'I WANT the truth!" shouts Tom Cruise in the 1992 military courtroom drama A Few Good Men. Only to be met with a yelled response from Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the truth!" Nor, it seems, can our politicians at Holyrood, judging by last week's kerfuffle over what to do about MSPs telling porkies in Parliament.
Truth is a weighty word. So when Alex Fergusson, the Presiding Officer, launched an inquiry into whether our MSPs are telling the truth in the chamber, he preferred to call it "veracity". A much more pleasant and unthreatening word, don't you think?
But it cannot hide the fact that Fergusson is opening up debate on the thorny subject of politicians and lies.
The barney that kicked this off need not detain us. It was a dispute about a group called the Inter-Faith Council, which had been under threat of closure but eventually had its £120,000 funding from the Scottish Government secured. The people we pay to represent us at Holyrood managed to spend most of last week arguing over whether Salmond was justified in telling Parliament the matter was resolved, even though the final details of the rescue package had not been completely agreed.
In other words, our MSPs have been splitting hairs from the heads of angels that are dancing on the heads of pins. They have been engaged in a tussle that is almost entirely conducted for their own benefit, fuelled by their own petty rivalries and simple desire for a scrap. Meanwhile, the rest of us roll our eyes and look away. We have a life, for goodness sake. We don't have time for this. And we'd rather our politicians were busying themselves with something useful, like trying to save Scottish jobs.
And yet the Inter-Faith furore does raise a legitimate issue that deserves our attention: what, if anything, can be done to ensure our political representatives tell the truth? A cynic would no doubt crack the old joke: Q. How can you tell when a politician is lying? A. His lips are moving. But to accept this canard would be to give up entirely on the ability of the political process to do good, and that's not something I'm prepared to do, quite yet.
Fergusson's reaction is a curious one. He seems to be asking Holyrood's Standards Committee to work out a system of acting as a referee when an MSP says something that another MSP believes to be a lie. How on earth is this going to be possible? Would there be a parliamentary investigation into every disputed statistic, with the committee calling expert witnesses to establish exactly how many boxes of paper clips had been misappropriated by civil servants in the past calendar year? Should the committee clerk get ready for this new responsibility by wiring up some crocodile clips to a car battery?
This could end up being a real mess. The MSPs who will have to conduct the inquiry say they are "puzzled and mystified" as to what is expected of them. The scope for vexatious complaints and speculative challenges is immense, especially now that a Government's ability to hit statistical targets on things like police numbers and NHS waiting times is seen by the public as a key measure of success. Nit-picking of the kind we saw all last week would end up dominating parliamentary business.
Yet we cannot allow a free-for-all where ministers and MSPs can lie with impunity. Of course we should expect our politicians to speak the truth when they stand up in the Scottish Parliament. They owe it to us, if not themselves. It is also true to say when it comes to insisting on the truth, the bar should be set higher in Parliament than in the big, bad world outside.
However, like it or not, exaggeration, obfuscation and statistic-mangling are all part of the business of politics and always will be. And the last thing anyone wants is to neuter debate at Holyrood so that it just becomes an exchange of polite pleasantries.
I still hope something useful can come out of the past week. For one thing, Salmond and his ministerial team may hesitate in future before they get too creative about teachers or timescales or any of the other raw material that fuels political debate. And when there have been honest errors, misplaced assumptions and miscellaneous cock-ups, they may be more willing to come clean and simply apologise to Parliament for any misunderstanding. Rather than being seen as a sign of weakness, it would be a sign of grown-ups acting in a grown-up manner. (Yes, I know this sounds implausible, but stranger things have happened.)
The Standards Committee should, I believe, look seriously at what Fergusson is asking – but not get too carried away. One possible solution is for Parliament to require MSPs to answer any 'veracity' challenge in writing. That way, disputes could be thrashed out in correspondence, published in full by the Holyrood authorities. In other words, Parliament should hold the jackets in any argument rather than act as the referee. They should not go beyond this. Ultimately, I still have faith in the ability of adversarial politics – aided by inquisitive and persistent journalism – to wring the truth out of any politician who deliberately chooses to lie. Or at least to hold them up to such intense public scrutiny that the voters can make up their own mind on whether there's jiggery-pokery going on. We can handle the truth.
The full article contains 932 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
