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I have been irritated by some of the lies being peddled during the election campaign. I set out below a few I spotted, with links to background information : 1) Labour ran up the
biggest debts in our history - In fact the When Labour left office in 2010 debt was 62.0% of GDP. Now after 5 years of coalition government it is 80.4% of GDP. One record Labour does hold is the largest net borrowing in a single year £154n in 2009/10. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th worst net borrowing years are all under George Osborne £135bn in 2010/11, £115bn in 2011/12 and £120bn in 2012/13. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/datasets-and-tables/index.html http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Public+Sector+Finance Since 2010 over £30bn of the £133bn has been recovered and the balance is expected to be recovered in due course. 2) The Conservatives never promised to eliminate the deficit in this Parliament – page 7 of the 2010 Conservative manifesto says “We will provide an emergency budget within 50 days of taking office to set out a credible plan for eliminating the bulk of the structural current budget deficit over a Parliament.” The Conservatives said they would eliminate the deficit in this Parliament and have failed. George Osborne Budget speech June 2010 3) The Conservatives
Have Fixed the Economy In the quarter to March 2015 the economy grew by 0.3%. In the quarter to March 2010 the economy grew by 0.5%. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/10613201 The Conservatives inherited a growing economy, but destroyed that growth by making sudden ideological cuts. The economy is only just recovering 4) Labour Caused the
Financial Crash This was denied by Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. In fact there was a global financial crash caused by reckless bankers. 5) Labour Caused the
Crash by Deregulating the Banks In fact Margaret Thatcher deregulated the banks with the ‘Big Bang’ in 1986. In 2007 the Conservatives proposed a Deregulation Act to relax the regulations further! Freeing https://flipchartfairytales.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/ecpgcomplete1.pdf proposed a Deregulation Act and said In many cases regulations are not necessary to keep businesses honest
and safe. Rt Hon John Redwood MP Co-chairman, Economic
Competitiveness Policy Group 6) Labour spent
irresponsibly before the crash Actually I have some sympathy with this statement as I was opposed to PFI and would have preferred to see a surplus prior to the crash. However, until 2008 George Osborne said that he would match Labour’s spending plans, so as the Conservative shadow Chancellor supported Labour’s spending plans he cannot very well criticise them now. 7) If you cut taxes
for the rich then it increases the amount of tax the government receives. It is a preposterous and dangerous argument that wealthy people simply avoid paying tax if the tax rate is too high and therefore you should cut taxes for the wealthy. I have a simpler solution – stop letting wealthy people off the hook over tax avoidance. It should be morally unacceptable to dodge taxes and Tories who make excuses for wealthy tax dodgers are betraying their country. Secondly, the facts simply don’t support the argument. When corporation tax rates were cut, the tax take fell. Finally I would simply point out that this argument is never used to argue for cutting taxes for the low paid. I set out below 2 examples of Tory economic incompetence https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-the-economy Today, our national debt stands at £770 billion. Within just five years it is set to nearly double to £1.4 trillion. To put it in perspective, that is some £22,000 for every man, woman and child in our country. David Cameron July 2010 16/9/92 Black Wednesday - |