I hate politics – plain and simple. I’m good with the principals and the objectives, but it is the execution I have a problem with. When I say execution, of course I mean the way they do it – unfortunately and too often the literal sense is also true.
Politics is all about lying. This should not be a surprise since a very high percentage of politicians have practiced or trained in law; or The Art of Lying, as I call it.
So I had better define ‘lying’ in case they are coming for me with the pitchforks.
The accepted definition fits well with ‘I did not steal the biscuit’ – when in fact you did. However, if ever there was an inadequate definition, that is it. Let’s call this example childish fibbing.
To lie (and I deliberately avoid saying, to tell a lie) you must know the truth. You must then do something that causes another to believe or act on something you know is untrue. For the English language students I see lying as a verb, not a noun.
Let’s see this definition in action and test how well it stands up.
The first question has to be, ‘is it wrong to tell a lie’. The answer has to be, not always. The classic example of this is contained in the question from WW2, ‘are you hiding any Jews?’ When the dying man asks if he is going to die, you may chose to reassure him that he is doing fine, to give him some comfort in his last hours. We all know instances when we would protect others from the stark truth.
I like to think about the liar rather than the lie. In a sense this makes the concept easier. Now, I can say that too many politicians are liars rather than that they tell lies. If someone tells a lie that is a single event. Liars, is a way of life, a practiced form of behaviour; they go on doing it again and again.
So, how do they lie. Here it gets very interesting – and remember, a prerequisite is that the liar knows the truth or reasonably should do. Here are some common techniques of the liar:
1. The blatant lie. Jackie Baillie tells the people of Helensburgh that an independent Scotland would close the base at Faslane and 12,000 would lose their jobs. This is the straight lie. She knows that a Scottish Government is committed to retain the base and in fact grow employment at the base under conventional forces to protect our shores, protect our oil and gas assets, our fishing shores and our renewable energy at sea. The MoD, Babcock Marine, and Lockheed Martin all concur that around 520 jobs are directly related to Trident and would ultimately be relocated. There are so many examples of this form of blatant lie. If the truth be told, the UK Government could decide that battlefield nuclear weapons are the way forward and a lot cheaper. Under increasing political pressure this is a realistic option. In that case, Faslane nuclear jobs would move, probably to Aldermaston in Berkshire and the entire base would close; because defense is not in the hands of the Scottish people. The real threat to Faslane is in fact THE UNION.
2. Rewriting history. An independent Scotland will not be able to share the pound. Aside from the fact that it is neither the UK’s pound nor England’s pound and the fact that Scotland has contributed around £4 Billion annually as their share of interest accrued maintaining the pound, recent history tells a different story. First of all, the custodian of the pound is the Bank of England. They are controlled by the Monetary Policy Committee made up of 9 individuals; 4 from London and 5 from India, the US and Canada. Scotland is not, nor ever has been, represented. Furthermore, the so-called bail out of the banks was NOT the Bank of England. The US Fed, in fear of a run on debt, bailed out the banks to the tune of around 1.3 Trillion. The lion’s share went to the biggest failure, Barclays who benefitted more than 10 times more than RBS. Scotland cannot influence UK inflation mathematically so in terms of sharing, Scotland gets to use the pound and the terms are dictated to them without any form of recourse or representation.
3. The half truth, or economical with the truth. Keeping it topical, because there are so many examples, Ed Miliband’s claim to get the debt down is farcically ‘economic with the truth’. Let’s see. The budget deficit carried forward from New Labour in 2010 was around £200 Billion, Structural deficit was around £80 Billion and the national debt is just north of £1.5 Trillion. So this needs a bit of clarity. The national debt has simply been increasing for years with no signs of let up. Why is that? So here the thing. The budget runs the UK. We take taxes etc as income and spend money to keep the country running on a day to day basis. We don’t have enough money to do this so we borrow. Labour left us with a budget borrowing deficit of about £200 Billion of which £80 Billion was structural. As this was a deficit in that year it gets added to the national debt – which rises. They could have got it down, but they didn’t and anyway, £80 Billion of that was structural – so, extremely difficult to do. Structural deficit is borrowing to do something unplanned yet unavoidable. So, if through global warming we had to build a 6 feet wall around the UK and spread the cost over 10 years then we would have an enormous structural deficit for 10 years. We could ignore it, but then half of the UK would be under water and paddling to work, but only if that work was above 6 feet. The Tories have managed to get the budget deficit down to around £90 Billion, so that gets added to the national debt – which now sits just north of £1.7 Trillion. So, back to Ed Miliband. If he manages to balance the books and get the budget down or should I say spending down by £90 Billion the national debt stays the same. If he gets the budget deficit down to 1 penny, the debt goes up by 1p. Every year the debt goes up further. And here is another marvelous con. Let’s say Ed Miliband gets the budget deficit down to £20 Billion for the next 4 years – quite an achievement! Then in year 5 he achieves a budget surplus of £1 then THE DEBT COMES DOWN BY £1 – Fantastic, but the debt is actually 4 * £20 Billion, or £80 Billion higher than when he started and made his promise. So his claim is complete mince – it’s not going to happen – especially not, because despite what he says, he is still New Labour so long as he has idiots like Murphy running parts of the show – although that will change in May 2015.
4. The implied fact. North Sea oil and gas is riddled with deception. A collection of deception would include the fact that had Scotland voted YES we would be in serious trouble with the low oil price. The projected date for hand-over was 6 Mar 2016. This would then include transition times that could run for some time. Who knows what the oil price would be then and it ignores the fact that the pressure on oil prices has been manufactured to impact Russia – this will change. Of course, Scotland is not dependent on oil – however, Westminster is with it’s enormous national debt and lack of liquidity. Hence the term ‘Better Together’. We have the liquidity, the UK has the debt. There can be no doubt there are massive reserves still to be tapped on the north coast and west coast and potentially £1.5 Trillion reserves in the current fields – albeit more expensive to extract. However, it is also clear that the west coast will not see any extraction (BP has already completed the exploration and licensing) so long as we have Trident at Faslane. Of course the ‘implied fact’ also ignores the fact that a socially responsible and green oriented Scottish Government would want to wean themselves off fossil oil in the medium to longer term as a matter of policy.
5. Ducking the truth. Trident is a great example of ducking the truth. Despite the vast capital and operational costs to maintain Trident the whole truth is being covered up. BP has carried out exploratory drilling and secured an extraction license but was unable to follow this through because of Trident maneuvers. At one time the Clyde launched 300 ships per year. Can anybody see this happening with Trident at the mouth of the Clyde? 300,000 – 400,000 jobs on the Clyde and dependent on the Clyde may well have been sacrificed against 520 nuclear jobs at Faslane. But the biggest red herring of all is the deterrent value of Trident. First of all, if the UK is serious about avoiding an attack perhaps they should recognise that the English Empire is long gone and it is time we got our nose out of other country’s affairs. The tiny UK has the 5th largest defense budget in the world. All that aside, in 1982 Argentine invaded UK sovereign territory. Were they concerned about the threat of Trident? not a bit. David Coburn of UKIP stated that this was a job for our army? Has he no idea how close we came to getting thumped. Without the US we would have really struggled. We went out there full of bravado – and discovered the might of exocet missiles and super-Etendard aircraft. What people in the UK fail to see because the truth has been denied us, despite the ease with which we can uncover information, Trident is not and never was meant to be a deterrent to anything. Enoch Powell, during the Irish troubles revealed that Scotland was strategically important because it was so far from the US – thus buying them time to react.
Final point. We in the UK do not have a culture of suicide. The Japanese did during WW2 and many in the Middle East and places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan use suicide as a weapon. Of course the world knows we in the UK don’t have suicidal instincts. If we use Trident the world is over. Logically, the world knows we will never use Trident – so, it IS NOT A DETERRENT – FULL STOP.
6. Doing the Goebbels. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi master of propaganda, famously said, ‘the bigger the lie the more believable it becomes’. Most of these lying techniques also benefit from the Goebbels effect. When you listen to the lies that come out of Labour in Scotland and Liberals in Scotland it is clear where they get their influence. Sadly, there are so many innocent people who see a really, really big lie and feel that it is so big, how could it possibly be a lie?
ASK JOSEPH GOEBBELS
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