“We all know that the easiest thing in the world is for an opposition party to blithely talk about all the efficiency savings we will make in government: how we will streamline public spending […] with a few well-chosen cuts that miraculously deliver substantial savings without harming public service delivery at all.” – David Cameron, 2008

“The Conservatives claim that the spending cuts can, in effect, be rendered painless by efficiency savings that they say their advisers have identified.” – Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2010

The Tories like to boast of their proposal for a £12 billion cut to National Insurance. The cost of the cut, so they claim, is to be met by painless ‘efficiency savings’: “no-one will be worse off” says Osborne; “no plan to cut jobs” says Hammond; “no cuts to frontline services” says Cameron.

Many beg to differ. The economist Howard Reed has calculated that the planned spending reductions could lead to 75,000 job losses, fifty-eight leading economists say that the NI cut would “lead directly to job losses and indirectly to further falls in spending through the standard multiplier process”, whilst the Chairman of Standard Life recently argued that the Tory proposals would “damage the services people rely on in times such as these”. It has also been suggested that if the Conservatives win tomorrow they will have to resort to a VAT rise to fund the NI cut – lowering a progressive tax by increasing a highly regressive one; in relative terms, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Painless cuts will not suffice. As Cameron himself put it in 2008, promises of ‘sweeping savings’ and ‘efficiency drives’ are “the oldest trick in the book”.

Over the past months, Tory Stories has revealed example after example of Tories in local government pulling that very trick. The pattern is well established: vague electoral pledges to remove ‘frills’ and ‘waste’ give way to savage cuts to essential services, often accompanied by a remarkably casual approach to truly unnecessary spending:

Nottinghamshire Conservatives last year promised ‘efficiencies’ under a ‘business administration’ that would “make sure that people are cared for”. They have gone on to sell off thirteen residential homes, increase charges for meals-on-wheels and home care, and cut community transport, welfare rights advice and extra-curricular activities, all whilst hiring a new council spin doctor, redecorating council offices and cutting top band tax by some £100/year.

Surrey Conservatives promised to ‘pursue efficiencies’ whilst concentrating on ‘quality of life’. Yet they have drastically increased spending on publicity (by £1.1 million in 2007-8 alone), frozen the wages of the lowest paid council staff and, in pursuit of ‘maximum savings’, will shortly discontinue a popular school bus scheme. The former CEO last year attacked the council’s “obsession with the control of inputs and resources […] mistaken for a focus on efficiency” and described councillors’ attitude as “private sector good – public sector, bad”.

Hammersmith & Fulham Conservatives used their 2006 manifesto to stress their ‘compassionate’ credentials, pledging ‘value for money services’, cuts to ‘bloated, unnecessary bureaucracy’ and an explicit promise not to charge for home care. On taking control, ‘Cameron’s favourite council’ promptly introduced eye-watering charges for home care, meals-on-wheels and childcare, sold off twelve homeless shelters, closed down youth clubs, community centres and a school and turned a public park into a private polo field.

Westminster Conservatives have declared war on ‘red tape’, promising to ‘become even more efficient’ and ‘retain and improve services rather than cut indiscriminately’. These pledges sit uncomfortably alongside the council’s record of cutting council housing maintenance, 500 council jobs (including neighbourhood policing) and support for voluntary groups, all whilst lavishing millions on a council tax freeze, a £3 million spin budget, a £1 million council website, ‘hospitality’ costs and bonuses for top officials.

Barnet Conservatives last year unveiled its ‘easyCouncil’ strategy. The savage cuts to almost every area of council provision have been presented in the language of ‘targeted intervention’, ‘no-frills’, ‘cheap and cheerful’ ‘flexible’, ‘responsive’, ‘a relentless drive for efficiency’ and ‘consumer choice’. The rhetoric is new and painless, but the policies are not: service cuts for the vulnerable and tax cuts for the rich.

No politician speaks this language of ‘efficiencies’, ‘frills’ and ‘targeted intervention’ better than David Cameron, whose own atavistic priorities fit seamlessly into the above pattern. It all amounts to a slight of hand, obfuscating the rank transfer of goods and services from the poor to the rich. It is the vulnerable who benefit the least from council tax cuts but depend the most on the home care, youth clubs and bus services so often culled to fund them. In the same measure, it is the vulnerable who will benefit the least from Cameron’s inheritance tax cut, marriage tax break and National Insurance cut but depend the most on the public services due to be offloaded onto the voluntary sector in the name of the ‘Big Society’. As Cameron so accurately put it to his party’s councillors in 2007: “You demonstrate Conservative government – your values, your achievements, represent our party in action.”

In 2006, a group of rebranded “compassionate Conservatives” beat Labour for control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, a long stretch of west London. George Osborne says the work they have done since then will be a “model” for a new Conservative government, while Cameron has singled them out as a council he is especially “proud” of.

[...]

The Conservative administration was determined to shrink the size of the state and cut taxes as an end in itself. Rather than pay for it by taking more from the people in the borough with the most money, they slashed services for the broke and the broken first. After the homeless, they turned to help for the disabled. In their 2006 manifesto, the local Conservatives had given a cast-iron guarantee: “A Conservative council will not reintroduce home-care charging”. It was a totemic symbol of leaving behind Thatcherism: they wouldn’t charge the disabled, the mentally ill or the elderly for the care they needed just to survive.

Within three months, the promise was broken. Debbie Domb, 51, is a teacher who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994. She had to give up work, and now she needs 24/7 care. After being lifted up by a large metal harness and placed in her wheelchair so she can talk to me, she explains: “This was always such a great place to live if you were disabled. You were really treated well. Then this new council was elected and it’s been so frightening… The first thing that happened when they came in was that they announced any disabled person they assessed as having ‘lower moderate’ needs was totally cut off. So people who needed help having a shower, or getting dressed, had that lifeline taken away completely. Then they started sending the rest of us bills.

[...]

And in this boarded-up youth club, in Debbie’s panic, in the image of Jane and her bump on the floor of the park, I realise I am peering into the reality of David Cameron’s “Big Society”. The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody opened their home to Jane, or volunteered to feed Debbie, or started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed. It’s a rebranding trick. The Conservatives know that shutting down public services sounds cruel, while calling for volunteerism sounds kind – but the effect is exactly the same.

[...]

So what is Cameron so proud of here? There seems to be only one answer: in this area the Tories have managed to cut council tax by 3 per cent. They’ve given back about £20 a year to somebody on an average income, and about four times more to a rich person. That’s why, when Cameron was challenged about what has happened here, he said: “When I look at the record of what the Conservatives have done here in Hammersmith and Fulham, far from being embarrassed as the Conservative leader, I’m proud of what they’re doing.” As I heard this, I remembered that earlier this year Cameron’s close friend and shadow cabinet member Ed Vaizey said Cameron is “much more Conservative than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency”. The principles that run through Cameron’s politics seem to become visible at last, as clear and as stark as the Westway on the Hammersmith skyline: tax cuts, whatever the social cost.

Is wielding the Hammersmith hammer really worth it? Is cutting taxes by a fraction justified if it means abandoning the most desperate people – the homeless, the disabled, the poor? Is that who we want to be? The last time I see her, Debbie Domb tries to move a little in her chair – painfully, slowly – and says: “People should look at what they have done to us in Hammersmith. This is what Cameron and Osborne want to do to Britain. They say so. Remember, the people running this council said before they were elected that they were compassionate Conservatives. I can see the Conservatism. Where’s the compassion?”

Last Friday David Cameron visited SPEAR, a youth charity in Hammersmith. A slick and media-savvy event, the visit formed the backdrop to his party’s Big Society plan, which, so its manifesto claims, envisions the state taking action to “agitate for, catalyse and galvanise social renewal”.

Yet rather than speaking of Cameron’s nebulous aspirations to ‘mend our broken society’, the event stood to exemplify the strength of community engagement under Labour. Tory Stories has found that SPEAR is in fact a direct beneficiary of Labour’s support for the voluntary sector.

The charity is a project of St Paul’s Centre, a faith-based education group in West London that provides work experience, training and careers advice for those aged 16-24. Founded in 2003, the centre has benefited from a panoply of Third Sector initiatives introduced by Labour: it is funded by Connexions (- launched by the government in 2000 -), the Community Cycling Fund (- introduced by Ken Livingstone in 2003 -) and the Youth Capital Fund (- part of the ‘Youth Matters’ programme described by Tory MP Edward Heathcoat-Armory as an ‘utter waste’ of money -).

SPEAR has also received operational support from Jobcentre Plus (- launched by Labour in 2002 -) as well as ongoing funding from the Urban Partnership Group (- itself funded by the Learning and Skills Council, the London Development Agency and SureStart, all established by the current government -).

This case well underlines the growth of the Third Sector under Labour: full time employment in the sector is up almost 25% on 2000, whilst UK charities’ income over the same period has increased by 40%, thanks in no small part to Labour’s extension of gift aid, the Charities Act and the Hardship Fund. The level of charitable giving in the UK is now the highest in Europe, whilst the proportion of the population doing some voluntary work, having fallen from 51% in 1991 to 48% in 1997, had climbed to 59% by 2007. Small wonder, then, that an investigation by the Economist magazine found that “The evidence supporting the existence of a “broken society” is thin indeed”, and that a recent poll by Third Sector magazine showed that charity professionals overwhelmingly support Labour over the Tories:

Third Sector Magazine, 8/1/10

It is just as well that Hammersmith’s young people can rely on SPEAR. The borough’s Tory council (known as ‘Cameron’s favourite town hall’ and a ‘policy test bed’ for the party) has sold off schools, community centres and youth clubs, cut the youth budget by £500,000 and turned a local park into a private polo field, all whilst lavishing £5 million on rebranding, £35 million on new council offices and further millions on 16% pay rises for top officials. It has also been slammed by local charities for selling off a community building used by no fewer than 22 different voluntary groups. Responding to the protests, the council said that the building was ‘surplus to requirements’.

In any case, Labour will be grateful to Mr Cameron for drawing attention to the government’s achievements in this way. After all, the SPEAR visit was not an isolated case. Over the past week the Tory leader has visited Leeds City Museum (admission free under Labour) and Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital (the first new hospital in the city for over 60 years, representing £545 million of NHS investment), launching his party’s manifesto in Wandsworth, the London borough in which unemployment has fallen most relative to the last recession (from 19,025 in 1992 to 6,641 in 2009).

Where will Cameron go next? There is no shortage of options. A new SureStart centre perhaps?  The Scottish Parliament? The Disability Rights Commission? Keep track of his Labour Achievements Roadshow here.

As part of the Same Old Tories launch, the site includes a new web video of Cameron which highlights how changes to the Conservatives are only “spin deep”:

Visitors to Same Old Tories can track what the Tories are saying throughout the election and share the information with their friends. The site encourages and provides tools for people to email about the stories posted, tweet quotes from Tory candidates, sign a petition to sack Chris Grayling and more.

Tory Stories has obtained details of the Conservative response to the claims that ethnic minority candidates were ‘airbrushed out’ of electoral material. The Observer reported that, on being confronted with the allegations, the party appeared to make a rushed attempt to cover up its dubious electoral practices:

“The Tories said it was “fiction” to suggest that non-white candidates had been left off deliberately and said there was plenty of material showing these candidates. They forwarded different material to the Observer with photographs of the non-white candidates prominently displayed. But it appeared that these images had been superimposed onto the new material so that they were next to their white colleagues. They were not original, group photos.”

The photoshopped image of council candidate Samson Omosule can be seen above, first in its original context, and then superimposed alongside a photo of white colleagues in a leaflet forwarded to the newspaper by the Conservative Party. This raises two questions:

1. Why was the party unable to provide a genuine photo of the candidates together?

2. Had the leaflet been printed or distributed before the Observer made its enquiries?

Questions also remain over whether or not Lord Ashcroft was involved in the production or funding of the ‘airbrushed’ leaflets.

And the significance of this apparent reluctance to promote non-white candidates goes beyond the local campaign. The Conservative candidate for the seat, described as a ‘Young Turk’ close to David Cameron, is a former employee of Lord Ashcroft. Together with Ashcroft he has helped coordinate the party’s overall strategy for ‘target seats’.

Tory Stories has found that it was Ashcroft’s wife, Susan Anstey, who just last year donated £5000 to Dagenham and Rainham Conservatives’ war chest:

Given the donation, and Ashcroft’s proximity to this particular Tory candidate, it might reasonably be asked whether he or his office were involved in the funding and production of the offending leaflets. After all, Ashcroft himself has made it clear that his ‘target seats unit’ is very closely involved in Tory campaigns in constituencies such as Dagenham and Rainham:

“In the run-up to the 2005 Election I “did my own thing” because I did not believe that the Party was targeting its resources effectively and that a ruthless focus on winnable target seats would deliver results.  Things have changed.  I am delighted that David Cameron and Francis Maude have asked me, as Deputy Chairman with responsibility for target seats, to apply this approach right across the Party.  My team will deliver a highly focused campaign working with our candidates from the day they are selected.  There is no room now for any mavericks running solo operations”

So was the omission of photos of ethnic minority candidates from the calendars the product of one such ‘maverick’? Did it slip through the Tory party’s rigorous vetting process? Or was it part of a ‘ruthless focus’ on winning the seat, funded from Ashcroft’s own pocket?

Lord Ashcroft has long been accused of undermining standards in British politics and today’s revelation leaves unanswered questions as to the extent of his involvement in further highly negative electoral practices.

Tory Stories can reveal that the reverse side of the calendars featured a prominent image of David Cameron with the local Conservative parliamentary candidate:

This raises an important question. It has been reported that the Conservative Party now rigorously vets all electoral material; Tory candidates were recently told by the party’s Chief Whip Patrick McLouglin that they “could put nothing in writing to their voters without first getting permission from the party leadership.” Did Cameron, his office, or anyone else in CCHQ see the leaflets before they were cleared for distribution?

This comes just days after Cameron promised that Conservatives would stand up for ethnic minorities, a pledge that stands on increasingly shaky ground; today’s news marks the latest in a string of cases in which his party has been accused of pandering to prejudice and intolerance.

Today Tory Stories has been made aware of further cause for concern at the attitudes harboured in today’s Conservative Party. Dervish, who is also listed as working for the Conservative MP for Romford, Andrew Rosindell, appears to be a member of several highly questionable groups on the social networking site Facebook.

These include ‘Restore Rhodesia’ and the ‘Augusto Pinochet Fan Club’. The latter describes itself as “dedicated to the support of Augusto Pinochet and the continuation of his memorable acts of justice against Communist forces in Chile during the later half of the 20th Century”. It states “We currently support General Pinochet’s innocence in his trial for crimes against humanity that he did not commit”, lists its email address as “pinochetkicksass@benevolentdictatorship.com” and its location as “Caravan of Death Avenue”. Furthermore, Dervish also set up the ‘Ian Smith Appreciation Society’ group, which praises Smith for “fourteen years of maintaining white rule” in Rhodesia.

This comes after a recent investigation by the Guardian into the extreme views of the Young Britons’ Foundation, an organisation described by its founder as “a Conservative madrasa” that radicalises young Tories, and whose past speakers have included Andrew Rosindell MP.

With its extremist allies in Europe, its close involvement in a radical right-wing ‘madrasa’, ongoing questions about the degree of complicity of one of its own MPs in the dissemination of virulently anti-immigrant electoral material, and now indications of extremism amongst its own candidates, does the Conservative Party’s ‘progressive’ and ‘compassionate’ rhetoric really stand up to scrutiny?

“The time has come for us to think of the voluntary sector as the first sector [...] No matter how difficult the problems facing our society, there is none so difficult that someone, somewhere, isn’t already solving it through voluntary action. The  question is not whether the sector can do it, but what government can do to help them do  more of it.” – David Cameron

“Wherever possible frontline voluntary organisations should be resourced and empowered to commission the support they need from Councils” – Conservative Party Policy

What they do…

“Last week, the Westminster City Partnership ended ten years of partnership with the voluntary sector, by voting to relegate voluntary and community representatives to a powerless advisory role, with no voting rights.

Following the vote, voluntary sector representatives Drew Stevenson, Jackie Rosenberg and Bernard Collier walked out of the meeting.

After the meeting, Bernard Collier, Chief Executive of Voluntary Action Westminster said: “It’s hard to see the logic behind this decision, which ends ten years of partnership working with Westminster’s voluntary and community sector. It’s a u-turn in terms of local policy – and flies in the face of the policies of all three main political parties. We’re deeply unhappy with this decision.”

The decision comes shortly after the decision to cut £500,000 from the voluntary sector grants budget.”