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)
Indeed. Which is why (IMO) the witch hunt against Clegg's tuition fees "u-turn" was illogical. Manifestos are a list of pledges/promises/aspirations that parties say they will put in place if they win the election outright. No one won the 2010 election outright ergo the manifestos ceased to be applicable thereafter (that's simple logic). When a coalition is formed you then come up with a compromise 'manifesto'. I'm not a member of the Nick Clegg fan club but the demonising of him and the lib dems over the tuition fees "promise" says more about the intellect of the demonisers than the supposed demons. In my humble opinion of course