FactCheck Revisited
Updated on 04 June 2006
Recalling some of the more outrageous claims from the 2005 election campaign.
Channel 4 FactCheck went live on 31 March 2005, five days before Tony Blair formally launched the General Election campaign, but already the phoney war was in full swing.
Margaret Dixon - an NHS patient-in-waiting - and Howard Flight - a loose tongued, wannabe tax-cutter and little known Conservative deputy chairman - were unwitting stars of those early days.
Next in line: Patricia Hewitt.
The Health Secretary told BBC Breakfast News viewers on 28 March: "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."
An eye-catching assault, for sure. There was only one problem. It wasn't true.
As FactCheck explained a few days later: "Our checks through policy documents and speeches showed [the Conservatives] had never made such an offer.
"They did propose a completely different policy in November - four, not two months ago - that maternity pay would rise to £150 a week."
A contrite Labour spokesman said: "That claim is not something we're going to continue to make."
So began 35 days of testing claim and counter claim. Some claims stood up to the scrutiny, much to the credit of the politicians who made them. Others, many others, did not.
Michael Howard might disagree but the 2005 Election Campaign was not about one big 'lie' over Iraq - difficult, if not impossible, to prove and more than two years old - but about a series of half truths, exaggerations and misrepresentations.
Some claims were absurd, some mischievous and other genuinely damaging.
To take two at random: the Conservative charge that Labour had introduced 66 tax rises/stealth taxes/hikes (delete as applicable) and the Labour charge the Tories were planning £35bn worth of cuts on public services.
66 tax rises
Here was a soundbite that first aired during the 2004 budget debate. As such it was inevitably out of date by the time Gordon Brown sat down a year later - there were now 79 tax rises. That didn't stop shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin using the older number - after all, "the clickety-click Chancellor" was a good pay off.
Yet it added nothing to informed debate. If you'd applied the same methodology - as FactCheck did - that got you to 66 (or 79) tax rises you would also have to conclude that there were over 200 tax cuts in the same period. (And, by the way, what does the minor oils tax have to do with every day life?)
It was misleading, it was inaccurate and it was irrelevant. But that didn't stop it being repeated again and again.
The £35bn claim
Ditto the £35bn claim. Labour made much of Conservatives 'plans' to cut £35bn from public spending, launching an iconic poster to ram home the message.
It was quickly pointed out, by FactCheck among others, that the difference between the parties was that the Tories planned a smaller increase in spending than Labour over the course of the next six to seven years. This didn't stop the Labour frontbench, and Gordon Brown in particular, repeating the dubious claim again and again.
The local ads
The Liberal Democrats were not innocent bystanders in all of this. Their tactic of choice? Selectivity.
First, selectivity enabled the party to make some outlandish claims about its electability. By picking and choosing the most flatteringly statistics Lib Dems across the country could tell a winning story.
So we had Bridget Fox in Islington South apparently just '12 votes from victory!' (source: the 2004 elections to the Greater London Assembly, when Islington South was part of London's much larger North East constituency). And we had the Merton Liberal Democrat website proclaiming "the only serious challenge to Labour in Wimbledon" (source: a poor 2001 general election result in Wimbledon combined with two much better results in neighbouring Kingston and Surbiton and Sutton and Cheam).
And there were plenty more.
The ubiquity of these bar charts suggests that this was not the act of unaccountable local activists but something encouraged from the centre.
Selectivity was again at play whenever Charles Kennedy and team talked up one of their flagship policies: the abolition of tuition fees. "In Scotland, thanks to Liberal Democrats in government, we've already abolished tuition fees," read the party's manifesto, at once demonstrating a record of achievement in government and highlighting a populist pledge.
What you wouldn't have learnt from the manifesto is that up-front tuition fees were replaced with a deferred charge of £2,000. Not a 'tuition fee' in the tight definition of those introduced south of the border by the Labour government, but a fee for tuition nonetheless.
Did the Lib Dems lie? Absolutely not. Did they mislead? You decide.
It was left to Tory councillor Les Topham to let the collective cat out of the bag.
Asked why he had distributed leaflets which claimed Tory-run services in Stratford-upon-Avon were 'good' when the Audit Commission had declared them two grades below 'good', he told FactCheck. "There's nothing wrong with being economical. You don't have to tell anybody if you don't want to. You just state the good points, you don't state the bad points."
Others may disagree.
Related Link
>>Election 2005 FactCheck
>>FactCheck Awards
>>The election's most repeated claims
>>Ones we stayed up for
Your view
You've read the article, now have your say. We want to know your experiences and your views. We also want to know if there are any claims you want given the FactCheck treatment. Email news@channel4.com
FactCheck will correct significant errors in a timely manner, Readers should direct their enquiries to the Editor at the email address above.
