Conservative Claims to have halved the Deficit - a fake claim on a fake road

The latest Tory poster shows a wonky road ahead, with the claim that they have halved the deficit, and created 760,000 new businesses.

In 2010 all major Parties, with the exception of the Tories said that they would halve the deficit over a single Parliament. The Tories claimed they would eliminate it totally. Their latest claim is wrongly based on measuring the deficit against GDP not the actual cost. In fact the deficit has only gone down by 1/3 in cash terms. But even if their figures are a bit skewed they have failed to achieve what they set out to do - and simply matched what both Labour and Lib Dems said was achievable.

I would also like to know how many of the 760,000 'new businesses' are self employed people who have been forced out of secure work, and instead scrabble for contracts with no job security.

In online comment on this dubious claim by Osborne, it is still being contrasted to the now discredited claim that Labour caused the deficit in the first place. I had hoped that the statement by Mervyn King last week, that this was not true would be the end of that nonsense. Clearly not, as many people still think that Gordon Brown personally sold sub-prime mortgages all over the USA, and caused the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The Conservative Party stubbornly sticks to its prejudices on this matter, and that is why they have failed to tackle the true cause of the defeicit - which is a failure of the banking system.

Like all major advanced nations the UK borrowed heavily to prevent world-wide financial melt-down. In 2010 the UK, thanks to Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, had a lower National Debt than all our major competitors, including Japan, The USA, Germany, France and Canada. That is because for most years national debt fell under Labour, so we started from a position of financial strength.

A brief look at the ONS figures will show that. That is why Gordon Brown is a World Statesman, was short-listed to head the IMF which Cameron blocked, and worked for the world bank. In contrast Osborne and Cameron have no international status at all.