Cathy Dobbs: Lip reading's a mug's game in politics
“How can you tell when a politician is lying?” the old joke starts. The answer: “Their lips are moving.”
We saw it with Tony Blair over his Iraq weapons of mass destruction debacle. His decision to go to war was based on patchy and limited information. However, he told us all that he had intelligence that was extensive, detailed and authoritative.
I once interviewed Edwina Currie and while politicians knew salmonella in eggs was making people ill, it was covered up. She lost her job for telling the truth – that’s how much Westminster hates politicians being honest with us plebs.
So, why do I feel like the only person in the country that wasn’t surprised about Boris’s Partygate? What did we all expect?
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Did you notice how careful I was with my pronouns in that last comment? Rather than use ‘his lips’ for the old joke I used ‘their lips’ – after all, we no longer only have male politicians.
I’ve recently been speaking with and about someone who is non-binary. It is hard, trying to use them/they/their instead of him/he/his.
Getting a sentence out takes about three times longer than it usually does, especially when you have to apologise for making a mistake. Is this putting companies off employing someone who is non-binary? – most definitely. Such a shame when talented, intelligent people are making others wary because of worries around misgendering.
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Big corporations have control of vast amounts of information, and trying to get hold of what is rightfully ours can often be difficult.
Yahoo locked me out of my email account this week. I have my username and password – however, I hadn’t updated my mobile phone number to the one I currently use.
And so began the dreaded dealings with Yahoo, who advised me to update my phone number - but I can’t get into my account.
OK, then we will send an access code to your phone number, but I don’t have that phone number any more.
Alright well you can’t access your account then, and our help centre is based in the US and doesn’t help people in the UK.
In one of their replies they said: “We really do try to provide the best possible service we can and are here to help, not hinder. We genuinely apologise for anything that gives a different impression.”
What a load of empty, meaningless rubbish. Yahoo announced this year that it would be laying off about 1,000 out of its 8,600 workers.
Judging by their 1.4 stars out of five on Trustpilot it looks like all the cuts were from their customer service department.
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