Howard Flight and the Lib Dem Flight of Fancy

When the Howard Flight story began to break I had some sympathy for the man. Until that was I heard that he had been warned by Michael Howard’s office on two occasions that he should not say the things he did because they were not true. It is quite clear there are no secret plans for massive cuts. This is particularly clear by the way in which Blair himself was caught out last week trying to spin Conservative proposals into something that was a fabrication. As I have said on this blog before the nonsense of the Labour attempt to smear is that two thirds of the slower growth rate is accounted for by the fact that Labour have themselves pledged to make those reductions.

It is rare that I consider a politician odious but I have to say that the current secretary of state for health (whom Jeremy Paxman described as the “labour attack dog”) is really deeply unpleasant and unappealing. He too attempted to spin that somehow our health proposal was to make people pay for operations which is itself a down right lie. All access to the health service would be free at the point of delivery. What is clear though is that the health service has not the capacity to deliver the operations it currently requires. To give a real example my understanding is that Kingston hospital is tuning away 50 pregnancies a month from its maternity department due to lack of capacity

Labour spin and deception are nothing in comparison with the methods of total spin used by the Lib Dems in Richmond Park. In a recent tawdry leaflet they have wrongly and fraudulently claimed that the Conservatives (who are the opposition in Kingston Council) were proposing to increase charges for the elderly and disable home care then it is no surprise that Jack Straw has called the Lib Dems the “Vultures of Politics”. To set the record straight it was in fact the Liberals themselves who were hiking the charges, as well as introducing means testing, even though this is totally contrary to their own national policy for free personal care. To make it worse we now know that less than 10% of those taking this care have bothered to apply for means testing as it such a debasing and humiliating thing to make them do.

Unfortunately for Richmond Park Liberals it is not just us that are saying this; The Kingston Labour Party, the Surrey Comet, The Kingston Informer (no website), The Kingston Guardian, The Richmond and Twickenham Times, Age Concern Kingston, the Kingston Centre for Independent Living and the Kingston Council website (sorry, not able to make the link as yet again the Council website is not working!!) all agree with us. Our budget proposals were to take away the means testing and revert to the previous lower and fairer charges. Just a shame that the local MP could not control his Council and bring them to heel. The Conservative proposal would not have increased Council tax and would have cost only £65k or the equivalent of 0.001% extra Council tax they could have levied which would have taken the Lib Dem Tax rose from 4.99% to 5.00%. They had options and instead they chose to stamp on the elderly and disabled of Kingston rather than do the right thing.