Nailing the lie of Conservative propaganda
Gordon says what he really thinks of the Tories
It’s amazing really – for years I believed that the economy was badly run by Labour in the seventies as they tried to square the circle of their allegiance to the Unions and the need to manage the country. It turns out, it’s all a lie promoted by the Conservative press in this country.
Now, at the end of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we’re seeing a repeat of the exercise, in which his stewardship of the economy is being called into question – people are virulently attacking him with a fervour normally reserved for paedophiles and cop killers. Again most of the attacks are founded on lies and deceit – spun so that Gordon is portrayed to look incompetent and indecisive.
It’s the same story – the same distortion of the truth, with the same aim of using a tyre iron to remove a Labour government and replace it with their friends in the Conservative Party.
Let’s take the end of the seventies. The “Winter of Discontent”, it was called. Kenneth Morgan describes it in his biography of Jim Callaghan: “Sick patients went unattended; schools were closed because of strikes by school caretakers or cooks, or just because they were unheated in freezing weather; ambulance men were failing to answer 999 calls; frozen main roads were not being gritted; dustbins and refuse bags piled up in town centres in their tens of thousands, full of rotting and insanitary waste. There were secondary pickets all over the country preventing non-strikers getting through.”
