Murnaghan Interview with Tim Loughton MP, Acting Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, 16.10.16

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:     A report from MPs today accuses the Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn of not doing enough to tackle anti-Semitism in his party.  The Home Affairs Select Committee says he has provided a consistent lack of leadership on the issue and said the party’s own investigation into the problem had failed to deliver.  Well the Committee’s Acting Chair is Conservative MP, Tim Loughton, who joins me now from central London, a very good morning to you.  Are you just picking on the Labour party especially here?

TIM LOUGHTON: Absolutely not.  Let’s make it clear, this is a report into anti-Semitism within society in the UK and within politics and we looked at all the political parties, we had representatives of all the political parties, mostly all the political leaders in front of us.  It is a cross party Select Committee, the report was unanimously endorsed by Conservative, Labour and SNP members of that committee.  This is not about trying to score points off Jeremy Corbyn and I am disappointed that it seems to have been accepted by him in that manner because that doesn’t do any of us any good.

DM: Well Jeremy Corbyn is saying we investigated this, we didn’t have to, I set up an independent committee chaired by then Shami Chakrabarti, now Baroness Chakrabarti, she looked into it and there are actions that she recommended that we are taking.

TIM LOUGHTON: Well as we say in the report, I’m afraid there are serious question marks about whether the Chakrabarti independent report is worth the paper it’s written on.  This was an independent report, we pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn for commissioning it.  Within days she had become a member of the Labour party, within a few more days she had become a Labour member of the House of Lords and now she sits round the Shadow Cabinet table with Jeremy Corbyn as the Shadow Attorney General.  So that’s not an independent report, a report which failed even to define anti-Semitism, focused more on other forms of racism, didn’t even acknowledge the up to 50 members of the Labour party who have been suspended, re-admitted, re-suspended or whatever and really dodged the serious questions which is why we are saying in the report that Jeremy Corbyn, for the sake of his party, all political parties, and the problems of anti-Semitism in society, needs to take this much more seriously and I’m afraid he is still  in denial and that sort of response is deeply disappointing for all members of the committee.

DM: Just let me talk to you about your investigations.  I’m got Jeremy Newmark, the National Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement coming up next, he’s going to tell me you didn’t talk to his group.

TIM LOUGHTON:  We spoke, we had a seminar with all the political parties, Friends of Israel and of Palestine, we went out of our way to accommodate all the different parts of the different political parties and we had lots of evidence, we had more evidence in front of us from Labour party members and MPs than any other parties.  So  we went out of our way to give the Labour party the opportunity to have their voice, we had the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in front of us for an extensive session.  When I took over this Committee we had a draft report which hadn’t at that stage actually looked at the Conservative party or the Liberal Democrat party, I made sure we had Tim Farron in front of us and then we had Sir Eric Pickles representing the Prime Minister in front of us last week so this really could be seen to be looking at all the political parties.  But there is a particular problem within the Labour party of anti-Semitism at the moment and just to continue to be in denial about it does not help anybody.

DM: I’ll put that to Mr Newmark in a moment or two.  Can I just ask you about other business before the Home Affairs Select Committee, this issue of the inquiry into historical allegations in so many institutions of child sexual abuse and the former Chair of it, Lowell Goddard, she’s gone back to New Zealand, she’s resigned.  You want to talk to her don’t you?

TIM LOUGHTON: We do and the previous Chairman wrote to her after she resigned earlier in the summer saying that we really would benefit from having her in front of the Committee to give her reasons as to why she has left and it’s not helpful for this very important inquiry and also to analyse her criticisms of the way the inquiry was going.  She refused to come in front of us, she eventually produced a five page and rather subjective letter, there are various parts of that letter which don’t hold water frankly.  Now we’ve had these further allegations covered in the Times in the last few days, I’ve written to her again saying we really would like to have you in front of the committee and frankly if you don’t like the allegations made, this is your opportunity to put your side of the story.  We’ll do a video conference link with her in New Zealand and I hope she will take up that offer.  This inquiry is too important to allow these headlines about key people within the inquiry to undermine it and to overshadow it and we want her side of the story.

DM: You also want to talk to, don’t you, the senior civil servant who was sitting beside the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, when she gave evidence to your committee about why Lowell Goddard went and she more or less said to you that she went back because she was homesick.  

TIM LOUGHTON: Yes and clearly there was a lot more to that story.  We had the Home Secretary and Mark Sedwill, the permanent secretary, the chief official at the Home Office, in front of us a few weeks ago, I questioned them about the departure of Lowell Goddard.  Mark Sedwill who has been the permanent secretary throughout the whole tenure of the inquiry did not offer any information about problems that may have been going on within the inquiry but surely the Home Office would have known about, certainly these further stories coming out in a national newspaper have led me to question who knew what about what when.  That’s why I have asked for him to come back in front of our Select Committee on Tuesday, we’re also seeing the new Chairman and other panel members to answer questions about did they know more about Lowell Goddard before the whole thing came out into the open over the summer and what where they doing about it?  It is really important that we restore confidence in what is a really important inquiry to get to the bottom of why systematic historic child abuse happened to so many thousands of young people over so many decades and that important work must carry on.  

DM: Chairman, thank you very much indeed.