On the rails with Gordon Brown
Updated on 02 July 2009
During a trip on the newly nationalised east coast mainline, Gary Gibbon talks to Prime Minister Gordon Brown about accusations from the Tories that he economical with the truth.
The embattled prime minister is touring the country as part of his re-launch after talks of leadership challenges, the European election results and the relentless waves of expenses stories.
He found himself mired in a row about honesty, with David Cameron accused him of being deceitful in his presentation of the budget statistics.
"If someone is called dishonest, there is an assumption that there is some wilful desire to mislead and that there is some corruption involved," he said of the accusation. "I don't think that is the case."
"What we are trying to do at the moment is to get the country through a very difficult period and the language of politics is sometimes not well suited to the need for the country to work together to get out of recession.
"There is a crudity developed in the language that people use in politics that people are now accepting as almost everyday language. People have got to think twice before they make accusations."
"I do not make personal attacks on people. I have tried to avoid doing that during my political career. But equally I understand that the language of politics can sometimes descend into people making quite crude accusations."
He insisted that he was not complaining about personal attacks on himself, but said the language was "out of line with the real issues that have got to be debated".
On public spending cuts, Gordon Brown said: "Of course we are making changes all the time. I have announced a huge programme of assets sales."
He insisted that the decision to abandon the part-privatisation of Royal Mail was purely because the bids were not good enough, but opponents say he ducked fighting for the bill in parliament because of internal Labour opposition.
"We could go through months and months of discussion," he said. "But if the investment is not there, then we are not able to implement that legislation. We are going to wait until we see if the investors are able to come along."
"The Royal Mail has its own modernisation plan that they have got to push ahead with. Secondly we have got to look at means by which we can get investment into the Royal Mail. That is what we will be looking at over the next few months."
Challenged that the government has retreated on policies like an Iraq war enquiry, ID cards and Royal Mail because the prime minister does not have the authority to push them through, Gordon Brown said: "Our policy is to get growth into the economy, to get jobs, and to build better public services for the future."
