Redwood urges more Tory tax cuts

John Redwood said he thought Labour would raise taxes

Conservative MP John Redwood has said the Tories may promise more than £12bn worth of tax cuts at the next election.

The shadow secretary of state for deregulation said the party would want to make more cuts than the £4bn they promised at this year's election.

He told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby Programme he believed Labour would add another £8bn in taxes, which the Tories would try and reverse.

But Tory MP John Bercow said the party had to "be careful" over tax cuts.

Mr Redwood said: "If you just simply carry our policy forward to the next election it will be £12bn of tax cuts because Labour will have put in the £8bn and we will be able to find ways of reducing that by finding unnecessary expenditure."

'Unfair taxes'

He told the programme there had been a lot of support for Conservative plans to cut inheritance tax and stamp duty.

He said: "There was a feeling in some areas that well, you haven't gone far enough. You correctly said these taxes are unfair but when you came to do your sums you discovered you couldn't do very much."

But Mr Bercow said in the same programme he did not believe tax cuts should be an automatic part of Tory election strategy.

John Bercow has criticised Tory health and education plans

"You have to show that they're affordable and that they're the right policy in the circumstances. I think we have to be very careful about it," he said.

"If you were to say to me would I regard it as a great priority for the Conservative Party to slash huge sums in taxation before considering what that might mean for public services, the answer is 'no'."

'Social justice'

Tim Yeo, who quit the shadow cabinet last week, said he believed taxes should be cut.

"But I think that if we want to show that the Conservative Party is a different party from the one the voters rejected in 1997, and twice since, we have to talk about issues other than tax cuts," he told the Sunday Programme on GMTV.

"I would much rather we talked about social justice than about tax cuts because tax cuts is traditional Tory agenda.

"It's not to say we would not aim to cut tax because we would and we should, and tax may be much more of a problem after four more years of Labour."