Surrey County Conservatives

Labour cannot disassociate themselves from Brown’s record

Dr. Andrew Povey, Leader of Surrey County Council, has welcomed Gordon Brown’s decision to step down as Prime Minster, but believes he should have gone long before now.

“Gordon Brown’s legacy has been to saddle this country with massive debts. He has overspent and over-borrowed, and to put it simply he has run out of our money. He has starved local services of the funds we need and hidden the true scale of the county’s debts through the use of PFI schemes.

He sold off our gold reserves at their lowest price, put more pressure on the poorest in our society with the abolition of the 10p tax-rate, has committed his party to a ‘jobs tax’ at just the point where we need to encourage job creation and, throughout the last 13 years, shown that he has surprisingly little grasp of economics.

It is clear that many people in this country recognised this, and the residents of Surrey in particular recognised this. They want David Cameron in Downing Street, and nearly 60,000 more people voted Conservative in Surrey in 2010 as opposed to 2005, whereas Labour lost 30,000 votes in the same period. Surrey would like a Conservative government, and I think most people expect a Conservative government. Labour have forfeited the right to govern, and even Gordon Brown has recognised that they lost the election – in no small part because of him and his record.

I look forward to working with a Conservative government to help build the ‘Big Society’ that we have talked about, a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control, and to pursue a credible plan to rescue our economy. Through these I believe we can work together to tackle the real issues affecting local residents and businesses in Surrey”.

Ian Lake, Cabinet Member for Transport at Surrey County Council, added, “Gordon Brown has failed on the economy and he has let the country down, yet Labour cannot escape their share of the blame. They could, and should, have got rid of him at any point in the last three years and indeed could have prevented him from becoming Prime Minister in the first place, but at every opportunity they bottled it. If they thought him to be the best person to be Prime Minister they were either deluded or had such a dearth of talent amongst their MPs that he was simply the best of a bad bunch. If they didn’t think he was the best person to be Prime Minster then they were cowardly in refusing to take the right decision for the country. If Labour MPs think that by Gordon Brown walking away they can somehow absolve themselves from blame and that the country will forgive them they are wrong.

Labour have led this country into a disaster and have forfeited the right to govern this country”.