Raising the Bar

A British idiom documented in parliamentary debate as early as 1924, the phrase drew its force from the literal absurdity of shifting football goalposts mid-game. It circulated in political English for decades before being catalogued as a named logical fallacy in the informal-logic literature of the 1980s. Karl Popper had anticipated the underlying pattern in Conjectures and Refutations (1963), describing it as a "conventionalist stratagem" — the habit of modifying a theory just enough to escape falsification rather than accepting the result.