I published this tweet yesterday:
This is so ridiculous. Everyone knows Dawn Butler is right. Boris Johnson has lied repeatedly in the Commons but that is apparently OK. She says he has - which is the truth - and is suspended from parliament for saying so. Excluding her undermines the credibility of parliament. https://t.co/GKPeTLvkA0
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) July 22, 2021
My friend, Howard Reed, had this to say on Facebook:
Dawn Butler has had to leave the House of Commons for the day after pointing out what everybody with (at least) half a brain in this country knows - that Boris Johnson is a compulsive and inveterate liar.
The rules of the House of Commons are that it is absolutely fine for government ministers to lie with impunity - politicians have done this for generations, with the frequency and seriousness of the lies gradually increasing until Johnson's post-truth administration. But if an MP points out that ministers are lying then that is apparently "unparliamentary language" and gets you chucked out. An insane system.
The entire Westminster parliamentary system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from first principles. I can't think of a single aspect of the UK governmental system that I'd keep as it is. In other words we need a fundamental revolution. Raze the goddamn thing to the ground and start again. A year zero approach.
Any sane person with half a brain would agree.
Why Labour its not saying so is hard to work out.
But good for Dawn Butler.
And let's bring on Howard's year zero approach.
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Well done, Dawn Butler. Hopefully, there will be many more who call out the Quockerwodger in parliament.
There is something very wrong when the person doing the right thing gets punished whilst the person doing the wrong thing gets away with it.
Craig
Is there official parliamentary guidance for appropriate language to refer to someone who utters a statement that is not factually accurate (that is, it is demonstrably false) and then refuses to correct the record? The first may be an honest mistake, but the second turns it into a deliberate and intentional inaccuracy.
If only the English language included some pithy words to describe an deliberately inaccurate statement, or a person who intentionally uttered it.
I sense irony….
At last. Well done Dawn Butler! Any more MPs with a spine?
“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer. I suppose Mr Johnson can cynically repeat that question originally put to the Roman governor 20 centuries ago. And though she did not quite suffer the extreme penalty of crucifixion for having confronted the most powerul, Dawn Butler suffered the same unjust decision verdict of being gound guilty, and refusal to hear her accusations, and the silencing of her proclamation of truth, as the victim who had spoken truth in Jerusalem in 33 AD.
At the risk of making myself unpopular, there is another side.
Serious issues are debated here and passions will run high. To make sure they are contained so it doesn’t just end in punch ups as we have seen in e g the Georgian parliament, we have conventions such as addressing the Speaker, not each other directly. Banning insults is part of that. The Speaker’s job is enforce the rules even when senior ministers try to challenge them. John Bercow did it with energy. It is not their role to assess the validity of the statements. It may look like theatre but I remember the part in Man for All Seasons when Sir Thomas Moore rebukes his son in law for saving he would give no legal rights to the Devil. The rules are there for a reason.
What makes this a bit different is that Dawn Butler could give a reason why a number of statements by Johnson in the House are incorrect. As she pointed out they have been put onto a short video which has been viewed 27 million times, (though not shown on the BBC).
I understand that the leaders of six opposition parties have communicated the substance of those to the Speaker, some weeks ago, and are still waiting for a response.
The rules provide for lies or misinformation to be corrected. I am more concerned that the Speaker has not called the Prime Minister to account, than Dawn Butler’s accusation. It maybe, as so often in our history, a deliberate breaking of the rules will draw attention to a greater wrong. If it does not do so, we have a real need to worry.
When the Speaker fails the members have a duty to take matters into their own hands
The Palace of Westminster – The Old Mother Riley of Parliaments. Discus.
I’m going to be that guy I’m afraid 🙂 I don’t think that allowing MPs to call each other liars will help, in fact I think it will degrade the already low level of debate even further. You may be assuming that the only people who will call out liars are the honest ones. Unfortunately Johnson and co are so shameful that I think they will call everyone else a liar. It’ll descend into a shouting match of grown men and women shouting liar at each other.
The change that would make a difference is for the Speaker to be much more assertive in getting MPs to correct the record. Where it isn’t a difference of opinion, but an MP or the PM has made a statement in Parliament that is patently, provably false, and another MP asks him to correct the record, the Speaker ought to force the liar back to Parliament to read a correction on the record. If necessary banning them from all other business in Parliament until they have done so.
When I read about Dawn Butler’s entirely justified attack on Johnson, and her subsequent expulsion from Parliament for using ‘unparliamentary’ language, my first action was to email her office to thank her for calling out Johnson’s lies, and offer my support. The latter because I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s on the receiving end of vicious online abuse from Johnson supporting trolls.
My second was to reflect on the absurdity of an institution that expels an elected representative who tries to hold the government to account, while doing nothing against the liar himself. The current speaker and his deputy are spineless. No wonder Johnson and his gang of Leaveliars were so keen to see the back of Bercow.
Labour should build on this. Every day we need one MP to call out the PM (or other ministers) as liars……. and make the long walk out of the chamber.
Dawn Butler should be applauded for standing her ground.
I just wish 20-30 opposition members, any opposition party, every day would simply end their speech or question by pointing out one of BoJo’s lies, refuse to take it back and then have to leave for the day. Do it for weeks, months if necessary, the clown needs to be exposed and it is Parliamentary rules that are the problem if when a proven lie is told you cannot call it for what it is. What a democracy we live in. Shamocracy more like.
It’s called misleading the House and as I understand it it’s the duty of the speaker to call back ministers, prime or not, to correct their statement when they’re pointed out. It’s clear the current speaker is so inactive on this point that effectively he has no place being there, which is probably why he has the job.
An excellent idea MarP. That is exactly the kind of thing Johnson and his party need to be exposed to. Every day, one of his lies, or those of the other liars in the cabinet, needs to be called out, and the Speaker forced to respond by asking the accuser to leave to retract their statement.
And, since these accusations will not be made in the heat of the moment, but as a result of calm analysis, the refusal of the accuser to retract them will make the Speaker’s actions in expelling them look increasingly ridiculous. They might even force the Speaker to do their job properly and call johnson and his ministers to account for their lies.
When I emailed my Tory MP listing 10 of Johnson’s proven lies and asked him how he could still support him he replied saying he did not recognise that characterisation of the PM and in any case he was too busy “helping constituents” to address the list of allegations.
As we Scots say – “There’s none so blind as cannot see”
The crime of perjury should be extended to include both the wilful misdirection of parliament and the use of misleading statements by electoral candidates and their agents.
Politicians lying should attract at least (and preferably much greater) the level of penalties faced by those lying to criminal courts. The £350million on the Brexit bus alone should have warranted Boris, Nigel and Michael having to pay for a rerun of the referendum.
Just off the top of the head, in the notorious “Spycatcher Case” in the 1980s, Tony Benn spoke in the House on the affair, and overcame accusations of contempt of court during the prosecution of an ongoing case by reminding the world that he was speaking in “the High Court of Parliament”, and therefore entitled to speak on the affair.
He was correct. In the US, the process of Impeachment is taken directly out of our parliamentary practice, although we gave up using it in the first part of the 19th Century.
I therefore agree that something similar to perjury should cover and qualify the validity of parliamentary speaking.
The thought of Johnson and his Cabinet cronies in the Tower is quite appealing…….!
There is a simple and pithy word that describes very accurately what Johnson and others are up to accuse them of peculation.
Any who don’t wish to be suspended could perhaps do a ‘Dennis Skinner’.
MP: Mr Speaker the PM is a liar.
Speaker: Retract.
MP: OK. The PM does not tell the truth.
Good for Dawn.
She has gone up in my estimation.
My view is that you cannot be governed by a democratic system that uses euphemisms to describe the bad behaviour of those managing that system because of some sort of arcane convention born out of a sense of ruling entitlement. Because that is all it is.
I wonder if The Speaker has received Peter Oborne’s book yet as evidence that our Prime Minister is a liar?
It is high time that Parliament called a spade a spade. The reason for not being able to do so is based on tradition but also because they have been getting away with it for far too long.
Look at the lies around tax and Government money which have been debunked on this most capable of blogs.
We’ve had democracy by deception in this country for far too long.
Enough is enough and I’m with Ivan and Dawn on this one.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/576886
This petition has more than doubled since Dawn Butler did that. In fact it has been going since April and only got over the 10,000 for a response yesterday. I quite expect it to be over 100,000 for a debate when they return. Dawn is getting lots of support.