Parliament's Powers to Prosecute Liars

This article in The Independent looks at Parliaments ancient powers to prosecute liars and those in contempt, last used in the 1880s. There have been new calls to employ such powers after witnesses provided contrary evidence to Parliamentary Inquiries.
"In the US anyone found in contempt of a Senate or House Committee can be reported to the US Attorney..."
For Interactive Democracy I propose much wider sanctions against lying in public life to keep public debate clean. This could be operated in a similar way to the Advertising Standards Authority, which responds to public complaints. It could have legal powers to investigate deceit and use a variety of powers, everything from a public warning to jail.

Science and Politics

On the BBC Radio4's Start the Week Andrew Marr asks how far scientific evidence can influence the political agenda. Professor David Nutt is a respected researcher working in the field of drugs, but is best known as the government advisor who was sacked by the Home Secretary for comparing the risks of horse-riding with taking ecstasy. He argues for a rational debate on drugs policy based on objective evidence. Mark Henderson despairs that this will never happen while only one of our 650 MPs is a scientist. But the former Labour minister, David Blunkett, defends his profession, arguing that even evidence-based policy must take into account public opinion and perception.
One of the dangers of all forms of democracy is that it ignores evidence. Or that only the evidence that supports a preconceived policy is used. Interactive Democracy has a number of ways of dealing with this problem:-

1. It provides an open, free and fair forum for everyone, including all the scientists in the country.
2. It allows leaders to emerge from all fields, not just from the political class.
3. The debate provides the opportunity to change people's minds, raise questions, challenge and clarify.
4. The system gives the opportunity for all to rank the type of evidence presented, from heresay to empirical and everything in between.
5. Contributions to the debate can be filtered by the type of evidence and by demographics, including the qualifications of the contributor. This provides both citizens and politicians the ability to filter the debate as they see fit, for example by those holding PhDs.
6. Politicians can both contribute to the debate in its early stages, in order to shape opinion, and analyse the debate in order to help formulate referendum options, request further study or instigate limited trials and experiments.
7. New laws and policies should have clearly defined measurable objectives, reviewed by the Office for National Statistics. Progress against the objective would be published on-line as part of the ID site, which would highlight failures of policy for reassessment.
8. This should all be done under the umbrella law against lies in public life.

Such a system may not be perfect, it may be quite a 'bun fight', but it goes some way towards counteracting today's problem of politicians wielding the power to silence evidential truth.

(Further news of Prof. Nutt.)

Secret Loans and True Value

The Bank of England has only recently admitted that it provided £62 billion to HBOS and RBS in October 2008, with the full knowledge and consent of the Government. Mervyn King recognised that the secrecy of this loan was a crucial element in preventing a collapse in the banking sector and was thus in the public interest.

Previously I have called for systems to ensure that politicians tell the truth, but the apparent necessity of this deceit calls that idea into question. However, it may fall into a category of exceptional circumstances in the public interest, and I continue to believe that there should be legal sanctions against politicians who commit more common and self serving lies.

More on this story here.

Lies

Free and fair debate is crucial to any type of effective democracy. Lies corrupt the very essence of this ideal and I think we should be considering how to use the law to combat lies in public life.

What is a lie? It is a statement, presented as fact, that is unsupported by evidence.

An un-truth is not a lie if the person communicating it believes it to be true and has evidence which in fact, turns out to be wrong. Plato wrote about this in Theaetetus (360BCE) and it is known to philosophers as the Tripartite Theory of Knowledge.

Could the law be used to punish liers? Or is the scale of the problem just too vast?

I don't think we should be punitive about off the cuff remarks, which, due to the sloppy nature of our spoken language, can cause misrepresentation. But perhaps we should be more demanding of prepared statements made by individuals in positions of authority and by organisations.

It may also be useful to split the issue into three areas:

1. Politicians and public servants
2. The Media
3. The Internet

It seems to me logical that we should be stringent about the truth of statements prepared by politicians and public servants. This would include prepared statements made in the House of Commons or to the media and simple verbal statements of fact (Did you do that? Yes or No.)

We should also be careful about the power of the media to corrupt debate with falsehoods. This does not mean that they will necessarily have to reveal their anonymous sources, who may have a secret truth that it is in the public interest to reveal, but it does mean that they may have to qualify their statements with "According to several sources..."etc.

The Internet is perhaps the thorniest problem because individuals can so easily publish whatever they want and some of the written content may be very conversational in tone. It is also an international media and it may be unclear where an author resides and, therefore, which jurisdiction appertains. However, British organisations and authority figures could easily be held to account for their online communication.

Interestingly, the ease with which the Internet's wide range of sources can be searched is perhaps one of its saving graces, as evidence can be gathered quickly, using a search engine, that proves or disproves suspect statements. And news media organisations, publishing on the Internet, who are threatened by legal proceedings against their dishonest statements, will become more trusted sources of information than"Joe Blogs".

How would such a system work?

Perhaps it requires an "Authority" like the Advertising Standards Agency, who could take note of complaints, decide if a case is to be answered, demand a public apology and a re-statement of the culprits position and, if necessary, prepare a case for the civil courts. I'd hope that few cases were brought, but the deterrent would be strong.