Wales could become first country to criminalise lying politicians
Lack of trust in politics is a crisis point for democracy and a UK-wide issue. Can Wales lead the way in repairing this by taking on lying?
@BylinesCymru Love it but wonder how many you'd have left.
Think the courts would get blocked up with the number of determinations of whether a statement was a "deliberate misleading" or a "reasonable interpretation of facts"...
Personally, I'd prefer to follow the model in The Last Continent (Terry Pratchett):
"We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they are elected"
"Why?"
"It saves time."
@BylinesCymru Wonder how well such laws would work.
Next week: ‘Wales becomes first anarchist country’
@BylinesCymru Depends on who decides what a lie is.
@BylinesCymru
Needs to be extended to the Media, including online.
Publishing something you know (or reasonably should have known) to be untrue should be a punishable offence.
@BylinesCymru First, a bit of web design feedback: the grey line under the heading is perhaps a bit too light.
It is an interesting idea, but this proposed law allows any statement reasonably inferrable to be an opinion to be fine... so it is doubtful how much of a different this proposal would actually make given how self-serving and selectively blind to reality opinions can be.
@Trajecient diolch for the feedback. I think if it happened it would be used only in the most obvious cases of misinformation spreading - like in the lies told about 20mph after they’d been publicly disproven after basic factchecking.
@BylinesCymru Improved safeguards against the most blatant lies isn't nothing, but in relation to the scale of political dishonesty out there it seems like a lot is left to be desired.
But, still, incremental progress given politicians can potentially be the very people most resistant to politically inconvenient levels of accountability of politicians is probably the most that can be hoped for as a next step.