Murnaghan 6.05.12 Paper review with Eve Pollard, Alan Duncan MP and Lord Glasman

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Time now to take a look through the Sunday papers. A great panel today, I’m joined by the International Development Minister, Conservative MP, Alan Duncan, we’ve got former editor of four Sunday newspapers …

EVE POLLARD: Two, only two.

DM: Okay, well we’ll give you a couple more, Eve Pollard and Labour peer and political thinker, Lord Glasman, a very good morning to you all. Well let’s kick off with these election results, I’ve been discussing those a lot this morning, Alan Duncan and the Chancellor is writing in the Mail on Sunday, he’s been on the Marr Show this morning saying he’ll take it on the chin but really is not going to do anything about it, no change of direction. Surely the message is, change a bit?

ALAN DUNCAN: No, the message is not change direction but he is right to say we haven’t explained things as well as we should and so let me take it on the chin too. We could have explained the Budget better but it was the right Budget.

DM: You could have just not leaked everything in advance to everyone then concentrated on the wrinkles in it there.

AD: I think Budget purdah isn’t what it used to be, that’s a fair comment, but let’s look at what we’re doing. The fact is some interest rates have gone up this week so people who have a mortgage are finding it is going to hurt more. Now if we’d done what Ed Balls wants to do, which is pay off the government mortgage with another mortgage, we’d have had higher interest rates already and then you’d have had real pain so what George Osborne is doing I think as Chancellor is absolutely right and if we were to go down the Ed Balls route it would be worse and that is exactly what the Governor of the Bank of England has said. I mean frankly I don't think Ed Balls is fit to be Chancellor, look at that what …

DM: Just let me put it to you, Eve, with your newspaper background, there is a sense isn’t that there that the press have turned, turned against Cameron and Osborne?

EP: The press have turned because, if I may say, the government, the coalition, are doing the worst job possible in explaining what they’re doing and there are people, lots of people, who would help them. For example the Budget, the great story was that he is lifting all these people out of paying tax because the threshold is going up. What’s terrible …

DM: There was a 5% increase in state pensions, they didn’t get that one out.

EP: That was bad but that hasn’t happened yet …

DM: No, no, it was the biggest ever rise.

EP: What is stupid is nobody sat down with George Osborne and said what’s going to be good after Tuesday? Frankly the taking people out of the threshold is not going to happen until April, by that time all this has been forgotten. They don’t sell their stuff correctly, the Lib Dems frankly did leak most of the budget before but the Lib Dems never had a Budget to leak before so you can see it’s good fun for them.

DM: There was a good quote from Ed Davey, saying we’re enjoying the mid-term blues, we’ve waited 90 years for them!

EP: Exactly but whoever is running their focus groups, probably somebody I know, should be shot because you get the impression as an outsider, and I’m not a politician, that nobody really understands how we, we ordinary people, I speak on behalf of all of us, feel about things. You’re quite right, you’re talking about what Ed Balls would do but the average person in the street is hurting, the average person in the street reads stories every day, there’s a story in one of the papers this morning about quangos spending money, about illegal immigrants walking off with our benefits and we just sit here and think this is a government that somehow doesn’t care.

DM: Okay, I just want to get Lord Glasman’s views, because Ed Balls has been mentioned a lot, do you feel there is an opportunity and did Labour take it, for Labour to be speaking on behalf of the people as Eve has been describing?

LORD GLASMAN: Completely and it is astounding to me that it has taken this government two years to get to the same paranoid condition that Labour was in after twelve. I mean it’s always about the message, it’s the message we’ve got to communicate better, there is no agenda for growth, that’s the problem. There’s no way the capital is going to the regions, the vocational agenda is half-hearted so their deficit reduction which Labour agrees is necessary but on the other hand the genuine growth in the economy is not happening.

DM: But is there a chance – I was suggesting this to Lord Prescott – that Labour has been quite tentative up to this point in rebuilding after the hit it took in 2010, is there a chance to be bolder and bolder on that kind of Red Ed strand of the Labour party, if I can say that, and say we will prime the pump, we will borrow more? Ed Balls never mentions that he will actually have to borrow more before the growth comes through.

LG: Well I think the discussion in the Labour party is much more about changes in the institutions, about regional banks, about vocational training, about corporate governance.

DM: Are you still an austerity party?

LG: Well we are completely with the idea that you can’t exclusively spend your way out of this so there has got to be real genuine changes in the workforce, it is all about the workforce and this is what the government can’t understand. They think that technology generates wealth, they think that this generate wealth, but it is the workforce.

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AD: But the modern apprenticeship scheme, you’re right it is about the workforce, unemployment is a lagging indicator. The causes of unemployment are normally those that have preceded it by two or three years so it is always a lagging thing but employment, you are absolutely right and that’s the main focus and I think the Budget did focus on that but higher interest rates, if we’d had them, would really have killed any prospect of better employment.

DM: You were going to butt in there but we are going to have another political story in a moment, this is a paper review, it is a fascinating discussion but let’s do it through the medium of the papers and we digress a moment to discuss the Olympics, that test event.

EP: The successful test of anything is how free and how good your press is and in fact the press today is very disappointing. There is no investigative journalism and the Sun has done the old chestnut which you do when there is trouble with aeroplanes, which you do when there’s trouble anywhere, they have smuggled a bomb into the Olympic Stadium. That is not what I call investigative journalism and I say bring back the News of the World which I think we all miss! That’s the worry about Leveson, that Leveson will actually make the papers duller, will make them papers less interesting. I know five or six stories that the newspapers have that they don’t dare run at the moment because they are petrified.

DM: But Eve, why, because if they were obtained legally which presumably they were, why won’t they run them?

EP: Because they just feel that the down on the press is enormous. I have to say…

AD: Tell us what they are!

EP: I couldn’t possibly but I also feel that the average man in the street again will read all this stuff and when they discover how much Leveson has cost they will be furious and also it’s known that MPs and owners of newspapers spend time together. Richard Littlejohn did a brilliant think about Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill.

DM: He was in the Cabinet.

EP: Absolutely, I mean this is what goes on.

LG: And Beaverbrook and Michael Foot, very importantly.

DM: This is a very interesting discussion but I’m going to go back to the elections and we didn’t discuss in our opening exchanges, Lord Glasman, the little issue of London with Boris, as he is universally known, swimming against the tide there, the anti-Conservative tide and a remarkable victory in London, a second term as Mayor.

LG: But once again the Conservatives all over the press are getting this completely wrong and particularly the Conservative right who are saying Boris is a true Conservative and that the Conservatives have got to learn from that. I mean Boris ran straightforwardly on living wage which Iain Duncan Smith hasn’t even done in the Department of Work and Pensions. I mean this is the real story, if you are going to make work pay then you have to pay people who work and you have to pay them enough to feed their families, so even in the Department of Work and Pensions, there was a good story this week about the cleaner who left a note on his desk, on Iain Duncan Smith’s desk, saying just pay me enough to feed my family. So Boris was strong on the living wage, he was strong on the regularisation of illegal immigrants, I don’t really notice that seething through the right wing of the …

EP: I thing Boris won because he looks like a human being and a lot of politicians don’t.

LG: So a living wage, community land trusts, regularisation of illegal immigrants and so Boris fought a very, very quite left campaign.

DM: Just take the headline though, a lot of your colleagues are saying Boris shows the way, we have to get back to core Conservative values …

EP: Well he does worry about council tax, he’s kept that down.

AD: I don't think that’s what the Boris result showed. To a large extent I agree with Lord Glasman, I think that unlike almost any other contest in the local elections or in our politics, it was a real sort of personality contest because most people did not associate the Mayoralty with their economic plight so they are not going to vote according to whether they can pay their bills so more than anything else this was a personality contest that Boris won hands down against Ken, although hands down by a narrow margin in the end, and I think that’s why he came through. Ken Livingstone looked like yesterday’s man and that’s why Boris won.

DM: Looking to the future, do you think he’s a threat to Cameron if it stays like this?

EP: No, I don’t.

AD: That is the most rubbish journalism.

EP: That is the easy stuff today. Look, half term blues are common, everybody does badly but the Tories, the coalition, are going to have to change the way that they speak to us, change the way that they speak to people, get involved with people because there is no doubt about it, we thought that Boris would keep our council taxes down and we felt that he was somebody who we’d have round for dinner.

DM: I hope your next story isn’t related to what we’ve been discussing, this is Spencer Percival isn’t it, the last assassination of British PM.

AD: Next week it’s 200 years since the last, and indeed only assassination and we hope the only assassination ever, of a British Prime Minister. Amusingly Spencer Percival was shot by an ancestor of my fellow Ministerial colleague, Henry Bellingham, so someone called John Bellingham shot him in the House of Commons, in St Stephen’s and he was aggrieved, he said I want the address of grievance, he said he was made bankrupt, he was actually imprisoned in Russia, so he was aggrieved and so he went and shot the Prime Minister. So dear Henry Bellingham, we have got to watch him very carefully as he walks up the Commons corridors I think.

DM: Well he knows a lot about the history. Eve, you have got this story, it’s back to what you were saying earlier about benefits cheats hanging on to the Chelsea… you can always find someone like that.

EP: The trouble is, and this is the problem, the trouble is that every week, almost every day, there is a story about somebody getting benefits who most people in this country feel shouldn’t be getting benefits and I’m not against this woman and I have to say I am a child of immigrants and I am not against immigration but there does seem to be a disconnect between what the government says and what the government does. Every time somebody who is really struggling, and lots and lots of people are at all levels financially, sees how easy it is to get money on benefits they get frustrated. The real problem I think with politics at the moment and the low turnout is people think politicians aren’t living a normal life like we are and they talk a lot about immigration and they talk about crime and they talk about all these things that the people on the streets are worried about, and actually nothing happens.

DM: One of the reasons, it seems to have gone away, a couple of weeks ago what the government were putting out there was this issue, you are saying they are talking, saying these things but not actually doing anything in practice, I mean Alan Duncan, you were saying it’s the civil service, we haven’t politicised them enough and we’re not driving through the policies. We are saying these things and the civil servants go, yes Minister.

AD: No, I don't think that civil servants are a break on these things, I think if you have got a clear policy they will implement it and we’re lucky I think to have such an honest civil service who will do what their political masters call them to do. Look we are reforming welfare at a very difficult time, more radically than has ever happened really. We’ve got a benefits cap, £26,000, which is exactly the sort of thing Eve is saying we should have, there are lots of …

EP: They don’t want to be horrible to people but …

DM: With benefits, if you look at the polling, people are very, very hard about people who …

EP: Yes, because people get up every day to go to work watching people who don’t do a thing.

AD: And they resent it and when you are spending £100 billion a year or more on a welfare system, you want to make sure it is being focused on the people who deserve and need it and that’s what we’re trying to do.

DM: It’s another element where we could have brought Lord Glasman in on that but I want to hear about football. What a weekend it is for the Premier League and of course England.

LG: Other than Labour it’s definitely Spurs and Spurs have had a worse drift than the government over the last couple of months, lack of leadership, no direction but suddenly, unlike the government, we’re renewed, we’ve won the last two and there is a very interesting West Ham story going on that it was an ancestral feud between Trevor Brooking who was on the FA committee who stabbed Harry in the back, that’s the man who blocked – everybody assumed Harry Redknapp was going to be the next England manager so I was very interested to see how this story is now being reported.

DM: So what went on, what do they say?

LG: Well obviously there seems to be some foundation in it because everybody is saying it’s not true.

EP: When they all say it’s not true, you know it is.

DM: A universal truth, but you must be glad to keep him.

LG: Very glad, I think Harry is a very special leader, a very special manager and I am really looking forward to this afternoon.

DM: Well thank you all very much indeed, we got through quite a few stories there, I didn’t think we’d get through so many. So Alan Duncan, Eve Pollard and Lord Glasman there.