Silence of the Cams

David Cameron’s launch of the six key Tory general election themes is in chaos after the party decided the NHS, Europe and immigration were not priorities. Critics rounded on Cameron suggesting he is becoming a serial dodger only a week after he refused to take part in TV debates with other parties during the election.

Ditching the NHS as a priority is further evidence the Tories are running scared of Labour on the issue amid the near meltdown of A&E and ambulance services this winter. Rachael Maskell, Unite head of health was not surprised the Tories did not want to talk about the NHS.

“The health and social care act opened up the NHS as a market place,” Rachael said. “It’s being cut up, sold off and already £13.5bn of NHS work has been handed to the private sector.

Free for all

“If the Tories win the next election it will be a free for all. In 2010 they promised to ‘cut the deficit, not the NHS’. What they did was the opposite, they cut the NHS and not the deficit.”

But scrapping Europe and immigration is bizarre given the Tories have made both central campaigning issues in the last year. Cameron has gone so far as to have shuttle diplomacy across Europe kicking off attempts to re-negotiate Britain’s role in Europe and linking it to immigration.

He has gone so far as to promise a potentially devastating and costly in/out referendum on Europe if he wins the next election, during which he aims to make European immigration a key issue.  The Tories have famously fallen flat on the smug faces after they failed in their 2010 “no ifs, no buts” election pledge to cut net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ a year.

Cameron set out the six key themes of the Tories during this election campaign. They are deficit reduction,  jobs,  taxes, education, housing and retirement.

At the launch (January 12) he concentrated on the first – deficit reduction – which the Tories see as their best line, once again promising to remove the deficit by the end of the next Parliament. They promised this and failed to deliver the end of the deficit by the end of this Parliament – the whole point of them forming a coalition with the Lib Dems.

Cameron said that debt was also to be a central theme of deficit reduction.  “When you look at the children you love” he asked “do you want to land them with a legacy of huge debts?”

Biggest government debt levels, ever

His government’s failure to increase growth to effectively tackle the deficit has led to the biggest levels of government debt ever seen. The truth is Cameron and the Con Dems’ failures have already burdened current and future generations with more debt.

In particular, the huge increase in the debt burden shouldered by millions of young students leaving university has already lumbered the current generation with debts.

While deficit reduction was the launch’s main theme it has been drowned out by the chorus of disapproval from Labour about the NHS not being a priority. And his own side certainly do not like immigration and Europe suddenly dropping off their list of priorities.