Labour Lies - Conservative Defence Spending Pledge

I'm a bit late to this but I wanted to highlight it, because I think it's important. On Wednesday at Prime Ministers Questions Gordon Brown was asked by David Cameron if he agreed that it was his decisions as Chancellor that have meant that our troops are improperly equipped today in Afghanistan.

His reply was to point to the "real terms" budget increase for the MOD and waffled around a little more. What he then said though was "Let me remind the right hon. Gentleman that he stood on a platform at the last election to cut defence spending by £1.5 billion"

Unfortunately for Mr Brown this just wasn't true. It was another example of him seemingly just making up a fact or statistic to get out of a hole. If we have a look at the Conservative manifesto for 2005 on page 25 we can see that actually David Cameron's platform was to increase front-line spending by £2.7bn over Labour.  It's a shame that David Cameron couldn't remember that (to be fair to him it was 5 years ago and a world of statistic behind him) as it would have been fantastic to watch Brown stumble over his own bare faced lies.

Sadly though that wasn't what happened, instead he got away with it and no doubt won't have to apologise for it, or make a correction at the next PMQs. The problem with corrections and retractions is that they aren't interesting and so even if they're made they won't be reported, equally if the Conservative Press office started briefing that actually the contrary was true then Labour would no doubt just spin it as being petty.

Either way, spotting these lies and mis-truths (no doubt mis-speaks would be Gordon's word) is going to be very important in the coming months.

Aside: Who designed and conceived the 2005 manifesto. No wonder we didn't win it's hideous and it's key messages are awful

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