Labour lies and the lying liars who tell them

Labour's top blogger (by 382 points) Kezia Dugdale recently posted about a BBC Question Time where she claimed that Alan Duncan had sought to mislead the general public.

Seemed a bit strange to me, because the quote attributed to Alistair Darling didn't read like his usual manner, so I had a wee look into it.

Here's some quotes from Kezia's blog:

Harriet Harman: “Yes you did, and I was sitting next to Alistair Darling in the House of Commons when this advice was being given by the Tories and Alistair Darling was saying “It beggar’s belief that at this time you could be arguing for taking away regulation of mortgage institutions, and if you’ve changed your view on that and you're going to support the government with regulation then I welcome that ….

Harriet Harman: "I’ve got a nice little quote here, “We see no need to continue to regulate the provision of mortgage finance (this is August 2007) as it is the lending institutions rather than the client who are taking the risk…” and George Osbourne said “This was very important to cut government regulation – “we see sensible supervision as protection and we need to increase it.” You were arguing a year ago for less regulation!

You might get the impression from these quotes that there was an exchange between Alistair Darling and George Osborne in the House of Commons in August 2007 on mortgage regulation. I did, so I went looking for it

I looked up the London Parliament

Then the Official Report (Hansard)

This way, come on, keep up

Into the bound volumes

Then I searched the index for volume 463 which covers August 2007.

Neither George Osborne nor Alistair Darling spoke in the House of Commons during August 2007.

Not satisfied with that, I googled for the quote in its entirety - nothing. I searched for Alistair Darling and "beggars belief" (in google it's - darling "beggars belief" site:parliament.uk) - 27 results and I have to admit that I thought Alistair Darling beggared belief a lot more than that, but not one of these results had the Chancellor talking about mortgages.

I tried using "mortgage institutions" instead of "beggars belief" - the only thing that came up was a Treasury Committee Budget Report.

The second quote, the apparently killer one, is just as much fun - Labour MP Rob Marris used it in a debate claiming it was a quote from a newspaper report about a paper from a Tory policy working group. Further searching appears to trace that quote back to the policy proposal penned by John Redwood - so not policy then.

Quite clearly, Harriet Harman invented the first part and misrepresented the second part. Who sought to mislead the public?

Assuming that Kezia reported accurately, Harriet Harman lied.