Nick Robinson catches Mandelson fibbing.

One of the more irritating aspects of New Labour is the way they are prone to the shameless rewriting of history. 

They've been doing it from the word go, from Tony Blair's attempts to blame non-existent votes in the House of Lords when he delayed legislation, to Godon Brown's Labour Conference speech in which he inferred that Conservatives thought it was impossible to abolish the slave trade or to ban sending children down mines and up chimneys. 

(The first was passed with the support of a many tories, one of Wilberforce's main allies having been a Tory prime minister, Pitt the Younger; the second was proposed by a Tory peer, Lord Shaftesbury.)

 

Particularly irritating is when, in true 1984 style, they not only drop a slogan which has been at the centre of their propaganda, but deny that they ever said it. Prior to the current economic difficulties, Gordon Brown claimed to have abolished boom and bust. This was always regarded as nonsense by experts, as you can read here. 

When the recession kicked in, and the claim to have abolished recessions began to look particularly silly, Brown attempted to deny that he had ever made it, saying "I actually said, 'No more Tory boom and bust'." 

There were some occasions when he did use those words. However, as the "Factcheck" website demonstrates here, anyone with an internet connection and a reasonable level of computer literacy can establish in five minutes that Brown also said that Britain used to have "an unenviable history, under governments of both parties, of boom and bust", and that his policies had ensured that "we will never return to the old boom and bust". 

Those quotes are from Brown's first pre-budget report speech as chancellor and his last budget as chancellor. Factcheck also quotes a number of similar speeches and concludes that Brown's attempt to deny that he had claimed to have abolished the business cycle "just doesn't stand up". When Factcheck assess a statement by a politician they award a score from zero to five, where zero means a statement which is completely true, and scores at the top of the range indicate a misleading or false claim. 

I am not aware that Factcheck have ever given a score of five out of five, which "unlikely event" would mean that "the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact." But they gave Gordon Brown a score of 4 for pretending that he never claimed to have abolished boom and bust, which in practice is about as close to calling someone a liar as they get. 

And today New Labour were busy rewriting history again. For weeks Gordon Brown has been claiming that the next election will be about a choice of "Tory cuts versus Labour investment." This morning that line was finally abandoned: and Nick Robinson suggested on the Today Programme this morning that you could almost hear "the sound of shredding machines" as the Prime Minister's previous line was abandoned. 

In response Lord Mandelson accused Nick Robinson of being unable to back up the suggestion that the Prime Minister had ever referred to Tory cuts vs. Labour investment with any specific quote. That didn't take too long to refute. 

Shortly afterwards, at 9.15 this morning, Nick posted this article on his blog, arguing that in the internet age no-one can rewrite political history and including the specific quotes Mandelson had challenged him to give: Hansard shows that during Prime Minister's Questions on 17th June Gordon Brown repeatedly used the phrase that Labour is now trying to expunge from the history books. 

If they had any sense the New Labour spinners would have stopped there but when they are caught saying something untrue they never seem able to admit the mistake and move on. They came back to the BBC and suggested that Gordon Brown was only quoting David Cameron! 

As Nick Robinson pointed out, Brown used the phrase repeatedly on 17th June and some of the quotes just do not fit the Labour argument: "'His is the party of cuts; we are the party of investment' doesn't sound to me like a quote from the Tory leader.'