Murnaghan Interview with Tim Farron, outgoing President of the Liberal Democrats

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Tim Farron is preparing to stand down as President of the Liberal Democrats, he’ll hand over to Sarah Brinton on January 1st next year, he’s been the party’s president for four fairly tough, to say the least, years and he leaves a party now regularly polling fifth place behind the Green party but it is fair to say that his time in the political spotlight is not over yet, rumours abound about his potential leadership ambitions so let’s talk to the man himself, the outgoing Lib Dem President, Tim Farron, who joins me from Kendal in Cumbria and a very good morning to you, Mr Farron.  Some might say your timing’s immaculate given what might happen to the Lib Dems in the election next year.

TIM FARRON: Well it’s not my timing.  I became the party President on 1st January 2011 in the middle of the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election and I give up because I am term limited on 31st December and Baroness Sarah Brinton takes over the role then and she will be an outstanding President and I will do all I can to support her.  The timing is not my choosing.

DM: Okay, not your choosing so let me rephrase it then, is it a case of apres moi le deluge, excuse my French, Louis XV before the French Revolution?

TIM FARRON: That’s not bad, not bad.  Look we know that we have ahead of us what, just four and a half months of tough campaigning, there is no doubt this is the biggest, most challenging set of elections the Liberal Democrats have faced for a generation but you could probably say that about any of the other parties as well.  I have never seen British politics, I don't think anybody has ever seen British politics as crowded a market as it is today with six parties regularly polling 5% or above in the national polls, the two main parties struggling now as much as we have over the last four and a half years.  I would say although the market is very crowded, for the first time ever you can see enormous space for the Liberals, the Liberal Democrats, there’s never been more space for a Liberal party when it comes to standing up for what’s right for our economy, an intelligent approach to immigration and Europe, standing up for human rights and civil liberties are things that nobody else appears to want to do.

DM: So that space exists in other parties and that’s what the polls are telling us, the ex-Lib Dem voters are now looking for the Liberal elements of the Labour party they like and indeed the Green party which in many polls over recent months is outpolling the Lib Dems.

TIM FARRON: Well the polls have been all over the place, they’ve not been massively encouraging for us over the last four years but we know that’s because we’ve made the very bold and right decision to go into government.  The most critical thing that we’re not talking about, it’s not in any news headlines today, is the fact that there is a recovery, an economic recovery.  It’s not something that everybody feels, in fact many, many people don’t feel it but of course the reality is that they would have felt it if there had been four million unemployed and we’d done what Ed Balls wanted us to do.  So what the Liberal Democrats have achieved more than anything else is competence in government and the rescuing of an economy that was absolutely on the brink four and a half years ago but at the same time to make sure that we have the biggest expenditure on green energy ever, the incredibly valuable and important income tax cut to the lowest paid workers in this country and they are of course the 24 million workers least likely to vote Tory so everybody knows the Tories wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t forced them to do it but of course being in government at a time like this has cost us.  It doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do but what we see now is a really differential pattern across the country so the Ashcroft polling in recent weeks and months absolutely bears up the strategy that myself and others have led over these four years to concentrate our resources on our key and target seats and it appears in those seats that the strategy is working.  So the national opinion polls, of course they are interesting, I’m not going to pretend I don’t look at them avidly – I do, for good and for worse, but what really matters are the polls in seats like this one where the Liberal Democrats appear to be doing very well.

DM: Well let me ask you, Mr Farron, what flows from that analysis that being in government has cost you, as you put it.  People say yes, it was a grown up decision by the Lib Dems to go into coalition with the Conservatives and they said how well prepared you were for those discussions back in 2010 so you had thought about it before that election, there’s no doubt you are thinking about it before the 2015 election, what are the discussion?  Do they include saying under no circumstances will we go into coalition with any party because we have to keep the brand pure, we have to keep Lib Dem principles at the core and not compromise them this time?

TIM FARRON: I think we did what was right in the national interest in 2010, even if it might not have been in the party’s interests, we did what was right for Britain, there wouldn’t have been an economic recovery if we hadn’t taken the tough decisions that we did and there certainly wouldn’t have been any fairness in the recovery if we hadn’t been part of that coalition and there was no alternative.  We either sat on our hands and let David Cameron run the whole show or we entered into a Lib Dem/Tory coalition and everybody knows that a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition was …

DM: What about next time round, Mr Farron?

TIM FARRON: Well next time round I should imagine we’ll be in a similar situation in that there will be no choice.  I don't think ourselves or any other party will be in a position where we can pick and choose the coalition we want to be part of.  We’ll either be in a situation where there is a minority administration or there is some form of arrangement, whether it be supply and confidence or coalition and with one or more political parties but we have a fruit machine of an electoral system, you put votes into it and goodness knows what you get out of it and we can only, after the election is finished, respect what the electorate have told us, be grown up enough to work with others, whether that be Labour or the Tories or somebody else, you can’t go and stamp your feet like a spoilt brat and say I don’t like the outcome of the election.  You’ve got to accept it and put together a government that will work in the interests of the country.

DM: And after that election, if your leader stands down, would you have a go at it?  Would you have a pop at the position?

TIM FARRON: Well you’ve already pointed out to us that our poll rating is challenging and indeed the election for all parties is challenging.  To my mind what is in Britain’s interests is for the Liberal Democrats to survive and thrive beyond 2015 and that means that over this next four and a half months anybody, myself or anybody else, giving head space and thought time to a vacancy in the future, well that would be very, very selfish and foolish and a short-sighted thing to do so we’re focused entirely on ensuring the Liberal Democrats perform far better than anybody expects in May 2015.

DM: Okay, Mr Farron, very good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed.  Tim Farron, the current Lib Dem President, another ten days left to go there.  The outgoing Liberal Democrat President.