Tories try and erase a history of broken promises

Prime Minister David Cameron. Photograph by Moritz Hager/World Economic Forum

The Conservatives have been accused of attempting to remove ten years of speeches, press releases, and party announcements from 2000-2010, a period from when the party were reorganising to try and win back power from Labour.

This was the period in which the Conservatives were having a makeover to appear as a more caring party, and the party made a number of promises about protecting the NHS and child benefit, and improving transparency in politics.

The removal of the documents was first spotted by Computer Weekly magazine, which noted that not only were the documents deleted, which would not be such an issue in itself, but have tried to get all traces of the documents removed from the web’s archives on the Archive.org Way Back Machine.

After removing the documents, the Tories added a “robots.txt” file to the website, which is a file that tells the indexing “bots” of the web what not to index and search. The addition of this file means that bots from Google, Bing, and Archive.org will remove the documents from their indeces.

Labour MP Sheila Gilmore said:

“The Tories are trying to hide from their own broken promises and failed policy. Rather than owning up to the mess they’re making of the economy and fixing it, they are pretending it hasn’t happened.”

The Tories have said that the move was to make their website easier for users to navigate, and an attempt to clean up the site ahead of a relaunch, although why they would try and have the documents removed from the Internet Archive is unknown.

Luckily, the British Library also runs an archiving service and and will keep the content available online at the UK Web Archive. Another website, British Political Speech, also provides the text of speeches from the leaders of the main political parties going back to 1895.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot delete anything from the internet.