Howard sacks MP over “secret cuts” row
Conservative leader Michael Howard has said that the party’s former deputy chairman will not stand as a Tory candidiate at the expected general election, after he resigned in a row over spending cuts.
Mr Howard withdrew the Conservative whip from Howard Flight following a speech in which the Arundel and South Downs MP appeared to tell activists that the party were hiding the true scale of planned spending cuts to win the election.
The move by the Conservative leader came after Labour seized upon Mr Flight’s remarks as a sign that the Tories are secretly planning big cuts to public services.
At a hastily arranged press conference at Labour’s headquarters in Westminster, the party’s election chief Alan Milburn said Mr Flight’s comments showed Conservative plans to cut public spending by £35bn were “just the tip of the iceberg”.
Speaking in County Durham, Tony Blair claimed the Conservatives had a hidden agenda to “take us right back to the economic risks, the under-investment in public services, the social division that people wanted to leave behind in 1997.”
In taped remarks from a speech leaked to The Times, Mr Flight said the scale of the Conservatives planned cuts was being concealed because “whatever the fine principles, you have to win an election first”.
Mr Flight – involved in setting up the James review of public spending which identified £35 billion of potential savings – continued: “The potential for getting better taxpayer value is a good bit greater than the James findings (which have been) ‘sieved’ for what is politically acceptable and what is not going to lose the main argument.”
The MP made the controversial comments at a meeting of the Thatcherite Conservative Way Forward group.
In a statement on his resignation, Mr Flight said: “I regret my choice of words which do not accurately reflect the process of the James committee, with which I have been closely involved and totally support.”
“I want to make it clear that the conclusions of the James committee represent the settled view of the Conservative Party on cutting waste, removing unnecessary bureaucracies, giving taxpayers value for money and protecting and enhancing frontline public services.”
Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the Conservatives had been “promising simultaneously to cut taxes, improve public services, and reduce the budget deficit. “
“They say ‘We will just cut waste’ and hope people will take them on trust and now they have been found out,” he said.
But the Conservatives insist that they will stick to their published plans to increase spending on schools and hospitals, while making efficiency savings in other areas.
“I give you an absolute assurance that there is no secret agenda, there are no secret cuts being planned,” said George Osborne, the party’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury.
“We have published in extensive detail exactly how we propose to reduce government activity in certain areas but very substantially increase spending on health, education and policing,” he stressed.
