Labour lies?

The last issue of The Sunday Times had a comment from a cabinet minister explaining the Labour Party strategy towards the voters. Oddly The Sunday Times has since taken it off their website although it is still available in the print edition. This comment received some publicity at the time and Alex Masterley has it recorded on his excellent blog:

"We don't care if the commentators or the economists turn against us. This is all about shoring up the base in the northern heartlands, which we lost in the European elections. We don't want or need them to understand the nuance of the argument. We just want them to hate the Tories again."

Interesting...

I was reminded of this when I heard some of Ed Balls' Today interview yesterday morning and thought I heard him say that the national debt was still coming down under Labour. So I looked around and found this article by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator Coffee House entitled "Balls lies" that identified two lies including that

"Alistair Darling in the budget set out plans which show the deficit coming down, national debt coming down."

So it was with interest that I read Fraser Nelson's follow-up article that reported:

"Ed Balls has just called me up about my post from this morning , hopping mad. He instructed me to "take that post down now". I thought he was joking: has there been some change to the constitution where ministers now have power over the media? But he was deadly serious. "You should not call me a liar," said Balls. I told him that if he doesn't want to be called a liar, “he shouldn't tell lies”. His defence is that his point about debt is a Brownie, not a lie - okay, he didn't put it quite like that. But when he said "debt" he referred to the "ratio of national debt to gross domestic product" which is forecasted in the Budget to start falling in eight to nine years time. Now the Budget, of course, has a "horizon" running out in 2013/14: there are literally no plans beyond that. It is a lie to suggest otherwise...."

Do read the rest of this Fraser Nelson article and note this extract:

"Five years ago, you could lie like this on the radio and get away with it. Space is tight in newspapers, no one would devote hundreds of words and graphs - as we did - to expose a lie for what is. But the world has changed now. Blogging has brought new, hyper scrutiny. Blogs have infinite space, and people with endless energy, to expose political lying - no matter how small. Your claims can be instantly counter-checked, by anyone. If you stretch the truth, you can be exposed - by anyone. And if you plan to base a whole election campaign on a lie, as you apparently intend to do, then you're in for a rude awakening."

What do you think? Was Ed Balls lying or "just" deliberately misleading the listeners? Or do you think he was actually telling the truth?