Left-wing "Winterval"?

[ciphergoth]

I've been reading The Winterval Myth, and wondering, what's the left-wing equivalent? What's a story that

• is told over and over
• to support a left-wing narrative
• as if it were an unquestioned fact, a simple matter of public record
• when it is in fact incontrovertably false
• and has been utterly debunked in detail?

Obviously I tend to think that those I've got more sympathy for have a more fact-based way of talking, but it would be odd if there were no examples. There must be some program that a specific named Tory council implemented, only they never did, or some awful thing that Thatcher or Cameron never in fact said (or whose meaning is so utterly changed by the context that once you knew the context you couldn't possibly apply the original meaning to it) or some terrible "fact" about nuclear power that isn't a fact at all. Anyone able to link me up?

Thanks!

Comments

[lovingboth]

Tebbit won libel damages over the report in the Guardian that he'd said 'No-one with a conscience votes Conservative' in a meeting.

[josy]

As I recall, Christmas, or at least the celebration of it, wasp[*] banned by Parliament during the interregnum following the English Civil Wars. That was a long time ago, though, and under a Puritan-controlled parliament. I'm not sure to what extent Cromwell was able to enforce the ban.

[josy]

Um, that should be [i]was[/i] banned.

[flick]

"There's no such thing as society": always mis underquoted....

[damerell]

There's no real evidence that Thatcher actually said anything about men on busses after thirty.

Churchill (very obviously when one considers his House-crossing) never said the line about being a liberal at twenty and a conservative at thirty.

Oh, and Nelson didn't say "I see no ships" which is nothing to do with left-right but is my favourite misquote.

[matgb]

The £120bn tax gap thing. Murphy's report has been widely discredited and even if it hadn't included lots of stuff where companies avoided tax by doing exactly what the Govt wanted them to do when it introduced a tax incentive, etc.

Treasury estimates actual tax gap is about £40bn. That's a huge amount of money, so why people want to use the completely discredited £120bn figure is beyond me.

Oh--Vodaphone didn't dodge any tax, and Arcadia group pay full UK taxes. If Vodaphone owe money, Arcadida don't, and vice versa, anything else is completely contradictory.

[pozorvlak]

Oh--Vodafone didn't dodge any tax, and Arcadia group pay full UK taxes. If Vodafone owe money, Arcadida don't, and vice versa, anything else is completely contradictory.

I know you wrote this a long time ago, but could you please expand on this?

[matgb]

Sure. The Tax Vodafone is accused of 'dodgin' is tax on profites made by their Eurozone subsidiary in Germany.

They paid tax on the profits in Germany, then paid residual corporate tax on teh profits in Luxembourg, then imported the profits from that sub company to the UK. On which they paid a minimal amount of tax again (over £1billion, can't remember figures).

If they "dodged" tax because they paid the tax where the profits were made instead of within the UK, then the argument is that profit tax should be paid where you incorporate, I disagree with this, you should pay it in the country you're working, but there is an argument there.

but Arcadia is a UK company that pays full UK tax. However, Arcadia is owned by a Monaco resident, so her dividends as owner are paid to her in Monaco and she pays tax on them there (not much, given Monaco is a tax haven, but that's what she does).

You simply can't argue that Vodafone is dodging taxes by paying them where they make the profits and that Arcadia is dodging taxes by paying them where the company is owned, you have to have it one way or the others.

[pozorvlak]

Deaths from the Chernobyl disaster are routinely exaggerated by the anti-nuclear crowd, though in their defence it's only in recent years that we've been able to do the long-term analysis of cancer rates to know this.