If you want lies, you'll get liars

It’s a lazy, easy accusation against politicians to say they all lie. In reality, many politicians only lie because it works. They’ve understood that enough voters want to hear their lies and believe them, which makes the right lies, told well, the quickest way to get power and to hang on to it.

The American journalist and writer H L Mencken summed up the process quite neatly, starting with a point I’ve felt for a long time: politicians – perhaps I should say most politicians – have no special aptitude for government, only an aptitude for getting into government.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

I’m not sure about its never being possible to satisfy B without looting A. After all, if US healthcare hadn’t been allowed to keep festering, and the British NHS hadn’t been repeatedly hacked at, for the last ten years, wouldn’t both A and B have benefited from better services in our present pandemic?

Perhaps I’m a little less cynical than Mencken. Or am I just less realistic?

What interests me most, though, is Mencken’s reference to the process of finding people who “pant and pine” for a promise that is unlikely to be kept. Isn’t that the incentive for politicians to lie? Or, put it in other words, if you want politicians to lie to you, isn’t it likely that you’ll end up with lying politicians?

Vote for lies and you'll get liars

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are saddled, for now, with political leaders for whom the lie seems to be as natural as breathing. At the start of the Coronavirus crisis, the UK Prime Minister claimed that the NHS was fully prepared for any eventuality. As well as the impressive rate of growth of deaths generally in the UK, the number of deaths of healthcare workers denied adequate protective equipment, proves how entirely false that statement was. Johnson’s good at thanking front-line staff for their courage and selflessness, less good at protecting them.

Trump’s lies have been more barefaced still, and compounded by irresponsible ignorance. Having suggested that injecting disinfectant might protect against the virus, whereas it’s much more likely to kill you, he attempted on the following day, to pass off the comment as “sarcasm”. That’s even though hundreds of millions have been able to see him on TV making the remark without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

At least a large minority of Americans seem happy to maintain their trust in Trump despite his being caught repeatedly in easily exposed lies. In the UK, the position is worse: a majority of the electorate still believes in Johnson, however often he shows he can’t be trusted. They “pant and pine” to be told what they want to hear, especially in the atmosphere of fear that comes with a crisis,  when it’s comforting to believe government is looking after you,

Most recently, the UK government has made a number of unrealisable promises, just as Mencken warned. One was that the UK would be carrying out Coronavirus tests at a rate of 100,000 a day by the end of April. By the 29th, we had reached some 81,611, though that included people receiving more than one test in a day.

Then suddenly, on the 30th, the day of the deadline, the UK reached 122,347. A brilliant success. The Health Secretary manfully and modestly claimed it as a triumph not for himself, but for the Health Service. A matter for celebration, in any case.

Sadly, a lot of people, anxious to believe whatever they’re told by the government, will take that as gospel. But when we look at the detail, we see that those 122,347 tests actually only affected 73,000 people. Mark Twain once commented that:

Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

Indeed. Most people understood that 100,000 target to mean 100,000 people tested, but if you do enough repeat tests on the same people, you can get there with just 73,000 people. Dexterous sleight of hand.

A still more curious fact is that 39,000 of those tests weren’t actually carried out on the 30th. They were sent to people who had ordered them. Who knows when the tests will be used? Or whether they’ll be used at all?

So people actually tested on the last day of the month may have been under 40,000.

That reminds me of one of the classic lies: “the cheque is in the post”.

How about “the test is in the post”?

Believe it if you want. But if you do, you’ll only be asking to be deceived again. And right now, a lot of people are dying.