Why didn’t we think of this 5 years ago?
Why didn’t anyone think of doing this site five years ago? I have no idea. It’s too obvious to have been missed.
To show you why, here’s some ancient cross-posting from our sadly departed friend Chris Lightfoot that really ought to have woken someone up to need:
4 November, 2003: Have I Got Lies For You
To comment on local political propaganda is pretty futile, but I was much amused by this figure from Anne Campbell Reports, the Labour Party’s local freesheet, showing how Anne’s electoral majority has changed over time:
Ignore for the moment the tragic graphic design and offensive chartjunk for which, no doubt, Microsoft Excel is to blame. Concentrate instead on something which seems, unaccountably, to be missing from this plot. Something quite famous. Something that you might remember. Something that happened in 1997.
Let’s see what a more honest version of the plot would look like:
– spot the difference?
(Obviously presenting the second of the above graphs — showing support plummeting — doesn’t give the right spin for Labour election literature. Presumably the point here is that this edition of Anne Campbell Reports is the first that will be seen by this year’s student intake. They may not know the history of Anne’s promise to vote against top-up fees prior to the 1997 election — a promise which she quickly forgot once the election was won, though oddly one which recurs in her propaganda now the deed is done — and may not realise that her seat is by no means safe. It’s just possible — this is where somebody who cared more would insert some kind of rant about A-levels — that the this year’s new undergraduates aren’t aware that there was an election in 1997, but I’d guess that’s pretty unlikely. All told, this is a pretty clueless piece of propaganda.)
[Chriss then adds some more representative depictions of voting proportions in the blog which you will have to go there to see.]
As usual, like us bloggers, we don’t do real journalism and ask for responses. They come to us, if it turns out that someone actually cares about what was said. So, two years later…
My long-term readers may recall something I wrote in November 2003 about an eccentric misrepresentation committed by then MP Anne Campbell in her constituency propaganda…
Some time ago one of her other constituents emailed her to ask why she thought this sort of thing acceptable. A copy of her answer came into my possession. I wouldn’t usually publish such correspondence — and I do so here without the permission of either party — but in my view an MP’s opinions of her constituents are a matter of legitimate public interest, as is dishonest propaganda. So here we go: (my comments are interspersed with the text)
[salutation redacted]
The idea that the graphic is misleading is astonishing and could only have been insinuated in the way that it has by a LD supporter which I am sure Chris Witter is.
Note here (a) the slightly surprising confusion of the URL of my web log and my name; (b) the bald, certain and quite wrong claim about my political affiliation. Regarding the latter I am reminded somewhat of a story — recounted, I think, in one of John Simpson’s volumes of autobiography — of Brian Redhead interviewing Nigel Lawson, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the Today Programme. In response to some difficult question other Lawson blurted out, “You’re only saying that because you vote Labour.”
Redhead calmly turned off Lawson’s microphone and said, to the listening nation, “We will now have thirty seconds’ silence in which you can reflect upon the enormity of claiming to know how I vote in a secret ballot, and the nation can reflect upon the failure of your economic policies.”
We continue from culumny to irrelevance:
Is he implying that I am somehow ashamed of my 1997 majority and that a large majority in 1997 somehow diminishes a very healthy majority in 2001. If anyone should be trying to hide the 1997 result it is the LDs who did worse in 1997 than they have done for many years.
– and from irrelevance to sophistry, and on to dishonesty:
I did promise to vote against top-up fees in 1997 and I did – immediately after the election when the government legislated to prevent universities from charging top-up or variable fees. I repeated the promise in 2001 and I am saying the same thing now, even though the government appear to have changed their minds. I have been wholly consistent.
I wrote a clarification on this point back in 2003. I had said `top-up fees’ when I meant `tuition fees’. Anne, also, was apparently confused on this point. In 1997 she promised that “Labour will not allow universities to introduce tuition fees”; yet in 1998 she did not vote against the Teaching and Higher Education Act which brought in tuition fees; nor did she even back this rebel amendment which would have satisfied her commitment to a “new system of financial support [i.e., grants] [which would] ensure that students have enough to live on while studying.”
I don’t understand why Parties do this kind of thing except of course, that occasionally people do get taken in by it. I do have a higher opinion of the Cambridge electorate.
Anne Campbell MP for Cambridge
Sure you do…
[The final denouement is here. Chris always had a lively comment threads in blog where people discussed other statistics-gone-wrong in election leaflets delivered to them.]
Man, it would have been cool if we were doing this site back then in 2003 when there was a lot less crud on the internet to compete with and we were young and keen, and Chris could have really got his blood boiling. That would have been a blast! Oh well, we’ll see what we can do with it now.