Ministerial Lies and the Paignton Job Centre

This linked article is clear proof that the Paignton Job Centre once existed but is now closed. One comment indicates it is in fact now a Tesco Metro shop. Yesterday morning Lord Mandelson went on Sky News to complain that the Tories were lying in claiming any Job Centres had closed. The Employment Minister Mcnulty appearing later on Sky News backed up the slimy peer and former EU commissioner. Interviewed by Dermot Murnaghan, read here, who had visited the closed Paignton Job Centre on his South West cycle tour the day before, things became quite heated but the Minister maintained the Job Centre had not been closed in spite of the evidence of Murnaghan's own eyes. Visit the Devon County Council web pages for Job Centres, here, and you discover all first contacts are by phone call to Plymouth, the following quote from the first linked article demonstrates that the phone scam is a ruse designed to camouflage the outright and deliberate lying in which the entire government machine is engaged:

Tackling the Work and Pensions Secretary in the Commons yesterday, Lib Dem MP for Torbay Adrian Sanders said: "Given that unemployment has risen faster in my constituency within Devon and Cornwall than anywhere else, I visited the staff at my local Jobcentre Plus and they are doing a fantastic job, but is there any possibility at all of reopening the Paignton Jobcentre Plus because the Torquay centre is frankly becoming overwhelmed with the ever-rising number of people out of work."

Responding Mr Purnell said he was happy for specific issues to be raised with him.

He added: "Overall we believe the system is performing well. Phone calls are being answered in a minute. We are processing people's claims faster than we were when unemployment was lower, and the key thing is we need to make sure the system is flexible enough to respond to the high level of claims, but also bringing in the extra help.

No doubt one could forcibly transport both Mandelson and Mcnulty physically to Paignton, show them pictures of the original Job Centre as it had existed for years AND they would nevertheless insist that it had not closed but was now open in Torquay. In other times such self-delusion would surely have resulted in them being at least shamed if not certainly subject to questions of their sanity.

Worse now follows, however, as I indicated on my blog last evening. For the reporting by Sky News for the rest of the day sought to disguise the facts such that by the end of the day the ministerial lying had become the official version and to a casual viewer or reader the Government distortion would appear as fact. Will Dermot Murnaghan by the time he gets back to the delusional bubble that is the Sky News studios this morning himself come to believe that the Paignton Job Centre has not been closed at all. Is his position within the media so important to him that he can convince himself black is white for the sake of his job, along with apparently the entire Labour Party and its corrupted Civil Service?