The Noble Lie

John Mearsheimer, the great sceptic of American policy in international relations, has become something of a political black sheep in recent years because of his views on Russia and Ukraine. As a realist, he has been concerned by the failure of the West to fully appreciate the interests and rational motives of Russia, with the result that Ukraine has become an unnecessary victim of great power posturing. His critics have accused him of appeasement; his supporters have noted that like Cassandra he has been proved right and his warnings have gone unheeded. While his academic oeuvre has been dominated by inter-state relations, in books such as The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, he has also made a telling contribution to our understanding of domestic politics in his short 2011 work, Why Leaders Lie. Though this also focuses on international relations, it makes the useful point that leaders find it easier to lie to their own populations than to other states, and that this is more pronounced in liberal democracies. Unsurprisingly, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 provides his textbook example. 

His explanation for the difference between international and domestic lying is tendentious - that democratic electorates are more credulous than state actors and that liberal democracies must invest in greater media-management - not least because it recycles older prejudices about the demos (the Platonic saitiating of the beast) and assumptions about the fellowship of diplomacy (we understand each other because we are members of a transnational elite). The current resignation and cynicism of the Russian population, despite a massive PR campaign by the government to encourage an enthusiastic chauvinism, together with the obvious strategic miscalculations by Putin, suggests that state actors may be more prone to self-delusion that the people and that the construction of an edifice of lies may ultimately be about reassuring the state itself rather than the notional electorate. There's an amusing historical irony here if you remember the apocryphal tale of the faux-village built by Prince Potemkin to impress Catherine the Great when she toured the newly-acquired Crimea in 1787. 

Mearsheimer is ultimately seeking to preserve the separation of the realms of domestic and international politics, which is a conservative instinct. To this end he notes that lies on the international stage can, if extreme enough, backfire and thereby corrupt politics at home. My own view is that this distinction is false: that there is no boundary and the lies are not categorically different. One reason for saying this is that the habituation of domestic lying can encourage lies about international relations. To take Iraq as an example, both George W Bush and Tony Blair had already established a reputation for deceit and dissembling in domestic politics before they agreed on the invasion. It was partly because they were already distrusted that scepticism about their claims of weapons of mass destruction found fertile ground. A famous example in the UK, because it so earnestly sought to deny the truth, was David Aaronovich's comment: "If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again". You have to have seen a lot heaped on a camel's back to reach that "final straw".

Mearsheimer's inventory of lying in international relations is useful because we can easily apply it (with the exception of his first category) to the domestic scene as well. He names seven types: inter-state lies (misdirection for strategic geopolitical advantage); fearmongering (inflating a threat to alert the population); strategic cover-ups (obscuring incompetence to maintain morale); nationalist mythmaking (rewriting history to foster group identity); liberal lies (disguising illiberal behaviour); social imperialism (diverting attention from domestic problems by emphasising the deficiencies of other societies); and ignoble cover-ups (dissimulation to protect state actors or privileged groups from criticism). If Martin Forde had had the balls to write a properly corruscating report on the Labour Party, rather than attempting a sober assessment that allowed the media to dismiss his findings as "fault on both sides", then the last six of these categories would have provided a useful template.

And that neatly segues to arguably the most startling example of political lying in domestic politics since the time of the Iraq War (and I'm not excluding Brexit in that assessment), namely the election of Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party. What stands out here is not that Starmer lied but that his lies have been simultaneously exposed and commended as noble lies - i.e. obvious untruths that serve a higher purpose, in the Platonic tradition. Centrist commentators, who clutched their pearls over the lies of Johnson, Farage and Trump, have taken to admiring Starmer's lying as a "single-minded focus on winning", partly because they can't find much else to enthuse about. To understand how odd this is we simply need to recall how previous Labour Party leaders were criticised for simply having a reputation of untrustworthiness (e.g. Harold Wilson) or a tendency to embellishment (e.g. Neil Kinnock). Clearly a lot changed with the election of Tony Blair as party leader, but perhaps more changed with his becoming Prime Minister, which seems to have convinced many that not only were lies acceptable in the service of a political goal but that deliberately lying was itself a mark of statesmanship.

Mearsheimer's typology is useful in providing a checklist of Starmer and his supporter's behaviour: fearmongering (the great antisemitism flap); strategic cover-ups (the behaviour of Iain McNicol & co); mythmaking (the claim that Labour lost in 2019 solely because of Corbyn rather than Brexit); liberal lies (the systematic purges); social imperialism ("the SNP are worse"); ignoble cover-ups (evidence of Islamophobia and rigged selections). But we can further distill what is going on by focusing on who is being lied to. As a popular party - i.e. one that depends on grassroots enthusiasm rather than simply financial donations by the rich (regardless of how much the current leadership wish it were otherwise) - Labour must always face two electorates: the party membership (and by extension the labour movement represented by affiliated trade unions and societies), and the broader population of voters. There is an obvious desire in the media to insist that the two are not merely different but poles apart, a strategy that was hugely succesful in 1979 and arguably defined politics until as late as 2017, but Labour leaders, of whatever stripe, have traditionally sought to bridge that gap and insist on the (massive) overlap. 

What is unusual about Starmer is not simply that he accepts the media framing of two distinct constituencies with conflicting interests, but that he deliberately accentuates it. He appears to want to win a general election by deliberately and very publicly disavowing arguably the most loyal element of Labour's traditional electoral coalition: those socialists who have nowhere else to go. And this leads to the paradox of an ostensibly anti-populist politician (the liberal media have assured us of this, and who are we to doubt it) emphasising populist tropes (his humble beginnings, his success, his blokeishness, his love of country etc) that are clearly meant to distinguish him from the politics-obsessed "weirdos" of the left. Without lurching into hyperbole, I would note that every populist leader - and in particular every Facsist leader - was initially dismissed as inadequate and unpreposessing. But what I want to focus on here isn't Starmer's rebarbative style but his instrumental attitude towards the electorate, which is arguably more worrying.

To justify a lie directed at a particular subset of the population you need to define them as not being worthy of the truth. This usually takes one of two forms. The first is delegitimisation, in which the group is deemed beyond the pale of political participation and consequently rights are limited or curtailed. This can be seen not simply in Starmer's brazen lies to party members during his election, but in the way that subsequent moves by the General Secretary and the NEC have systematically disempowered constituency parties and increased the power of the PLP to determine future leadership candidates. On the right of the party, this instrumental lying has been publicly celebrated with overt cynicism. If you were taken in by Starmer's "Corbynism without Corbyn" pitch then you revealed yourself to be a naive fool and your outrage at being lied to simply proves it. If you recognised at the time that Starmer was lying, and were perfectly happy to go along with it, then you proved yourself to be a political "grown-up".

The second form is one of intellectual contempt: a belief that the group is both innately stupid and easily led by the press or demagogues (i.e. popular democracy). The obvious example here is the mythical Red Wall constituency for whom Brexit and immigration controls are "red lines". In this case the lying is both expedient - the necessary action to build a winning coalition for a general election - and an example of lying for the greater good: the noble lie. The assumption is that the electorate can be persuaded to accept a particular course so long as you frequently deny the objective and advance incrementally. A good example from recent history is the marketisation of the NHS, which Labour promised to reverse in 1997 but once in office decided to expand, with added targets and quangos to ensure "quality" and "value for money", laying the foundations for the increasingly fragmented and dysfunctional health service that we see today. The contemporary elephant in the room is Brexit, with centrist commentators keen to signal that Starmer will reveal his true europhile instincts once in Downing Street.

Mearsheimer's book is a fascinating, if not altogether convincing, analysis of political lying, but it suffers from the fundamental limitation of all realist critique, which is that it assumes that state actors are rational and that the behaviour of states is thus predictable. In this view, conflict is typically the result of either inescapable material constraints or miscalculations by the elite about each other's intentions. This is a reasonable perspective in international relations, but it's explanatory attraction owes much to the fact that it removes politics, and more particularly democracy, from the equation. And it is the contempt for democracy that provides the key insight into Keir Starmer's lying. It should be obvious now that he is committed to re-establishing the authority and capacity of the state after the neglect of the Tory years, and the authoritarian turn of the party is a precursor to this. This not only requires disavowing any hint of socialism but refusing to present the electorate with a meaningful choice on any major policy, whether that be Brexit or nationalisation. The willingness to lie and deceive is proof that he is the embodiment of the establishment; and the continued failure of the public to warm to the man is evidence of their recognition of this.