The Lies of Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown told the voting public a string of barefaced lies on immigration, border controls, the armed forces budget and the police force, an analysis of his claims during last week’s TV debate has shown.

Lie Number 1: Mr Brown claimed that net inward migration had fallen for the past three years in a row.

The truth is that the most recently available figures only date from 2008, two years ago already. Mr Brown could therefore not have been quoting figures for 2009.

In 2008, net migration was 163,000, a fall on the 2007 figure of 233,000. However, between 2006 and 2007, net migration rose by 42,000.

In reality, there has only been one consecutive year in which net migration has fallen.

Mr Brown simply lied when he said it had fallen three years in a row, and to make matters worse, has already been publicly rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for making a similar lie in a podcast earlier this month.

Mr Brown also ignored the impact of illegal immigration and the bogus asylum racket, which would have accounted for tens of thousands more migrants.

Most importantly of all, Mr Brown — and all the other parties calculate this “net migration” figure by deducting the numbers of those leaving Britain from those coming in.

Official statistics show that up to half a million British people flee Britain every year to escape the multicultural nightmare into which decades of Tory/Labour rule has plunged this country.

If net migration was “only” 163,000 in 2008, this means that total non-ethnic British migration into Britain was in excess of 600,000 for that year alone.

Lie Number 2: Mr Brown also claimed that net inward migration was falling as a result of the action which his government had taken.

The reality is that net immigration fell by 70,000 between 2007 and 2008 — but of that figure, 67,000 or 95 percent, was caused by a fall in net migration from the new Eastern European members of the EU.

That had nothing to do with government policy as East Europeans have free movement within the borders of the EU.

Lie Number 3: Mr Brown said that “Border controls have been brought in and we are counting people out and in from the end of this year. It was a policy that the Conservatives scrapped before 1997.”

The truth is that the Tories stopped counting EU nationals journeying in and out of Britain in 1994 when they surrendered border control policy to the EU.

It was the Labour Party’s Jack Straw who scrapped all embarkation controls for non-EU nationals in 1998 and it has been a free-for-all ever since then.

Lie Number 4: Mr Brown said that as a result of his party’s policy, “Police have to spend 80 percent of their time now on the streets.”

The truth is that this claim, used before by Government spokesmen, has been conclusively disproven over and over again.

A complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency resulted in an official rebuke for this claim when it was shown that paperwork now made up the majority of police officials’ time and only 14 percent of all police officers’ time is spent on patrol.

Lie Number 5: Mr Brown claimed that spending on equipment for British troops had increased “dramatically over these last few years.”

The truth is that figures from the Ministry of Defence show that the defence budget has fallen year-on-year in real terms on four occasions since 1997.