Honestly, Gordon

20 June 2009

The Spectator on Gordon Brown's dishonesty over public spending

Since his brush with political death, Gordon Brown has made ‘candour’ his word for the month. So it was extraordinary to hear how brazenly the Prime Minister distorted the truth in his address on Tuesday to the GMB’s conference in Blackpool: a thunderous campaign speech which sought to draw the sharpest of ‘dividing lines’ between virtuous Labour and wicked Conservatives.

Using the age-old New Labour technique of the anecdotal case study, Mr Brown congratulated his government for saving the life of ‘a woman called Diane’ who had written to him to thank him, he said, for ensuring ‘that there is proper breast screening in the National Health Service’. Yet the PM somehow neglected to mention how appallingly patchy screening remains for women aged 50 to 70 and how coverage for screening of those aged between 50 and 64 actually declined between 2001 and 2008. He scorned the supposed Conservative dogma ‘that says that you must cut public services in order to fund inheritance tax for the richest people in this country’ — apparently forgetting that he himself bounced Alistair Darling into increasing the allowances for inheritance tax in October 2007 in a panicked response to George Osborne’s popular proposals to allow us to hand more of our wealth on to our children.

Above all, he warned again and again of the prospective ghastliness of a ‘Conservative government bringing in 10 per cent cuts in our public services... We must expose those people who would impose 10 per cent cuts... In two years’ time if we do not act and do not wake up to the problems that will be faced by a Conservative government cutting public expenditure by 10 per cent, then many of these services would be going or gone.’ As Fraser Nelson points out on page 10, this is dishonesty of the highest order. The Tories would indeed introduce cuts, as Mr Osborne readily admitted in a Times article on Monday — and rightly so. But so too, according to their own published figures, would the Labour government after April 2011.

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Christopher Chantrill

June 18th, 2009 6:55pm Report this comment

Presumably the "Tory cuts" line will help Labour with the voters that are straying off to the BNP.

But for the Tories, the question is: what will the "precious people" think, the Lib-Dem voters they have so devotedly love-bombed for the last three years?

I'd say that if you are an enlightened, progressive sort of person, in 2009 you are ready to see an enlightened, progressive rationalization of public services. Nothing as nasty as "cuts," you understand.

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