Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Sir Keir Starmer MP

SKY NEWS – SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY – 09.00 – 2.12.18 – INTERVIEW WITH SIR KEiR STARMER MP, LABOUR

SOPHY RIDGE: Labour and opposition parties are threatening to launch proceedings for contempt of Parliament unless the legal advice given by the Attorney General to the Prime Minister on her Brexit plans is published in full, so let’s talk now to the man behind this, Sir Keir Starmer, the Shadow Brexit Secretary, thank you for being on the show this morning.

SIR KEIR STARMER: Not at all.

SR: Just explain what it is that you’re trying to do here?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well as you just said, in nine days’ time Parliament has got to take probably the most important decision it’s taken for a generation and it is obviously important that we know the full legal implications of what the Prime Minister wants us to sign up to. So we had a debate about two weeks ago in Parliament where we said we need the full legal advice from the Attorney General, the final advice. At the end of that debate Parliament ordered the government to produce that advice. Now it is exceptional to have that advice produced to Parliament but that was the order. The government at that stage two weeks’ ago had the opportunity to vote against that order and they didn’t, they abstained, so there’s that order. The government now says we’re not going – or looks as if it’s going to say – we’re not going to comply with the order so as it were having pushed Parliament away for weeks and months, if it is now moving into the territory of ignoring Parliament altogether and breaching an order of Parliament, then we’re getting to very, very deep water.

SR: You’ve talked about contempt of Parliament proceedings, what does that mean and what can it actually do? Can you force the government to publish it.

SIR KEIR STARMER: Yes. The first thing I should say is I don’t want to go down this path, I said to the government two weeks ago and I said to them last week, do the right thing, you’ve been ordered to produce this advice, just produce it. If they don’t produce it tomorrow then we will start contempt proceedings, this will be a collision course between the government and Parliament. That then has to be debated in the House and an order can be made of contempt. Now as I say, I don’t want to go down this path, we’ve nine days to go before this vote, we shouldn’t be dealing with contempt of Parliament but at the moment, for the government to say on the one hand we’re not going to vote against the order being made and then to turn round, if it does turn round tomorrow and say we’re not going to comply with the order, is to get themselves into really deep water.

SR: Because it has said that it will publish a summary of the advice, why is that not good enough? Why do you need the full hearing because there is an argument isn’t there, that it’s important for the government to be able to have honest and frank conversations with their legal advisors?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Of course it is and that’s why the convention is that the Attorney General’s legal advice is not disclosed except in exceptional circumstances and these are exceptional circumstances. Now when we had that discussion in Parliament I was offered a summary. Now having been a lawyer for many years, I’ve seen a lot of summaries of legal advice and summaries are not as good as the full legal advice and they tend to leave out the bits the author of the summary doesn’t want people to know about so we said no to a summary, we said we want the full legal advice and that was then what we voted on. At the end of the debate the Speaker asked whether the government wanted to oppose that order and they chose not to so I think you’ve got Brandon Lewis on later, maybe ask him why they didn’t vote against the order if they now say they shouldn’t have to comply with it.

SR: You mentioned there that you have been a lawyer and obviously you have been a lawyer for a very long time and how many times have you made your legal advice public? Your private legal advice to clients?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well on a number of occasions lawyers make their advice public but we’re talking about a different issue here, we’re talking about the Attorney General’s advice to the Cabinet on the legal implications of the agreement that the Prime Minister wants us to sign up to. I accept that it is exceptional to have that disclosed – it has happened in the past but it is exceptional – that’s why we had a debate in Parliament to say is this the sort of case where it is so exceptional it should be disclosed. At the end of that debate the House could have divided, government could have voted against it but it didn’t so it can’t come along now and say well we didn’t vote against this order but now we don’t want to comply with it.

SR: There is also an argument that we effectively know what that legal advice is going to say.

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well this is the thing. This morning on the front page of the Sunday Times you see whilst the Prime Minister and the Attorney General on the one hand are saying MPs can’t see this advice, leaked bits of the advice are now getting into the media and that can only have come from the Cabinet, this advice has only been in the Cabinet so you have got this situation where somebody in and around the Cabinet who has seen this advice has got bits of it to the Sunday Times so the journalists and the editor of the Sunday Times knows more about this legal advice than I do. This really is so unacceptable.

SR: Now we’ve got this key vote in Parliament coming up, more than a hundred Conservative MPs indicating that they’re not happy with the deal on the table so I am wanting to know what you’re planning to do if Theresa May loses that vote, will you call a motion of no confidence in her?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well we’ve got nine days to go, we’ll have to see which way the vote goes but it looks like a considerable number of Tory MPs are going to vote against it, it looks as though the DUP are not and the opposition parties are not so I think the Prime Minister as we all know is going to struggle between now and that vote and people praise her resilience – at the moment I don't think this is resilience, it’s just ploughing on regardless.

SR: What will you do in that situation?

SIR KEIR STARMER: If she loses that vote the legislation that we have already passed says she must come back to the House and make a statement about what she is going to do next. Now technically she’s got 21 days to do that but she’ll probably come back the next day and we need to see what that is but it seems to me that if the Prime Minister has lost a vote of that significance then there has to be a question of confidence in the government.

SR: So will you seek to move that?

SIR KEIR STARMER: I think it’s inevitable that we will seek to move that. Obviously it depends on what actually happens in nine days, it will depend on what the response is but if she’s lost a vote of this significance after two years of negotiation, then it is right that there should be a general election because but for the Fixed Term Parliament Act, the convention was always if a government loses what’s called a confidence vote, something of such significance, then that government has to go.

SR: You clearly want to see a general election, that’s been Labour’s policy for a long time but I’m keen to press you on the second referendum as well because it does appear from an observer’s point of view that Labour’s position has been shifting, that you have been warming to the idea of a second referendum. Is that something that you believe is possible?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well let me just set out how we’ve thought this through because we had a good discussion about this at our party conference in September and we tried to look at the decisions that we would have to make.

SR: A good discussion? It was a slightly confused discussion wasn’t it, let’s be honest.

SIR KEIR STARMER: No, it was a good discussion. Of course there are different views and a lot of views over the two years, of course there are, but what we wanted to do at conference and what we succeeded, is what decisions we’ve got to make in what order. Firstly it’s what are you going to do about the deal? We’re at that stage now where if it’s not good enough we’ll vote against it, so that’s decision number one. If the deal falls then the next question is are you going to call for a general election? We just dealt with that. Obviously if that doesn’t happen we need to press on to other options such as a public vote because having gone through the first options we need to look at what would happen then and at conference that’s what we decided we would do.

SR: We can just have a look at what John McDonnell said on this this week, the Shadow Chancellor said: “If that’s not possible to have an election, we will be calling upon the government then to join us in a public vote, that’s the sequence I think that will inevitably go through.” So do you agree with John McDonnell then that it could be inevitable?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well John is going through exactly the same process as me, looking at, as he says, if a general election is not possible then options such as a public vote will have to be looked at and that’s what we decided at our party conference and obviously …

SR: Would you like there to be a second referendum?

SIR KEIR STARMER: I would like to have something far better than we’ve got at the moment. This deal is a bad deal and frankly to have got to a situation where at the end of the negotiations …

SR: But would a second referendum be far better than where we are at the minute then?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well we’ll have to see when we get there but it’s far better than this deal. Here we are, almost at the end of the negotiating period with a deal which looks as though is not going to get the confidence of parliament. That is a huge failure and the Prime Minister has run the clock down so if we get to a question of a public vote, if we get to a question of a referendum, it’ll be because the option of a deal that I think could have been negotiated, has been taken off the table by the Prime Minister who will have failed to put something before Parliament that we can have confidence in so in a sense she’s pushing these other options by the failure to have got the option of a deal that Parliament can support.

SR: If a second referendum does happen, what do you think should be on the ballot paper?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well we’re going to have to decide that as a Parliament if we get to that stage but I’ve always been very clear that the option of remain ought to be on that ballot paper.

SR: How about the option of no deal? Should that be on as well?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well I would be worried about that because I do think no deal would be catastrophic for the country and I don't think people have necessarily thought through all the implications of no deal. If you’ve got no deal you’ve got no trading relationship with your most important set of trading partners but you’ve also got no security arrangements, no arrangements for dealing with counter-terrorism. Before I was a Member of Parliament I was Director of Public Prosecutions and I was the UK rep in Eurojus which everybody will be please to know is where we share information about terrorist activities etc. The idea of getting to a state where we are not participating in those sort of arrangements is something that I think, whether you voted leave or remain, you wouldn’t want so we shouldn’t be casual about no deal, it has huge risks for our country.

SR: So taking what you are saying there, I mean some people would say if the two options on the ballot paper were remain and Theresa May’s deal, then that’s not really reflecting what many people feel.

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well I’m not stating a fixed position here, we’re not at that stage of the exercise, we’re at the first stage which is obviously the deal. All I’m pointing out and it’s a point really for the vote in nine days, is that the option of no deal or going for no deal carries huge risks for our country. I don’t actually think that this Prime Minister will move to a no deal situation, she knows the risks. She’s very serious about counter-terrorism and security, I don't think when she stands up if she loses this vote that she is likely to say I am now going to take the country off the cliff, I’m going to go to the no deal scenario.

SR: Just finally, a little later in the show we’ll be hearing from Nick Boles who is pushing for this idea of a Norway plus, staying in the single market. Is that something that you think Labour could support?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well obviously we’d have to hear what Nick says about it. He’s put it a number of different ways but this idea of a Norway, I mean I went to Norway to study the Norway model as it’s called for four days and I didn’t think it would really work very well for the United Kingdom, it obviously works well for Norway. When it was put as a proposition to Parliament it didn’t get a majority and the Prime Minister says she is not interested in it, so …

SR: Would you consider it then or is it something that you just don’t think will work?

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well at the moment we need to see quite how it’s put but at the moment I’m not sure that it’s something that’s very attractive but I think what you are seeing now is as we run into this vote people are saying, well what other options are there? I think the person who needs to answer that question is the Prime Minister, what is her Plan B?

SR: You could argue as well that she has been slightly hamstrung by a divided Parliament as well.

SIR KEIR STARMER: Well she had the snap election and lost her majority so it’s not just Parliament against the Prime Minister, actually she’s the author of her own misfortune.

SR: Okay, Sir KeIr Starmer, thank you very much.

SIR KEIR STARMER: Thank you.