Shock! Horror! Two politicians tell the truth

Yesterday was a good day for media outrage. In Britain, Labour MP Paul Flynn apparently accused government ministers of lying about the situation in Afghanistan. Result – he was expelled from the Commons. After all, we can’t have our politicians telling the truth.

Meanwhile, over in the US, the ghastly mad Mitt ‘foot in the mouth’ Romney dared suggest that there was no point a US president even trying to solve the Middle East problem as the Palestinians have never been, are not and never will be interested in living in peace with Israel. We all know it’s true – but it’s politically incorrect to say it.

I think we can largely blame the press for politicians being afraid to speak the truth. Over the last 20 years, journalists have gone from reporting the news to making it up to advance their own lousy careers. So they have to find stories to be outraged about. Whatever a politician says or does nowadays, hyper-ambitious journalists quickly find a ‘victim’  – someone who has apparently been ‘insulted’ or ‘treated unfairly’. And that gives journalists their ‘big story’.

Yesterday we also saw the result of politicians’ terror of journalists. Spineless creature David Cameron abandoned the only good policy the Tories had – giving all pensioners a flat rate £140 a week state pension. He dropped this because he knew that journalists would start howling about how ‘unfair’ this would be to existing pensioners.

At some point, we need leaders with the courage to face down our dishonest, conceited, self-important, over-ambitious journalists and do what is right for the country. But looking at today’s worthless, self-serving, lying, expenses-thieving, pointless political pygmies, that day may be long in coming.