If Tory MPs had any self-awareness or sense of shame they would surely have shut up about the national debt and the deficit by now.
In 2010 the Tories were enabled back into power by the strategically inept Lib-Dems and they were full of hubristic boasts about how their austerity agenda would brilliantly eliminate the entire budget deficit by 2015.
As the 2015 General Election approached it became increasingly clear that the Tories were going to abjectly fail to keep their deficit elimination promise, so they simply rebranded this massive failure as a glorious success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third"!
This Tory "cut the deficit by a third" mantra has to be one of the most brass-necked economic boasts in British political history. Unfortunately neither Labour nor the mainstream media bothered to hold them to account over this brazen presentation of their biggest and most obvious failure as a remarkable success to actually be celebrated and they ended up strolling back into power.
By 2016 the Tories were openly admitting that they wouldn't be eliminating the deficit at any time before 2021, meaning that they're going to take over eleven years to achieve what they promised to do in less than five!
Anyone would think they would shut up and stop drawing attention to their woeful economic mismanagement, but no ...
In February 2017 the Tory MP for Shrewsbury Daniel Kawczynski decided to have a dig at Labour's economic record by Tweeting a graph he'd found on the Economics Help Blog. The obvious problem being that the graph not only included the debt spike that happened in the wake of the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis, it also clearly showed the abject Tory failure to do what they promised in 2010.
Kawczynski's Tweet exemplified the absolute crap that Tories talk about the economy. He said "we are determined country gets back to balance asap" which is a bit damned rich coming from a party that has so blatantly failed to get the debt under control like they promised to in 2010. I'm sure they were "determined" in 2010 too, but it turns out that determination counts for very little if the solution you're determined to push is an economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" austerity con.
Tweeting a graph showing how much your party has failed to get the debt under control (despite making that your number one objective) as an attack against your political opponents is pretty humiliating, so, like an Internet n00b Kawczynski decided to delete his embarrassing tweet in the naive hope that deleting it would erase all traces of it from the Internet.
Unfortunately for Kawczynski that's just not the way the Internet works. Once you've written something stupid it's going to stay on the Internet forever (example), and deleting your stupidity just draws more attention to it than simply owning your mistake (another example).
Anyone who actually looks at the economic evidence (rather than mindlessly rote learning economic fairy stories from the right-wing press) knows that throughout history Labour has created far less public debt than the Tory party, and in fact, that George Osborne alone created more new public debt than every Labour government in history.
The big problem of course is that fools like Kawczynski (who can't even understand a basic graph off of the Economics Help Blog!) will always keep pushing the propaganda narrative that the Tories are the party of fiscal responsibility, and other fools will continue to believe him because they can't be arsed to check facts for themselves.
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