Conservative lies in this election
The conservative campaign in this election is so riddled with lies: the 40 hospitals they are supposedly building (they are not), the 50,000 extra nurses they will provide (when 18,500 of them are already employed by the NHS), the £1.2bn that Labour is planning to spend (it isn’t), that Corbyn wants to abolish MI5 (he doesn’t), etc etc, but the most egregious (so far…) concern the case of the 4-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia who was, because of pressure on resources at Leeds General Infirmary, forced to spend the night on the floor in a corridor.
Firstly, and just as a taster, Tory spokespeople put about the story that Matt Hancock was “punched” by a Labour activist when he visited the hospital - a story that was uncritically repeated by Laura Kuenssberg, who later had to make a (rather half-hearted) apology that there was no such punch: she'd been relying on what were clearly Tory plants. But the real lie - or, actually, pack of lies - came in the claims all over Twitter that “a good friend” of the poster, who was “a senior nursing sister at Leeds Hospital” had informed them that the whole incident was staged.
This tale was totally undermined not just by the fact that it was denied by, amongst others, the CMO of Leeds Teaching Hospitals and the Chief Executive of the General Infirmary or by the reference to “Leeds Hospital” when it was, in fact, the General Infirmary, but by the fact that the story was repeated many times, word for word - below are just three of them. And what exposed the lies? It was a properly researched examination by James Mitchinson, the editor of the Yorkshire Post, doing what a proper journalist should do.
It was such an obvious and crude campaign by the Conservatives (led by the Mekon Cummings, presumably), but it acts as a warning to those who are content to believe whatever fairy stories they read on social media rather than to follow actual journalism. And what does it say about us as a country that people are prepared to swallow such lies and, probably, return those same rotten liars to government?
Richard Carter ● 2528d15 Comments