GCSJ seminar series: Legislating against political lying: risks and feasibility

Speakers: Alex Barber (Philosophy)  Sean Cordell (Philosophy)

No one likes a lying politician, but what to do about the phenomenon? The Welsh Labour government (reluctantly but with cross-party support) has committed to legislating to bar elected politicians from the Senedd if they refuse to apologise after having been found to have lied, even if the lie was committed outside the chamber. This proposal has been billed as trailblazing, as a world first. But the fact that such laws cannot be found anywhere else might equally serve as a clue that this is unlikely to be the hoped-for panacea. Might it in fact be politically dangerous? We identify four core challenges for the Senedd proposal in its latest iteration. More positively, we identify some potential workarounds and some alternative approaches to the problem of political lying in a democracy.