6 Speeches The Conservatives Don’t Want You To See
The Tories have attempted to wipe all of their pre-2010 speeches off the internet. So we’ve dug them out.
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.
(Here it is.)
With the Conservatives there will be no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS…So yes, I’m proud to say the Conservatives will stop these pointless, retrogressive re-organisations and closures.”
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.
(Here it is.)
What Google has achieved is truly amazing…. You’ve begun the process of democratising the world’s information. Democratising is the right word to use because by making more information available to more people, you’re giving them more power.
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.
(Here it is.)
I have committed us to two per cent a year spending rises for the next three years. This will mean real increases for our public services.
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.
(Here it is.)
When it comes to the firing, we’ve said we’ll introduce a power of recall to allow voters to kick out MPs mid-parliament if they have been proven guilty of serious wrongdoing.
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.
(Here it is.)
The first step is to redistribute power and control from the central state and its agencies to individuals and local communities. Where it doesn’t make sense to give power directly to individuals, for example where there is a function that is collective in nature, then we will transfer power to neighbourhoods.
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.
(Here it is.)
We need to harness the internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible - and so bridge the growing gap between government and governed
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.
UPDATE: A Conservative spokesman gets in touch.
We’re making sure our website keeps the Conservative Party at the forefront of political campaigning. These changes allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide - how we are clearing up Labour’s economic mess, taking the difficult decisions and standing up for hardworking people.
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.
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