The shadow business secretary has expressed his regret at not being 'bolder' in negotiations surrounding Heathrow expansions and the related judicial and environmental regulations. Andrew Griffith also said that he is awaiting 'actions not words' to 'get us out of this hole', referring to the 'economic mess' which he believes the government's budget caused. Griffith described the country's economic metrics as in the 'flashing red' after claiming that they were initially going in the 'right direction' under the previous Conservative Government. The Tory MP also criticised efforts to define what counts as 'extremism' which he claimed 'deflects police resources'. Report by Faragt. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Yes, the government has certainly got us into the mess we're in. They inherited an
00:04economy that was growing where most of the metrics are going in the right
00:06direction. Today they're almost all in the red, flashing red in many cases when
00:11it comes to things like rising unemployment. So they've dug this hole,
00:15they need to get us out of it and it's actions not words that are going to
00:19count. You know, you can make as many speeches about long-term growth as you
00:23want, you can expand airports in the future, that is good, but right now the
00:27high street is bleeding out. Every day we're hearing difficulties of retailers,
00:31pubs, hospitality businesses and a lot of that stems from Labour's budget, the
00:36choices they made, that big jobs tax, 25 billion jobs tax coming out of the
00:41private sector and the red tape. They talk about cutting growth, cutting a red
00:46tape and lower regulation, but actually day by day in Parliament they're adding to
00:51the burden of red tape. Yeah, look I'm all in on expanding Heathrow. The UK
00:55needs a proper global hub airport, it's a competitive world, we depend on trade,
01:00our services rely on that across the Atlantic and to Asia, but of course that
01:06won't be on stream for a very long period of time. So it's good and if the
01:09government is serious about pushing back on judicial review, the idea that an
01:14elected politician makes a decision and then lawyers spend years campaigning
01:19against it when they were never elected. If the government's serious about that,
01:22that is good, but we also need action here and now this week to help hard
01:28pressed businesses on our high street. Well these things are challenging and
01:32one of the challenges we had was that the Labour government and the House of
01:36Lords opposed those very reforms on judicial review, those very reforms on
01:41some of the environmental regulations that we were proposing to sweep away to
01:47get Britain building. So I regret that, I regret that we weren't bolder, but the
01:51reality is that at that point in time it was Labour and the unelected House of
01:55Lords that was frustrating the will of the democratic government. Look, with the
01:59greatest will in the world, I don't think when a criminal suspect, you know, hacks
02:04three young children to death and injures many more, the issue is exactly
02:10what adjectives we use. That is clearly a crime, the full resources of the law
02:14should be applied to that, but what we don't need is to deflect police
02:18resources by ever more adventurous interpretation as what is and isn't
02:23extremist words, it's the actions that matter.