SHADOW defence Secretary James Cartlidge has said Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has a “big question to answer” about whether he withheld information about an escaped prisoner.
Cartlidge told GB News: “There’s a big question about the ministerial code. As a minister, David Lammy is duty bound to be transparent with Parliament.
“Had I known that when I was asking those questions, he apparently had a statement about that issue at hand, and he chose not to give any answers at all – I find that extraordinary.
“I certainly think there’s a big question for him to answer, and when Parliament returns this week on Tuesday, we’ll have justice questions and hopefully other opportunities to hold him to account.
“Because my final point is we then requested him to come back to Parliament later in the day. I don’t know if you saw this, I did a point of order. Colleagues did points of order. He needed to come back and clarify, and he refused to do so. He did a runner and that’s not acceptable.”
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He also said that there should be cuts to State benefits to fund defence: “We think that the government should go to 3% this Parliament. And that is because we think the threat is very serious.
“The threat is now – the Strategic Defence Review, which is the government’s big policy paper on defence talked about threats and then dealing with them in the 2030s. We think that’s far too far away, because the principle, which I think your viewers will understand, is very straightforward.
“If you’re worried about a threat, the best thing to do is to deter it, to make it less likely to translate into an actual attack on our allies, or even on this country. So that’s incredibly important, but we recognise spending 3%, getting to that will require very difficult decisions.
“The biggest concern here, when you talk about defence spending, is actually what happened in that Labour vote on welfare. Labour were going to bring forward a bill, as you will recall, to reform welfare, but unfortunately, they bottled it in front of their own back benches, because that budget on sickness and disability benefits are going to go to £100 billion this parliament.
“The money has to come from there. We’ve got to get the benefit bill down and use it to fund defence, but also supporting the productive sector of our economy through tax cuts and so on.
“Because Labour’s lost control of public spending and welfare, they cannot afford to deliver the highest spending. That’s the concern we all have today.”
