A short but interesting article appears on the website of Prospect Magazine by A.C. Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities, the title of which is: Should it be illegal to tell lies in parliament? – and, by inference, whether such an act should be punishable in a court of law.

In differentiating twixt an untruth and a lie, Grayling maintains that a lie is a deliberate, conscious untruth, the intention of which is to mislead and manipulate; and in the case of the highest court in the land, the court of parliament; and that deliberate and intentional misleading of fellow legislators and the public at large is a profoundly serious matter.

Grayling poses two questions/examples when it may be necessary/acceptable to lie in Parliament:

One clear case might be when matters of national security are genuinely at stake, in such sensitive circumstances that even parliament cannot yet be told what is happening. Suppose an opposition MP asks a question directly relevant to those circumstances, and in reply a minister tells a conscious and deliberate lie. It might be that the lie is never discovered until government papers are opened to inspection decades later. Is this justifiable? In these circumstances the answer might well be Yes.

A second clear case is when ministers wish to do something that they know will meet serious opposition unless they tell a conscious lie that persuades others to give way. If what they wish to do is a matter of policy, choice or preference, rather than something justifiable on the kind of grounds just envisaged, then the lie is obviously unacceptable, and is the type of case where questions about sanctions arise.

For the sake of what follows, perhaps we can assume an untruth results in misleading the audience to which it is given and is due to a lack of knowledge about the subject matter; whereas a lie results in misleading the audience to which it is given, done knowingly – and invariably done for personal or political gain.

In his article Grayling states that there have been egregious examples of, what he terms, untruths told to parliament in recent times and in so doing citing the Iraq war. Others that immediately spring to mind are: Ted Heath (there will be no loss of sovereignty in our joining what was the EEC); the distortion of truth, or lie, contained in the Coalitions ‘manifesto’ about the recall of MPs; more recently Cameron’s distortion of truth on the matter of Norway being ‘governed by fax’.

Bearing in mind my definition between an untruth and a lie, in my mind it is beyond doubt that all the examples offered in the preceding paragraph were deliberate lies.

Another question arises, following Graying’s article: what is the difference between a lie offered to Parliament and a lie offered to the British people? In any event, where the lie is immediately recognised by the people they can do nothing about it for anything between one and five years – and by the time the people do have the opportunity to hold the politician to account; (a) it will have more than likely to have been forgotten and (b) the political class will do their utmost to ensure it has been forgotten.

Politicians are quick to apologise to the house for things that have ‘gone wrong on their watch’, probably/possibly without their knowledge. So why has Cameron not apologised for lying to the people on the Norway ‘governed by fax’ matter, especially when the dossier I handed to him showed that he had. Would not the ‘stock’ of any politician rise with the public where he/she to return and apologise, especially were it shown that he/she had been mis-briefed? As an aside, it may be recalled that in my response to Cameron’s ‘non-reply’ to the charges I made in my dossier I reminded him that for a politician to be called a liar was, I admitted, a serious matter; and that if he felt his integrity had been called into question, then perhaps he may wish to institute court proceedings. Needless to say, to date, nothing further has been heard.

The relationship between the political class and the people must be one based on truth and that must also be one of the basis for democracy to work for the benefit of all. Politicians are in the position whereby they can decide what is the truth, aided and abetted by the mainstream media. If we are to take Cameron’s statement at face value, made on the steps of Downing Street when he ‘assumed’ office then we still have the position whereby the tail still wags the dog – another reason why our current system of democracy is not fit for purpose.