Orwell, thou shoulds't be living at this hour

It is incredible how the Tory spin doctors and their allies in the right-wing press have succeeded and continue to succeed in turning truth upside down.

The nonsense that our current financial difficulties are the result of Gordon Brown's profligacy and ineptitude rather than the failure of the international financial system is now taken as read. Even the Labour party itself has been convinced that Britain's public debt is at so dangerously high a level, which it isn't, that failure to give its reduction the highest priority will lead to a loss of international confidence and put us in a position similar to Greece, which it won't.

Now, with almost three million people, of whom over a million are young, unemployed because of a lack of demand which cuts in public expenditure exacerbate, the propaganda machine is succeeding in convincing even the unemployed themselves that the fault lies with them and their lack of drive and determination, as the article: "So I wonder, in the end does he think that being unemployed was his own fault." by John Harris in yesterday's Guardian (08/02/2012) so poignantly illustrates.

As more and more of the medical and associated professions call for the bill to"reform" the NHS to be dropped the government pretends that this is simply opposition from bureaucrats and providers rather than abhorrence at the prospects of privatisation.

And now George Osborne has the chutzpah to claim that the public's genuine and legitimate outrage at obscene payments to chief executives and the like is motivated not by a desire for fairness but by a culture that is "anti-business."

Yet, with the possible exception of the NHS (have Liberal Democrat peers in the House of Lords been listening?) the cries to the contrary are sadly muted. Comment may be free but the truth is not getting a fair airing. In a developing country with a largely illiterate population this could be understood. In a sophisticated and highly educated democracy it is a disgrace.