Murnaghan Interview with Jon Ashworth, Labour MP, 11.12.16
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the Sleaford by-election took place last week and it saw Labour slip from having the second largest share of the vote in the constituency to having the fourth largest. It was overtaken by UKIP and the Liberal Democrats and that’s despite the fact that one of the biggest issues for the constituency is the closure of overnight A&E services at its local hospital and health is traditionally of course an area which sees voters turn to the Labour party. Well I’m joined by the Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth. A very good morning to you, Mr Ashworth, I know you campaigned in the constituency, did you find that the NHS message wasn’t enough to give Labour a hearing?
JON ASHWORTH: Well what the Labour party needs is a laser like focus on the issues and concerns of the British people and that includes jobs and wages, that includes schools but it also includes the NHS. You will have seen in the newspapers today stories of some of the most poorliest children having to wait nine hours for an appropriate bed in our hospitals. In fact on Friday night across England according to the papers today there were just four beds in children’s intensive care. When you see the scale of the underfunding of the NHS you can see why the NHS is going backwards even though the people who work in the NHS, their goodwill and professionalism is something I praise, I mean they are brilliant but the NHS simply isn’t getting the funding it needs.
DM: Which I am sure is part of the argument you were making on the doorsteps in that by-election and the point is this, the point is yes, a big concern for many people but it seems, yes it was only one by-election but it was a constituency where you did quite well just a year and a bit ago and you are pushed into fourth place. It seems that message was not enough.
JON ASHWORTH: Look, I’m not going to pretend that the Sleaford result was nothing other than extremely disappointing, of course it was, I wish we’d done better. We have had other parliamentary by-elections in the last 12 months in Sheffield and Oldham where we have done a lot better than we did in Sleaford but I’m not making any excuses for Sleaford, we should have done hugely better than what we did but the NHS and indeed social care are of great concern to people. You will have seen in the newspapers again today about the crisis in social care now, social care has seen £4.5 billion of cuts over the last six years, a lot of our elderly relatives are not getting the compassionate level of social care service that they deserve and one of the things that I’m saying today is that in the next few days the government are going to announce their local government finance settlement, that is an opportunity for them to bring forward an injection of cash into social care because when the Chancellor did his mini budget, the Autumn Statement, a few weeks ago there wasn’t even an extra penny piece for social care. I think that was an absolute disgrace, this week is an opportunity for government to change that and give social care the money it needs. Social care is the sort of issue that concerns lots of people and I hope the Labour party and I believe the Labour party will be talking about that a lot more in the weeks to come.
DM: Do you not think that to get that hearing on the big issue of the day, it may change of course but it came back from Vernon Coker, he was saying on the doorsteps in Sleaford that messages like that were being drowned out first and foremost by Brexit, they’d say to him are you leave or remain, the response from the Labour canvasser has to be well it’s more nuanced than that, some of us are in favour of leaving the single market, some of us aren’t, some of us are in favour of controlling immigration, some of us aren’t. You don’t really have definitive answers on those issues.
JON ASHWORTH: Well the British people have voted to leave the European Union, I didn’t want to leave the European Union and I am very worried that it is going to damage our economic prospects but I entirely accept the will of the British people in that referendum so what the Labour party needs to do is to say yes, we accept that result, as we showed in our voting in the House of Commons just this last week but the Labour party also needs to remind the British people that there is a whole range of issues that we have practical answers on. For example, the government want to push forward with divisive grammar schools, dividing children at 11, we don’t think that’s the best way to educate our children for the future and the government are not putting the investment in to social care. Many of the people in Sleaford and indeed in all of the constituencies that we’ll be campaigning in hard will have elderly relatives, perhaps a mother or a grandmother, suffering from dementia, perhaps mother or a grandmother who are too frail to feed themselves or too frail to go to the toilet and we do not have a compassionate social care system in place at the moment and the reason why this is so important is that the government has refused to put the money into social care. It’s quite disgraceful and the Labour party by demonstrating it has practical answers on policies like this can win over the trust of the British people again.
DM: And your leader, seeing now that he is 33 points, 33 point Jeremy Corbyn behind Theresa May on the issue of leadership, you would accept that you need a leader who can command the confidence of the voting public?
JON ASHWORTH: Well the Labour party members made their decision on the leadership last summer, they decided they wanted Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour party into the next general election but do you know something, campaigning hard for the Labour party, winning votes for Labour and taking on the Conservatives and showing for example in next year’s county council elections and next year’s mayoral elections which are very important to the Labour party, is the responsibility of all of us and that is why I am so passionate about campaigning for the NHS, that’s why I am so annoyed and disappointed with the government for not putting the money into the NHS and particularly not putting the money into social care in the last few weeks, that is why I am going around the country reminding voters of that and that is what I’m going to be continuing to do over the weeks and months ahead.
DM: Can I just ask you, do you think that you personally are going to get to be able to campaign on these issues in the next general election? I’m just looking, I’m not sure how representative they are at some tweets coming into here at Sky purporting to be from Labour party members saying deselect Jon Ashworth.
JON ASHWORTH: Who’s saying that, give me their name!
DM: You can find out, just put your own name in Twitter, you know how to do it.
JON ASHWORTH: The good people of the Leicester South constituency Labour party will decide whether they want me to fight for them at the next election. It may well be somebody from Leicester South CLP who is tweeting in but I suspect it’s not.
DM: As I say, they are purporting to be Labour supporters but the broader question being that we know there are moves afoot in other constituencies to deselect some of the so-called moderates and you have heard an awful lot about it’s not just your leader not being appropriate but your party machinery having been hijacked by those that want to turn the Labour party to the far left.
JON ASHWORTH: Well first of all every MP goes through something called the trigger ballot. That sounds like a bit of jargon but every MP in the Labour party has to get reselected but let me be absolutely clear, every single one of my Labour colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party work hard day in and day out for their constituents, they work hard in parliament taking on this rotten Tory government and I believe that all of them, if they want to fight the next election, will be reselected and I will be supporting every single one of them in their efforts to get reselected as well.
DM: Mr Ashworth, very good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed.
