Cameron rewrites conference speech to remove credit card pay-off call
We were not ever trying to urge people to pay their credit card bills tomorrow, Downing Street says David Cameron has hastily rewritten his conference speech to remove any suggestion that he is either urging or instructing the public to pay off their credit card bills – a move that could dampen consumer demand and worsen the recession. The prime minister’s aides said the speech would now read: “That is why households are paying down the credit card and store card bills”. The pre-briefed version of the speech on Tuesday read: “The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the credit card card and store card bills.” A Downing Street aide said: “We are putting our hands up on this. It has been misinterpreted, and the only way to deal with it is to change the wording. We are not going to carry on when it is fairly obvious that it needed to be clarified. “People at home who are struggling cannot afford to pay off their debts, so to have an instruction from on high to do so would have been wrong. We were not ever trying to urge people to pay their credit card bills tomorrow. It was intended as a metaphor or an observation, as opposed to an instruction.” Downing Street also denied that Treasury forecasts showed household debt was set to rise, saying these figures included mortgages. A variety of papers had written up the speech as a haughty instruction from Cameron to the public to pay off their debts for the sake of the economy. On Wednesday morning, economists suggested the plan for a collective pay-off of credit card debts, if interpreted literally, would be economically disastrous as well as politically inept. The episode shows the delicate balancing act Cameron faces in trying to offer some optimism in the middle of the deepening recession. The prime minister does not want the entire Tory message to be one of gloom, deficits and debt, but fears he will be regarded as out of touch if he strays from those areas of concern. Conservative conference 2011 Conservative conference David Cameron Economic policy Conservatives Borrowing & debt Credit cards Consumer affairs Economics Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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Cameron rewrites conference speech to remove credit card pay-off call
We were not ever trying to urge people to pay their credit card bills tomorrow, Downing Street says David Cameron has hastily rewritten his conference speech to remove any suggestion that he is either urging or instructing the public to pay off their credit card bills – a move that could dampen consumer demand and worsen the recession. The prime minister’s aides said the speech would now read: “That is why households are paying down the credit card and store card bills”. The pre-briefed version of the speech on Tuesday read: “The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the credit card card and store card bills.” A Downing Street aide said: “We are putting our hands up on this. It has been misinterpreted, and the only way to deal with it is to change the wording. We are not going to carry on when it is fairly obvious that it needed to be clarified. “People at home who are struggling cannot afford to pay off their debts, so to have an instruction from on high to do so would have been wrong. We were not ever trying to urge people to pay their credit card bills tomorrow. It was intended as a metaphor or an observation, as opposed to an instruction.” Downing Street also denied that Treasury forecasts showed household debt was set to rise, saying these figures included mortgages. A variety of papers had written up the speech as a haughty instruction from Cameron to the public to pay off their debts for the sake of the economy. On Wednesday morning, economists suggested the plan for a collective pay-off of credit card debts, if interpreted literally, would be economically disastrous as well as politically inept. The episode shows the delicate balancing act Cameron faces in trying to offer some optimism in the middle of the deepening recession. The prime minister does not want the entire Tory message to be one of gloom, deficits and debt, but fears he will be regarded as out of touch if he strays from those areas of concern. Conservative conference 2011 Conservative conference David Cameron Economic policy Conservatives Borrowing & debt Credit cards Consumer affairs Economics Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
Posted by
on October 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News.
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