The Wardman Wire

Two new wannabe Usmanovs in a few days. Ye Gods.

First the Society of Homeopaths, and now the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I have been looking into the methods and techniques in which the Blair and Brown administrations have deceived Parliament and People over the years, ranging from outright lies through delaying the availability of information in order to cause distorted reports in the News Media (as we saw with Gordon Brown’s “tax cut for the poorest” at the last budget), to multiple announcements of false impressions (as we saw with Gordon Brown’s announced plan to withdraw troops from Iraq who had already been withdrawn).

Then I spotted an article in the Independent.

The Independent caught my eye

An item in the Independent yesterday about Alistair Darling caught my eye, from Simon Carr’s column on page 37 of the Edition from 22/10/2007. As of this morning the entire column was missing from the website.

This is the text of the item written by Simon Carr:

“We saw something new in Parliament, last week. The Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House that he had always been going to change the rules on inheritance tax, and that his decision had nothing to do with the Tories’ announcement at their conference. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we can confidently say that that this is a lie.

That’s new. Tony Blair was often called a liar, but you’d be very hard put to recall anything of his so cut and dried that it could be called a lie (no letters, please). Textually, he was a master. And when the facts went against he would say: “my information at the time was…”.

But Alistair Darling is not so well provided for. A cool, calculated lie on the floor of the House. And we take it without indignation, or even surprise.

That’s a mistake, because this is new territory.”

This is what Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had said to the House of Commons on October 18th (source):

Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East) (Con): Would the Chancellor like to uncross his fingers, look you, Mr. Speaker, straight in the eye and assert that the Government would have made their inheritance tax announcement if the Conservative Opposition had not made their promise to raise the threshold to £1 million?

Mr. Darling: Yes, I would. It is right to recognise that, in this day and age, most husbands and wives contribute to the family assets. If a husband who has not used up his allowances dies, his wife should be able to inherit them. The key difference between us and the Conservative party is that we can make those tax reductions because we can afford to. The Conservatives have now made tax promises worth more than £6 billion, yet they have no idea how they will be able to finance them.

There are two points here: 1 – Did Alistair Darling lie to the Commons and 2 – The manner in which the article alleging that he did was deleted from the Independent website. I will take these separately.

Deletion of Article from Independent website

What happened

I would link to the item but it has been “vanished” from the website. Here are the Exhibits A, B and C. My suggestion is that simple deletion of an entire column is *not* the way to do a correction for an item that only constitutes 10-15% of that column.

Exhibit A: Screenshot from Google showing a link to Simon Carr’s Independent column, which included a side item about Alistair Darling’s alleged lies to the House of Commons.

Exhibit B: Screenshot from the Indy website showing what is at the link now.

Exhibit C: Screenshot from the Indy website showing the “hole” in Simon Carr’s columns. No column for the 22nd October. Where did it go?

This morning we have a statement on the Independent website, under “News”. I first saw it at 11:09am.

Exhibit D: Screenshot of apology from Independent website.

I see no evidence here showing that the allegation was wrong. So why did they apologise?

My conclusions

It’s pretty clear that somebody at the Independent has been panicking bigtime. They have pulled an entire composite column of around 1000-2000 words for the sake of a 200 word sidebar item. Anyone who has run websites knows that it would have been childsplay to edit out that part of the article and replace it with the above correction.

Further, we are in the context of the Usmanov / Schillings affair – the best way to do a “correction” is to leave the original there and correct it in situ; otherwise you end up looking very silly indeed with dead links all over your site.

See Tim Ireland’s comments on the subject:

When you begin a weblog, you also begin a relationship with those who read and interact with it. To simply delete content without explanation shows a complete lack of regard for this relationship and/or respect for those who take part in it.

I would hope that newspapers would do the same.

Did Alistair Darling lie to the House of Commons?

This one might be a bit more debatable for some parts of the political spectrum <g>.

Rt. Hon Alistair Darling MP states that the Government would have made the inheritance tax announcement “even if the Conservatives had not made their promise to raise the threshold to £1 million”.

Iain Dale put together a long list of quotes from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling (going back as far as 1995), including this from the Times on 21 August 2006, showing Mr Brown and Mr Darling’s dismissal of a Labour proposal to change the Inheritance Tax regime:

Stephen Byers, the former Cabinet minister and a supporter of Mr Blair, called for inheritance tax to be abolished, saying that rising house prices were making the estates of the middle classes liable for big tax bills.

…

Mr Brown’s supporters launched a swift counter- attack, dismissing Mr Byers proposal in terms usually reserved by Labour for assaults on the Conservatives during election campaigns.

Alistair Darling, the Trade Secretary and a friend of the Chancellor, told BBC News 24: “Inheritance tax brings in about £3 billion a year. If you get rid of it, it follows that some other tax has to go up or you have to cut some public spending, on health and education and so on.

“Ninety per cent of estates don’t pay it, it is paid by 6 per cent, and I don’t think this proposal really has much support across the political spectrum. The Tories and the Liberals have looked at it and backed off from it. It may make for a headline, but I don’t think it makes for a prudent and sensible tax and spend policy.”

So the previous Chancellor Gordon Brown, and the current Chancellor Alistair Darling, are on the public record as being opposed to changing the Inheritance tax Regime in the manner they have just proposed over the long term and almost up until the present.

And public support for such a change was revealed by the public response to a similar Conservative proposal.

So, against that background, they coincidentally happened to decide to change their attitude of more than a decade.

I’m wondering just who had told them to change their policy?

• Did Mr Darling get instructions from the pixies at the bottom of the Garden?
• Did he perhaps see a star over the Lord Moon of the Mall Inn, followed by instructions from the Angel Gabriel?
• Did he perhaps get instructions from a passing Martian?
• Perhaps he forgot to put his tinfoil hat on?

My Conclusions

My opinion is that the following are about 98% likely to be the truth:

• The Rt Hon Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, lied to the House of Commons when he claimed that he had planned to change the Inheritance Tax regime before the Conservative Party Conference publicised their similar proposal.
• Someone has bullied the Independent into a rapid withdrawal of a reasonable statement by Simon Carr in order to cover Mr Darling’s backside.

If anyone can come up with credible evidence to the contrary, I am quite willing to change my opinion and publish the fact here.

And finally

It’s very lucky for someone that this wasn’t one of the parts of the Independent subcontracted out to the Government Press Office.

Tags: independent, inheritance tax, alistair darling, lies in parliament, labour’s little lies, chancellor of the exchequer, alisher usmanov[tags]independent, inheritance tax, alistair darling, lies in parliament, labour’s little lies, chancellor of the exchequer, alisher usmanov[/tags]