see if there was enough evidence for them to carry out an investigation. And then, if it was, then it would go through the process. They would provide a file to the public prosecutor.
We rule out private prosecutions … in order to prevent this from being armed, if you will, by tit-for-tat prosecutions between different political parties or, indeed, by vested interests. So it would only happen if there was enough evidence and if it was in the public interest.
We have some carve-outs there to, for example, give an opportunity when someone says something false, they realize their mistake, there’s a 14-day period [where] they can actually retract and apologize.
And there are exceptions for national security. There are some circumstances, a fairly narrow set of circumstances, where it might be legitimate to protect mutual security for a politician to use incorrect information.
So there are reasonable protections there. But at the heart of it, it’s a very simple principle. It is never, ever, acceptable for a politician to lie deliberately.
We have a small number of parliaments around the world, about half a dozen, where it is already a crime to lie to parliament. So earlier this year, the former Austrian chancellor, for example, Sebastian Kurz, was found guilty of that crime of lying to parliament. He is currently the leader of the opposition in the Singaporean parliament charged with the crime of lying to parliament. What we don’t have yet in the world is … a comprehensive ban on deliberate fraud by politicians.
And would it, could it lead to jail time, or do you think fines would be enough?
The punishment we have currently imposed is not fines or imprisonment. It is simply disqualification from the job. So if you were a sitting politician, you would be sacked. If you were a candidate, then you could not stand for an election cycle. Our term in our parliament is four years. For a politician, that is a very severe sanction, you know, in terms of their reputation, etc. So that’s what we’re aiming for at the moment. But obviously, you could also look at other criminal sanctions.
You mentioned a moment ago about … resignation, at this point, of so many people around the world to the possibility, maybe even the probability, that politicians are going to lie and lie regularly.
If we look at the example of Donald Trump, during his [U.S.] presidential term, the Washington Post documented that he made 30,573 false or misleading claims. But as you well know, it seems that many, many Americans, his party as well, continue to support him. So that is a factor that complicates things when the public not only accepts it, but votes in politicians who have said things that are clearly not true..
I believe that example is the reason why we need to legislate, to make intentional fraud a crime.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a couple of very important essays on lying in politicshe said that what happens when you accept political lies is not that the public believe the lies, but that they stop believing in the very idea of ​​truth itself.
And I think that’s what has happened in a kind of Trumpian America, is that all politics, therefore, has suffered in terms of public credibility. People are starting to believe that all politicians are the same; they are all liars. And so, it has little effect on Trump’s approval rating because it’s kind of priced into this credibility gap, which has grown in politics.
That is why we need to set this standard, to prevent that from happening in future democracies and globally.
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