Should lying politicians be disqualified from office?

Suppose lying was outlawed in politics? Legislation is seriously being considered to do this in Wales.

In an article on the Positive News website it is written 

Public confidence in lawmakers plunged to a record low last year in the wake of Partygate and other scandals: only 9% of British adults polled by Ipsos said that they trust politicians to tell the truth. Without trust, says Jennifer Nadel of the thinktank Compassion in Politics, faith in democracy is undermined. “If we can’t trust what politicians are saying, how can we decide who to vote for? We need to be able to rely on our politicians to tell the truth,” she explains.

The article further states:

The campaign sprung from concern at the rapid normalisation of lies in politics. “We are slipping at an alarming speed into a post-truth era,” says Nadel. “We only have to look at what is happening in the United States.” Fact-checkers at the Washington Post found that Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidency, averaging about 21 a day. “America is a warning of what can happen if this problem is allowed to go unchecked,” Nadel believes. “[Our proposals] are designed to stop [the UK] from getting to that stage.”

And further:

“You couldn’t function as a society if you constantly distrusted others,” says Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University. “If you walk out of your front door, and you don’t trust that there’s a pavement to walk on, you’ll never get anything done. When intentions to deceive become normalised, people start to question the trustworthiness of all entities … You can’t believe anything you hear.”

Increasingly, intellectuals say that we are living in a “post truth” society where disinformation is routinely practiced and public trust is eroded. Lies are like a cancer in the body politic strangling the life out of it. 

Increasing the immunity of the body politic from lies through efforts at teaching media literacy is a protective activity but doesn’t eradicate the source. Making it illegal for politicians to lie and barring them from office eliminates the source of the toxin.

Compassion in Politics has long been campaigning to introduce criminal penalties for political lying, with a petition launched in 2019 attracting more than 200,000 signatures. In a surprise move two days before the UK’s general election, the Welsh government committed to passing legislation that would make lying illegal for Senedd members and candidates, having previously opposed the measure. Under the plans, those found guilty of deliberate deception by an independent judicial process would be disqualified from office.

Should lying to the public be a disqualifying offense for holding public office in the US? Yes, if we are to restore faith and trust in our democracy.

To read the article in Positive News click here.

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