Leighton Andrews - Tweeted / Deleted

I see that Rhondda AM Leighton Andrews has been a busy boy over the last few days. First he was busy tweeting about the made up smear the London parties and Daily Telegraph launched on Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. And then he was busy deleting all the tweets when he finally realised that the whole smear was fake.

To read about the smear in more detail you should check out Wings over Scotland, but here's a quick summary. The Telegraph ran a front page story claiming that someone had been told that someone else had been told by the French Ambassador that Nicola Sturgeon had told the French Ambassador she wanted David Cameron to remain as PM. This is despite the fact the SNP have promised that should the Tories try and form a government they will vote against this.

In what should surely stand as a textbook example of the growing irrelevance of print media compared with the instantaneous nature of the internet the story was debunked before the papers even hit the shops.

Deleted tweets from here. Share via twitter

So first up we have a backbencher from the Welsh Branch of London Labour claiming that the First Minister of Scotland falsely claiming that Sturgeon backs the Tories. Then we have him accusing the First Minister of Scotland of being a liar after she had made the denial.

Tweet from the UK embassy of The French Republic (France) - Link

And then the tweets started vanishing, thankfully there is a website which monitors tweets from politicians and then when it detects those tweets have vanished it sends out an alert and publishes it on its website. It's called Politwoops.

And it's a good thing a website such as this does exist or politicians like Leighton Andrews would be free to spread lies and then delete them when challenged in the hope that a screenshot hadn't been taken.

Tweets like this one for example.

Here's page 49 from the recent Plaid Cymru manifesto, I have posted the main points here but you can read the whole thing on their website.

See if you can spot the pledge to SLASH FUNDING OMG!!! - Share via twitter | facebook

Let's pause a second in order to remind everyone that Leighton used to be the Education Minister until that whole thing about him closing schools around Wales whilst simultaneously fighting to keep his own school open from his own cuts. This was not long after he had campaigned to save his local hospital from the government he was a part of.

You'd think that a basic comprehension exercise would be fairly straight forward for a former minister of education, wouldn't you? School children all across Wales will you used to things like this, you read a passage of texts and then you answer questions on the text.

Here's a summary of page 49. Increase ambulances, invest in nursing, reduce business rates, improve broadband, more powers for communities, reduce fuel costs, improve public transport, help farmers and their families, mail delivery charges kept the same, change local funding to reflect increased costs of rural areas, provide comprehensive fire crews across Wales.

Did you spot the bit about SLASHING FUNDING! No? Well Leighton apparently did. Tweets like this are similar to how the newspapers operate. They publish some bullshit lies and then if they need to retract the story they do it in small print on a page no one reads. Leighton has lied and misinformed and not even had the decency to apologise. He's just deleted his tweets in the hope that no one notices.

Show Leighton you noticed via twitter | facebook 

Note - I'm getting a lot of traffic from Wings over Scotland after a comment on their linking them here for another link to the petition calling for Ed Miliband to apologise to Nicola Sturgeon.

The easiest thing to do is to add the link here to save you a wasted trip (hopefully you enjoyed the piece above). Here is the link to the petition.