Rewriting history with the Tories – The Tory party’s online revisionism (video)

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will be familiar with the Conservative party’s attempts to mislead the public about the nature and effect of their policies. You will also know that Lynton Crosby, Grant Shapps, Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa May and others have been caught on a number of occasions lying or withholding reports and have even been accused by the police of probable fraud. So it should not come as a surprise to learn that as well as lying about what they have been doing in government they are also trying to re-write history by ‘amending’ and deleting inconvenient information that has been available online.

Image Credit: The Daily Mail

Most recently, there has been the highly publicised ContribSX Wikipedia scandal in which Shapps has been accused of changing his and other leading Tory MPs entries on the site to his own advantage and their detriment. But did you know that Crosby had been found doing exactly the same thing 2 years ago and that the Conservative party deleted its entire online archive of speeches and announcements made by Cameron et al up to 2013?

This is all a long way from 2010 when Cameron promised that his would be the most transparent government in British history. one of the speeches deleted by Tory HQ was this one by Francis Maude from March 2010 on the subject of data transparency in which he promised that a Tory administration would make it easier for the public to scrutinise Cameron’s government.

“Absolutely crucial to our vision for the new Britain is data transparency. We are passionate about the genuinely transformative powers of free data…The era of closed shop government is over.”

Other speeches lost in the re-write include Cameron’s promise to increase spending on the NHS, the Tories intention to clean-up lobbying (the “next big scandal”), the abolition of the “surveillance state”, the promise to recruit thousands more nurses and so on so forth. Fortunately, Channel 4 News courtesy of the British Library) was able to salvage some of these items for posterity.

Image Credit: Guido Fawkes Blog

In a statement at the time, the Conservatives claimed the changes “allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide” although, as you will see towards the end of the video, they told Russia Today a slightly different story.

The video begins with the Tory party’s attempt to crowd-out the Shapps story by rolling-out their most ‘popular’ Prime Minister of recent times the “man of the people” multi-millionaire John Major – a deception that, in leading the major TV news bulletins that night, appeared to work.