Tories have no plans to scrap school building projects

Can you guess what the following three true statements have in common ?

1) The Conservatives are not planning to cancel any school building projects

2) The Conservatives are not anti-nuclear

3) John Redwood does not support the "Railtrack" model of rail privitisaion

Answer - untrue statements from the New Labour spin machine have been made on all these subjects this week.

Shane Greer notes

here that the Labour Party website has essentially accused the Conservatives of planning to cancel hundreds of school building projects:

However, this is not true. The Conservative paper that Labour is referring to makes clear that no building projects would be cancelled. Rather, they’d be taking £1.5 billion a year from the Building Schools for the Future fund for allocation after 2011. Why 2011? Because no funds have been allocated past 2011. And where would this £1.5billion go? Into building new academy schools!

Then, in the Whitehaven News this week, "Jedie" Jamie Reed (Labour MP for Copeland) alleged for the nth time that the Conservatives are anti-nuclear. This is untrue, Jamie knows perfectly well that it is untrue, and repeating this nonsense is not in the best interests of the nuclear industry which directly employs 24% of the working population of Copeland.

And then there's John Redwood. Now I have never agreed with all of John Redwood's positions, especially where he goes beyond Conservative policy. However, one area where I do agree with him that restoring regional train operators would have been a far better model for the railways than the "Track Authority" option which was actually chosen at the time of privatisation.

This did not stop Junior Transport minister Tom Harris from claiming on his blog that John Redwood "still thinks Railtrack was a good idea!"

Devil's Kitchen has an excellent post here which points out not just that John Redwood has made clear in the House of Commons that he thinks nothing of the sort, but that Tom Harris spoke immediately afterwards in the same debate and acknowledged the fact, saying "It is good to know that we do not have to wait for the publication of his memoirs to see that he disagreed with his Cabinet colleagues on the nature of the privatisation of the railways in 1993."


There are people in all three political parties who ought to make more effort to stick to the truth. But as they get increasingly desperate in the face of a growing threat of electoral annihiliation, New Labour seems to be sinking to lower depths of mendacity and scaremongering as they try to convince people that the election of the Conservatives would be the end of civilisation as we know it.

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