Following the 2008 financial crisis, when the size of the debt became a major political problem, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that if you included PFI debts in the total, the debt would swell to nearly twice its official size.37 Suddenly, Brown was less keen on doubling-up his numbers.
‘When we are dealing with these problems, let’s talk fact, not fiction.’
Alan Milburn, BBC Radio 4 Today, 22 January 2002
By the time Labour had settled into their second term in office, their constantly whirring spin machine seemed to have been accepted as a routine part of the game of political reporting. Whitehall press officers would put out a story, and journalists would set about testing and teasing each aspect of it to see which would be the first to fall down. The teams would sometimes swap ends, and the government’s shock troops would devote themselves to demolishing the details of a front-page scoop that showed the Court of King Blair in a bad light. No one emerged much the wiser from any of it, but there were only a few casualties – the odd special adviser here, a political correspondent deafened by an Alastair Campbell earbashing there. Then, suddenly, it all got considerably darker.
The first victim was a ninety-four-year-old woman called Rose Addis who had had a fall and cut her head quite badly. She was found by one of the care workers who visited regularly at her North London flat; the carer called an ambulance, which took Addis to the accident and emergency department at the Whittington Hospital. It was there that Addis’s daughter Zena Gold, herself in her seventies, found her two days later – still in the clothes she had been brought in wearing, and with dried blood caked in her hair and on her face. ‘I went absolutely ballistic,’ Gold said. She ‘asked why she hadn’t been moved to a ward. The nurses said they didn’t have any beds.’38
The hospital denied this, saying there had been beds available but doctors had chosen to keep her mother in the A&E department so she could ‘be kept under observation’. They also said that it was standard practice not to wash a patient’s hair immediately after they had suffered head wounds, lest the wound open up again. They said they had tried to change Addis’s clothes and clean her up, but she had ‘refused’ their help and been ‘most particular about whom she will allow to care for her’. She was, they said, understandably, ‘confused and agitated’ after her accident.39
What took this beyond the bounds of a horrible trauma for Mrs Addis was the family’s decision to tell not just the papers but their MP about it. Their MP happened to be the leader of the opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, and he promptly laid the whole thing at Blair’s feet at Prime Minister’s Questions. ‘Mrs. Addis’s daughter also said to me: “If my poor mother had been a dog she would have been treated better”,’ the Tory leader roared. ‘Will the Prime Minister now apologise to Mrs. Addis for her treatment…?’40
The prime minister was not in the mood to do anything of the sort. Instead, he went on the attack. ‘The idea that one elderly woman’s care was the big political story for the entire country was ridiculous,’ chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell noted in his diary. ‘If we were not careful we would be into a new season of personal case histories presented as the big picture… we agreed we had to get the doctors at the Whittington Hospital out there.’41
The clinical director of the Whittington, James Malone-Lee, was only too happy to oblige, going on various BBC programmes to throw blame firmly back onto his ninety-year-old patient. ‘She would not allow the nursing staff who were on duty in the A&E department at the time to change her. She refused.’42 At the end of his long day of interviews (Campbell applauded the appearances as ‘excellent’), Malone-Lee went further on Newsnight: ‘She had a particular reservation about some of the nurses who were on duty,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to develop that much further. I have discussed it with my colleagues and it’s an area of health care that’s often a problem to us. It causes a great degree of distress to the staff. It is a sensitive issue.’43
What was being implied was that Addis was a nasty old racist who had actively resisted treatment from certain staff. Spinners for the health secretary, Alan Milburn, who himself had dismissed the family’s version of events as a ‘fiction’ – were forced to deny that they were actively pushing this line. This innuendo was something her family would not stand for. ‘My grandmother has two social carers from Hackney social services who are both from ethnic minorities. She absolutely adores them and they love her,’ stormed her grandson Jason Gold to the Evening Standard. ‘She has absolutely no problem with them.’44 The chief executive of the Whittington, Trevor Campbell Davis – Malone-Lee’s boss – hastily withdrew any hint of accusation. ‘I would not want the hospital ever to give the impression that there was any racist overtone that might be seen as a slur on the family.’45
Things were about to get even more churned up. Malone-Lee was exposed as a Labour Party activist, although he insisted he had ‘been wearing my clinician’s hat at all times when I have spoken during this recent episode, not a Labour Party hat’.46 Campbell’s deputy Tom Kelly was upbraided for revealing confidential medical details about Addis and two other patients in a briefing to journalists. ‘It was a tactical error because it allowed the Tory papers to make it a “Labour dirty tricks” story, rather than being about IDS getting his facts wrong,’ complained Campbell.47 In fact, Iain Duncan Smith, the hospital and Addis’s family between them had already put most of the details in the public domain. Only one thing was painfully obvious: none of this had been the fault, intention or desire of Rose Addis, who was still recuperating on the Whittington ward to which she had eventually been moved.
She was merely one of the many ordinary people who were to feel the full force of the Whitehall attack dogs, their teeth sharpened on the harder necks of professional politicos. A few months later Dan Corry, a special adviser at the Department of Transport, was caught attempting to dig up dirt on survivors of the Paddington rail crash, which had killed thirty-one people and injured more than five hundred. In particular Corry wanted to identify any ‘political affiliations’ ahead of a meeting with Stephen Byers at which it was suspected the survivors might criticize the minister.48 Another of Byers’ advisers, Jo Moore, was forced out in a storm of publicity over an email in which she had urged colleagues to take advantage of the 9/11 attacks as ‘a good day to “bury” bad news’.49
The manic whirligig at the centre of Whitehall, epitomized by the increasingly unstable figure of Alastair Campbell, was beginning to spin out of control.50 And in the summer of 2003, when it caught up an unassuming weapons expert at the Ministry of Defence, Dr David Kelly, and forced him to face public pressure that was too much for anyone to bear, the machine finally exploded.
‘We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act. The violent drug dealer who cannot be sent home because his daughter – for whom he pays no maintenance – lives here. The robber who cannot be removed because he has a girlfriend. The illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because – and I am not making this up – he had a pet cat. This is why I remain of the view that the Human Rights Act needs to go.’
Theresa May, Conservative Party Conference, Manchester, 4 October 2011
It is a rule that is very rarely broken. Perhaps we could call it ‘Littlejohn’s Law’. If anyone, particularly anyone who hails from the same end of the political spectrum as that particular Daily Mail columnist, prefaces a statement with words along the line of ‘you couldn’t make it up’, you can be almost certain someone did.
That was certainly true of the moment when Home Secretary Theresa May put on her best pub-bore act at the Conservative conference in 2011 to cite various reasons why ‘human rights’ were – nudge, nudge – more like ‘human wrongs’, if you know what I’m saying, eh, squire? Among her reasons was – and she really was making this up – a cat.51
It took but a handful of minutes for judges at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to shoot her down in flames. ‘This was a case in which the Home Office conceded that they had mis
takenly failed to apply their own policy – applying at that time to that appellant – for dealing with unmarried partners of people settled in the UK’, came the stern announcement. ‘That was the basis for the decision to uphold the original tribunal decision – the cat had nothing to do with the decision.’52
Indeed, the published judgments in case number IA/14578/2008 of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal make it clear that the man in question had actually been allowed leave to stay in Britain due to the misapplication of ‘a withdrawn policy, DP3/96, which no longer applied at the date of decision’.53 He was a Bolivian national who had come to the UK as a student, met his partner, been living with her for four years, had outstayed his visa and was now seeking leave to remain in the country. Unlike the two other examples that May had lumped him in with, there was no suggestion that he had committed any criminal offences during his time here.
He had, however, been helping to care for his partner’s father, whose state of ill health prevented the couple from moving together to Bolivia. They did own a cat – but that was only one of a host of pieces of evidence they had offered to prove they were in a long-term relationship, along with bank statements, diaries and sworn statements from their friends. ‘The evidence concerning the joint acquisition of Maya (the cat) by the appellant and his partner reinforces my conclusion on the strength and quality of the family life that appellant and his partner enjoy,’ noted Judge James Devittie, who had no doubt at all that their relationship was genuine.54 Problem was, when the case was referred to the upper tier of the tribunal, Judge Judith Gleeson had done what no judge should ever do: she tried to make a joke about it. ‘The Immigration Judge’s determination is upheld,’ she wrote in the last paragraph of her ruling. ‘The cat… need no longer fear having to adapt to Bolivian mice.’55
On such flights of fancy do reputations rest. After the unprovoked assault on Maya the cat, May the human found herself caught up in a catfight of her own. A cabinet colleague, Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke, pooh-poohed her call to rip up legislation on such flimsy grounds and informed the party conference that the case ‘certainly has nothing to do with the Human Rights Act and nothing to do with the European Convention on Human Rights’.56
After taking over as prime minister in the summer of 2016, May declared that she intended to scrap both of them – once she had got Brexit out of the way (Clarke was already long gone). Until then, however, both pieces of legislation remain. A bit like Maya and her owner.
‘The benefit cap sets a strong incentive for people to move into work and even before the cap comes in we are seeing thousands of people seeking help and moving off benefits…. Already we’ve seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs. This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact.’
Iain Duncan Smith, Department of Work and Pensions press release, 12 April 2013
Iain Duncan Smith is a man driven by ideology. He has his beliefs, and he holds strongly to them even when evidence suggests quite different conclusions. For instance, he believed very sincerely that the judges of the Supreme Court, in ruling in January 2017 that Parliament must have a vote on the Brexit process, had ‘stepped into new territory where they’ve actually told Parliament not just that they should do something but actually what they should do’, despite the fact that the judgment made it explicit that they were doing nothing of the sort.57 He also truly felt in his heart of hearts when filling out his Who’s Who entry that he had studied at the University of Perugia, rather than the language school in the same town where he had failed to finish his exams.58 He believed so strongly that he could get by ‘if I had to’ on the £53 per week that his department expected certain jobseekers to survive on, that he graciously declined all invitations to prove it by experiment. And he absolutely, unequivocally believed that his proposed benefit cap, which would limit the amount that any household or individual could receive in public handouts, no matter their circumstances, was going to be such a roaring success in pulling people out of poverty and into work that he released a bunch of figures to the media before it was even introduced proving it was already working.59
Except the figures didn’t prove any such thing. The UK Statistics Authority, the official independent watchdog which keeps tabs on government figures, wrote to Duncan Smith on 9 May 2013 to point out his claim that eight thousand scroungers had already gone out and got jobs because of his initiative was ‘unsupported by the official statistics’ published by his department – and, in fact, that the civil servants who put together those statistics had explicitly warned that they could not be used as evidence of ‘additional numbers entering work as a direct result’.60 What’s more, they noted that the numbers Duncan Smith had quoted ‘do not comply fully with the principles of the Code of Practice [for Official Statistics], particularly in respect of accessibility to the sources of the data, information about the methodology and quality of the statistics, and the suggestion that the statistics were shared with the media in advance of their publication.’61
It wasn’t his first offence with respect to statistics, and it wouldn’t be his last. Less than a week before the watchdog had drawn Duncan Smith’s attention to problems with figures relating to his flagship work programme, stating that ‘the information published by the Department was unclear, and Parliament, the public, and the media were left confused as to the relevance and meaning of the information that did enter the public domain’.62 In January 2012 they observed that his department had provided figures on ‘the nationality of benefit claimants’ which ‘attracted wide media coverage and comment’, but put them out as ‘ad-hoc statistics’ rather than official ones, which meant they didn’t have to comply with the rules or highlight ‘important caveats and weaknesses that need to be explained carefully and objectively to Parliament and the news media’.63 In 2010 they had rebuked his department for ‘serious deficiencies’ in the way unemployment figures were presented;64 the admonishment came in the same week Duncan Smith was forced to correct the parliamentary record after figures he quoted on local authority housing – which he had claimed came from the Office for National Statistics – turned out to have been plucked from the slightly less authoritative findaproperty.com website.65 This lackadaisical approach to empirical evidence would continue throughout his six-year career at the DWP, culminating in 2015 when the department put out a leaflet in which named and photographed benefit claimants sang the praises of a hard-line approach to docking payments – only for it to emerge that they were actors, the department having been unable to find a single genuine enthusiast among the 5 million recipients of working-age benefits in the UK.66
But as usual, what mattered was what Iain Duncan Smith believed. When challenged about his dodgy benefit cap numbers, he replied: ‘What the Statistics Authority said to us was that we couldn’t say the number of people going back to work in the early days of the cap was directly linked, that we couldn’t prove that was the case. But then again it also has to be admitted you can’t disprove that…. I have a belief I am right.’67
6
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
The Brexit referendum campaign at times resembled a ‘who can lie the loudest’ competition. All was sound and fury as the idiots took turns blaring on the nightly news; grossly partisan papers enabled and amplified grotesque exaggerations, scare stories and blatant falsehoods in lieu of a genuine national debate. Some minds must have been changed, but most just calcified around long-held positions. And it ended, uniquely, with a winning side who seemed to be just as angry as the all-but-equally proportioned losers.
Yet spectacular dishonesty about the EU did not begin in 2016. Europe had long been the one subject about which it was somehow okay for journalists to make stuff up, thanks largely to an early nineties coterie who took their cue from the Daily Telegraph’s masterful Brussels correspondent Boris Johnson. A quarter of a century later, having carefully weighed up which option would play out best for his new political career, Johnson would
return to finish the job, but he was far from the first charlatan to jump on the sceptics’ bandwagon in the intervening years. The soaring success of UKIP as they split and then set the agenda for the Conservative Party was largely down to Nigel Farage’s skill at influencing popular opinion with spurious statistics and wild, if heartfelt, claims. Yet mainstream politicians have never been entirely straightforward about Europe either. David Cameron’s ‘cast-iron promise’ to hold a vote on the terms of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 turned out to be a very weak alloy indeed. That was no more than we should have expected. By then politicians had been breaking their word on the European subject for a good four decades.
Relations with our Continental neighbours have, right from the outset of this experiment in governance, been characterized by a common complaint: when it comes to Europe, the strength of one’s argument comes from its passionate intensity, not its veracity. You go with your gut, not with your brain. And whichever side you put yourself on, there are always plenty of people who are happy to feed you exactly what you want – no matter how bad it might be for your digestion.
* * * * *
‘There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the economic interest.’
Government white paper, ‘The United Kingdom and the European Communities’, July 1971
It became an article of faith among Eurosceptics, stunned by the scale of their defeat in the referendum of 1975, that the British people had been ‘tricked’ into entering Europe without being made fully aware of the implications. ‘The British people were led to believe that they were voting to stay part of a “Common Market” or free trade area,’ blustered UKIP’s Nigel Farage. It was ‘very simply a step towards a far larger and, to me, more sinister goal: European economic and political union, the creation of a United States of Europe.’1 MP Bill Cash insisted: ‘All the European stuff before from 1972 was about trading, that sort of thing.’2 And in announcing his timely conversion to Brexit campaigner ahead of the 2016 referendum, Boris Johnson claimed: ‘it isn’t we in this country who have changed. It is the European Union… the project has morphed and grown in such a way as to be unrecognisable.’3
The Lies of the Land Page 15