264
Parliament will debate petition: Make lying in the House of Commons a criminal offence - 23rd October 2023
(petition.parliament.uk)
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
264 points (98.9% liked)
United Kingdom
4105 readers
102 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is a daft idea, it would basically stop any politican from saying anything or making any policy announcements. The people promoting this will be annoyed when MPs treat this deabate as a joke, but it's a completely unrealistic proposal.
Yes it's completely unrealistic to tell the truth.
The key word is "knowingly". Making a statement that is your best understanding of the situation but doesn't turn out to be true in the fullness of time is very different to lying.
But even in that situation they would be accused of lying, so it would have to be investigated. It would massively chill speech.
Given the alternative of having them make outright lies, i.e. regarding the benefits of Brexit? I'm OK with that
So you're saying that it is impossible for a politician to speak without lying ?
I don't care who you normally vote for, would you mind sitting the next election out ? Preferably all the ones after that too.
No, but I'm saying that if you make it illegal "lie" then they will say very little in case they are accused of lying.
Why the scare quotes around lie ? The word has a straight forward meaning which is already defined in House of Commons rules.i.e knowingly mislead.
It's not even "negligently mislead" where they say something they should have known was not true, but the much tougher test of proving they knew it wasn't true.
A ridiculously low bar, and yet you think even that is too high. Is this because you support politicians who have been shown regularly to knowingly mislead ?
The majority of parliament arrive carefully well prepared with facts. It's only a small number who deliberately lie, our former PM has been proved to be one of those.