FactCheck, Channel 4’s despinning, debunking, delightful website crafted to help with coverage of the General Election and inspited by the US’s factcheck.org, is back after a 14 month hiatus. Here’s what I said when it launched first time around:

This is an excellent idea – an independent website which will check the facts spouted by the politicians between now and the general election. Perhaps it will encourage our party leaders to be more honest in their speeches, instead of making false claims in order to scare voters into voting for them above the opposition parties. Perhaps it will mean that the leaders can no longer hide from the truth about their past performance behind some dodgily compiled selective statistics. Perhaps it will even stop the politicians from telling outright lies.

Of course, it never actually did any of those things, but it was still fun to read, and hence got a reasonable amount of coverage on this blog. My only complaint thus far is that the logo’s been replaced with an uninspiring red box with the Channel 4 font surrounded by compression artefacts (see picture), and each article is split over several pages. A disappointment. But the actual content still seems to be up-to-scratch.

I, for one, am glad to see it back.

This is an excellent idea – an independent website which will check the facts spouted by the politicians between now and the general election. Perhaps it will encourage our party leaders to be more honest in their speeches, instead of making false claims in order to scare voters into voting for them above the opposition parties. Perhaps it will mean that the leaders can no longer hide from the truth about their past performance behind some dodgily compiled selective statistics. Perhaps it will even stop the politicians from telling outright lies.

This is one site that’s going straight into my bookmark list (and this site’s sidebar), and I imagine I’ll be commenting on it quite often over the coming weeks… Right now, if you want some more background on the service, check out this Guardian article.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-ninth post of a series.

With all the talk about “the lionesses” this week, and with more no doubt on the way next week, I can’t help but keep thinking of this bit from The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which I read years ago.

“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘nigger’”, I volunteered.

“Like what?”

“Like any word that ends in –ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”

This, from Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation which I’ve been reading this week, brought back happy memories of when Wendy and I visited Capri in 2014:

We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri. It was early April. A light cold rain misted over the sea. We took a funicular up from the dock and found ourselves the only tourists. You are early, the conductor said with a shrug. The streets smelled like lavender and for a long time neither of us noticed that there weren’t any cars. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again.

I went on a Met Office course relevant to my job this week. I’m pretty sure I’ve now been on it three times in six years. They always introduce it with a bit of background on how jet streams impact the weather, a topic I seem unable to retain in even the most cursory detail.

This time, I did manage to retain something about orographic rain, which—if I understood correctly—is the reason it rains every time I visit Leeds, yet rarely rains when I’m walking to work in Newcastle.

Wendy and I were talking this week about the mnemonic we were taught at school for remembering the order of the planets of the solar system.

I was taught, “Me Very Early Man Just Standing Under Nine Planets.”

Wendy was taught, “My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets”

And, by sheer coincidence, Offill also cites an example in her book:

My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles

Of course, the downgrading of Pluto has necessitated shorter mnemonics.

My recommended read this weekend comes from the website of the excellent Full Fact organisation. Full Fact usually publishes articles which check the veracity of claims made by politicians or companies, which always make for enlightening reading. But earlier this week, in this post, Owen Spottiswoode looked at the veracity of the claims made in a particularly unpleasant letter to a newspaper, which had been spread widely online.

It’s a brilliant example of the simple truth making prejudice look foolish. It’s like the research behind a Aaron-Sorkin-esque rant. I love it. Bravo.

Not content with lying and being corrected, John Reid has now been caught by FactCheck telling lies that’s he’s already been told are lies:

Mr Reid devoted a sizeable part of Labour’s morning press conference on Saturday to explain how he thinks the Tories’ scheme of paying money towards private operations works and in the process repeated two claims already rejected by FactCheck.

And yet he has the audacity to attack the Conservatives over a single set of adverts placed in local papers which they have now admitted were misleading, apologised for, and promised not to publish again. And, actually, I didn’t find the Conservative ad so misleading, since it said quite clearly at the bottom of the page the hospital trusts which were included in the figures, but that’s another argument altogether.

The story here is that Mr Reid has told some lies repeatedly, then been corrected, and now has gone ahead and told them all over again, learning nothing from the fact that he’s lied in the first place. Or perhaps he was too lazy to bother coming up with any new lies, and so just recycled the same old untruths. Who could possibly want him to head up the health service?

I missed one earlier (though, actually, this is such a whopper it probably needs a post of its own anyway):

A family with two children pays no net tax until their earnings reach £21,000.

That sounds good. It’s from the Labour manifesto. But, as usual, it’s not even a half-truth. FactCheck have discovered that they’d have to pay £1234.04 in National Insurance.

Now, before some Blairite comes back with the claim that National Insurance is not a tax, let me remind them of Mr Blair’s own preface, to which I’ve added some bold:

We do not duck the tough choices – from independence for the Bank of England to the tax rise we made for the NHS, to the war in Iraq.

The ‘tax rise for the NHS’ was an increase in National Insurance rates. So the party leader thinks National Insurance is a tax.

So, without doubt, the first claim must, quite simply, be a lie. Has Labour not learned anything from the lies they told about Iraq?

FactCheck have uncovered three blatant lies about Mr Blair’s record in his manifesto, and a number of dodgy claims.

Here are the Labour lies:

The UK has the lowest unemployment for 30 years

Actually, we have higher unemployment that in 1979. So unless we’ve been magically transported to 2009, that’s a blatant lie.

Longest Period of uninterrupted growth in modern history

I guess it depends on your interpretation of ‘modern’, but he’s clearly not including 1948 to 1973. Since his Chancellor was making claims about ‘since 1701’, then this is clearly another lie.

We will invest more in renovating and building new kitchens as well as investing an extra £210 million in school meals.

Except the £210m was already in the education budget. So how can this possibly be classed as extra money?

And now for some general dodginess:

Crime has fallen by 30 per cent overall, with almost five million fewer crimes a year than in 1997

According to one set of statistics – the British Crime Survey. Mr Blair says the BCS is ‘the most authoritative crime survery overall’. So why, in the exact same manifesto, does he criticise the Tory figures using the Recorded Crime Statistics, instead of the BCS?

The number of asylum applications has been cut by two-thirds since 2002.

How can Labour possibly even begin to claim the credit for this, when the number of refugees has fallen worldwide?

How could anyone want to re-elect a party which can’t even be honest about its record in its own manifesto? After eight years, they should be shouting from the rooftops about their acheivements, not having to lie about them to be re-elected. It’s crazy.

From this poster, you might get the impression that interest rates have halved under Labour. An easy mistake to make, I agree. Sadly, though, it isn’t true. When Labour came to power, the interest rate was 6.25%. It’s now 4.75%. If Mr Brown’s maths thinks that’s interest rates halved, then how on earth are we supposed to trust his budgets?

The Conservatives have produced some figures that you can argue about, but they have a pretty clear explanation of how they’ve done their calculations and why they’ve done them that way. And, as it happens, they haven’t used the figures that would show Labour in the worst light: They’ve tried to be as logical as possible using the next-to-useless government figures produced by Labour. Their crime ads are blatantly misleading, though, and quite a disappointment because of this. But, by my count, Labour are still streets ahead on the number of blatant lies they’ve told during this pre-election campaign. But then, Alan Milburn said he’d do anything to win. Labour should be ashamed.

I said I’d love FactCheck. Talk about multiple lies from the Labour party:

I notice that the Conservatives are offering £50 a week to help with childcare. A couple of months ago they were getting headlines for offering £150 a week, so there has already been a huge cut in the help they are offering families for childcare

So said Patricia Hewitt on Breakfast. The only problem being that the Conservatives never promised £150 in the first place. So does our Trade and Industry Secretary walk off with her tail between her legs. Erm, not exactly…

In November, the Tory offer was £150 a week to mothers to stay at home. Today we learn that the Tories have backtracked on this and will only offer £50 a week. It is clear the Tories cannot afford the £150 a week because of their commitment to cut £35bn from public spending

That was Alan “I’ll do anything to win” Milburn, writing in The Grauniad. As much as Labour would like it otherwise, repeating a lie does not suddenly make it true. But you’ve got to give them credit for perseverence:

At a press conference after her BBC appearance on Easter Monday, Ms Hewitt was challenged about the claim by a journalist who accused her of mixing up maternity pay and childcare allowances. The female reporter said: “You have said the Tories have obviously cut their pledge on childcare. They have not. That is a cheap shot as far as I can see.”

But Ms Hewitt refused to admit she was wrong.

She said: “If you go back to the headlines at the time of the Conservative briefing a couple of months ago, what you will see is very clear headlines, that they persuaded people to write, saying £150 a week for childcare – that has now come down to £50 a week for childcare.”

But, you see, FactCheck did go back to the headlines at the time of the Conservative briefing:

FactCheck went back to the press cuttings relating to the Tory proposals in November and the coverage made it very clear the £150 payment related to maternity pay and not help with childcare costs.

So she’s trying to weasel her way out of blatant lying by – erm – lying some more. Go Pat!

The official party response to this much-repeated lie?

We would accept that after they [the Conservatives] had done their press conference that particular claim is not something that we are going to continue to make. We will not continue to make that claim

So they’re not going to admit they were wrong, nor apologise for lying. But then, what more could we expect from Labour?

FactCheck is on the case very quickly about Ruth Kelly’s promised £280m worth of ‘new money’ for school meals. Which was very kind of her, and somewhat convenient with Mr Oliver on Mr Blair’s doorstep.

But the truth will out, and usually quite quickly in an election campaign, so no-one was really surprised when Mr Blair later admitted

Of course it is part of the education budget, but it is still new in the sense that this is money now specifically allocated to school meals.

So does this make it new money? Short answer – no. They’re playing that age-old game of announcing the same money again and again. They’ve announced the education budget, and now they announce a subsidiary of that, claiming that it’s new money. As far as I can see, ‘new’ money is money that has not previously been announced.

But, of course, if I announce ‘I will spend a whopping £2 on fruit today’, and then another day announce ‘I have £1 of new money to increase the apple budget’, most people would take away the message that I’m going to spend £3, which is good for the election campaign when the opposition announce that they are only going to spend £2. But, of course, we would both be spending only £2, it’s just that I’ve announced my apples budget separately from my fruits budget, and so made the whole thing look like it’s worth more than it really is.

But then, isn’t that Labour policy through-and-through?