Ed Miliband still isn’t being honest about debt. And yes, that matters

The Guardian’s superb live blog was even better than usual this morning when it covered Twitter’s reaction to the Ed Miliband interview: eight tweets, of which five came from Spectator staff. That’s what I call balance: opinion from the full spectrum of opinion in 22 Old Queen St. We were challenging Miliband’s claim when he said the debt was “lower than what we inherited” – it was about £200bn higher. I can’t imagine these tweets went down too well with Guardian readers, because an update emerged later saying that the debt/GDP ratio fell. So was Ed speaking the truth after all?

I’m rather keen on this topic. We journalists do the public a great disservice if we just repeat jargon – especially jargon intended to mislead voters. So, for example, if George Osborne wrongly claims to have ‘halved the deficit’ in a broadcast interview, he needs to be picked up on that – otherwise the listener is successfully misled.