The real voters who nailed Labour’s lies

IT was the day the phoney election campaign finally sprang into life.

For week after tedious week, the party leaders have been whisked from one meticulously stage-managed engagement to the next – posing for embarrassingly stilted pictures and speaking only to small, handpicked groups of supporters. But at the BBC studios in Leeds on Thursday night, all that changed. The leaders were finally confronted by real people – and boy did they get an earful.

How refreshing it was to hear the real issues of the day being debated with such passion, but how sad it didn’t happen until the final few days of the campaign.

Here was an intelligent, politically diverse, plain- speaking Yorkshire audience, demanding answers to the crucial questions the leaders have been dodging since the campaign began.

It was political theatre at its best for which the BBC deserves congratulations. For this is the first time this paper can recall a genuinely balanced Question Time audience as opposed to the usual Leftdominated crowd, whose dreary shroudwaving over any Coalition reform has made the show virtually unwatchable.

The Prime Minister was ferociously grilled about his plans to cut welfare and his failure to meet immigration targets.

Nick Clegg was savaged for raising university tuition fees after solemnly promising he wouldn’t.

But the most searing interrogation was reserved for Ed Miliband.

When he tried to pretend the last Labour government had not overspent and that the crash had nothing to do with his party’s reckless economic policies, audience member Adrian Gill spoke for most of the nation when he said: ‘It’s ludicrous. You’re lying.’

He was absolutely right. Even through the boom years before the crash, Labour’s spending was so profligate that they were already having to borrow enormous sums.

The size and cost of the state rose faster than in any other country – much of the money going on higher wages and pensions for public sector workers – with the result that by 2005/6 Britain had the highest deficit in the EU.

So when the crash came, Britain was hugely debilitated by debt and unable to weather the financial storm without massive extra borrowing.

The other blatant lie Mr Miliband tried to peddle was that he’d never do a deal with the SNP to become prime minister.

Does anyone really believe that a man so obsessed with getting to No 10 that he would knife his own brother could pass up any opportunity to grab the keys?

From their frosty reaction the audience clearly didn’t, and yesterday even three shadow cabinet members were forced to admit that Labour would deal with the SNP if they hold the balance of power.

Mr Cameron, by contrast, handled the fiery Leeds audience with poise and candour, which makes one wonder why he hasn’t been out engaging with ordinary voters since the start of the campaign.

Unlike Mr Miliband, a key member of the last Labour government which almost bankrupted Britain, Mr Cameron has a massively positive story to tell of the Government’s successes – a million more in work, the strongest growth in Europe, and wages and family incomes rising.

With 40 per cent of voters still undecided, this is a message he must repeat with tireless passion every day between now and polling – to real people.

The choice for the waverers really couldn’t be clearer. Do they want financial responsibility, fair taxes and a growing economy with the Tories, or a tax-andspend binge benefiting Labour’s client state sector and their union puppetmasters, which would wreck the recovery and load our children and grandchildren with an ever- rising mountain of unsustainable debt?