Saint Jeremy And His Battle With The Truth

Corbynistas, where do these words come from, will tell you Jeremy Corbyn is one of the most trusted politicians because he's such a decent, honest bloke. Well, if that's the best we've got, which it isn't by the way, although good ones are scarce, then we need a total clear out.

Lying to, or misleading parliament, is considered to be very naughty by our betters, naughty, naughty, but lying to us is fair game. The leader of Labour's Brexit campaign was on TV last night pressing for Brexit to move ahead even though he admitted he had no idea how it might work out.

He pedalled the now old cliche that the Remain campaign lied just as much as his lot, as if that justified misleading and lying to people any more than the selling of arms to untrustworthy regimes can be justified by the 'if we don't someone else will' line.

He also, and I'm not putting this in quotes in case its not word perfect but it is a quote in effect, said that people always vote without knowing the full facts and that that's just the way it is, that's democracy. It may be in today's Britain, but it shouldn't be. Again he was effectively justifying lying. Probably thinks, like others of his ilk, that lying and a robust debate are the same thing.

In fact the Leave campaign lied on an industrial scale and most interested and engaged people now realise that. As to lies by Remain, well it was a pathetic campaign masterminded by Cameron and Osborne. It was, as opportunist Boris said, a scare campaign.

However, whilst I would have preferred a positive campaign based on what the European Community has done for us, for Europe and for the wider world, we cannot yet say if the problems predicted by Cameron and Osborne are fact or fantasy. They were a prediction and that's dangerous, pulling figures out of the air is dangerous too, they might yet prove to be conservative - sorry for that one.

So lets examine the business of honesty, lying and misleading as a subject in its own right. If I say something is black when it is white that is a lie, simple. If I state a fact which is true but leave out information to deliberately create a false impression and mislead, that too is a lie, some may disagree, but if you deliberately seek to misinform and use a little of the truth along the way in order to do so (or partial statistics come to that), then that in my opinion is a downright lie.

It's more subtle and people can bluster, it's more difficult for the victim of the untruth to detect it, but doesn't that make it all the worse? If you seek to convey a falsehood with a grain of truth thrown in then the deception is all the greater, you're more likely to be believed. Saint Jeremy knows how to lie like a Brexiteer. Politics eh.

You can support this blog by purchasing my gift items at Redbubble, Society 6 or Artflakes