Editorials

Liars and Hypocrites

19 September 2017

By Lois

The claim the leave campaign made last year that the NHS would receive an extra £350 million a week if we were to leave the EU, was, is and always will be, bogus. Many have accepted this as fact by now, but not, it appears, has Boris Johnson. He repeated the figure in a recent article for the Daily Telegraph, making it astoundingly clear he expects even now to lie blatantly about what post-Brexit Britain will look like to the many who trusted him before the referendum. Theresa May has dismissed the comments with a blasé ‘Boris is Boris’ – a comment clearly not designed to instil the public with great confidence in the Cabinet.

And how long have we been saying ‘Tories are Tories’ or ‘politicians are politicians’? How much longer can we do that for? Could anyone say for certain May isn’t distancing herself from a lie that she may have endorsed had it furthered her cause? There is a reason people don’t trust politicians, and that’s it. They lie as and when it suits them. We need to stop talking about politicians the same way we talk about children; the longer we excuse or expect manipulative out-right lies, the greater a time before we can expect anything else.

The government has become something of a circus; a reality show in which we vote for the biggest characters and those whose dresses are the most sparkly. Figures like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg stand in the limelight because they make the most noise, and numerous politicians have been cast out because they didn’t dress correctly or didn’t understand spin. The £350 million pound lie is only the tip of the iceberg in a long line of deceptions from the government regarding Brexit, and lies like it have become the bedrock for most contemporary politics. I do not think that’s an exaggeration: it’s how Donald Trump was elected, it’s how the Brexit campaign became hazy, and it’s what the rise and fall of many politicians in the last decade have depended on. Blatant hypocrisy is what we get from our Prime Minister, and we’ll get just the same from the rest of them.

 

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