London: Stating that the previous Labour
government had indulged in "crazy" spending decision, Prime
Minister David Cameron on Sunday announced an audit of accounts
during the last year of the Gordon Brown administration.
In his first television interview after taking over as
Prime Minister of a coalition government, Cameron said to a news agency
that the audit would be officially launched on Monday by the
new Office of Budget Responsibility.
He also said there would be a crackdown on top civil
service pay and bonuses.
He said: "What we have seen so far are just individual
examples of very bad procedures and bad behaviour, spending
decisions taken in the last year or so of the Labour
government that no rational government would have done -
giving something like 75 percent of senior civil servants
bonuses after everything that`s happened in the current year".
He added: "That`s not a fiscal stimulus. It is a crazy
thing to do. We are beginning to find individual decisions
like that."
According to him, the the coalition between his
Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats would last, and
said the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who is now the deputy
prime minister, would be part of his "inner circle" and have a
say in hiring and firing ministers.
On his plans to fix the term of parliament, he said
the time had come in Britain to move in this direction.
Several MPs have expressed concern over his plan to
introduce a fixed-term, five-year parliament, with a 55
percent majority of lawmakers needed to dissolve it.
Cameron said: "I`m the first prime minister in British
history to give up the right, independently, to go to the
Queen and ask for a dissolution at a time of my choosing. This
is a big surrender of prime ministerial power. I think it`s a
really good thing".
He said if you have a fixed-term parliament, "you
have to have some form of mechanism of actually making sure it
is a fixed-term parliament."
PTI
