Untruth in politics

Paul Sagar says that Tony Blair “initiated an era in British politics where the truth was a worthless commodity”, an era which Cameron and Clegg are continuing.
For me, this raises two questions: why is there so little demand for the truth, and why should we care?
I suspect there are two mechanisms which lead to a tolerance of untruth. One is that people - quite rationally - don’t pay much attention to party politics. This means that it is only strong, bold claims - “we want to abolish tuition fees”, “45 minutes from doom” - that grab their attention. But strong, bold claims are apt to be wrong.
Secondly, voters, or at least journalists, want certainty, or at least the illusion thereof - a desire compounded by a statistical illiteracy which renders them incapable of understanding confidence intervals or probabilities. This too generates a demand for clear but wrong statements rather than unclear but accurate ones.
But why should we care if there‘s a demand for untruth? Surely, all sides are equally capable of promulgating lies, half-truths and misrepresentations. So what’s the damage?
It would, I think, be a simple category error to complain that untruths degrade public discourse and increase distrust. Politics is about power, not fluffy things like truth and trust. Instead, I suspect the problem is that politics doesn’t just value untruth, but does so asymmetrically. I’m thinking of three biases here:
1. Some claims are more closely scrutinized than others, so it‘s harder to get away with inaccuracies. Propositions which fall outside the Overton window get a rougher ride than “mainstream” ideas.
The bias here is not just against leftist ideas, but against libertarian ones too: proposals to legalize drugs, say, get a harder time from the media - if they get any time at all - than does a defence of the drugs war.
2.  To utter an untruth convincingly - a lie, or a simple statement shorn of caveats - requires self-confidence. It is public schoolboys who are more likely to have this. It’s no accident that the men Paul accuses of promoting untruth into politics were expensively “educated.”
3. We tend to trust others more if they are like us. Given that the media is dominated by people from rich backgrounds, this means that untruths from politicians from similar, rich, backgrounds are less closely scrutinized. Just compare the chummy tone of so many interviews with politicians to the rougher rides that protestors or union leaders get.
The upshot here is that the demand for untruth leads to a bias in favour of the status quo and of inequality, even if the particular untruths are not explicitly used to argue for inequality.

Comments

[BenSix]

I'd disagree on one point: truth was hardly valued before Saint Lynton arose to favour. I'd recommend Mark Curtis's "Web of Deceit" as an investigation into just how deeply rooted lies have been in British foreign policy. (And speculate that "Yes Minister" must have had its origins somewhere.)

[Abdullah]

What BenSix said. It's also the fatal flaw behind 'The Rise of Political Lying.'

[Phil]

I don't think the point is that politicians never lied before Blair - obviously that would be a ridiculous claim. The specific disservice Blair did to the truth was to proclaim - and trade on - his own honesty and sincerity, while in fact being as big a hypocrite as any other politician; what David Runciman calls second-order hypocrisy. Sir Humphrey devalued telling the truth; Blair devalued the *idea* of telling the truth.