The triumph of political lying?

Thursday-Friday blog

In 2005, journalist Peter Oborne published a book titled “The Rise of Political Lying“:

In it he traces the history of political falsehood back to its earliest days, but focusing specifically on the exponential rise of the phenomenon during the Major and Blair governments, Peter Oborne demonstrates that the truth has become an increasingly slippery concept in recent years. From woolly pronouncements that are designed merely to obfuscate to outright and blatant lies whose intention is to deceive, the political lie is never far from the surface. 

There are so many lies told by the Blair government that it would be impossible to list them here. But two of the biggest were possibly:

• Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction). Blair used the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ to justify going to war against Iraq. Google tells us that: ‘An estimated 180,000 to over 200,000 Iraqi civilians died from direct violent causes during the Iraq War, while total war-related deaths—including indirect causes like infrastructure collapse—are estimated to be significantly higher, ranging up to 460,000 or more’. An, of course, Dr David Kelly, who knew there were no WMDs, was conveniently ‘suicided
• Gordon Brown was the supposed ‘Iron Chancellor’. This was nonsense. Brown spaffed our money away like a very horny drunken sailor in a whorehouse. During Gordon Brown’s tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer (May 1997 to June 2007), the capital value of signed Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals in the UK grew significantly to an estimated £56 billion to £68 billion, committing future taxpayers to long-term repayments exceeding £215 billion over the lifespans of the contracts. But by pushing the payments into the future, Brown pretended that he had public spending under control and none of our MSM journalists was smart enough or brave enough to expose Brown’s deceit though I did this in my two books “Plundering the Public Sector” and “Squandered”

Since then the lies seem to have got ever bigger. Perhaps one of the worst was that (IMHO) useless bloated bag of foul pestilential air, Boris Johnson, pledging to cut immigration to “the tens of thousands” while actually doing everything he could think of to increase it to hundreds of thousands every year.

What’s the point of all this? Well, I want to propose that Blair and Brown seem to me to have at least made an effort to disguise the fact that they were brazen liars. But I get the feeling that we are now in a new era where politicians no longer even bother to pretend they are not lying. Just a couple of recent examples:

• The Manchester pipsqueak PM claims that it is “fair” that Burnham’s mostly uneducated, mostly unemployable, often criminal, often rapist Third-world illegal migrants are distributed around the country in both poorer and wealthy areas. This is, obviously, complete garbage. What would be “fair” would be to stop the boats (rather than supplying a Border Farce luxury ferry service to the UK) and deporting all the illegals already here.
• The Chagos capitulation. Burnham and Streeting claim that giving the Chagos Islands away to CCP (Chinese Communist Party) vassal Mauritius and then giving Mauritius so much of British taxpayers’ money that Mauritius can scrap income tax for its citizens is the only way to secure the Diego Garcia military base. This lie is so preposterous that surely anyone with an IQ in double figures or more can see its absurdity.

What I’m suggesting is that there is almost a new pattern to our rulers’ lies. They hold us in such contempt that they no longer make any attempt to cover up the fact that they are lying to us. They know they are lying, we know they are lying, they know we know they are lying and yet they carry on with the most blatant lies because they couldn’t give a toss as they have so much power over us.

And now we hear that Burnham is setting up a Ministry of Truth (or Disinformation Unit or something like that) to decide what we are allowed to know and hear. So the only accepted narrative the Disinformation Unit and Ofcom and, of course, the BBC will allow will be the blatant, brazen lies our leaders want to feed us with.

I despair at what has happened to our once great country.

However, let’s end on a positive note: