Murnaghan Interview Pat McFadden MP, Shadow Europe Minister, 4.10.15

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, one of the issues that also looks set to dominate the next year’s politics is the promised referendum of course on Britain’s membership of the European Union.  In an interview this morning, Mr Cameron said that he will rule nothing out if he doesn’t get his way in renegotiations with the EU.  Now Labour has promised to campaign for the party to stay in Europe no matter which way the Prime Minister’s discussions go and I’m joined now by the Shadow Europe Minister, Pat McFadden, good morning to you Mr McFadden.  I know you were sat there listening to that conversation I was having with Mr Lewis and it would just be interesting to get your take on Syria and the Labour party position if faced with a vote in the House of Commons on extending British military activities from Iraq into Syria.  We know there’s a strong groundswell within the party to say no, isn’t that now bolstered by the further complications of Russian military action there?

PAT MCFADDEN: No, I think we need to look at the proposal if it comes.  We took a vote about a year ago in the House of Commons to support air strikes against ISIS in Iraq but not in Syria, for my part I have always wondered what the moral justification was of coming to the aid of the victims of ISIS in Iraq but not in Syria, this is after all a border they don’t recognise at all in the Caliphate that they are trying to build.  So I don’t begin from the premise that extending the air campaign to Syria is impossible but obviously the actions that the Russians have taken in recent days have complicated matters there.  I think we would have to ask what exactly is it that further action by British forces would contribute to a situation like this with the Russians and the Americans in different ways already engaged there.  I don’t have an in principle objection to doing this, I agree with Julian that ISIS represents a huge danger to us in terms of values and our way of life, that responding to that should not rule things out militarily but I think we’d have to see exactly what the proposal was and what it was expected to add.

DM: Well thanks for that Mr McFadden, let’s get on to the issue of Europe and again the Labour position.  Let’s try to work this out and bring some clarity to this because the Prime Minister is now saying that if he doesn’t get what he wants in renegotiations he rules nothing out.  Now one of the things he might want in renegotiations are dealing with employment rights and some of the red tape as they describe it surrounding those issues but we’ve heard from Labour saying well if they go some of us or all of us, the whole party, might actually campaign for out.  Is that the case?

PAT MCFADDEN: That’s not the position, no.  Some of our friends in the trade unions have quite rightly said …

DM: Well the GMB.  

PAT MCFADDEN: The GMB and others have quite rightly said Europe is an important source of social protection and rights for people at work, one thinks of the rights to paid leave, equal rights for part time workers, anti-discrimination measures and so on, there has been quite a lot over the years so what they’ve said is we don’t want the Prime Minister to rip these things up as part of his renegotiations and neither do I, I think that would be wrong and …

DM: So you want him to fail?  

PAT MCFADDEN: No, I don’t want him to fail.  

DM: You want him to fail and then you’d vote for in and he’d be voting for out, I mean it’s very complicated.  

PAT MCFADDEN: No, it’s not really that complicated because the question on the ballot paper is remain or leave, the word maybe is no on the ballot paper.  If the Prime Minister was unwise enough to rip up everybody’s employment rights as part of his renegotiation and by the way, it’s not clear at all that that’s going to happen, he certainly didn’t mention that on any interviews today but if he did that the right response wouldn’t be to leave the European Union because then by definition people at work wouldn’t have access to any EU wide employment rights because we’d be outside the European Union.  The right response to that would be for us to campaign at subsequent elections to opt back into those measures and we’ve done this before.  When the Social Chapter, the original EU wide employment rights piece of all this was put in place, the Conservative government at the time under John Major opted out of it, they said they didn’t want to sign up to that.  We disagreed with that in opposition, we said we’d opt in to that chapter if we got elected and that’s precisely what we did when we won power and we couldn’t have done that if we had been outside the European Union so for us this position, we don’t want to see the employment rights diminished but the in principle position in the referendum is very clear and was confirmed at our conference last week.  We will campaign, and Alan Johnson has been appointed to lead the Labour campaign on this, for Britain to remain in the European Union when the referendum comes.  

DM: Okay, let me just ask you this overall about the party and your leader’s actions tomorrow, going up to join demonstrations and protests.  I mean there is a convention that has held, proclaimed in British politics that you don’t really queer the pitch as leader for somebody else’s party conference.  Mr Corbyn deciding to go to Manchester, join some of these protests, do you feel that in itself is perhaps treading too much on their toes and also rather underlines the difference between your parties.  There is one party taking decisions that affect the very future of the country, international affairs and Mr Corbyn is outside with a lot of people shouting impotently.  

PAT MCFADDEN: Well for me it’s not about conventions.  Conventions are there, sometimes they are broken or not but I think the second part of your question is what I’d like to address.  Mr Corbyn is a person who, if you like, spent his background in protest movements, going to lots of demonstrations and so on.  There is a culture of protest in the Labour party, it’s always been there going back many decades and it has its place but government is different from protest and what I want to see is a party that can get elected and can implement change and everything that we’ve managed to achieve, be it from the creation of the NHS to the introduction of the minimum wage, has been based on being able to win elections and there’s a difference between being a party of protest and a party of government and I think one of the important things for him is to make that transition as a politician from one of protest to one at least potentially of government because they’re not the same thing. What I don’t want to see is the Labour party’s job description being changed from being either a party of government or at least contesting elections seriously to become a party of government, to being satisfied with just being a protest movement because that would be a fundamental change in our job description and our relationship with the British people and that’s not something that I want to see.  

DM: Mr McFadden, than you very much, Shadow Europe Minister, Pat McFadden there.