Political prejudices produce lies and prevent public debate on real facts

Politicians need to apply logic and reason, and to start telling the truth, says Alastair Bonnington

What now passes for public debate in this country often consists of little more than the application of a pre-ordained set of prejudices to a set of dubious facts.

Could I put in a plea in support of reason – and for good measure, maybe even a little honesty too? They seem to have departed our public discourse and decision-making process of late.

On most days, in our newspapers and on TV, we see politicians and journalists advancing the quite extraordinary viewpoint that a general truth can be drawn from a single set of facts. This is the logic of the infant and the idiot. If the pharmaceutical industry tested drugs on this basis, mass deaths would follow. In my 45-year lifetime as a voter, the real power of our political leaders has diminished dramatically. As we can see only too well, the quality of many of those who now gain political office has correspondingly dropped. Such limited people are not at home with the often difficult task of applying reason to a complex set of facts. It is much easier to proceed on the basis of their many prejudices. But that method almost always produces the wrong result.

It doesn’t help that today’s politicians pretty much demand that the statistics produced for public consumption support the notion that all is going incredibly well on their watch. As a result, for example, we are told every year, that crime has