General Election 2010: Conservatives fight back after Labour poster warns off the elderly

Published on Monday 12 April 2010 01:44

THE General Election turned nasty over the weekend as the Conservatives launched a poster campaign accusing Labour of telling lies about Tory policies on the elderly.

The UK-wide poster campaign featuring an elderly woman with her finger in her ear was a retort by the Tories to claims in Labour leaflets that a Conservative government would scrap free bus passes, TV licences and winter fuel payments, as well as reduce pensions.

In Scotland, the campaign was accompanied by a letter from Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie to Labour Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy accusing his party of engaging in "dishonest campaigning" and trying to "scare the elderly into voting Labour". She also demanded he stops his party's candidates from "spreading smears".

"We need to regain the public's respect, and twisting the truth and scaring people with smears and dishonesty is just going to turn people off even more", said Ms Goldie.

The accusations have come at a bad time for Labour. The party was forced to sack its Moray candidate, Stuart MacLennan, for offensive remarks he made on Twitter, including describing pensioners as "coffin dodgers".

But Labour hit back with a dossier of quotes from senior Tory party members, apparently backing up their claims, although one of the quotes questioning the

winter fuel allowance from frontbencher David Willetts dated back more than two elections to 2000.

Another from shadow business secretary Ken Clarke in 2009 said that free TV licences "ought to be looked at".

Scottish Labour campaign manager Frank Roy said: "The Scottish Tories are running scared and seem to think people here are stupid.

"Tory head office in London have ordered all their local candidates to issue press releases claiming dirty tricks and now Annabel Goldie has just cut and pasted the words her bosses have sent her."

The row came against a background of increasingly fraught campaigning, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg accusing his opponents of being corrupt and claiming Britain could be hit by a wave of "Greek-style" unrest if a Tory government narrowly wins the election and tries to push through Draconian spending cuts.

Meanwhile, SNP schools minister Keith Brown was accused of manhandling a Labour Party press officer.

SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson insisted yesterday that the claims had been exaggerated and were a distraction by Labour from the embarrassment for Prime Minister Gordon Brown being questioned about the "illegal" Iraq war by Mr Brown, who is a Royal Marines veteran.

Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy described the schools minister as a "hooligan" and said that a child who did the same thing at school "would be suspended or

expelled".

There was fury, too, over a letter from Labour Health Secretary Andy Burnham to cancer patients telling them that they would die sooner under a Tory government.

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb damned the letter as being "contemptible".