Murnaghan 5.01.14 Paper Review with Michael Portillo, Clare Short and Sarah Teather

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s time to take you through the Sunday papers and I’m joined by the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, the former Labour International Development Secretary, Clare Short and the former Conservative Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo. A very good morning to you all, thank you very much indeed and what a lot to discuss, into the new year and so many stories. Sarah, “Fear and foreboding are rarely a recipe for victory”, an article by Matthew D’Ancona in the Telegraph.

SARAH TEATHER: The papers of course are absolutely full of immigration today but there are a couple of pieces which read to me like the moderate Conservative backlash against the heavy rhetoric and this I thought was a particularly interesting piece and made a number of points that really chimed with me actually. He was talking about the fact that immigration consistently comes up as a top issue with voters but he said the point is that it is often an emotive proxy for other anxieties: fear of economic insecurity, of change, of losing out and also points out that for many politicians, they use it as a similar emotive proxy but an emotive proxy for virility and toughness. He is saying that the danger is that rather than looking tough, you end up actually looking like the weak skinhead outside the pub and I think it’s very welcome to hear many people who are traditionally on the right saying, hang on a minute, this is really unhealthy. Obviously you had on your show earlier Romanians who talked about their own experience of what this kind of coverage can do for perceptions of people in the nation and it is really unhealthy I think for Britain. It’s not very British.

DM: You want to bring in your story, Michael, because it obviously keys straight into it and it is interesting you mentioned that, Sarah, because I was quoting to Mr Farage the IPSOS MORI poll which they released last week about the whole thing about reality and perceptions of immigration. So many interesting findings in that, including that if you are asked, the public who were asked, if they were asked ‘Is immigration a problem for the country?’, 78% said yes but when asked ‘Is it a problem in your own area?’, only 28% said yes so there is a huge gap isn’t there?

MICHAEL PORTILLO: Yes and that happens with all sorts of things doesn’t it? There are similar answers about crime and the health service and so on.

CLARE SHORT: And when people are asked about their MPs, they hate them all!

MICHAEL PORTILLO: The story I picked was Nick Robinson, the political editor of the BBC, writing in the Mail on Sunday in advance of a programme he is doing on the BBC on Tuesday I think, in which I think he is trying to take a pretty objective look at the immigration question, so the pros and cons, what are the advantages, what are the disadvantages? What I found interesting about his article was his view that the BBC, and I think you can make the point more broadly, has really failed in the immigration debate over lets say a 40 year period. Actually from about the time of that Enoch Powell speech in 1968 which you mentioned earlier when you were talking to Nigel Farage, there has been such a fear since then of immigration equals racism that the BBC and other media outlets it has to be said, have kind of banished reporting the full facts for fear of stoking racism and he is saying really the BBC and everybody else has to play a part now in having a really thorough debate on immigration.

DM: And the politicians as well, the politicians have been pussy footing around this as well.

CLARE SHORT: Isn’t that out of date, Michael, because in Enoch Powell’s time it was race, he was stirring the race thing but now it’s Eastern Europe, these are white people and a lot of the government’s controls have been on non-white EU citizens and stopping students and silly things and it’s an EU question that is why does the …

SARAH TEATHER: It is still unfortunately the language of hate but it is not necessarily racism.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: I think the point that Nick Robinson makes very well, there are lots of people who support immigration on economic grounds, I’m one of them. I think we need a larger population of young people earning lots of money …

DM: But skilled young people? Nick Robinson talks about some of the agricultural labourers there who even say that Britons won’t do the jobs, that’s not skilled.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: I think perhaps even more important than skills is the willingness to work and ambition. These are ambitious people who will come to this country and they may start unskilled but they will probably end up being quite highly paid and they will probably be in work nearly all of their lives. I’m talking about majorities here, I’m not talking about small minorities. On the other hand, what Nick Robinson says is all very well to make that broad economic point but it may be that for particular groups of people who find that their wage levels are depressed by this competition from Eastern Europe, it’s not very good for them. You have to be honest and say look, we think there is an overall economic advantage but it is perfectly true that some people may suffer.

DM: And that was the judgement that the government that you were part of made wasn’t it, about that initial wave of immigration, of migration from EU countries?

CLARE SHORT: it was a Treasury led policy which always says immigration is good. Everyone else in the EU said we were phasing the free movement of the Poles in all those countries apart from Ireland and Britain so guess what? A lot of people came to Ireland and Britain and it was a mistake because of the speed of doing it, the numbers. I think that’s what stirred the feeling now that it is all out of control but the media, leaving aside the BBC, the press as you through it today, the cheapness and the ignorance of the Romanian/Bulgarian story is worse than the BBCs coverage. I mean this is not an intelligent discussion of what are the EU rules, what do other countries in the EU think, should this be modified to be about skills?

SARAH TEATHER: It is deeply stigmatising.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: But a vacuum has been left by the responsible media, by their unwillingness to debate the issue.

CLARE SHORT: But the headlines are really crass.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: If you want to screen out the crassness, then the responsible media has to give space to the issues.

SARAH TEATHER: I think the other thing there that has often been missing, coming back to Matthew D’Ancona’s point really, it is about understanding the real concerns so if there are communities who feel they are under pressure, often it is because there has historically been a problem with accessing affordable housing in that area, there has historically been a problem with accessing jobs and it is very easy to assume this is just about immigration whereas we actually need to talk to people’s real underlying concerns and make sure we are addressing those.

CLARE SHORT: The migration does press down wages at the bottom of the labour market whereas having a skilled plumber more cheaply is nice for upper middle class people, there are two different interests at work.

DM: Clare, let’s move on to another issue, one I touched on with Nigel Farage, we are into the commemoration, the remembering of the centenary of the start of the First World War in of course August 1914. ‘Labour tears into Gove’, this is your Shadow Education spokesperson, ‘for crass ugly claims over the First World War.’

CLARE SHORT: I’ve been worried about this. The hundred year anniversary of the First World War, it was a terrible, terrible war, in all 16 million died in the mud and so on and I think you can say the bad treaty at the end of the war led to Second World War, so this is a phenomenal historical set of errors and we are supposed to be commemorating it. Now we could intelligently talk about that because we are in a situation with maybe a declining America, a rising China, is that similar to what happened to when there was declining Britain and rising Germany that helped to explain the First World War … no, so there is a very intelligent and important discussion to be had but then silly Michael Gove, who I must say does irritate me, criticises historians for having been blaming the generals …

DM: So is it silly to polarise it as a left/right issue?

MICHAEL PORTILLO: I think don’t think he is criticising historians, I think he is criticising non-historians. From about 1930 …

DM: But he is saying some left wingers have hijacked it …

CLARE SHORT: He said left wing historians.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: I doubt if some of the people who have made the reinterpretation of history in drama, for instance Oh What A Lovely War! and Blackadder are on the left. I think it is very important to remember at this time, I think Nigel Farage was making a similar point earlier, that at the time the British people thought they were fighting Germany militarism, they thought they were fighting to defend Belgium which had been attacked …

DM: And defend their own country.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: To defend their own country and they were fighting against German atrocities. There was a period during which these German atrocities were discounted, they were thought to be British propaganda but they were not, there were mass killings of civilians when the Germans were …I think it is very, very important to understand that the people at the time did not think that this was a futile war, they thought that it was a very …

CLARE SHORT: And they thought it would be over very quickly …

DM: Has Michael Gove got it right, is he in the right direction there, that it has been polarised left and right?

MICHAEL PORTILLO: I think it is probably unfortunate to introduce the term left and right into a discussion about the First World War. What I would hope will emerge during the course of 2014 is an understanding that what we think of now as the First World War was not the way people viewed it at the time and not the way people viewed it in the ten years after it. One of the reasons why we view the First World War now as something that was futile is indeed, as Clare said, because there was a Second World War so the terrible sacrifice which was thought to be the war to end all wars turned out not to be the war to end all wars.

DM: Sarah, you’ve got this in the Observer, ‘Evictions will create benefit black spots.’

SARAH TEATHER: Yes, I picked this out really because it’s an issue that affects my own constituency where house prices are very high and rental prices are very high and it is very difficult for people to rent, whether you are on benefit or not, properties just go like that. You see a property and it’s gone and it has become significantly more challenging since the changes to local housing allowance and then the changes now to the benefit cap have made it really difficult for people to be able to rent. It concerns me that you can end up with whole areas where if somebody has a period of time when they fall on hard times, that they inevitably have to move out and I don't think that’s great for the make up of London actually, I don’t think it’s very good for social cohesion.

DM: Boris Johnson made that point, he talked about virtual apartheid in some ways because of that. I want to bring in your story, Michael, to join up with that because given that happening in large areas, in many areas of the country, we’ve got on the front of the Times the Prime Minister in a New Year cash give away. We haven’t got the cash to give away have we?

MICHAEL PORTILLO: Well he thinks … he’s talking about the five year period from the next election and he thinks with the growth in the economy, which does now seem to be quite well established, that it will generate enough money for a pledge on pensions which is that pensions will rise either by the rate of inflation or by the rise in earnings or by 2.5%.

DM: The triple lock.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: The triple lock, whichever of those is the greatest. Two things strike me about this, one is that it is the Prime Minister in a more self-confident mood than he’s been before and secondly, to Sarah’s point earlier based on the Matthew D’Ancona article, this is a kind of rather centrist policy, this is a policy that goes to real people. It isn’t a nasty policy, it isn’t about immigration, it isn’t about creating fear, it’s about making a promise. Another thing that strikes me because of …

SARAH TEATHER: Based on a Liberal Democrat achievement, the triple lock.

DM: Well that’s it, isn’t it also a bribe. There are a lot of people even within the Conservative party who say well why should certainly better off pensioners keep all their benefits?

MICHAEL PORTILLO: Basically because it is so complicated to take benefits away from very small numbers of people but what struck me because of my antiquity is how different this is from Margaret Thatcher. Remember, Margaret Thatcher was determined to reduce the size of the state and so all the years that she was in office and for years after she was in office too, pensions only rose by prices at a time when earnings were rising a lot faster than prices. So this is a very, very different policy. This is not the policy of a man who is determined to reduce the size of the state.

CLARE SHORT: I think this is a policy of a man who is scared he is not going to get enough votes to win the election. Pensioners are big voters, the Tories traditionally do well amongst pensioner voters and it is very early for bribes for elections to be starting.

DM: Yes but is it only, to bring in your story, Clare, a man whose advisors are telling him that Miliband isn’t even close to winning the next election?

CLARE SHORT: Well the reason I picked that out, because there were other stories about how Cameron can’t win a majority and I think now we’re in a long term prospect of no one party being in a majority so we get the Tories can’t win a majority, Labour can’t win a majority, we’re going to have a different kind of politics in Britain with more coalitions into the indefinite future.

DM: So if you think that, is that because the Liberal Democrats are going to get lots of seats? I don’t quite understand … the Liberal Democrats are not going to get many seats so why would they …

SARAH TEATHER: Oh!

CLARE SHORT: UKIP will rise a bit, take Tory votes, Labour is ahead of the Tories in polling but they won’t get a majority. I’m not saying the Tories are going to be wiped out, I do think the Lib Dems will lose out but I don’t think either main party is going to get a majority.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: In a general election in a way the number of votes you get isn’t the important thing, it’s the number of seats and the only party in the market for seats are the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives, Labour and the Scottish Nationalists and the parties in Northern Ireland. Those are the only ones in the game.

DM: Sarah, given that you are leaving parliament perhaps you can be dispassionate about the Lib Dems chances. The Lib Dems are not going to increase their number of seats are they?

SARAH TEATHER: I can’t make predictions on elections. I think you’ll be surprised by how well the Liberal Democrats do at the next election, I really do. Just knowing about the kind of campaigns that are going on on the ground in lots of areas, the Liberal Democrats are pretty good at getting stuck into their seats so I think come the next election a lot of things that we have delivered on people will remember.

DM: But do you think the broken promises, once you’re a politician and you get that hung round your neck as a party, it is very, very hard to shake it off. Given the overall view of politicians, you are the party that stands out as having reneged on some pretty …

SARAH TEATHER: I think it would be very difficult to say we’re the only party that …

DM: Not the only party but the big tuition fees, that really sticks.

CLARE SHORT: There is no doubt there is real bitterness about that and it really damaged the party but is it fading is the question?

SARAH TEATHER: I think at the next election there will be very different questions to ask.

MICHAEL PORTILLO: A party that thinks it is not going to be in government makes silly promises. The Liberal Democrats thought they weren’t going to be in government so they made silly promises. At the next election you must look for the party that doesn’t think it is going to be in government that is making silly promises which is UKIP.

CLARE SHORT: I think the student fees thing, there were alternatives to that. I think going to £9000 was a real error for our country.

DM: Well, like all the debates so far today there is more to be discussed. Thank you all very much indeed, Sarah, Clare, Michael, very good to see you.