Truth or Dare – Rishi Sunak’s dilemma

John Underwood takes a look at the fallout from the recent TV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and ‘that’ Tory tax claim.

As anybody who has played the party game “Truth or Dare?” knows, a big porky pie can be both embarassing and expensive. So why have the Conservatives tried to suggest that Labour will raise taxes when any such assertion flies in the face of Labour’s well-established and frequently reported policy statements to the contrary?

Well, as every political spin doctor knows Churchill was right when he suggested that a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth pulls its boots on and a couple of recent academic papers illuminate the threat that political lying can pose.

In a recent paper for the International Journal of Press/Politics, Ivor Gaber and Caroline Fisher have suggested that in the age of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump “strategic lieing” has developed as a political tactic.  They suggest that the 2016 Brexit Referendum, the 2019 general election, and Trump’s victory in 2016 offer some evidence that politicians caught lying are not always punished at the ballot box and that strategic political lying has become a priming device to set the news agenda with the ultimate aim of affecting the salience of key issues.

And a recent paper in the journal of the Behavioural Science & Policy Association suggests that bold, simple assertions that are easily processed can be the most effective lies.  The paper even points out that a single repetitive voice retelling the same strategic lie can sound like a chorus of different people echoing the same position.

So, at first glance, strategic lying may appear to be a fruitful – if politically corrupt- strategy.  But (and it’s a very important but) it’s becoming increasingly clear there’s a replacement strategy that can knock “the big lie” on the head and earlier this month Labour used it to great effect on the day after the leaders debate on the BBC.

With the support of a letter from the Treasury’s chief civil servant indicating that – contrary to Rishi Sunak’s claim – civil servants were NOT involved in calculating the Conservative Party’s figures, Labour went on the attack calling the Prime Minister a liar.

It also emerged that the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) had given Sunak a wrap over the knuckles for using misleading tax statistics and it wasn’t the first time the OSR had accused him of falsifying figures.  Earlier this year he was criticised for falsely claiming the government had cleared “the backlog of asylum decisions” when in reality there were almost 100,000 cases where a decision was still to be made.  And to top it all the highly respected chair of the UK Statistics Authority accused the Prime Minister of damaging trust in politicians generally.

Suddenly the issue was less a question of Labour’s tax policy and more a question of the Prime Minister’s integrity.  In a somewhat lukewarm manner, the Tories tried to keep the tax issue going, but it rapidly became clear that it was becoming counter-productive for them.  There was more downside in facing accusations that the Prime Minister was a liar than upside in focussing on Labour’s tax policy.

So, will the Conservatives try to revive the tax question in future election debates?  If they do Labour’s response should be short, sharp and simple.  It should NOT repeat the Conservative tax figure, even to rebut it, but instead it should remember the pure simplicity of the playground chant… “Liar, liar, pants on fire”.  The moral is simple.  If you lie you will find yourself in the hot seat.

Important note:  The number of times in which the Conservative tax figure has been mentioned above is zero.  The number of times the words lie, liar or lying have been mentioned is sixteen.