Ex-Tory attacks party on return to Commons

FORMER Tory MP Julian Knight has condemned his old party for what he calls “appalling financial mismanagement”.

The now-independent MP for Solihull also took a swipe at the “public school, dyed-in-the-wool establishment clique” he claims runs the party.

Mr Knight was booted out of the Conservative Party in December 2022 when it was revealed he was under investigation by the Metropolitan Police over serious sexual assault allegations.

The investigation was dropped last year and a second, by Essex Police, opened for unclear reasons, was closed last week. Mr Knight (pictured) always denied the claims but his request to return to the Conservative Party after the Met investigation ended in April 2023 was denied due to “further complaints” made to the Whips’ Office. Mr Knight accused the party of conducting a “witch hunt” and said he would “under no circumstances” seek to return to the Conservative Party.

In his first appearance in the Commons since the investigation ended, Mr Knight, speaking from the Opposition benches, criticised the Government’s “huge missteps since 2010”. These, he said, had led to national debt rising to nearly 100% of gross domestic product (GDP).

He told the Commons: “This means we have an increase in national debt equivalent to the first two years of the Second World War, when we were fighting for our very lives against the Nazis.

“No one can say anything in this period of time remotely approaches that.

“In the 1960s and ‘70s, governments of the day had an excuse.

“They were recovering from the economic dislocation of the Second World War.

“We have no such excuse for this appalling financial mismanagement, apart from our indolence and lack of political will.”

Mr Knight added: “2010 and 2015 were huge opportunities to reset the relationship between the state, the individual and businesses, who are the only means of growing the tax base in this economy.

“So-called austerity was nothing more than a reduced increase in Government expenditure.”

Mr Knight said supply-side economics - cuts to taxes and slashing regulations - should have been the “core of everything that we did”, and said the Government had failed to grasp the opportunities of Brexit to “deregulate en masse”.