Party Politics: Where truth goes to die. It often astonishes me how slippery politicians can be. Clearly I’ve not been paying enough attention lately. In the interests of feigning interest, I watched Prime Minister’s Questions today.

Yes, I know, I deserve everything I get.

Today Harriet Harman wanted to tell the world that the Coalition will put 1.3 million people out of work. Cameron responded by saying that the independent Office of Budget Responsibility has confirmed that they expect unemployment to fall, that more people will be employed by the end of the year than were employed at the start. He didn’t deny it though, which made me wonder what was really going on.

Round and round they went, with Harman complaining about the 1.3 of job losses and Cameron talking about the extra jobs.

It turns out, of course, that these 1.3 million jobs Harman is referring to are as follows:

Assuming the Coalition changed nothing in the Budget, and assuming the previous Government’s own predictions about the effectiveness of its plans were 100% accurate, and we didn’t actually need to take into account the unemployment and disaster that would be caused by having to go to the IMF for a bailout or worry about the consequences of unrestrained borrowing, and if the sun shines just right on exactly the right point on the tip of the Red Flag flying over Labour HQ then maybe, must maybe, there might be 1.3 million MORE new jobs by the end of this year (UPDATE: Ha! It’s not even that! It’s by the end of the parliament! It’s more slippery than I though) than there will now be. Of course, when you know you’re going into opposition it’s easy to make spending commitments you know are impossible, just to make the incoming Government look like bastards when they apply the reality stick.

And, worth noting, a huge chunk of these ‘job cuts’ are those absolute bullshit, flushing-money-down-the-toilet, making-things-worse-in-the-long-run ‘Future Jobs Fund’ temporary jobs for 18-24 year olds. Harman didn’t say anything about these 1.3 million jobs being permanent or full time.

So Labour’s still up to its old tricks, still spinning, still trying to make political capital out of anything they can get their hands on. Sure it sounds rad, groovy, right on and seems to care passionately about ‘the people’ but it’s all statistical bollocks based on fantasy budgets they never, in million years, expected to implement.

Well, that’s party politics, innit?