Of honest politics and the reverse, IDS and the National Living Wage.
All governments make mistakes.
All governments which have been in office for any material length of time when the country is going through financially challenging times - for example, if it has to deal with the sort of mess that the Conservative-led coalition inherited from Labour in 2010 - will have had to make some tough choices which not everyone will like.
Any remotely competent supporter of an opposition party who wishes to criticise a governing party which has been in office for more than the shortest period of time - eight years, say - should be able to find plenty of serious criticisms without the need to tells lies.
Let alone really obvious lies.
One of the more memorable images broadcast in TV reports of George Osborne's 2015 budget was the sight of Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) cheering when the then chancellor introduced the National Living Wage - effectively a rebranding and big increase in the minimum wage.
There are - if you take a free market position - genuine arguments for and against a minimum wage as I explained at the time in an article called the minimum wage balancing act.
This balancing act is that for a minimum wage floor to be successful in reducing poverty it must be high enough to make sure we reward work, not so high as to bankrupt small employers and price people back onto the dole queue.
I discussed the real arguments for and against a minimum wage in great detail here but they are not relevant to this article about honest politics because the people who have been dishonestly using film of IDS cheering the announcement of the National Living wage to attack him neither believe nor pretend to believe in the free market arguments against the minimum wage. They are supporters of a minimum wage floor and indeed think it should be even higher.
IDS has a long and controversial record in government and there are plenty of things he has done which an honest socialist would disagree with and could use to criticise him without the need to lie about his record.
Which is why it says something interesting about some Corbyn supporters that both in 2016 and again this week they have been sharing the image of IDS cheering the announcement of the National Living Wage and lying about it.
Anyone who reads this blog regularly will probably have noticed that I usually bend over backwards to avoid accusing people who say something I disagree with of lying but this time there is really no other word for it.
As the Independent reported in 2016 here, Corbyn supporters shared the image of Ian Duncan Smith cheering the NLW and said that it showed him celebrating, quote "screwing the poor."
In the newspaper's words,
"He was, of course, celebrating the proposed rise in the minimum wage to £9/hour as set out by George Osborne in the post-election Budget in July last year. Which many probably wouldn't see as 'screwing the poor'."
This week some Corbynistas have been spreading a similar lie on social media again, circulating the same gif on social media and claiming that it showed IDS cheering "government policies that leave people choosing to heat or eat, having to go to Foodbanks & live in poverty!"
Nonsense. And it is not just that he was actually cheering a policy which make it less necessary for millions of the poorest-paid workers to do any of those things: the Resolution Foundation published a report arguing that the National Living Wage caused the biggest improvement in low wages for 40 years.
It's not only a lie, but a stupid lie because enough people remember that image of IDS cheering and that he was cheering the NLW that the lie was always going to be called out.
If Momentum were confident that they could win by telling the truth they would not need to resort to dishonest tactics like this one.
All governments which have been in office for any material length of time when the country is going through financially challenging times - for example, if it has to deal with the sort of mess that the Conservative-led coalition inherited from Labour in 2010 - will have had to make some tough choices which not everyone will like.
Any remotely competent supporter of an opposition party who wishes to criticise a governing party which has been in office for more than the shortest period of time - eight years, say - should be able to find plenty of serious criticisms without the need to tells lies.
Let alone really obvious lies.
One of the more memorable images broadcast in TV reports of George Osborne's 2015 budget was the sight of Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) cheering when the then chancellor introduced the National Living Wage - effectively a rebranding and big increase in the minimum wage.
There are - if you take a free market position - genuine arguments for and against a minimum wage as I explained at the time in an article called the minimum wage balancing act.
This balancing act is that for a minimum wage floor to be successful in reducing poverty it must be high enough to make sure we reward work, not so high as to bankrupt small employers and price people back onto the dole queue.
I discussed the real arguments for and against a minimum wage in great detail here but they are not relevant to this article about honest politics because the people who have been dishonestly using film of IDS cheering the announcement of the National Living wage to attack him neither believe nor pretend to believe in the free market arguments against the minimum wage. They are supporters of a minimum wage floor and indeed think it should be even higher.
IDS has a long and controversial record in government and there are plenty of things he has done which an honest socialist would disagree with and could use to criticise him without the need to lie about his record.
Which is why it says something interesting about some Corbyn supporters that both in 2016 and again this week they have been sharing the image of IDS cheering the announcement of the National Living Wage and lying about it.
Anyone who reads this blog regularly will probably have noticed that I usually bend over backwards to avoid accusing people who say something I disagree with of lying but this time there is really no other word for it.
As the Independent reported in 2016 here, Corbyn supporters shared the image of Ian Duncan Smith cheering the NLW and said that it showed him celebrating, quote "screwing the poor."
In the newspaper's words,
"He was, of course, celebrating the proposed rise in the minimum wage to £9/hour as set out by George Osborne in the post-election Budget in July last year. Which many probably wouldn't see as 'screwing the poor'."
This week some Corbynistas have been spreading a similar lie on social media again, circulating the same gif on social media and claiming that it showed IDS cheering "government policies that leave people choosing to heat or eat, having to go to Foodbanks & live in poverty!"
Nonsense. And it is not just that he was actually cheering a policy which make it less necessary for millions of the poorest-paid workers to do any of those things: the Resolution Foundation published a report arguing that the National Living Wage caused the biggest improvement in low wages for 40 years.
It's not only a lie, but a stupid lie because enough people remember that image of IDS cheering and that he was cheering the NLW that the lie was always going to be called out.
If Momentum were confident that they could win by telling the truth they would not need to resort to dishonest tactics like this one.
Comments
In this case however, whoever pulled off the film of IDS cheering and created the .gif file which was being circulated has to have known what it really was. So must a substantial proportion of the people who shared it.
And I challenge you to specify a single instance since I have been involved in politics when I have made a statement of fact about current or past events which I could reasonably have been expected to have known at the time was not true.
(Statements which are clearly opinions rather than matters of fact, hairsplitting or semantic arguments on either side, and predictions which turned out to be mistaken do not count.)