The "EdStone" was a large stone tablet which was commissioned by the Labour Party during the United Kingdom general election, 2015. The stone was 2.6 metres (8.5 ft) tall and featured six election pledges carved into it, together with the Labour logo, and a copy of signature of the party leader Ed Miliband. It was much mocked; for example, John Rentoul, Tony Blair’s biographer, described it as the "most absurd, ugly, embarrassing, childish, silly, patronising, ridiculous gimmick I have ever seen".
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The Labour Party failed to declare the cost of the stone in its election finances report and was therefore fined by the Electoral Commission.
Unveiling and reaction
The tablet was produced by stoneCIRCLE, a Basingstoke-based stonemasonry company; the firm signed a confidentiality clause. It was rumoured to have cost £30,000, but invoices later showed the cost was £7,614.
The tablet was unveiled on 3 May 2015, in a car park in the marginal constituency of Hastings and Rye, which Labour hoped to take from the Conservative Party. The purpose of the stone was to illustrate Labour's commitment to its promises, contrasting this with the failure of the Liberal Democrats to keep their 2010 election campaign pledge to abolish tuition fees.
The six pledges written on the stone were:
- A strong economic foundation
- Higher living standards for working families
- An NHS with the time to care
- Controls on immigration
- A country where the next generation can do better than the last
- Homes to buy and action on rents
Miliband had pledged that if Labour won the election the stone was to have stood in the Downing Street Rose Garden "as a reminder of our duty to keep Labour's promises".
The stone became a source of near universal ridicule. It was unfavourably compared to the stone tablets in the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments, and to a cemetery headstone. In a matter of hours Twitter users had declared it the "EdStone".
Then Mayor of London Boris Johnson called it "some weird commie slab", whilst shadow transport minister Michael Dugher later admitted it was a "12ft, granite, marble, cock-up" – though the tablet was actually limestone. Dan Hodges reported that while watching Miliband unveil the tablet on television, a Labour press officer "started screaming. He stood in the office, just screaming over and over again at the screen. It was so bad they thought he was having a breakdown". A party adviser said after the election that "The only reason it got through 10 planning meetings was because we were all distracted, looking for a way to punch through on the SNP". By the evening it had also been called the "heaviest suicide note in history", a reference to a famous description of Labour's unpopular 1983 manifesto, dubbed "the longest suicide note in history".
Lucy Powell, the Labour campaign's vice-chair, was widely thought to have committed a gaffe about the stone, when she said on Radio 5 Live: "I don't think anyone is suggesting that the fact that he's carved them in stone means he's absolutely not going to break them or anything like that". This was particularly damaging as the whole point of the stone had been to underline the seriousness of Miliband's commitment.
Election aftermath and location
When commissioning the tablet, the party decided that were it to lose the election, the stone would be destroyed. After the election—in which Labour performed worse than expected, and the Conservatives won a surprise overall majority—the location of the stone became the subject of widespread speculation. Labour officials refused to disclose its location, for which various newspapers offered rewards. The Daily Telegraph contacted 50 masonry firms in an attempt to find it, whilst the Daily Mail offered a reward of a case of champagne for its location, and The Sun set up a hotline for information.
The disappearance of the EdStone led to joking comparisons in the media with the Ark of the Covenant as portrayed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the Ark is stored in secret in a large warehouse, its location undisclosed.
The seat in which the stone was unveiled, Hastings and Rye, was held by the Conservatives, whose MP Amber Rudd increased her majority to 4,796, up 5.4%.
As of 15 May 2015 the EdStone was allegedly in storage inside a garage in South London. The party reportedly had two plans for its break-up and destruction: Throw the rubble away, or sell Berlin Wall-like chunks to party members to raise money. "There are claims it has been destroyed", The Guardian reported in early June 2015, "but even Miliband's close advisers cannot confirm its fate." In January 2016 two party officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Bloomberg News that the stone had been destroyed in the weeks following 7 May 2015, putting an end to eight months of speculation about its whereabouts.
Initial enquiries aimed to determine why spending incurred on the stone tablet was missing from the Labour party's campaign spending return. It was established that these payments, totalling £7,614, were missing from the party’s return and the Electoral Commission launched an investigation which uncovered other undeclared expenses. The Commission concluded that the party’s spending return was incomplete, as it omitted 74 payments totalling £123,748, along with 33 separate invoices totalling £34,392. The registered treasurer of the party, Iain McNicol committed two offences under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 and the Labour party was fined £20,000. This is the largest fine the Commission has imposed since it began operations in 2001.