The Conservatives have been caught deleting a decade of speeches from their website.
David Cameron's party has been busy removing all copies of speeches and press releases made between 2000 and May 2010 from the internet. This means they no longer show up on Google.
The party has even fiddled with the code on the their website to remove the speeches from archive.org, a library service that creates a back-up copy of almost all websites in existence on a regular basis.
Deleting the speeches from the internet makes it much harder to find out what David Cameron and other Conservatives pledged to do before coming to power.
Which will probably make life a lot easier for the Prime Minister in the run-up to the 2015 general election.
So we collected a few of the speeches and press releases that are now substantially harder to find.
Just to help you remember.
1. November 2009: Cameron pledges there will be no major changes to the structure of the NHS.
Until last month you could find the speech here. But no longer.
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2. May 2006: Cameron tells an audience at Google that the search engine is giving people power.
Unfortunately you can't find this speech on Conservatives.com anymore.
3. October 2007: George Osborne commits to increasing state spending.
Before the financial crisis Osborne tried to reassure the public that the Tories didn't want to slash the size of the government. But now the conference speech isn't on his party's website.
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4. February 2010: Cameron pledges to let the public kick out MPs halfway through a parliament.
The government is belatedly introducing a watered-down version of this law. But now you'll struggle to find his original speech, which used to be here.
5. November 2009: David Cameron's sets out his Big Society vision.
The Big Society was the core vision of the Conservative manifesto for the 2010 general election, proposing a mass devolution of power to the people. But the public didn't buy into the idea and it lost momentum when David Cameron came to power.
But most pre-election mentions of the bold plans have now been erased. Along with this speech.
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6. March 2007: George Osborne praising the internet's ability to make politics more accountable.
Knowledge is power, except when the knowledge is contained in a speech that is no longer indexed by a popular search engine.
But worst of all they've deleted the records of David Cameron's April 2006 trip to the Arctic to raise awareness of climate change.
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Won't someone PLEASE think of the huskies?
Although the problem with this explanation is that the Conservatives have tried to remove the speeches from all search engines, not just their website.
This robots.txt file lists the parts of the site that the party has chosen to remove from search engines and archive services.
UPDATE #2: The party has since edited the robots.txt file to remove mentions to the directories shown in the above screenshot.
