Deceitful 'Voice'

Have received a Lib Dem publication calling itself the 'Voice'. It abuses 'statistics' in a way which calls to mind the saying about 'lies and damned lies'.

• The Lib Dems came to office and power in 2002 with the biggest majority anyone has had since 1982 at least (LD 30 C 15 Lab 3). Since then the Council staff have increased from 3750 to 4518 - 500 of that increase in the past year alone. They are NOT all extra teachers and care assistants by any means.
• The Band D Council Tax has, in the same time, soared from £1060 to £1471 - yet the 'Voice' claims the Lib Dems have kept it down.

They draw grotesquely distorted comparisons between the 'brave new world' they would like us to believe we live in now and the previous period of Tory 'control'.

• From 1998-2002, when the Conservatives formed a minority administration in a Council of 21 Conservatives (from 2001 18 Cons and 3 Independents) 19 Liberal Democrats and 10 Labour.
• The Lib Dems and Labour refused to form a coalition and even when the Lib Dems became the largest party in the summer of 2001 they refused to take office.
• The Lib Dems and Labour imposed their own choice of Mayor in 2000 and 2001 and controlled the Overview Panels.
• The budgets of 2000 and 2002 were most emphatically theirs not the Tories'.
• They exercised 'power without responsibility and were keen to keep it that way.

The Tories have not actually controlled Kingston since 1994, and then only by the Mayor's casting vote between 1990 and 1994.

The voters of Kingston gave the Lib Dems an unparallelled opportunity in 2002 and they have done remarkably little with it.........hence the 'Voice's' rather strangled, desperate distortion of the past and the present. Sad, really.