For one glorious day in March, hope dawned that the next election might be fought on the basis of truth. The occasion was a press conference at which ITN’s Nick Robinson skewered Tony Blair over his claim that the Tories were going to cut spending by £35 billion. As Mr Robinson made pointedly clear, the fact was that Conservative spending plans were to increase spending at a slighly slower rate than Labour’s. Tony Blair was left flapping around like a fish out of water, which was appropriate given the Billingsgate location of the press conference.
Sadly this was a one off, and now that the campaign is underway Blair is back in his element i.e. the aquiescence of the media to blatant Labour fibbing. Hence, Mr Blair’s entirely predictable reaction to Conservative pension proposals: They don’t have the money for it, say Labour. The Lib Dems follow suit. This is unthinking, lazy politics which doesn’t deserve the air time it gets – or, at least, not without a monstering from the likes of Mr Robinson.
But instead what we get is this sort of thing from BBC online’s Election fact check*. There’s nothing much wrong with the “facts” that are listed – though they’d be better described as statements of the bleeding obvious. But just look at what is ambitiously described as a “conclusion”:
“All parties are going through their rivals' spending plans with a fine toothcomb; a number of disagreements on projected savings, for example on immigration policy, have been unearthed. The Tories have had to explain that they would not be introducing their tax cuts immediately. But given that so many details of all plans are yet to be known, and because no-one can predict exactly how the economy is going to perform, the overall battle so far has resulted in a draw.”
As conclusions go, this really couldn’t be any more inconclusive.
So, in conclusion, BBC online’s Election fact check gets a mediocre 4 out of 10.
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