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.

[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]

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.