How do you know a Tory is lying?

When you see his lips move.

Here’s a promise from 11th April this year:

Andrew Lansley, the[n]shadow health secretary, said: “For Labour’s campaign to deliberately distress or scare sufferers from breast cancer is shameful. Because we are going to increase the NHS budget in real terms and cut bureaucracy and waste, we will have the capacity to ensure that cancer patients are seen sooner than they are at the moment and to meet the quality standards that they expect.

And here’s a quote from the Health spending section, page 43, of the Spending Review:

To ensure spending is focused on priorities, some programmes announced by the previous government but not yet implemented will not be taken forward.

This includes free prescriptions for people with long term conditions, the right to one-to-one nursing for cancer patients and the target of a one week wait for cancer diagnostics.

Hat-tip to Paul Waugh.

A lying bitch

You’ve claimed £60,000 of parliamentary expenses for a second home. A BNP thug drags you before the Commons watchdog to justify it. You’ve given testimony against yourself on your own blog. What’s a not-so-poor gel to do?

Prove herself a liar, of course:

MP Nadine Dorries has said that the blog she writes on her constituency website is “70% fiction, 30% fact”.

She was criticised by the MPs’ standards watchdog for giving the impression on the site that she spent more time at her Mid-Beds constituency home than she actually did.

She said she wanted to reassure people about her commitment to the area.

‘Strawdinary!

A word in urea

The word currently in use by pretty-well every UK commentator is “gamble”.

Well, “gamble” is what one might do with a couple of quid and a lottery ticket. It’s trifling, nugatory, ephemeral. It softens and trivialises the whole business.

It’s also a description of a few getting obscenely rich and the rest being taken to the cleaners.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

To see ourselves as others see us, Anthony Faiola at the Washington Post has a sharper word:

Britain unveiled on Wednesday a campaign to dig itself out from under a mountain of public debt, setting up a global experiment: Can a major nation drastically slash government spending without derailing its economic recovery?

So, fellow Brits, how should we take to our new-found rôle as lab rats?

More:

Malcolm has just caught up with David Blanchflower in the New Statesman:

A Harvard economist said to me recently that the coalition government’s fiscal deficit reduction programme is the biggest macroeconomic experiment in an advanced country in any of our lifetimes – and this was before the Comprehensive Spending Review on 20 October. He argued that no government, unless forced to, would be dumb enough to take such unnecessary risks with the well-being of the nation.

Every other country will be watching, he said, to ensure they don’t repeat the same mistake as George Osborne’s wildly unnecessary, misguided, doctrinaire and potentially dangerous spending cuts. They’ve let the Chancellor jump off the cliff first.

Reassured by that, anyone?