It is not just the Winning here! Posters sited in places where the Liberal Democrats have lost recent local and General Election seats that irk, but election leaflets that tell it as it isn’t.
The Liberal Democrats’ prospective parliamentary candidate for Guildford Sue Doughty’s latest election leaflet (emblazoned There is nothing to smile about Gordon) claims that the Conservatives will “sell off the NHS” and are planning “huge cuts to schools, policing and even defence”. This is from a member of the party whose leader Nick Clegg declared that
For the record, it should be reiterated that the Conservatives are the only party to have made a promise to increase spending on the NHS. The maverick Daniel Hannan was slapped down by David Cameron for making his (very) minority comment about the efficacy of the NHS.
The “huge cuts” alleged rely upon regurgitated funny figures originally published by Labour, which have since been debunked elsewhere including (on the issue of education, for instance) on Channel 4’s FactCheck Blog.
It is generally accepted that whichever party wins the General Election on 6th May 2010 a severe reduction in public expenditure will have to take place. We shall just to have to accept the Liberal Democrats’ word for it that their savage cuts will be kinder than those to be imposed upon us by the post-General Election government. It follows that the spending pledges made by the Liberal Democrats are not worth the leaflet they are printed on.