Ed Miliband – 2015 Comments on Conservative Spending Cuts
The comments made by Ed Miliband, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 23 April 2015.
This General Election is coming down to a straight choice about who will stand up for working families: a choice between another five years of a recovery just reaching big firms in the City of London with the Tories – or Labour’s better plan to ensure the recovery reaches the front doors of working people across Britain.
And, with two weeks to go, it’s time that choice was made plain and clear. The Tories want to pretend that another five years of their failing plan is the route to the good life. But the truth is they are engaged in a grand deception.
David Cameron is running a desperate campaign, talking about anything but their record of failure or their plans for the future. They might not want to talk it, but we will.
The Tories are committed to the most extreme spending plans of any political party in generations.
It is a plan so extreme that IMF figures show Britain would be facing the deepest cuts over the next three years of any advanced country in the world.
It is a plan so extreme that far from protecting the NHS they would end up cutting the NHS.
It is a plan so extreme that it wouldn’t mean three years of the good life, it would mean three years of hard times.
Maybe not for some of the rich and powerful, who have done so well with the last five years of the Tories.
But it would mean hard times for the working families of Britain, who put in the hours, pay their taxes and play their part.
It would mean hard times for young people just starting out in life and wondering if they will ever be given a decent chance.
And it will mean hard times for the NHS that we all rely on. David Cameron has broken all those promises he made before the last election.
He promised there would be no more top-down re-organisations and then wasted billions on the biggest the NHS has ever seen.
He stood outside a hospital with a sign that said there would be no cuts and no closures – only to shut that very same A&E.
He said there would be no return to people waiting hours on end in A&E. But under his government, A&E targets are in tatters and patients are waiting longer and longer to be seen.
He promised extra money for frontline services like cancer treatment but ended up cutting cancer budgets.
And now in this campaign, he’s at it again. After five years of failure, he wants us to believe the NHS is safe in his hands. He wants us to believe he’s going to increase funding for the NHS. When he can’t tell us where a single penny of the money is coming from. You can’t save the NHS with an IOU and you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS.
