[Twosugars]

It’s not just Boris Johnson’s lying. It’s that the media let him get away with it
Peter Oborne
The prime minister’s falsehoods are mostly left unchallenged. If this goes on, the integrity of our politics faces collapse


It’s Friday lunchtime and Boris Johnson is in Oldham. He’s live on Sky News, speaking to supporters in front of his Tory battle bus. During a speech lasting no more than 10 minutes, viewers learn that he is building 40 new hospitals. Sounds good. But it’s a lie that has already been exposed by fact-checkers, including the website Full Fact.

The prime minister tells Sky viewers that “20,000 more police are operating on our streets to fight crime and bring crime down”. This assertion is misleading in a number of ways. Recruitment will take place over three years and do no more than replace the drop in officer numbers seen since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

Sky viewers are then informed by Johnson that Jeremy Corbyn “plans to wreck the economy with a £1.2 trillion spending plan”. Labour’s manifesto hasn’t been published, let alone fully costed. Johnson’s £1.2tn is a palpable fabrication. As Full Fact concluded: “Many of the figures behind this estimate are uncertain or based on flawed assumptions.”

Johnson then goes on to say that the Labour leader “thinks home ownership is a bad idea and is opposed to it”. I have been unable to find any evidence of Corbyn expressing this view. Perhaps Johnson is referring to the floated Labour policy that would give “right to buy” to private tenants. The policy, which was only ever supposed to target the wealthiest landlords, has since been dropped and, according to the Financial Times, will not appear in the party’s manifesto.

Johnson then told his TV audience that Corbyn “wouldn’t even stick up for this country when it came to the Salisbury poisonings” and that he sided with Russia. Another obvious lie. In the aftermath of the poisonings, Corbyn wrote in the Guardian: “Either this was a crime authored by the Russian state; or that state has allowed these deadly toxins to slip out of the control it has an obligation to exercise.” The Labour leader also stated that the Russian authorities must be held to account.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s own government is refusing to publish a report into Russian interference in British politics amid reports that a number of wealthy businesspeople with links to Vladimir Putin have donated generously to the Tory party.

At the end of his speech, the Sky News presenter, Samantha Washington, strikingly made no attempt to challenge or correct any of Johnson’s false statements. This was just the latest example among many of the British media letting Johnson get away unchallenged with lies, falsehoods and fabrication.

Welcome to the Conservative party election campaign. I have been a political reporter for almost three decades and have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so regularly, so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson. Or gets away with his deceit with such ease.

Some of the lies are tiny. During a visit to a hospital he tells doctors that he’s given up drink, when only the previous day he’d been filmed sipping whisky on a visit to a distillery. And sips beer on film the day after in a pub.

But many are big. Johnson repeatedly claims that Britain’s continued membership of the EU costs an extra £1bn a month. False.

He told activists that the Tories were building a new hospital in the marginal seat of Canterbury. False – and shockingly cynical.

He told Michael Crick that during the EU referendum campaign, “I didn’t make remarks about Turkey, mate.” He did.

On his potential conflict of interest over his friend Jennifer Arcuri, who received £11,500 from an organisation he was responsible for as London mayor, Johnson said: “Everything was done with complete propriety and in the normal way.” We now know he failed to declare this friendship, and is being investigated by the Independent Office of Police Conduct.

These lies point to a systemic dishonesty within Johnson’s campaigning machine. His party deliberately doctored footage of the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, to make it look as if he was at a loss for words when asked about Labour’s Brexit position. In fact, Starmer had answered confidently and fluently. The video was a deliberate attempt to mislead voters. And when Piers Morgan tackled the Tory chairman, James Cleverly, on the issue, he refused to accept he’d done anything wrong, let alone apologise.

Beyond Johnson and his cabinet, there are unscrupulous Tory briefers working behind the scenes. One of them told journalists last week that Johnson was going to accuse Corbyn of political “onanism” the following day. It was gleefully reported in some papers, but Johnson did not use the phrase in his speech. Political correspondents are being taken for a ride by the Downing Street machine, which is as contemptuous of newspaper readers as it is of the truth.

As someone who has voted Conservative pretty well all my life, this upsets me. As the philosopher Sissela Bok has explained, political lying is a form of theft. It means that voters make democratic judgments on the basis of falsehoods. Their rights are stripped away.

This matters more than ever because this election is the most important in modern British history. If Johnson wins, Britain will leave the EU within a matter of weeks and Johnson himself will serve a five-year term as prime minister.

In theory Johnson should not be able to get away with this scale of lying and deceit. In a properly functioning democracy, liars should be exposed and held to account. But that isn’t happening. As with Donald Trump, for Johnson there seems to be no political price to pay for deceit and falsehood. The mainstream media, as Washington’s response to Johnson’s speech shows, prefers to go along with his lies rather than expose them.

Recently the hugely experienced broadcaster Andrew Marr allowed Johnson to go unchallenged in saying the Tories “don’t do deals with other political parties”. What about the coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in 2010? Or the £1bn “confidence and supply” deal struck with the Democratic Unionist party just two years ago? Marr let Johnson get away with it. So do many others.

A big reason for Johnson’s easy ride is partisanship from the parts of the media determined to get him elected. I have talked to senior BBC executives, and they tell me they personally think it’s wrong to expose lies told by a British prime minister because it undermines trust in British politics. Is that a reason for giving Johnson free rein to make any false claim he wants?

Others take the view that all politicians lie, and just shrug their shoulders. But it’s not true that all politicians lie. Treating all politicians as liars gives a licence for the total collapse of integrity of British politics, a collapse that habitual liars such as Johnson are delighted to exploit. The British media is not holding him to account for his repeated falsehoods. It’s time we journalists did our job, and started to regain our self-respect.

• Peter Oborne is a journalist, commentator and author. His website about the lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations of Boris Johnson is at https://boris-johnson-lies.com

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...on-lying-media

[Twosugars]

To follow are regular updates from the excellent website https://boris-johnson-lies.com/

[Kizzy]

The phrase 'Teflon tory' has never been more apt.

[Twosugars]

He will be found out. If not before election then after. You can only get that far by lying

[Twosugars]

“20,000 more police are operating on our streets to fight crime and bring crime down”
Boris Johnson in a speech in Oldham, live on Sky News

15 NOVEMBER 2019


Claim

The prime minister has regularly claimed that one of his government’s plans is to recruit 20,000 additional police officers. In this instance, he said that 20,000 more police “are operating” on our streets, suggesting that his government had already achieved this goal.

Facts

Recruitment will take place over three years and do no more than replace the drop in officer numbers seen since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

Verdict

Johnson lied. It is a realistic possibility that the Conservatives will recruit an additional 20,000 police officers, but it will take several years and will only cover cuts they have already made.

[Zizu]

But all politicians lie , always have , always will ...


Why pick on Boris


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[Kizzy]

Why be so accepting of lies? .. why elect someone who is a proven and accepted liar and expect them to do what's right for the country?

I've heard of fuzzy logic but this is the fuzziest.

[Livia]

Originally Posted by Zizu

But all politicians lie , always have , always will ...


Why pick on Boris


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Ahhh you're done it now. Kicked the hornet's nest. Good luck to you.

[Twosugars]

“We are getting on with a fantastic program … 20 hospital upgrades, 40 new hospitals”
Boris Johnson in a speech in Oldham, live on Sky News

15 NOVEMBER 2019


Facts

Only six hospitals have been allocated sufficient funding for rebuilding programmes. The Guardian’s health editor Sarah Boseley wrote that “almost all the money earmarked will go to just six NHS trusts, which each have a major hospital badly in need of rebuilding and have had plans waiting for approval.”

Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, the membership organisation of NHS trusts, said funding to complete schemes in 34 other hospitals “remains to be allocated.”

Full Fact concluded: “It’s correct that the government in this announcement has only allocated funding for six hospitals to receive building work by 2025. Up to 38 other hospitals will receive money to develop plans for upgrades between 2025 and 2030, but not to undertake any building work.”

Verdict

Johnson first delivered this lie to The Daily Telegraph. It has since featured prominently on Tory digital campaigning material.

When asked, the Conservative Party failed to give evidence that the prime minister will upgrade 20 hospitals and build 40 new hospitals.

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Livia

Ahhh you're done it now. Kicked the hornet's nest. Good luck to you.

Can you explain this please, do you have an issue with the responses in this thread?

[Kazanne]

If we vote for someone who doesn't lie,none of us would be voting, so we have to go with who we think is the most truthful liar. just to balance things out https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/0...d-andrew-neil/

[Gusto Brunt]

Lying is the new truth.

[Twosugars]

“If somebody asks you to [fill in a form], tell them to ring up the prime minister, and I will direct them to throw that form in the bin”
Boris Johnson, to manufacturers in Northern Ireland

7 NOVEMBER 2019


Claim
Johnson was responding to a Northern Irish exporter asking if he would have to fill in customs forms for goods going to Great Britain after Brexit. Johnson said: “You will absolutely not.” The prime minister had said in a speech: “There will not be checks on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.”
Johnson has made similar claims before. In parliament on 22 October he said: “There will be no checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

Three days after Johnson’s comments in Northern Ireland, the hapless Energy Minister Kwasi Kwarteng backed Johnson in an interview with Sky’s Sophie Ridge. He said Johnson was right in saying there would be no customs checks or forms: “As far as I understand I don’t think there will be. I think the prime minister’s absolutely right.”
Facts
Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told the House of Lords in October that paperwork would be required for goods sent from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.
Verdict
The prime minister’s statement was a lie. Not for the first time, Kwarteng went on to parrot false statements made by a cabinet colleague.

[Liam-]

‘The most truthful liar’ is a very bizarre concept to base an election on

[Kazanne]

Originally Posted by Liam-

‘The most truthful liar’ is a very bizarre concept to base an election on

It's a bizarre selection .

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Kazanne

If we vote for someone who doesn't lie,none of us would be voting, so we have to go with who we think is the most truthful liar. just to balance things out https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/0...d-andrew-neil/

You can live in a post truth era if you want... what makes you think it will stop at politics? If you accept this then what's next, nicotine is a cure for cancer?
Green energy gives you aids?...

[Liam-]

Originally Posted by Kazanne

It's a bizarre selection .

Not really, a proven liar, with bigoted tendencies, or a man who wants to help everyone and has fought against bigotry for his entire career, simple choice

[Denver]

Are we really gonna bring up links to Putin when your hero is best freinds with terrorists?

[Twosugars]

Originally Posted by WickedSkengMan

Are we really gonna bring up links to Putin when your hero is best freinds with terrorists?

Calling Corbyn a ‘terrorist sympathiser’ is just a way to prevent awkward questions
Daniel Finn
Labour’s leader draws fire because he doesn’t go along with the double standards ruling the UK’s relations with foreign powers

Last week Jeremy Corbyn was branded a “terrorist sympathiser” by a heckler in Glasgow, who demanded to know where his “Islamic jihad scarf” could be found.

The moment, gleefully covered by the rightwing press, lost some of its lustre when it emerged that the heckler, a Church of Scotland minister called Richard Cameron, allegedly had a back catalogue of Islamophobic and homophobic tweets. But the reverend’s terrorist sympathiser insult did not come out of nowhere. David Cameron, then serving as prime minister, denounced Corbyn and his colleagues in precisely the same terms when he opposed airstrikes in Syria in December 2015. And Boris Johnson accused Jeremy Corbyn of seeking to “legitimate the actions of terrorists” in his speech after the 2017 Manchester bombing.

Johnson seemed confident that public opinion would share his view of Corbyn’s speech as “absolutely monstrous”. But polls suggested that the majority of people agreed with the Labour leader that terrorist attacks on British soil were connected, at least in part, to the country’s foreign policy. The “terrorist sympathiser” label appears to be as subjective as the word “terrorist” itself.

Much of the criticism directed at Corbyn focuses on his relationship with Sinn Féin in the 1980s and 90s. During the 2017 general election campaign, Boris Johnson tweeted a photo of Corbyn with Martin McGuinness in 1995, deriding his claim to have never met the IRA: “You cannot trust this man!” By the time that photo was taken, the Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, had already shaken hands with the then US president, Bill Clinton; two years later, McGuinness would be a guest in Downing Street. It has been widely reported that Adams and McGuinness were still members of the IRA’s army council at the time. But Clinton, Tony Blair and the Unionist leader David Trimble all held talks with them in their capacity as Sinn Féin politicians – a distinction vital for the entire peace process.

While successive prime ministers insisted publicly that they would never “talk with terrorists”, there was in fact discreet contact between British government officials and the IRA throughout the conflict. William Whitelaw, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland at the time, even negotiated directly with the IRA leadership during the truce of 1972. Pragmatic considerations trumped any sense of moral outrage.

Corbyn’s critics insist that his record of engagement with Irish republicans is very different, because he supported their political goals. It’s quite true that leading voices of the British Labour left argued for Irish unity in the 1980s, much to the displeasure of unionists in Britain and Northern Ireland alike. Corbyn himself wasn’t a prominent figure at the time, and became an MP only in 1983; Ken Livingstone, then head of the Greater London Council, was much better known, and his comments on the Northern Irish conflict attracted a great deal of controversy. If support for a united Ireland made Corbyn and Livingstone into fellow travellers of the IRA, by the same logic, those who defended the union with Britain shared a political objective with the loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of deaths during the Troubles. The argument of guilt by association can easily backfire on those who deploy it.

The Labour leader has also faced sharp criticism for his meeting with representatives of Hamas in 2009. But even Mike Gapes, the former Labour MP who is one of Corbyn’s fiercest critics, had called for talks with the “moderate” elements of Hamas in 2007, and Tony Blair later described the boycott of Hamas after it won the 2006 Palestinian elections as a mistake. Blair himself met in private the Hamas leaders Khaled Meshaal and Ismail Haniyeh only four years ago.

And while Corbyn expressed “regret” for using the term “friends” in reference to delegates from Hamas – after it elicited an indignant response from critics – there was no such outrage when Conservative and Labour politicians referred to the Saudi royal family as valued “friends”, allies and partners of the UK in the course of a parliamentary debate on continued arms sales for the Yemen war, which those MPs supported. It is certainly difficult to imagine a consistent set of principles for a prospective British prime minister that would put Hamas beyond the pale yet allow for a close relationship with the Saudi Arabian monarchy, given the UK’s support for its war in Yemen, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Of course, violence against civilians – from the Isis-inspired massacres in France to the deliberate targeting of civilians in Yemen – is a crime in all circumstances. But the way we talk about terrorism, and the application of the “terrorist” label by governments, has always been arbitrary and self-serving. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan denounced the African National Congress in South Africa as terrorists, while supporting insurgent groups elsewhere whose record of violence against civilians was incomparably worse, from Angola to Afghanistan, Cambodia to Nicaragua. The Clinton administration initially branded the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as a terrorist organisation, before enlisting it as an ally against Slobodan Milosevic. In recent years, the US and the UK have kept the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on their list of proscribed terrorist groups, but accepted Syrian groups closely linked with the PKK as partners in the war against Isis. “Terrorism”, in this sense, is simply the use of violence by non-state groups without the blessing of the US State Department.

If Corbyn had been willing to internalise this value system and its peculiar set of taboos, he would have attracted much less controversy in his time as Labour leader. But the foreign policy consensus works much better when it doesn’t have to be explicitly articulated by those who support it. Insults such as “terrorist sympathiser” are meant to discourage awkward questions about the double standards that govern Britain’s relationship with the outside world.

• Daniel Finn is a journalist and historian from Ireland, and author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...uble-standards

[Zizu]

Originally Posted by Liam-

Not really, a proven liar, with bigoted tendencies, or a man who wants to help everyone and has fought against bigotry for his entire career, simple choice

Maybe a more balanced , possibly more realistic portrait of Corbyn may have been better ..


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[Zizu]

Originally Posted by WickedSkengMan

Are we really gonna bring up links to Putin when your hero is best freinds with terrorists?

You were slightly more direct than me ...


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[Twosugars]

Originally Posted by Zizu

Maybe a more balanced , possibly more realistic portrait of Corbyn may have been better ..


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Feel free to provide it. With proofs.

[Zizu]

Originally Posted by Twosugars

Feel free to provide it. With proofs.

There’s really no point is there .. you’ve made your mind up on him ..




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[The Slim Reaper]

Originally Posted by Zizu

There’s really no point is there .. you’ve made your mind up on him ..




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This debate always goes the same way, and always ends when folks ask for proof.

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Zizu

There’s really no point is there .. you’ve made your mind up on him ..




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Aka there's no proof.