The Welsh Government promised to introduce a law banning lying politicians before the next Senedd election after striking a last-minute deal to avert defeat.
Mick Antoniw, who is counsel general, the Welsh Government’s chief legal adviser, reached an agreement with Adam Price just before a key vote on creating an offence of deception.
Under the elections bill, Mr Price proposed a four-year disqualification for Senedd members, ministers or candidates found guilty of deliberate lying.
Mr Antoniw stopped short of supporting criminalisation as he invited the Senedd’s standards committee, which is holding an inquiry on accountability, to make proposals.
He said: “The Welsh Government will bring forward legislation before 2026 for the disqualification of members and candidates found guilty of deception through an independent judicial process.”
Whilst I love the idea of more truth in politics, I think the only way to do that sustainably is behaviourally through a political culture that values this, not legalistically through political rules. The latter isn’t a substitute for the former.
Without a political culture that prioritises honesty and respectful debate, either this law will have to be a toothless gimmick, or it will become weaponised by malevolent populists against their political opponents. Neither of these outcomes would be a good thing.
To lie means to knowingly deceive. To have been misled is another thing. The latter is okay, but a question of competence, while the former is wilful disregard of duty and is a problem of corruption. In either case, waxing poetic with ideological undertones is at best pseudo-intellectual, at worst deceitful.
I’m not sure which one you would be, but if you knowingly lied to your electorate, you should get the boot.
Nuff said.
Democracy isn’t about rules, it’s about culture.
America is an example of what happens when you rely on the former not the latter. They have all sorts of rules against misconduct in office, and these rules are routinely abused by the far right to try to shut down their opponents - such as the Republican attempt to impeach Biden with no evidence as revenge for Trump’s legitimate impeachment, or attempts to impeach the Democrat Attorney General in Georgia for investigating Trump’s attempt to fix the election there, or the expelling of black lawmakers in Tennessee for protesting in support of gun law reform. Meanwhile Trump himself - a twice impeached, convicted criminal - is currently narrowly leading in the polls for their November presidential election…
You’re under the impression that the rules you’re advocating will just get used against the bad guys. But what will happen in reality is that the very well-funded bad guys will hire some very expensive lawyers who will use these laws to harass the good guys and tie them up in spurious investigations and court cases.
In a democracy, the ultimate punishment for an ill-intentioned politician - liars, cheats, rulebreakers - should come at the ballot box. In a democracy, the political culture makes it the job of the voters to doll out the punishment on election day. The more you take that responsibility away from voters by investing it in rules and regulations, the more you risk diluting voters’ sense that this is their job, and the more ill-intents you’ll find getting elected (a la Trump). Sometimes that’s a risk worth taking, when we’re talking about corruption or national security breaches - things where the damage a bad actor can do may so dwarf the voters’ capacity to punish them. But I think voters are pretty capable of spotting a political liar and punishing them at the ballot box.
That’s nice, but not true.
When it comes to parliaments in the Nordics region, you’d bet your bippy that both formality and accountability is a part of procedure.
Lying knowingly and being caught for it is political suicide, between the representatives - because we have representative democracy, as most people do - though we do have national votes on occassion.
That means it’s largely their culture, the representatives that is, and that culture, when soured, can manipulate and destroy entire societies, very easily.
It can also be used to say persecute minorities. See Daughter of the Confederacy and the US judicial system put on camera since the 60s, all the way up to the “anti-woke movement”. The inflammatory messaging, the lying, the deceit, has caused uncountable damage to psyches, lives, families and communities.
This also applies to cases like Detroit. The former motor industry basically swindled the people of Detroit with the help of gullible and/or corrupt politicians. An industry that could no longer compete was fed money, which was pocketed, and people just walked away from destroying the economy of an entire city instead of dealing with it properly.
The idea that representatives get to say and accept whatever they want without consequence is akin to saying they get to do whatever they want without consequences. That breeds corruption, which breeds degradation and quite possibly collapse of a society.
Remember: history will always outclass idealism and philosophy.