Mike Kane. Labour's Education spokesman. I know politicians of all hues are experts at avoiding the question but that was an absolute masterclass from him.
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=mike%20kane&src=typd
2010:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7165000/conservative-manifesto.html
"A Conservative government will act now on debt to get the economy moving. We will deal with the deficit more quickly than Labour, so that mortgage rates stay lower for longer with the Conservatives."
I could be wrong (for a change) but I believe their core aspiration was to reduce the deficit rather than the debt per se. You obviously need to turn the deficit into a surplus before the debt starts coming down from the mega high levels they inherited. Are you suggesting they should have deployed even more "living within our means" measures over the last 7 years than they have done thus far in order to have brought the deficit down at a faster rate? One accepts that they haven't cleared the deficit as quickly as they'd hoped. Maybe they haven't been 'nasty' enough....? or maybe they should have tried squeezing more than c.25% of the country's tax receipts out of c.1% of the richest people in the land...?
Edit: just skim read their 2015 manifesto and it did indeed contain the aspiration to 'clear the deficit by the end of the parliament', so there was never a pledge to "cut the UKs debt pile" as such. The debt was always going to grow whilst the deficit still existed (which it could still have done under their manifesto pledge until the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the parliament)