One Nation Under a Lie

Why Can't Johnson's Crazy Gang Stop Telling Porkies?

Most of us will remember being told at least once in our childhoods by some adult or other that we shouldn’t tell lies. And most of us will have realised coming into adulthood that adherence to the truth is not always a guiding principle of adult life and particularly of political life.

I say ‘not always’, because contrary to established wisdom not all politicians lie, at least not all the time, and even those who do lie will do it for different reasons, and in different ways.

Some politicians lie by saying things that are blatantly untrue. Others are ‘economical with the truth’ or leave out just enough outright falsehood to give even their most dishonest observations a veneer of credibility. This is what Tony Blair and George Bush did in order to convince the world that Saddam Hussein possessed the WMD that they intended to use as a casus belli.

This kind of lying belongs to the category of ‘secrecy and deception’ that Hannah Arendt, in her famous essay on the Pentagon Papers, once called the ‘arcana imperii, the mysteries of government’, which she characterised as ‘the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends.’

But there is also another kind of lying, which is not aimed at achieving any specific political ends - it is simply the default response of politicians and governments that have no familiarity with the truth or any interest in even searching for it, if its discovery is liable to reflect badly on them.

It’s important to point out these distinctions, because if you simply allow yourself to shrug your shoulders and believe that ‘all politicians lie’, as if that were the be all and end all of the problem, you can’t really understand the dangerous new world of lies that have corrupted so many democracies where rightwing populists have come to power in the last few years.

Take the UK’s clown car government. Yesterday at Prime Minister’s Question Time , the ‘Prime Minister’, now fully recovered from his post-partygate humility, was back in his blathering Bertie Booster comfort zone, braying to the house that P&O’s decision to sack UK workers was the EU’s fault. But let the Great Man speak for himself:

The law that P&O are allegedly relying on was introduced as a result of EU directives... He [Starmer] would have kept us unable to change it... Never forget Mr Speaker, but that’s the reality…He would have made us unable to get out of it. He would have made it impossible for us to protect UK employees in the way that we’re going to.

Adam Schwarz @AdamJSchwarz

Johnson: "The law that P&O are allegedly relying on was introduced as a result of EU directives... He [Starmer] would have kept us unable to change it... He would have made it impossible to protect UK employees". Ireland & Spain banned fire & rehire. Both are in the EU. #PMQs

You can look at those sentences from many different angles. You can photograph them with your new drone. You can hang them on your kitchen ceiling and see how the light plays upon them. You can put them in a cot next to your bed and feed them milk. But they will never not be a total fabrication. They could not become truth even if they fell on their knees in front of you to beg forgiveness and mercy or offered to walk the Santiago pilgrimage as an act of contrition. 

Let’s take a look. Johnson appears to be basing his accusation on the 2018 EU directive, which removed shipping companies from the obligation (enshrined in the 1992 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act) to inform the UK government about mass redundancies.

The new directive required companies to inform the ‘competent authority’ in the countries where shipping companies were flagged. In P&O’s case, these countries are Bermuda, Cyprus, and the Bahamas.

At the time, the British government accepted that directive, without apparently understanding its potential implications. Given that Chris Grayling was transport secretary at the time, no one will be surprised by this. Even so, the idea that the sackings were a ‘result of EU directives’ doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, given that other European countries have laws preventing ‘fire and rehire’ practices of this kind.

Last but not least, Johnson’s own government voted down a bill proposed by Labour last year that would have enabled the UK to prevent the mass redundancies that he now proposes to take action against.

So by any standards Johnson’s statements are preposterous, and if he was in a penalty competition, the result, within fifteen minutes of appearing in public, would be Lies 1: Truth 0. 

Next up was Rishi Sunak, the living image of Sade’s smooth operator. No one should begrudge Johnson’s right to chortle happily while Sunak chuntered on about the bombs falling on Ukraine, because those bombs have after all helped to save his government.

But we can look askance at Slinky Sunak’s attempt to deflect from the biggest drop in living standards since the 1950s, with the announcement that homeowners who want to fit energy saving products such as solar panels, electric heat pumps or insulation will pay zero value added tax, versus a rate of 5 per cent previously ‘ thanks to Brexit.’

In our penalty shootouts, this claim is something of a sidefooter, neatly sending the keeper the wrong way before patting the ball into the back of the net, in comparison with Johnson’s ballooning whopper.

Nevertheless it’s still a lie, because EU law has already exempted the goods that Sunak referred to from the VAT levy. It’s also a distraction, because very few of the people who going to be hammered by rising energy costs will ever be putting up solar panels in the near future.

The aim of this, like Johnson’s previous observations, was to generate the ‘thanks to Brexit’ headlines which dutifully followed, from newspapers that rarely have anything good to say about anything green. Even that well-known Edwardian ecowarrior, Jacob Rees-Mogg, stepped up to take a penalty - an aristocratic toe punt which nevertheless dribbled past the keeper.

Jacob Rees-Mogg @Jacob_Rees_Mogg

The EU would not allow us to do this, another benefit of Brexit.

HM Treasury @hmtreasury

We're cutting VAT on the installation of energy saving materials in residential properties from 5% to zero for the next five years. #SpringStatement2022 https://t.co/hM5piUulY0

The Culture of Lies

So that’s Lies 3: Truth:0, and in the UK these days, truth is nearly always playing away from home. All this may be little more than a venial sin for the Moggster, but it’s wearying and demoralising for those of us who still believe that democracy demands at least some modicum of commitment to the idea of truth in order to have a chance of functioning effectively, and in the best interests of society rather than the venal few.

By the time Trump left office, the Washington Post calculated that he had told 30, 573 lies in his four years in power. As many have pointed out, this is epic, dictatorship-level lying, and even though no one has made such precise calculations about Johnson, he was a consistent liar as a journalist and in his private life long before he thought he should have the Big Job.

So it’s no surprise to find him presiding over what must surely be the most dishonest period in British political history. Yes, we have had governments that have lied about this and that. But the lying of Johnson and his cronies is relentless, instinctive, promiscuous and orgiastic. Effortlessly, and always with a little twinkle in his eye, Johnson lies about the EU; the pandemic; vaccines; death tolls; PPE, Northern Ireland, and parties.

He cannot not lie, and because he lies, his cronies have to lie too, in part because they were chosen for their ability to do this. And the more they do it, and the more they find they get away with it, the more they lie with impunity.

It would be overstating it to describe this as a strategy of governance, at least not yet. The lying of Trump and his subordinates has more in common with Steve Bannon’s infamous explanation of the political value of constant misinformation: ‘The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’

We aren’t there yet, though no one can say we won’t manage it. At present we are merely sinking inch by inch into what Hannah Arendt called ‘ The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions.’ And unlike America, the key to understanding the lying of Johnson and his cronies - and the unwillingness of millions of British voters to hold them account for it - is Brexit.

Again and again, Johnson’s lying returns to Brexit and the EU, as it did yesterday. This is partly because he knows that such lies will please a constituency that needs to be pleased, and is not that bothered whether what pleases it is true or not.

But it’s also because Johnson and his cronies - like the ‘brightest and the best’ who oversaw the Vietnam War - need to believe in their own lies, or rather they need their own lies to come true.

In her discussion of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt argued that political lying was a more fragile activity than it sometimes seemed:

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.

This might seem an overly-optimistic outcome in the UK right now. Faced with a government that lies ‘on principle’ day after day, we haven’t reached that critical mass where the ‘immensity of factuality’ manifests itself.

Too many people have a vested interest in keeping this toxic Brexit government afloat for as long as possible, no matter how many lies it tells, because too many people cannot or will not recognise that Brexit has not delivered what Johnson and his cronies once promised. Too many powerful voices in the media share the same interest.

I’m not arguing here that we should rejoin the European Union. But Brexit provides the essential glue that holds this culture of lies together. It explains why this government is at pains to say that such-and-such an outcome is ‘thanks to Brexit’, regardless of whether it really is.

So until that changes the government will continue to wrap itself in a ‘tissue of falsehood’ that can be applied to anything it wants to use to its advantage - and anything that might ‘prove’ that Brexit has been a glorious success.

As Arendt argued, such systemic lying will one day collide with reality in ways that it can’t escape. And if we want to see that happen, we can’t shrug our shoulders and say they’re all as bad as each other.

Because this government is so much worse. We need to look at how and why these politicians lie day after day.

We need to care enough about their lying to hold them to account. As Demosthenes once asked, ‘In a political system based on speeches, how can it be safely administered if the speeches are not true?’

That really is the million-dollar question. And in this country, the way we answer it will in the end decide so much more than Brexit.