Now, as the clock keeps ticking towards the 7th of May with less than three months to go, it is good to turn our attention to the efforts the Conservatives have exerted in order to hide the other half of their two faces from the Internet over the past few years. With the aim of hiding past promises under the bushel and letting the new promises of the British moon and stars shine, the Tories have tried to slowly but surely take down speeches and promises made before May 2010 still available online. This has happened while apparently, very wishfully, thinking that no one would notice.
The pre-election ‘contract’ presented in 2010, where David Cameron pledged to fulfil 16 promises or be held accountable in the 2015 General Elections, has been silently deleted from the website of the Conservative Party. Uploaded back online by the Another Angry Voice blog, it has been shown that the ruling party has practically failed to meet every point they made during the campaign before the 2010 elections. Covering politics, economy, and society, the issues included cutting net migration, MPs’ expenses, and increasing healthcare spending every year, among many others.
In terms of immigration, which has been a burning issue mainly due to the rise of UKIP in polls, the Prime Minister failed miserably in delivering the promised cut to ‘tens of thousands’ migrants a year. Between 2013 and 2014 net migration actually rose by 78,000 to 260,000 people moving to the UK. Of course, the promise was impossible from the get-go partly because free movement is guaranteed to the citizens of the European Union, but that did not hinder Mr Cameron in trying to convince the British electorate that he could go to Brussels and demand changes on the matter.
Similar was the case with the ‘British Bill of Rights’, which would have required the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. The glamorous company of Belarus and the Vatican City would have waited behind that curtain. Conveniently masked as another slap towards the EU by the government, the European Court of Human Rights is actually a part of the Council of Europe comprised of 47 member states, ranging from Sweden and Germany to Russia and the current chair, questionably democratic, Azerbaijan. All in all, a move that thankfully was not made despite the Prime Minister’s promises.
When it comes to domestic policy, the government frequently promised before May 2010 that there would be ‘no more top-down reorganisations’ of the NHS. However, 2012 saw the dawn of the Health and Social Care Act, which did exactly the opposite of what the Tories had promised years earlier. Additionally, the Tories have happily dumped 4,000 nurses from the services of the NHS as well as cut spending on maternity care – despite promising to do just the opposite.
Truly, families either expecting or with young children seem to have been the main target of the Conservative establishment, as in spite of the growing economy Chancellor Osborne’s spending cuts have hit the families with young kids the hardest. Cuts in aid to Sure Start have been made, while, at the same time, over 200 libraries were shut in 2012 alone companied by similar numbers in the estimates for this year. Against this background the government recently declared their ‘war on illiteracy and innumeracy’. Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan somehow seems to believe that young children are just units in which the required knowledge can be shoved into. (Some still claim, however, that the former education secretary Michael Gove is still conducting the orchestra from the shadows.) Despite the big words, school funding has stayed stagnant only to reduce in real value per pupil due to inflation.
The economy is apparently growing, but what does it matter when there are numerous citizens who just don’t see it? Never mind the economic growth when homelessness in the UK has seen a 26 per cent rise since 2010. The amount of rough sleepers in London has increased by 75 per cent during the last four years. ‘Great news everyone, the economy has grown!’ So what George, so freaking what? It should reach those in need as well. One of the reasons for this alarming progress has been the reduced budget of local authorities by the government, resulting in fewer resources to tackle problems such as housing. In the meantime, while at first reducing the MPs’ salary by the promised 5 per cent, Westminster then decided to delegate an independent body to raise the salary of the MPs by 11 per cent to £74,000 for 2015.
The Tory revisionism has also included blaming Labour for everything bad in the economy. However, once again the facts behind the rhetoric are something completely different. For instance, George Osborne has accumulated more debt in the past five years than the former Labour government did in 13 years. Another repeatedly mentioned revisionist argument by the Tories revolves around the fact that they have managed to decrease the deficit inherited from the last Labour government. Yet, the Labour leadership in reality managed to grow the economy by 40 per cent and to reduce debt that it inherited from the pre-1997 Conservative government.
On top of all this deleting of speeches and unfulfilled promises the two-faced Prime Minister had the guts to say that people should not have the right to delete their information from the internet if this information is true. This came as a reaction to the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling by the European Union Court of Justice in 2014. In a perfect ‘do as I say, and not as I do’ twist of events, the Tories have now effectively deleted ‘every article, speech and press release released before the last election from their website’. No wonder the public feels that politicians cannot be trusted.
The only lesson we can learn from this is to do as the Prime Minister intended we do and vote him out of Downing Street, for failing to deliver what he promised. Otherwise we can only expect the Ministry of Truth to be established after May 2015.
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