Lies, Damn Lies and Labour Party Leaflets

I was the recipient this morning of no fewer than three leaflets from the Labour Party. Sadly, two of the three are glossy (or should that be Panglossy?), so they have few alternative uses around the home. However, the one which really stuck out was the party’s official Election Communication for the Lothians.

It’s printed on a piece of very flimsy 1/3 A4 card, and says not a word about what Labour has achieved in office or what they plan to do if returned. Instead, they give an example of an ‘average family’ (Question - why does their ‘average family’ always seem to consist of a firefighter and a nurse cohabiting? Does their publicity guru have a thing for uniforms or something?), whom they contend would be £913 per year worse off if the SNP were to win power.

That seems an unusually precise figure, although sadly no-one in the Labour team has seen fit to explain how they have arrived at this amount. It’s also significantly at variance with the £5,000 per family figure they have on their billboards and party political broadcasts currently. To make things even clearer, there is considerable confusion amongst Labour spokespeople as to whether this £5,000 figure relates to alleged SNP spending commitments; or to the supposed ‘borrowing requirement’ identified by the now discredited GERS report, divided by the number of households in Scotland.

So far in this campaign, they’ve tried to terrify us with ‘deficits’ of £6bn (Labour’s North-East Scotland leaflet), £7bn (their analysis of supposed SNP spending commitments), £11.9bn (GERS), and £13bn (Labour press conference). Quite clearly, they are just making it up as they go along. Perhaps more to the point, though, if I were to speak to their economic team (assuming it even exists), would I even get an attempt at an explanation for all these competing figures, or would they all be too busy sitting around on what they think are their elbows to give me a proper answer?