ReportsandSurveys AGoodPlacetoBuryBadNews?Hiding theDetailintheGeographyontheLabour Party'sWebsite DANNYDORLING,HEATHEREYRE,RONJOHNSTONAND CHARLESPATTIE Butactually,hethoughtashere-adjustedthe Ministry of Plenty's ®gures, it was not even forgery.Itwasmerelythesubstitutionofone piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is con- tained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as muchafantasyintheiroriginalversionasin theirrecti®edversion. GeorgeOrwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) The ®ctional Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four worked in the London skyscraper that housed the MinistryofTruth.Hespenthisworking daysrewritinghistoryin`Newspeak'so that it favoured `the Party'. Among the more menial of his tasks was the sub- stitution of one set of statistics for an- other to show how well the party was runningthings.Winstondidnotseethis substitutionasforgery.Itwasjustapart ofhisjob. This article examines the work of a contemporary Winston Smith who, in the service of a governing party today, hasthejobofsubstitutingstatisticstoput that party in a good light. We do not know the actual identity of this person or persons, although they almost cer- tainly work in George Orwell's original setting of London. There, however, the similaritieswiththedarksecretiveworld of Nineteen Eighty-Four cease. What is dierent about the contemporary Win- stonSmithisthattheirsubstitutionsare availableforanyonetoseeandarerela- tively easily uncovered on the party's website. The fact that they have not been revealed until now is testimony to our expectations of campaigning beha- viouronthepartofpoliticalparties.Itis also, probably, testimony to how few people actually directly use sources of thiskind.However,wesuspect(butcan- not easily prove) that what is put on websites like this is much further dis- seminatedthroughbeingreproducedby party agents in local campaigning liter- ature,releasedtothelocalpressandfed into general local political debate. What wasthestuof®ctionin1949iscommon- place `spin' in 2002. Here we examine how it is done, what the contemporary rules of political statistical manipulation are,andhoweven®guresmanipulatedto showtheworkofapartyinagoodlight canbeusedtocastdoubtontheirclaimed achievements.Weconcludebyconsider- ingtheimplicationsofthisdevelopment forpoliticalcampaigning. Ourcontemporaryexampleofpolitical statisticalmanipulationconcernstheLa- bourParty,whichwontheBritishgeneral electionsof1997and2001.Ourevidence is drawn directly from the statistics on `What Labour's done in your constitu- ency'madeavailableontheLabourParty websiteÐavailabletoallanddrawn,the party claims, from data in the public # ThePoliticalQuarterlyPublishingCo.Ltd.2002 PublishedbyBlackwellPublishing,108CowleyRoad,OxfordOX41JF,UKand350MainStreet,Malden,MA02148,USA 476