Spin doctors always have their own prescription for a moral vacuum

ONE of the more interesting news stories last week was that of Church of England vicar Joanna Jepson, who took the British police to court over their failure to investigate the abortion of a 24- week-old unborn child with a cleft palate.

Jepson is 27 and was born with a cleft palate herself.

Her case highlights the extreme nature of Britain's abortion laws, but also the dishonesty that sometimes characterises political debate, to the discredit of the politicians involved and the disadvantage of the people they serve.

In 1990, two academic lawyers, John Finnis and John Keown, warned British MPs that the proposed abortion law would lead to the sort of cases that Jepson has now highlighted.

"If abortion on any of the four grounds results in the delivery of a living and viable foetus, it will be lawful to destroy it during birth for any reason at all, from harelip to hair colour," they wrote. Their comments provoked outrage.

Harriet Harman, the then solicitor general, said they should be reported to the Law Society or Bar Council. Lord Steel, the Liberal Democrat peer and architect of the 1967 law, described their comment as "a gross calumny on the medical profession."

And Labour MP for Aberdeen Central, Frank Doran, dismissed their claims as "pure scaremongering."

But look at what has happened since. There have been 25 abortions for cleft palates since 1995. And the National Abortion Statistics for 2001 shows that one late-term abortion took place because a baby had a cleft palate.

Frank Doran now admits that the law should be re-examined. What is interesting, however, is how he justifies his past comments.

"I feel my language ('pure scaremongering') was appropriate for the highly engaged debate in which I was participating," he says. "These remarks were made 13 years ago and this issue had only just been raised."

In other words, he was quite willing to dismiss what turned out to be well-grounded fears as 'pure scaremongering' despite the fact that he hadn't a clue himself about what the future held. His behaviour shows how dangerous political spin can be, especially when life and death issues are at stake.

And it illustrates why Mary Harney's language during the recent stem cell debate was very questionable as well. Harney told us the decision facing the EU council of ministers was not whether to fund embryonic research, but which regulations would govern such research.

If guidelines weren't approved, she warned, the EU commission would go ahead and fund embryo research anyway, in an unregulated way.

What Harney didn't say was that things are never so simple in politics. More probably, if Ireland and a few other countries object strongly enough, the EU commission will not fund embryo research.

Yet the Government wasn't interested in telling us this because we might then ask why they weren't taking a more principled position.

Tony Blair is the creature we most associate with political spin and when the Hutton report emerges he may pay dearly for his failure to level with people in the run-up to the Iraq war.

It now seems that Saddam Hussein did possess weapons of mass destruction capable of being activated within 45 minutes, as the British government had claimed.

But Blair allowed people to think that Saddam's weapons could be launched long-range, for example against British troops in Cyprus or British civilians back home. There was no evidence for this.

There is the more day-to-day variety of spin, too. Immediately after decentralisation was announced in the budget, Mary Harney's party colleague, Tom Parlon, littered his constituency with 'Parlon delivers!' leaflets taking credit for bringing '965 jobs!' to Laois-Offaly.

The trouble is, Parlon did nothing of the kind at least not in the sense that we usually talk about delivering jobs.

Theoretically, if decentralisation goes ahead, the jobs of 965 people will move to Laois-Offaly. The number of spin-off jobs which this will create is unquantifiable but you can be quite sure it will be nothing like 965.

You may say that Parlon was just engaging in a harmless political stunt, claiming credit for something that was going to happen anyway, and fooling nobody. Maybe you're right.

But the culture of political spin, whether it involves big or small lies, exaggeration, dishonesty, evasion or idle speculation is ultimately very serious.

At its root, it's about a basic disregard for people, a belief that they do not deserve to be told the truth, and a view that it is acceptable to manipulate them in the pursuit of one's own political goals.

This leads people to be alienated from the political system. And what happens then? People may become more cynical and dishonest themselves, when they see their elected representatives acting in an irresponsible fashion.

Others may be attracted to false prophets of honesty and probity who, in reality, are engaging in spin themselves.

The best example of such a false prophet is the American writer and film-maker Michael Moore, who won an Academy Award for his 'documentary,' Bowling for Columbine.

Moore is one of a number of best-selling authors who claim to expose the lies, hypocrisy and vested interests of George W Bush and right-wingers generally. He accuses Bush and his administration of hoodwinking people and in the wake of September 11th of stoking up their fears to further military aims.

Not surprisingly, but very ironically, Moore gets rave reviews in Irish media. Over here, we look down on American politics as crude. And since Moore is suitably left-wing in his views, he is portrayed as a refreshing alternative voice, an enemy of all those engaging in spin and deception, and a truth-teller.

But Moore's own documentary, Bowling for Columbine, is far from truthful. The film dishonestly links images and sound as part of a propaganda coup against the US administration, the National Rifle Association and other organisations Moore dislikes.

For example, he implies that Charlton Heston, spokesman for the NRA, held a gun rally in Flint, Missouri, within 48 hours of a nearby high school shooting. Heston did nothing of the sort.

The NRA held an election rally in Flint eight months later during the presidential election campaign, as did George W Bush, Al Gore and Moore himself, who hosted a rally for the extreme left-wing candidate, Ralph Nader.

Moore also tries to portray Heston as a racist in the film. But in the 1960s, Heston picketed restaurants that discriminated against black people. He even worked with Martin Luther King to break Hollywood's colour barrier. None of this features in Bowling for Columbine.

So, if the so-called good guys are spinning as manipulatively as everyone else, where do you go?

The answer, surely, is to recognise that there can be no honest political debate if society does not have a clear set of moral values at its core. Talking about right and wrong, truth and falsehood, should not be regarded as prudish and judgemental.

If you don't have a clear, shared sense of right and wrong, you end up with a moral vacuum. And that's the kind of climate in which politicians, spin merchants and campaigning journalists feel very little obligation to tell us the truth.