Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 28 February, 2010 10:00
Sunday Live with Adam Boulton

Any quotes used must be attributed to Sky News, Sunday Live with Adam Boulton 

ADAM BOULTON:

In his big speech today, David Cameron will say that it’s his patriotic duty to oust Labour but if today’s YouGov poll is to be believed, which puts the Tories just two points ahead, he’ll need all the help he can get between now and polling day if he’s to serve Queen and country in that way. Well joining me now is the Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox MP. Liam Fox thank you for being with us. What is your view, what do you think is going on? It does seem if you look back to the party conference that since then your lead has rather wasted away.



LIAM FOX:
Well there’s been an up and down in polls, there always is.

ADAM BOULTON:
Well it’s been a steady down.

LIAM FOX:
Well no, we’ve also seen polls in the last few weeks about marginal seats and big Conservative leads there. The bottom line is this, it’s going to be a tough election, we’ve always known to win this general election would require a big swing, bigger than we’ve had at any time since the 1930s, so there is a distinct possibility that people could waken up with Gordon Brown on the steps of Number Ten for another five years. So if people want change, and this is what this election is about, they have to go out and make change happen.

ADAM BOULTON:
But why is it, do you think, that you’ve struggled to get that message across? I mean after all, things have not been brilliant for Gordon Brown since Christmas, if you look at the economy, if you look at all the stories about his character, and yet it seems that David Cameron on the economy for example is now falling behind Mr Brown.

LIAM FOX:
I think actually when we are in periods where we are focusing on real issues and not personality, we are actually doing quite well and just to take the polls …

ADAM BOULTON:
Like the bullying?

LIAM FOX:
Well just to take the polls for a second, our vote has been up or around 37, 38, 39, 40 points for about fifteen, sixteen months, something like that but it will be a tight election, people need to understand, including in the Conservative party, they will have to fight very hard to oust this particular Labour government and they also have to understand it is not a referendum on Labour, it’s not a referendum on the Conservatives, it’s a choice between the two for the direction the government will take in future years.

ADAM BOULTON:
And yet the first thing you said to me and the first thing other speaks, George Osborne yesterday was saying as well, do you want five more years of Labour. I mean that is your strongest card isn’t, that however bad you may be in future, you are the change from an unpopular Labour government.

LIAM FOX:
Well it is a choice. Do people want to continue in the direction that we have at the present time with a rising national debt, a rising tax burden, the early release of criminals, rises in immigration – all the things that the public seem to dislike or do they want to have a change, do they want a new direction for the country? That is what David Cameron will offer.

ADAM BOULTON:
You mentioned there crime, you mentioned there immigration and yet if we are to believe what he said in his podcast ahead of his speech and the briefings in the papers this morning, Cameron – no return to Tory comfort zone, no going back to those fundamental Conservative issues. Do you think that’s the right approach?

LIAM FOX:
Well if you read today his article in the News of the World for example, he does talk about those issues, about crime. I think the overwhelming concern of the public is about the debt and what it’s doing to the country, the average family will be paying about £1200 in tax just on the interest of the national debt, next year the interest on the debt will be one and a half times the whole budget for defence of the country and I don’t think people understand the size of the money. When you are talking about £799 billion worth of debt, that’s the equivalent of borrowing something like £1.1 million every day since the birth of Christ, I mean this is a phenomenal size of debt that has been passed on to the next generation.

ADAM BOULTON:
That’s the economy, but there is still this basic issue it appears, this argument going on between the Conservative party of whether you go back to Conservative first principles or whether you present yourselves as a modernised changed party. Where do you stand on that?

LIAM FOX:
Well first principles, there is no more sound Conservative principle than sound money, that there is no such thing as government money, only tax payers money and by extension there is no such thing as government debt, only tax payers debt.

ADAM BOULTON:
So you regard yourself as a first principles man?

LIAM FOX:
Well that is first principles, sound money and security for the people of our country, that’s what the Conservative party has always stood for.

ADAM BOULTON:
But isn’t that the comfort zone that David Cameron says he’s not going back to?

LIAM FOX:
Well I think the battleground for this election is really going to be the economy and Conservative first principles say sound money, protecting people’s savings and the value of their money, is an essential part of what Conservatism has always been about.

ADAM BOULTON:
What did you make of these six key pledges announced yesterday?

LIAM FOX:
I think they deal with a lot of the anxieties that people have. If you talk to people on the streets, if you talk to people working in our public services, they will say we’ve got too many politicians, too many bureaucrats, too much regulation, too much taxation. If you just got off our backs we could give you a better health service, we could give you better growth in small businesses in the country and provide you with the wealth that you will need because ultimately you can talk about taxes, which is how the government distributes your money, you can talk about spending which is what the government does with your money but we have to find an enterprise economy, wealth generation, so that the country in the future will not be saddled with the sort of debt that …

ADAM BOULTON:
Here it is though, if you’re talking about spending, freeze council tax, raise the basic state pension, recognise marriage in the tax system, increase spending on health every year – I mean all those are spending pledges aren’t they?

LIAM FOX:
We have and George Osborne set out £7 billion worth of tax reductions at the party conference last October so all our pledges are properly set out but it is about creating a balance …

ADAM BOULTON:
Do you think they are harsh enough given the extent of your worries about the deficit?

LIAM FOX:
Well we’ll have to go further and George Osborne has again set out the three phases that we’ll have to have. We will look at our office of fiscal responsibility, we’ll make an assessment of the public debt when we come to office, then we’ll have to have an emergency budget and that will have to make some in year cuts in some departments and thirdly, we’ll have a proper assessment of what we need to spend for the quality of the services we need in relation to the amount of money that we have over next summer so that we can come to the autumn with a proper idea of how we set out spending for the whole parliament and beyond.

ADAM BOULTON:
It’s quite striking what’s been left out of these early pledges, for example no mention of climate change which really was for David Cameron in his early years as leader the defining issue.

LIAM FOX:
Well we’ve talked about green jobs within those pledges.

ADAM BOULTON:
Not jobs but actually doing something to save the environment, have you dropped that?

LIAM FOX:
Well we could have had twenty pledges, it’s a question of setting out …

ADAM BOULTON:
But these are priorities aren’t they?

LIAM FOX:
These are setting out very clear examples of what the public will actually want us to try to do. Of course what we’re doing with the environment is a major part of our policy as is national security, as are …

ADAM BOULTON:
Well again, you say national security, we are fighting two wars at the moment, no mention of defence or Britain’s position in the world beyond saying we’re going to be the most family friendly country in Europe, in these early pledges. That suggests that you are going to be, if you are the Defence Secretary in a Conservative government, you are going to be in a pretty low priority.

LIAM FOX:
Not at all because when David Cameron said in his party conference speech, obviously the number one priority is the war in Afghanistan for the government …

ADAM BOULTON:
But it’s not a six key pledge.

LIAM FOX:
Well of course you can’t say to the electorate about the war in Afghanistan and pledges, everyone understands national security and the war we’re in has to be a priority. It’s about setting out the sort of society that we want to have in Britain, actually a genuinely fairer, more meritocratic society than we’ve had in the past which sets our public services free to do what public servants should be doing.

ADAM BOULTON:
If you wanted to put your defence policy in pledge terms what would it be, what are you pledging, what are you able to promise?

LIAM FOX:
What I would like to see, I would like to see us having a defence strategy which is relevant to the threats that the country faces in the future rather than the legacies of the past. I’d like to see us having an affordable equipment programme that fits those priorities and I would like to see a Ministry of Defence that is efficient enough to actually provide them and then look after our armed forces and maintain the military covenant that we haven’t done in recent years.

ADAM BOULTON:
And all this with a reduced defence budget, I mean it’s pretty certain it’s going to be reduced isn’t it?

LIAM FOX:
Well we’ll go through the defence review, we’ll see what we have to do. We’ll be under pressure in every area of our public life …

ADAM BOULTON:
Other than the ones that have been protected.

LIAM FOX:
We’re under pressure because we know we are going to inherit a record debt, also a record overspend in the public accounts. Now we will have to deal with those in a rational way but what I want to do is make sure that when we spend money on defence, we are spending it on the front line. If you look at the pressures we’ve had, I’ll give you one tiny example, the government saying that they can’t afford training for the Territorials at £30 million but they spent £2,000 million upgrading the main building in Whitehall and over £2,000 million on consultants. Wrong priorities.

ADAM BOULTON:
Given where we are, given what President Obama is saying in the United States, is it possible to look at our nuclear posture, our independent nuclear deterrent, that if not getting rid of it altogether, at least the scale of what is planned?

LIAM FOX:
Well we are already planning to reduce the number of warheads for Britain’s independent deterrent, parliament made that decision back in 2006 and that’s a programme that we would want to continue but while the …

ADAM BOULTON:
Three submarines or four?

LIAM FOX:
Well it doesn’t make any difference really …

ADAM BOULTON:
That’s a lot of money though.

LIAM FOX:
Well that doesn’t make a difference to our nuclear posture which was the question you asked, because whether you have the warheads divided into three submarines or four submarines makes no difference to the disarmament programme, it might make a saving. We currently don’t have the technology to have a continuous at sea deterrent with three submarines as was made clear by the government in the White Paper, we’d have to look at that …

ADAM BOULTON:
So you’d go with four would you?

LIAM FOX:
Well that’s a decision we’d have to make about 2019, 2020, 2021, something like that.

ADAM BOULTON:
Aircraft carriers? Go ahead with the aircraft carriers, the two aircraft carriers?

LIAM FOX:
Well we have exempted the nuclear deterrent from the SDR because we know that North Korea has just developed nuclear weapons, Iran’s trying to develop nuclear weapons, the United States and France are both very keen for the UK to maintain an independent nuclear capability, we support that. The other programmes will have to be part of a wider review. We have set out and William Hague has set out what we think our foreign policy assumptions are but specific programmes will have to be looked at, we must get value for money.

ADAM BOULTON:
And two final questions, first is how confident are you that you would keep the defence portfolio in a Conservative government?

LIAM FOX:
Well David Cameron has said to me that if we win the election that’s the job he’d like me to do.

ADAM BOULTON:
So you are pretty confident?

LIAM FOX:
And we just need to win the election. 

ADAM BOULTON:
And how confident are you that you are going to win the election?

LIAM FOX:
Well I think that the trends still say that the public want to change the government. We’ve now got to make them more enthusiastic about the change and set out exactly what that change would mean and we have got to set it out in terms that people understand but when you look at what Labour have done in recent times and the way they talk about themselves and it is Tony was friendly with Gordon, Gordon was friendly with Peter, then they weren’t friendly, it’s always been about them. We need a government that will govern not in its own interest, in its own narrow party interest, but in the national interest and that’s what David Cameron offers.

ADAM BOULTON:
But you do … if you are going to clinch this you are going to have to change something aren’t you?

LIAM FOX:
We need to continue with the message, we have got to clarify our policies, set them out really for the public and say here is the change, there is a chance that Gordon Brown will stay in Number Ten, if you want the change get out and vote for the change and don’t leave it to somebody else.

ADAM BOULTON:
Dr Liam Fox, thank you very much indeed for joining us this Sunday Live.