Read My Lips

There is a pervasive perception, undermining public trust in our political system, that today’s politicians lie. Many people feel that we were led to war against Iraq on the basis of a lie. The Hutton enquiry, in part designed to remedy the sense of distrust, only seemed to many to compound the problem, first by revealing further levels of deception and then by appearing to miss the truth that its investigation had revealed. According to the opinion polls, public confidence in the truthfulness of the prime minister plummeted.

Earlier this year the Archbishop of Canterbury even felt moved to suggest that, while we might not want to embrace ‘the melodramatic language of public deception’, it is right that in an era of ‘democraticised knowledge’ that the government’s truth-claims should be ‘tested’. Governments, he added, have a responsibility to pay attention to the truth if they want to retain the obedience of their citizens. He may have a point. In March this year Spanish voters turfed out a government it believed had misled them, for electoral advantage, about the nature of the terrorist outrage in Madrid.