Are all our politicians born liars?

Are they? Do all politicians routinely lie?

I would contest that. Some certainly do – Boris Johnson for instance – but most are more like Alan Clark once put it, economical with the actualité. That doesn’t make them monsters or sociopaths. It’s a very human trait to put the best spin on your own actions and intentions, but when it goes too far, as it often does in politics, objective truth is the casualty. Inconvenient facts are quietly suppressed. The result is an untrustworthy mash-up of aspiration and misrepresentation that’s fed to the electorate as promises.

In this election, it feels as if we’ve all taken a holiday from reality.

First we had the Tories, who are promising £17bn of tax cuts while improving public services (you’re having a laugh). Then we had Labour who plan magically to turbo-charge growth to avoid spending cuts arising from a financial black hole in their plans (pull the other one).

And now we have the SNP. At the party’s manifesto launch yesterday, John Swinney said a vote for the SNP was a vote for independence and that an independent Scotland would have a richly funded and staffed NHS with no public spending cuts (contrary to every credible analysis of Scotland’s post-independence finances). This while he attacked Labour over and over for failing to come clean about impending cuts.

Rishi Sunak's tax claims raised eyebrows (Image: free)

He argued that spending shortfalls in Scotland were really Westminster’s fault, knowing full well that it will never be him and his party that have to make the maths work at the Treasury.

Do they think we’re daft?

Politicians always behave like this, you might well say.

True, but this is not just any election. Right now, the country is facing multiple epoch-defining challenges – seemingly intractable inequality that’s feeding political polarisation, climate change, the rise of new superpowers, divisive identity politics at home and dictatorship abroad. There are dangerous currents in the black water around us. Given all that, the state of the debate feels desperately inadequate. It makes you fear for democratic politics.

Trust in government and politicians is as low as it has ever been, according to Sir John Curtice, fuelled by wrongdoing like Partygate and above all by Brexit, the greatest mis-selling scandal in living memory. Nearly six in 10 voters “almost never” trust politicians to tell the truth when in a tight corner and nearly half would think hell had frozen over if a politician put country before party.

If you listened to Mr Swinney yesterday – time in government 16 years – all that is other people’s fault. People were crying out for “principled leadership”, he said. The Scottish Government had been treated with rank disrespect by Westminster in the last five years, he said.

This may well be true – the government of Boris Johnson ushered in an era of bone-headed “muscular unionism” – but it hardly happened in a vacuum. The SNP have always been enthusiastic sparring partners of the Conservatives, always eager to push the fabricated notion that devolution is broken while simultaneously posing as its defender. Never during waking hours has an SNP politician missed an opportunity to proclaim grievances against the UK government, both real and imagined. It’s a cynical game all right.

READ MORE

Read more Rebecca McQuillan: Do we really know what the SNP stands for any more?

Read more Rebecca McQuillan:In this election, rural voters actually matter

Mr Swinney has scored some hits during this campaign, including in calling out Labour’s cowed silence over Brexit. He knows full well that it’s much harder for them, needing votes in Red Wall seats to get rid of the Tories, than for him, in a country that voted two to one against leaving the EU, but he was right to raise it. The 2019 election was all about Brexit; five years on, it’s the debacle that dare not speak its name. He did an effective job of highlighting Labour’s lack of ambition. “Where’s the change?” is a powerful rhetorical device.

He highlighted Scottish Government spending on key priorities like the NHS, saying that the Scottish government had hiked doctors’ pay and arguing that Labour could replicate that at UK level, unlocking more cash for Scotland’s NHS through Barnett consequentials. It was a decent line, building on the SNP’s choices in government to put forward a concrete suggestion.

And he attacked Labour and Sir Keir Starmer over the indefensible two-child benefit limit – again, the Scottish Government’s own major investment in the Scottish Child Payment gives the SNP leader moral authority.

But mostly you’re left with the feeling that things don’t really add up. It’s the same with all the parties. The sidestepped questions, the failures that are skated over, the numbers that don’t convince: always there’s the knowledge that no one is being entirely honest.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Image: free)

Being honest seems to be the hardest thing. Is that why Labour haven’t said they’ll abolish the totemic two-child benefit cap, even though it’s a horrible policy that pushes children into poverty? It is indeed strange they haven’t made that pledge. Why have they not?

Just consider that for a moment. So terrified is Labour of being misrepresented as Corbynesque that they would rather give the impression that they are callous about child poverty than make themselves vulnerable on it during the campaign. They are perhaps relying on voters assuming that whatever Labour say, they will spend more when it comes down to it.

It's not exactly open and honest, is it? It certainly doesn’t say much for the health of our democracy.

We have two more weeks of this. It can’t end soon enough.