Liar, Liar!

Parliamentary privilege allows Members of Parliament to say things in the House of Commons that outside it would make them liable for prosecution for slander, contempt of court, or breaching the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, rules around unparliamentary language forbid MPs from using certain words or phrases about other MPs. Words like blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon, and traitor. And of course, liar.

 

Members of Parliament are generally described by one another as "the Honourable Member for . . .” and the assumption is, as the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has said, that “No honourable member would actually mislead or lie to the House,” and should an MP unwittingly utter a falsehood, or accidentally mislead the House, then they are obliged to correct the matter at the earliest opportunity. Not that they always do. [1]

 

Accusing a fellow MP of lying will result in the MP making the accusation being required to withdraw from the Chamber if they do not retract their remark, as happened to Labour MP Dawn Butler last week. Citing a YouTube video produced by the lawyer and filmmaker Peter Stefanovic in which he dissected and debunked a number of claims made in Parliament by Boris Johnson, Butler said that Boris Johnson “has lied to this House and the country, over and over again."

  

As Dawn Butler found, in this country we take accusations of lying very seriously. In much the same way as we take accusations of racism and anti-Semitism very seriously. Unfortunately, we take the accusations more seriously than the offence a lot of the time. As former Speaker John Bercow and Dawn Butler herself said in a joint statement published in The Times, “Someone lying to tens of millions of citizens knows he or she is protected by an ancient rule. They face no sanction. By contrast, an MP with the guts to tell the truth is judged to be in disgrace. It is absurd.”

 

Dawn Butler speaking in the Commons on Friday. Picture: House of Commons/PA

MPs can be accused of lying of course. Virtually every week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer says, of some answer or statement that Boris Johnson has given, ‘That simply isn’t true.” A lie, then. As he has said, “the Prime Minister is the master of untruths and half-truths.” Starmer says that he supports the deputy speaker who ejected Dawn Butler, but also supports Butler for what she said. He likely only said that because his silence on the matter had drawn criticism, but that sort of fence sitting harms him more than Johnson and the Tory government.

 

I saw a comment on Twitter that if MPs were allowed to call each other liars, then that word would be constantly bandied about in the Chamber, and the point being made clearly was that it would be uttered even when no lie had been told. Which raises two points.

 

First, if Honourable Members were actually honourable and didn’t lie, then the accusation would carry no weight (it wouldn’t stop it being used, but it would be more detrimental to the accuser than the accused), but secondly – and just as importantly – is it right that MPs shout across the Chamber?

 

While some speeches in the House of Commons are listened to respectfully, anyone who has watched PMQs will know that the House is often like a bear pit, with voices raised on both sides. MPs should not shout ‘liar’ at their opponents; they ought not shout anything at all. They should however, be able to use a speech to call out lies on the part of another member, particularly if that member knowingly and demonstrably did lie.

 

The arcane rules and customs of Parliament are like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, where things are done a certain way because of accidents of history, because of tradition, not because they are logical or make sense. If Parliament were a private business, engaged in banking for example, it would probably use abacuses instead of calculators, and handwritten ledgers instead of computer mainframes because that is how it has always been done. Getting Parliament to move with the times is on a par with getting a cat to learn algebra.

 

Christopher Lee as Mr Flay, responsible for upholding the rules and maintaining 
tradition in the castle of Gormenghast. From the BBC production.

But move with the times it should. The whole system of politics in the UK is overdue for reform: Our First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system for a start. In the last seventy years FPTP means that in all but three elections the majority of votes have been cast for parties other than the one that formed a government. 

 

Politics is binary, but the world is nuanced. The majority support a political party the way they support a football team, with blind, unthinking loyalty. But whichever party you support you are likely to be lumbered with just as many policies that you don’t like as ones that you do. In fact, it may be that there are policies that another party has that you support more than the ones proposed by the party you vote for. Which is the reason why we should stop voting for people and parties and start voting for policies.

 

Come election time, the parties should set forth their intended policies. The public votes for the policies they want and the policies are carried out by private industry. We will still need MPs, but not the 600 odd we have now; a couple of hundred should suffice to act as administrators and make sure that the private companies entrusted with carrying out the policies we voted for do so properly. An unintended consequence is that this could lead to a privatised health service, but at least it would happen through conscious choice and not implemented by stealth.

 

In private industry objectives are the norm, and performance against objectives is how pay rises and bonuses are set. In a privatised parliament, our MPs could be assessed and rewarded by how effectively they manage to get the policies implemented.

 

This method of governance would ensure that the right people are doing the right jobs. Iain Duncan Smith last year lambasted the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), for recommending that working from home measures stay in place. He said that SAGE had no right to tell employers what to do because “most of them have never run a business.” Duncan Smith has never run a business, nor have many MPs, so how appropriate is it that a completely unqualified person is put in charge of the Department of Health, or Education, or the Ministry Defence?

 

Michael Gove once said that Britain is fed up with experts, but it is normally accepted that some degree of expertise and knowledge of a business is useful when running it. Being in charge of a multi-million pound department with thousands of employees and the literal power of life and death over the population of the whole country apparently requires no experience or knowledge, just the good fortune to have won a popularity contest and be looked on kindly by the Prime Minister.

 

It’s time to privatise government and get the experts in.

 

 

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[1] Since 1979 there have been 93 occasions on which MPs have apologised for misleading the House. The most recent was in 2019. Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03169/