The best way to restore trust in politics is to make it a criminal offence for politicians to lie, says Welsh parliamentarian Adam Price.
Price has brought forward legislation in the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, that would make it a criminal offence for a politician to knowingly deceive the public. Those found guilty would be temporarily disqualified from sitting in the Senedd, or running from office.
While some countries already have laws against lying to parliament, this legislation, if passed, would be the first to bar politicians from lying more generally.
Price, a member and former leader of the centre-left Plaid Cymru party, tabled the proposal as an amendment to an election reform bill currently before parliament.
It has since been separated from that bill and sent to the standards conduct committee for review for consideration. All four parties in the Senedd have come out in favour of the proposal, and Price says he expects it will be voted on within the next couple of months.
Price has made truth in politics a focus of his political career since he called for the impeachment of then-prime minister Tony Blair in 2004, for making what turned to be false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as he sent British troops to war.
Price spoke to As It Happens host Nik Köksal. Here is part of their conversation
I have to ask you. You have to be honest. In all of your years of politics, have you ever lied? Fibbed? Even a white lie, just a little bit?
I hope not. I’d be a real hypocrite if I had.
This has been part of a long campaign for me. It started with the Iraq War when I was an MP at Westminster. But, you know, here we are almost 20 years later, and I think the issue of truth in politics has never been bigger in democracy worldwide.
We’ve got falling trust in politics and in politicians. And the question is, what are we going to do about it? Well, here’s something that we could do about it. We could make it a criminal offence for politicians to lie.
So if there was one lie that sparked this for you, it dates back to the war?
For me, absolutely. And that shows that, you know, this can have the gravest of consequences. Politicians make decisions every day which affect our lives, but they can be life and death decisions, peace and war.
Setting a standard, a norm, that it is never acceptable for a politician to deliberately lie should be important to all of us. And that’s something that, unfortunately, we haven’t done.
Maybe we’ve learned to accept the kind of mendacity, the kind of post-truth politics, the wave of disinformation now that is really kind of eroding the foundations of democracy. And we’ve got to draw a line.
What you said there, though, that’s part of what would make it hard to enforce, I imagine. How do you prove that someone was deliberately lying? They could say they just believed something at the time.
We’ve got to get the balance right, haven’t we? Because what we don’t want to do is to undermine freedom of expression. That’s obviously protected.
What we’re talking about here is deliberate deception. And, yes, that does set the bar high. You’d have to prove an intent to mislead.
But that’s what we do in fraud cases. That’s what we do in defamation cases. So there are plenty of legal examples where we do the same.
And in other professions. If a doctor lies, then they are struck off. If a lawyer lies, then they are disbarred. And yet we seem to have tolerated a democratic culture where politicians can lie with impunity. Well, that’s got to stop.
At the heart of it, it’s a very simple principle. It is never, ever, acceptable for a politician deliberately to lie.– Adam Price, member of the Welsh parliament
Under the amendment you’re proposing, just specifically, how would it work? What would happen to a Welsh [member of Senedd] if they were to be found to have lied?
Like any criminal offence, any person could make a complaint. It would have to be investigated, first of all, or considered by the police as to whether there was sufficient evidence for them to conduct an investigation. And then, if there were, then it would go through the process. They would provide a file to the public prosecutor.
We rule out private prosecutions … in order to prevent this from being kind of weaponized, if you like, by tit-for-tat prosecutions between different political parties or, indeed, by vested interests. So it would only happen if there was sufficient evidence and if it was in the public interest.
We’ve got some carve-outs there to, for example, provide an opportunity when somebody does say something that’s false, they realize their mistake, there’s a period of 14 days [where] they can actually retract and apologize.
And there are exceptions for national security. There are certain circumstances, a fairly narrow set of circumstances, where it might be legitimate to protect collective security for a politician to use misinformation.
So there are reasonable protections there. But at the heart of it, it’s a very simple principle. It is never, ever, acceptable for a politician deliberately to lie.
We’ve got a small number of parliaments around the world, around about half a dozen, where it is already a criminal offence to lie to parliament. So earlier this year, the former chancellor of Austria, for example, Sebastian Kurz, was found guilty of that criminal offence of lying to parliament. The leader of the opposition in the Singaporean parliament is currently accused of a criminal offence of lying to parliament. What we don’t have yet in the world is a … comprehensive ban on deliberate deception by politicians.
And would it, could it, result in jail time, or are you thinking fines would be enough?
The punishment that we’ve set out currently is actually neither fines nor imprisonment. It’s simply disqualification from office. So if you were a sitting politician, you’d be removed from office. If you were a candidate, then you couldn’t stand for an electoral cycle. Our term in our parliament is four years. For a politician, that’s a very severe sanction, you know, in terms of their reputation, etc. So that’s what we’re aiming at at the moment. But obviously, you could look at other criminal sanctions as well.
You mentioned a moment ago the … resignation, at this point, of so many people around the world to the possibility, maybe even likelihood, that politicians are going to lie and are lying regularly.
If we look at the example of Donald Trump, during his [U.S.] presidential term, the Washington Post documented that he made 30,573 false or misleading claims. But as you well know, many, many Americans, his party as well, seem to continue to support him. So that’s a complicating factor when the public is not only accepting it, but voting in politicians who have demonstrably said things that are not true.
I think that example is the reason why we need to legislate, to make deliberate deception a criminal offence.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a very important couple of essays on lying in politics, said that what happens when you accept political lying is not that the public believes the lies, it’s that they stop believing in the very idea of truth itself.
And I think that’s what’s happened in sort of Trumpian America, is that all of politics, then, have suffered in terms of public credibility. People start to believe that all politicians are all the same; they’re all liars. And therefore, it has little effect on Trump’s approval rating because he’s kind of priced in this credibility gap, which has grown in politics.
That’s why we need to set this standard, in order to prevent that happening in democracies in the future and worldwide.