Lying in the Practice of British Diplomacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of British diplomacy, in particular in relation to the Middle East, has long been marked by the presence of different forms of lying. This article takes four specific crises which highlight this tendency. Firstly, the record of British policy in the region over the course of the First World War. Secondly, the crisis provoked by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-36 and the peace plan put forward by Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval. Thirdly, the Suez crisis of 1956 and finally the Iraq war of 2003. In a first part this article considers how lying, in various forms, was an integral part of the ways in which Britain conducted its diplomacy in this region. In particular, the contradictory and mutually incompatible promises made by Britain to its various allies in the conflict against the Ottoman empire—Arabs, Jews and French—inevitably led Britain to adopt a certain number of lies. The second part of the article deals with the lies that were part of the ways in which these policies were presented to public opinion at home and internationally. In the third and final part, it analyses the forms of lying in the various post-conflict accounts in which various British decision-makers sought to defend their past policies and to put as favourable a spin on their actions as possible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".