Conservatives Facebook page tries to troll Labour - makes a spectacular mistake

Given the criticism levelled at Labour over their struggles with numbers, you’d think the Tories would try that bit harder to make absolutely sure no one could accuse them of the same.

You’d be wrong.

Someone in the Conservatives’ social media team was left with egg on their face over the weekend after doing the one thing they shouldn’t have.

They posted a photo on Facebook over the weekend depicting ‘what socialism looks like’, featuring cars queueing up for petrol in 1973 as lorry drivers strike.

The post has since been deleted, but you might have already worked out what the problem was:

That’s right, the apparent socialist dystopia in 1973 was under a Conservative government. Oh dear.

What next? Maybe we’ll see them take credit for the 2012 Olympics, which were awarded to London following a successful bid during a Labour government and with a Labour London Mayor.

Or perhaps we’ll see them take credit after introducing policies originally proposed by other parties. Keep an eye on these, just in case.

Still, maybe they’ve got something to fall back on. Maybe the Tories had only just come into government in 1973 and could realistically pin it all on…what? Three whole years? Okay, as you were.

As EvolvePolitics has noted, the choice of 1973 specifically is quite significant.

It was, after all, the year of the Oil Crisis, which came about at least in part due to the Conservatives’ continued support of Israel in the early 1970s. Not, as they claim, socialism.

OPEC suppliers cut off supplies and raised prices for countries in support of Israel, prompting long queues at UK petrol stations and strikes in search of higher pay to keep up with rising costs amid high inflation: circumstances which ultimately brought about a recession.

So it’s no surprise that the Facebook post was removed. The only question is how many people it went through before making it onto the site in the first place.

(Images: Rex Features)