Dawn Butler MP was right, yesterday, to highlight the extent to which untruths have been told in parliament and to add that people have lost their lives as a result.
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| Dawn Butler MP |
Accusations of lying are very serious and that's why the House of Commons has stringent rules to prevent MPs levelling them at one another. However, a significant boundary seems to have been crossed in the present parliament. Firstly, 'untruths' in the political world are often a matter of context and opinion. But, as Butler said, in many of the cases she was citing whatever was said had led to people losing their lives. Secondly, although she gave examples of how truth had been damagingly misrepresented, she was punished yet there is no mechanism currently being effectively used to hold to account those who have told lies. As a parliamentary democracy, we seem to have lost our grip on the difference between truth and untruth and to have undermined the various systems intended to expose lying and hold to account those who abuse truth.
To say that somebody lies should never be done lightly or without evidence. But what she said appears to have struck chords all round the country in many different quarters. It would be improper to speculate on contexts about which we know little and conclude someone is lying. Each of us might have an opinion but we can only call out lying where it is something we have experienced and where we have evidence. If truth is being abused, our duty is to speak for our own area of experience and expertise.
In the Social Care sector it is indeed the case that, because of what has been said at the dispatch box, people have lost their lives. I was working part-time in a care home last year. We were repeatedly told by government ministers that 'a ring of protection has been put around care homes'. I'm retired and found myself in the rather unusual position of being a nurse trained in infection control working as a carer in a pandemic. I had worked on a haematology unit where we were required to cover an infectious diseases unit at night during the initial phases of HIV. Haematology patients are often severely immunocompromised so we had to take enormous care not to transmit infection between units (it was actually a pretty crazy arrangement.) So when COVID-19 struck I was immediately conscious just how vulnerable care home residents were and how extremely open every home would be to transmission of the virus. It would take only a few days for it to spread widely within homes and it would clearly be life-threatening to many elderly people.
Families were faced with a dilemma. Some thought about whether they should care for their relative at home but were swayed by the fact that 'a protective ring' was being thrown around care homes and believed they would be safer left where they were. Yet at exactly the time this statement was first being made, I was taking phone calls from hospitals who had been instructed to discharge COVID+ patients and untested patients into care homes. We refused, but many did not and, in fairness, where were these patients to go? As staff, we objected, we warned, we wrote to our MPs and the CQC but the message 'there is a ring of protection' in place was repeated. We were directed to online sites setting out regulations for 'safe procedures' I knew to be unsafe or unachievable in the circumstances, we had no PPE and we were under huge pressure to accept COVID+ residents.
When the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary make statements that tangibly and immediately impact on people's ability to make life-saving decisions they ought to be honest. When they are repeatedly challenged about statements and continue to assert that they are true, we assume it is on the basis they have checked the facts. It could not both be true that 'a protective ring' was in place and homes were being forced to take in COVID+ patients, employing agency staff who move between homes to cover for sickness and isolation.
The point I am making here is not a criticism of what was or wasn't done (that's a different story) but a protest at the repeated statement of something that, very quickly, everyone could see was untrue. That constantly re-iterated lie was responsible for thousands of deaths. Had the lie not been told there was the possibility that something could have been done both systemically by professionals and for individuals by their families and carers.
Dawn Butler's point is that there are examples of this kind of distortion of truth right across issues, sectors and departments. When parliament cannot distinguish between truth and untruth, or between opinion and proven fact we are in trouble. When parliament cannot hold all MPs including prime ministers to account for the truth of what they do and say, we need an overhaul of our parliamentary systems. When MPs who are trying to point to the truth are expelled while those who repeat untruth are protected, we are not seeing democracy function. The lie becomes 'all is well' when, in truth, all is very far from well.
In our current circumstances we need more MPs who will pay the price of speaking up. If the opposition benches were to empty out every time a challenge is met with prevarication or lying, the Speaker would have to take action to make the government accountable.
'Every time somebody discovers a truth {s}he becomes a stone in society's shoes.' Bangambiki Habyarimana The Pearl of Great Price.
