Cllr Iain Lindley's Diary

Dishonesty and broken promises are second-nature to Gordon Brown’s Labour Government, and one of the biggest broken promises has been a failure to hold a referendum (as promised in the 2005 Labour manifesto) on the Lisbon Treaty – a re-branded version of the EU Constitution.

David Cameron has now rightly launched a new campaign to get Gordon Brown to honour Labour’s promise to give the British people the final say over whether we sign up to the Lisbon Treaty. You can get involved by joining the Facebook group or adding the EU-turn widget to your blog or website, if you have one.

Conservatives have promised that if the Constitution was not in force at the time of the General Election, a Conservative Government would hold a referendum on it, urge a no vote, and reverse Britain’s ratification if successful. Unlike Labour and the Liberal Democrats, we will hold to our promise to give the British people the final say.

We’ve already seen in today’s budget that the predictions made for the economy by Alastair Darling in last year’s Pre-Budget Report were not worth the paper they were written on – they were completely wrong.

As the Chancellor reeled off (as quickly as physically possible) some of the most appalling financial figures in history during today’s budget speech – £703bn of borrowing over the next five years, a national debt of £1.4 trillion, and every baby born will owe £22500 – I couldn’t help feeling that once again he had plucked figures out of thin air to suit.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long to have my suspicions confirmed. A mere couple of hours after Darling’s speech, the IMF issued their own projections for the British economy. Where Darling forecasts a contraction of 3.5% this year, the IMF thinks our economy will shrink by 4.1%. The Government expect the economy to grow 1.25% in 2010, whereas the IMF think it will shrink further, albeit at a slower rate.

Faced with contradicting figures from a Government whose own forecasting has today proven to be hopelessly optimistic and inaccurate, and the IMF, I know who I believe – and that leaves a further £23 billion hole in the public finances.

Britain simply cannot afford another five years of Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence. It’s time for change.

It shouldn’t have taken a genius to work out that a keynote speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a UN “anti-racism” Conference was a toxic mix, and so it proved. It rather begs the question, why did the Government send a delegation there in the first place only to end up walking out?

Surely the sensible option would have been to follow the lead of the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, Poland, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Canada and the United States who all stayed away entirely?