Forget the broken electoral system, what about broken promises?

We all know Polly Toynbee isn’t the most unbiased commentator around, but she has shed light this weekend on the astonishing degree to which the current Conservative led government has backtracked on many of its promises.

U-turn if you want to, this Dave is for turning.

“Three days before the election, Cameron said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, “any cabinet minister … who comes to me and says ‘Here are my plans’ and they involve frontline reductions, they’ll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again”. Yet £81bn in cuts now rain down on frontline services.

Would VAT rise? A month before the election, Cameron said: “Our plans involve cutting wasteful spending … our plans don’t involve an increase in VAT.”

As for the NHS, “We will stop top-down reorganisations of the NHS,” said the coalition agreement, yet now what health secretary Andrew Lansley calls his “revolution” rolls in. The coalition promise that “we will guarantee that health spending increases in real terms” has gone the same way. Two months before the election, Cameron eulogised universal child benefit: “I wouldn’t change child benefit, I wouldn’t means test it, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” On education maintenance allowances, Michael Gove said, just before the election: “Ed Balls keeps saying that we are committed to scrapping EMA. I have never said this. We won’t.” On tax credits, the promise was to cut them only for families on £50,000, but the budget book shows families with an income of just £30,000 lose all credits. Liam Fox promised “a bigger army for a safer Britain”, but it now loses 7,000 soldiers.

Never mind what you think about all these promises – some are more honoured in the breach than in the observance – but such breaking faith with voters is breathtaking. The list is long – prison for anyone carrying a knife; no cuts to the navy; keeping the child trust fund for the poorest third of families; no hospital closures; 3,000 more midwives; a two-year council tax freeze – and more. Bluster about bank bonuses, wellbeing, going green and family-friendly government were all deceptive conceits too.

But all politicians lie, don’t they? No, in 1997 Labour was so terrified of breaking pledges that it stuck painfully and needlessly for two years to Tory spending plans and kept to policies that the former chancellor Ken Clarke laughingly said he never had any intention of following. Labour MPs were driven through the lobby in tears to cut single parents’ benefits. Jack Straw carried out Michael Howard’s two strikes and you’re out “prison works” act. Every Labour manifesto promised no income tax rises, and only in its very last month after the worst crisis since 1926 did Labour finally raise it for top earners. Here were promises that would certainly have been more honoured in the breach – but Labour, facing a mostly hostile press, never felt it had the leeway for the slipperiness afforded to Conservatives. There was indeed Labour dishonesty, from Brown’s hubristic “no return to boom and bust” to the greatest deceit of them all – Blair’s 45-minute frightener and the dodgy dossier taking us to war in Iraq. But there was care about election promises.”