Sheila Gilmore MP, commenting on reports that the Conservatives are deleting past records from their website, said:
“The Tories are trying to hide from their own broken promises and failed policy. Rather than owning up to the mess they’re making of the economy and fixing it, they are pretending it hasn’t happened.
“This cynical stunt won’t fool any family suffering from a cost of living crisis. With hardworking people over £1,600 a year worse off under him, it will take more than David Cameron pressing ‘delete’ to make people forget about his broken promises and failure to stand up for anyone beyond a privileged few.”
Ends
What the Tories would rather you forgot
Reports that the Conservatives are deleting past records from their website suggest that given their record in government, there are some things they wish we didn’t recall:
• David Cameron’s pledge to “cut the deficit, not the NHS”.
“We are the only party committed to protecting NHS spending. It’s there in black and white behind me. I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.”
David Cameron speech: I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS, 4 January 2010
• His commitment to “No more pointless reorganisations” of the NHS, before he went ahead with one.
“So I make this commitment to the NHS and all who work in it.
“No more pointless reorganisations.”
David Cameron, Conference speech 4 October 2006
“With the Conservatives there will be no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS.”
David Cameron, speech at the Royal College of Pathologists, 2 November 2009
• A pledge to “match” Labour’s spending plans.
“What I’ve pledged to do is match the current spending plans. These extend from 2008-09 and the next year and the year after.”
George Osborne, Daily Telegraph, 08 September 2008
“And overall, we need to share the proceeds of economic growth between higher investment in our public services and lower taxes. George Osborne and I have made clear that we will put economic stability before promises of up-front, un-funded tax cuts. As George Osborne has set out, we will match Labour’s spending totals, and by growing the economy more quickly than public spending over an economic cycle, we will deliver a lower tax economy over time. Sharing the proceeds of growth is a significant policy choice. There are clear dividing lines here, and I believe that in time economic history will show that once again those on the political right, and not those on the left, have the correct analysis and the most productive policy solutions.”
David Cameron, Speech at the London School of Economics, 10 September 2007
• A promise to be “the most family friendly Government we’ve ever had”.
“And let me just say something about the organisation that I think is the most important of all in fighting for a, and delivering, a responsible society and that is the family. I want the next Government to be the most family friendly Government we’ve ever had in this country and that is about everything we do to support families and it’s about supporting every sort of family. It’s about saying to parents you should have the right to request flexible working because parents suffer from not having enough time with their kids as well as not having enough money to spend with them. It’s about saying when a new child comes along you should be able to share the maternity leave and the paternity leave in whatever way you think is right for your kids.”
David Cameron Speech- ‘Mending our Broken Society’, 22 January 2010
• That David Cameron promised Sure Start would be protected, before overseeing the closure of many centres.
“I believe that a stable, loving home is the most precious thing a child can have. Society begins at home. Responsibility starts at home. That’s why we cannot be neutral on this. Now I don’t live in some fantasy land where every family is happily married with 2.4 kids. Nor am I going to stand here and pretend that family life is always easy.” But by recognising marriage and civil partnerships in the tax system and abolishing the couple penalty in the benefits system, we’ll help make it that little bit easier. But it’s not just about money. It’s also about emotional support, particularly in those fraught early years before children go to school. Labour understood this and we should acknowledge that. That’s why Sure Start will stay, and we’ll improve it. We will keep flexible working, and extend it. And we will not just keep but transform something that was there long before Sure Start began – health visitors.”
David Cameron, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 8 October 2009
• Given their failure to do anything about it, maybe they are hoping everyone will forget that David Cameron called lobbying “the next big scandal waiting to happen”.
“Now we all know that expenses has dominated politics for the last year. But if anyone thinks that cleaning up politics means dealing with this alone and then forgetting about it, they are wrong. Because there is another big issue that we can no longer ignore.
It is the next big scandal waiting to happen. It’s an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money.
I’m talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism. We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism. So we must be the party that sorts all this out.”
David Cameron speech, ‘Rebuilding trust in politics’, 8 February 2010
http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/02/David_Cameron_Rebuilding_trust_in_politics.aspx
• Or that no one will remember ‘vote blue, go green’.
“Our message in this local election campaign is simple: vote blue, go green - and save money. It’s been our campaign slogan for the last three elections. Why? Because it goes to the heart of what Conservatives believe. And because that’s the kind of change people really want.”
David Cameron, Speech at Local Election Launch, 17 April 2008
• Or arguing that we “cannot afford not to go green” and that when utility bills are higher it is “even more urgent” that we act to boost the green agenda.
“As David Cameron put it in his speech on the environment last month, these pressures mean we cannot afford not to go green.”
George Osborne, speech to the Green Alliance, 9 July 2008
“There’s increasingly an argument being aired that that the public might put up with the green agenda when the going’s good, but not now that the economy is slowing and they’re feeling the pinch. But the fact that oil prices are rising, utility bills are higher and it’s now more expensive to fill up your car, should make it even more urgent that we act.”
George Osborne, speech to Green Alliance, 9 July 2008
• Perhaps their aim is to get people to forget that they spoke out against tougher regulation of the banks.
“In an age of greater choice, he offers more overbearing control; in an age of greater freedom, he gives us more interference; and in an age of flexibility, his rigid belief in bigger government is out of date. In short, in an age that demands a light touch, he offers that clunking fist.”
George Osborne, Hansard, 27 November 2006, Column 835, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm061127/debtext/61127-0005.htm#0611275000572
• That David Cameron argued from opposition that “we can build a society where we end the scandal of child poverty” when in Government he’s overseen an increase in child poverty.
“Yes: we can build a society where we end the scandal of child poverty and give every child the decent start they deserve but only if we have radical Conservative welfare reform to achieve it. This is the big argument in British politics today, an argument through which we show that in this century as we have shown in the centuries that went before with Peel, with Shaftesbury, with Disraeli, when the call comes for a politics of dignity and aspiration for the poor and the marginalised, for the people whom David Davis so vividly described as the victims of state failure, when the call comes to expand hope and broaden horizons it is this Party, the Conservative Party it is our means, Conservative means that will achieve those great and noble progressive ends of fighting poverty, extending opportunity, and repairing our broken society.”
David Cameron, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 1 October 2008
• Or maybe, given their website decision they’re hoping we’ll forget David Cameron’s argument that “the starting point for reform should be a near-total transparency of the political and governing elite”.
“And the starting point for reform should be a near-total transparency of the political and governing elite, so people can see what is being done in their name.”
David Cameron, Speech to the Open University, Milton Keynes, 26 May 2009