Mark Stuart: Promises, promises... why politicians never quite learn to keep their word

Most of us are old enough to recall US presidential candidate, George Herbert Walker Bush's ill-fated promise at the 1988 Republican National Convention: "Read my lips, no new taxes". Back here in Britain, ardent Euro-sceptics still haven't forgiven Tony Blair for abandoning his promise of April 2004 to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution.

And much more recently, Nick Clegg and his fellow Liberal Democrat MPs must be rueing the day that they all signed a pre-election pledge to scrap tuition fees. Note the word "pledge". Apparently, we are now informed by Clegg that a "pledge" isn't quite the same as a "promise". Weasel words, you might think. And you'd be right.

What Nick Clegg should have done instead is to admit that in the year before the election, he tried valiantly to get his own party to abandon its pledge to scrap student fees. That much has been revealed in Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley's excellent account of The British General Election of 2010. We learn that Clegg lost a vote in July 2009 by wide margin of 18-5 (with the Liberal Democrat leader voting in the minority) when he tried to persuade his ruling Federal Policy Committee to scrap their commitment to abolish fees.

Undeterred, Clegg tried to soften his party's policy at their pre-election conference in Bournemouth in September 2009, carefully saying: "There is no question mark over the policy of the Liberal Democrats to scrap tuition fees. The only question mark is about when we can afford to scrap tuition fees."

At the very same conference, Clegg tried to prepare the public for "savage cuts" in public spending. It was as though Captain Clegg could see the iceberg coming, but couldn't get any Left-leaning members of his crew to listen.

Now, he faces loud protests from angry voters up and down the country, as we saw last week in places such as Leeds, where students held up placards that read "FibDems".

The first lesson of this sorry state of affairs is that we the electorate must be on our guard about the type of promises that political parties make in their manifestos. For instance, it's all very well promising to "uphold family life as the most secure means of bringing up our children". Such a manifesto promise plainly isn't testable: a party might as well promise motherhood and apple pie. By way of contrast, promising to uprate child benefit by 10 per cent to all children under the age of 16 can be measured fairly easily. We can judge a government's record on that basis.

Richard Rose, the only British academic ever to measure whether the two main parties have kept their promises, found that between 1970 and 1979 while the Conservatives kept 80 per cent of their manifesto promises, Labour could only manage a disappointing 54 per cent.

In 1997, I genuinely thought that New Labour had learned the lessons from their troubled past: not to make promises you can't keep. They came up with the famous "pledge card", used in both 1997 and 2001, confining themselves to just five policy areas where they promised to make a difference.

We all became bored with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott constantly taking his pledge card out of his top pocket, proudly reciting that Labour had kept all their promises.

All well and good, you might think. But somewhere along the line, New Labour began making spending promises that they could not possibly pay for in taxation, failing to learn the lessons of the 1970s.

They should have listened to the ghosts of James Callaghan or Denis Healey, forced to explain to their party faithful during 1976 why public spending cuts were necessary to balance the national finances.

Or heeded the sage words of Douglas Hurd, who penned a long-forgotten book, An End to Promises. Reflecting on Edward Heath's public spending cuts of December 1973, Hurd wrote: "We were entering a period of the lean years, perhaps many years of really harsh scarcity and impoverishment. The lean years would need new policies and new vocabulary. There would have to be an end to promises."

Sadly, our politicians have failed to learn the hard lessons of the 1970s when it comes to spending more than the country can afford. In their search for our votes, the three main political parties flunked their chance during the General Election earlier this year, failing to find a "new vocabulary" that would tell us how it is, rather than bewitching us with promises they can't keep.

Not all voters were fooled, however. During the election campaign in April, I encountered a fellow allotment holder in York, a hardened veteran of more elections than he cared to remember. I'll never forget what he said: "It's not what they promise during the election that matters; it's what comes afterwards that counts."

This type of grizzled Yorkshire cynicism will have to be our guide in the lean years that lie ahead.