38 Degrees are hypocrites

A full week ago the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees published a post on their Facebook feed that included a graphic that claimed the NHS needs £8 billion per year by 2020 and listed the amounts pledged so far by each of the parties claiming Labour are the highest at £2.5 billion with the Tories and the Lib Dems on £2 billion each.

The problem is that figure for the Lib Dems was wrong. The party had already pledged to spend the extra required £8 billion as this Guardian piece from January makes clear.

Many, many, many people pointed out this error in the comments below the piece. And each time, painstakingly 38 Degrees responded individually to these comments conceding that they had made an error and acknowledging the Lib Dems had made the commitment they were asking for.

At no point did 38 Degrees update the graphic in the original post. So the thousands of people who saw the post but didn't scroll down and read the comments, after 38 Degrees realised their mistake would still have been misled.

Of course the best thing to do would have been to create a new Facebook post with a new graphic and to highlight the error they had made to make it clear what the real Lib Dem figure is.

I tweeted 38 Degrees two days ago when I became aware of this error:

.@38_degrees Why have you still not corrected yr chart claiming LDs only pledged £2bn for NHS? You've had 5 days. It makes you look partisan
— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) March 31, 2015

To be fair to them they did tweet this in response to me:

@MarkReckons Hi Mark, sorry about the mistake. Here is a correct chart, kindly adapted by @iampav pic.twitter.com/jaa9rYaF4r
— 38 Degrees (@38_degrees) March 31, 2015

But as I then pointed out to them:

.@38_degrees Thank you but it is not me that needs to see it. It's all your Facebook followers who were misled by the original chart.
— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) March 31, 2015

and

.@38_degrees You need to do a new Facebook post with this new image highlighting the previous error so everyone is clear. That's only fair.
— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) March 31, 2015

to which they responded:

@MarkReckons agree - we are doing this shortly.
— 38 Degrees (@38_degrees) March 31, 2015

At the time of writing, a week on from the original mistake and two days after they promised me they would to do a new, correcting post, 38 Degrees have still not done this.

They have clearly been active on the feed though doing posts about zero hours contracts and the NHS.

They now appear to have deleted the original post (although the cynical amongst you might feel this is less to correct the error and more to clean the feed so such a blatant error is no longer visible) which is why I cannot link to it.

The hypocrisy in this situation is quite evident. 38 Degrees was one of the organisations who most vociferously supported the Leveson Report and even launched a petition which currently has almost 30,000 signatures calling upon the government to implement Leveson in full.

Of course one of the key recommendations of Leveson was for the new body to have powers to enforce the prominence of timely corrections when newspapers make errors to have an equivalent prominence to the original story.

38 Degrees have singularly failed to do that in this case where they have made a mistake. Of course a lie is half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. In this case many of the thousands of people who saw the original Facebook post and chart (before it became an unpost) will still likely believe it.

It appears that 38 Degrees think that equal prominence should only be given to corrections by other people.

At least that is now clear.

Hoist by their own petard

Labour activists and left leaning commentators have been bemoaning how unfair it is that ever since the Scottish referendum, the SNP have been going around claiming that because Labour campaigned together for the No side they are just the same as the Tories.

The SNP have indeed been claiming this and this has almost certainly added impetus to their recent surge leaving Labour (if the polls are to be believed) at risk of losing a majority of their Scottish held seats.

It is ridiculous that Labour would be considered to be exactly the same as the Tories just because they happened to be on the same side in a particular campaign. It's the sort of stupidly simplistic argument that we see far too often in politics.

But I am afraid my response to Labour on this is "Ah Diddums".

Because "Labour are exactly the same as the Tories" in Scotland is pretty much identical to  "The Lib Dems are exactly the same as the Tories" in the whole of the UK, a line Labour has been pushing since 11th May 2010. A claim which is equally as ridiculous that just because a party is in coalition with another party that means they are now exactly the same party.

I for one am delighted to see Labour being hoist by their own petard in this way.

Sanctimonious hypocritical rubbish from Labour on the NHS

I read this piece on LabourList today from a Labour candidate in Brighton and I am afraid I couldn't help myself but post a somewhat ranty response in the comments below it.

I thought I'd reproduce it here seeing as it's the longest thing I've written in a while!


What an absolute load of sanctimonious tribalistic rubbish. You didn't "rebuild" the NHS in 1997 and you won't need to "rebuild" it in 2015. It was perfectly functional when your party came to office in the 1990s and will be so next year if you win.

Your comments about cuts should be seen for what they are - hypocritical. The current government has ring fenced NHS spending against their cuts. Tiny rounding errors where money is either not spent in an area or rolled into the next year are screamed about by your party as "CUTS"! But your party made no such pledge about ring fencing the NHS so the readers can draw their own conclusions about what would have happened had you won in 2010.

The administrative problems you refer to regarding the closure of a GP surgery in Brighton is the sort of thing that happens under all governments not just this one. There were loads and loads (and loads) of admin issues under Labour. I remember Tony Blair getting an absolute roasting from a BBC Question Time audience during the 2005 general election campaign when one audience member highlighted how they could not book an appointment in advance and had to ring on the day first thing in the morning when they could often not get through. Blair said he was sorry and it must be particular to that one surgery at which point many more people in the audience spoke up about how they had exactly the same problem across a variety of surgeries. I myself had experienced it too. It was systemic. It was still happening late in the previous parliament when Labour had had over a decade to sort this out. Was that SAME OLD EVIL UNCARING LABOUR??!!! or is it simply that a massive bureaucratic service like the NHS is by definition very difficult to manage and when you have all sorts of targets (some of which contradict each other) administrative failings like this are inevitable. It's nothing to do with the party or parties in power usually. It's just the nature of complex systems.

Your party might have been in power when the NHS was founded but there was a clear pre-war consensus that something like it was going to happen and the Beveridge report which was the foundation of the NHS was produced by a member of the Liberal Party. Your party does not own the NHS like so much of your rhetoric and this piece would imply. It is owned by all of us. And it is not just Labour members and voters who care about it. We all do.

And finally, this is probably a controversial point because Cameron himself has unwisely referred to the death of his son probably too many times in this context but to suggest as you do that Cameron personally does not understand the value of the NHS is simply factually incorrect. Anyone who has had a sick/terminally ill child understands intuitively the value of it. It is very unwise of you to suggest otherwise.

This is why people hate you Gloria

Labour MP Gloria De Piero has a piece on LabourList today where she highlights Lib Dem "hypocrisy" on pay transparency.

She talks about how Jo Swinson has been going around saying that compulsory pay transparency is now Lib Dem policy and how it is necessary to help close the gender pay gap.

But the twist in the tale is that Labour are organising a vote on this issue on 16th December and the Lib Dems are not going to vote for it. Hence all the talk of hypocrisy.

I'm not a Lib Dem any more and I don't blog as often as I used to mainly because I feel so often like I am just repeating myself but I'll have another go.

Gloria, the reason why the Lib Dems cannot vote with you is. Wait for it. Because....

They. Are. In. Coalition.

That means they cannot just go around voting on things that are not agreed government policy. If they were to do that the government would collapse.

Gloria knows this of course. She's just playing political games in the hope of "embarrassing" the Lib Dems.

A couple of years ago Gloria went round the country speaking to people on her "Why do you hate me?" tour, trying to find out why people dislike politicians so much. Well here is a prime example. An MP pretending she does not understand how collective government responsibility works in order to score political points from one of her rivals. I'd say that's a good reason why people hate MPs Gloria.

There is a way to redeem yourself though. If there is another hung parliament after the next election, and if Labour find themselves in coalition with a smaller party, you will need to argue vociferously for that smaller party to be able to vote any way they wish on any issue. And Labour will just have to put up with the consequences of this.

After all, anything else would mean that party being "hypocritical" wouldn't it Gloria?

And we can't have that now can we?

Oneupmanship and hypocrisy

I listened to last week's Week in Westminster today on the way into work and heard Peter Lilley say something very interesting.

No, really.

It was during a debate with Labour's Patricia Hollis where she was suggesting that David Cameron was mistaken to have ring-fenced benefits for pensioners in the way that he did before the election. Lilley pointed out quite rightly that Cameron ended up doing this as a result of a large amount of pressure applied by Labour who accused him of planning to reduce pensioner age benefits and demanded that he rule it out. Now they are saying he should not have ruled it out. Hollis at this point spluttered incredulously that Cameron should be strong enough to make his own decisions on policy.

They are both right. Lilley is spot on in his description of what happened and is correct to highlight the hypocrisy. Labour might not be in office but Conservative policy was not made in a vacuum before the previous election. Cameron was indeed responding to Labour attacks. I think he should not have ruled out pensioner benefit cuts but you can understand why he did. Older people vote in much higher numbers than younger people and with Labour unwilling to allow a sensible debate about it and instead running scare stories about what the "evil Tories" were planning for your granny Cameron's response was predictable.

I'm singling out Labour here but all parties do this. The Tories probably prevented Labour from getting a majority in 1992 by running "Tax Bombshell" scare stories. The repercussions of that were felt all through the New Labour years with Blair always refusing to raise income tax (which is partly why our economy is in the mess it is now with so much investment on the never-never). He bore the scars on his back of that election campaign. And I know my own party are not beyond a bit (or even a lot) of opportunistic positioning when it suits, some of which has bitten us hard on the arse now we're in government. I hope we have learned lessons.

But sadly as a whole the political class tends to learn the wrong lessons. If we want genuine and lasting reform of things like pensions, the welfare state, the NHS, schools and all sorts of other areas we need better than hypocritical posturing.

Sadly I don't think we're going to get sensible debates on any of these issues. Our political system seems to actively militate against it. Maybe it's the inbuilt adversarial nature of it. Maybe it's just too damn easy (as Labour has done for the last two and half years and the Lib Dems used to be famous for) to just oppose everything a government does and claim it would be much better under you.

It of course leads to mass disillusionment eventually but hey, at least we got one over on the other lot eh?

Super soaraway hypocrisy

Today:

Two years ago:

Hattip @scolvey on Twitter

Chuka's hypocrisy

Just heard up and coming Labour shadow minister Chuka Umunna on The World at One being grilled about Labour's announcement that there will have to be further cuts if they win power in 2015.

Under questioning from Martha Kearney he pointed out that they would be making the cuts because "they have no choice".

Yet Chuka has been at the head of the queue previously denouncing the "ideological" cuts of the coalition government.

So, just so we're clear, when Labour cuts it's because they are forced to but when the coalition does it, it's because they're evil ideologues.

Got that?

Good.

Alan Johnson exhibits a monumental level of hypocrisy

A couple of years ago, the MP for Hull West and Hessle was very concerned about the possibility that an asylum seeker who had found refuge in his constituency might be sent back to his country which has a dangerous human rights record and where in the MP's own words it:

would be devastating for him, his family, indeed it could prove fatal... There are few cases where we need our system to work more than this one.

However last month, the Home Secretary returned the 35-year-old asylum seeker to that country. The one with the dangerous human rights record.

Oh did I mention that the Home Secretary is (and was last month) the MP for Hull West and Hessle, Alan Johnson?

That's right. In a move that exhibits a monumental level of hypocrisy, the very same asylum seeker who two years ago Mr Johnson was pleading to not be sent back was actually sent back by Mr Johnson himself.

Apparently at least one Labour activist in his constituency has resigned in disgust at his actions. I am not surprised.

I'm not sure how much mainstream media coverage this case has had but it needs more. Mr Johnson needs to be held accountable for this change of heart once he was actually in a position to do something about it.

(Hattip to Byrne Tofferings and Private Eye magazine)