Murnaghan Interview with Tom Watson, Labour Deputy Leadership candidate, 12.07.15

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: As the race for the Labour leadership hots up there is also a fierce battle going on to be the next deputy leader of the party.  Harriet Harman has done the job for eight years now and is Acting Leader at the moment and one of the candidates to replace her is the Labour MP for West Bromwich East is Tom Watson, who joins me now and a very good morning to you, Mr Watson.  Have you any preference or are you going to express it, as to who you would like to be deputy leader to?  

TOM WATSON: Well I’ve not nominated anyone, Dermot, I could work with any of the candidates for leadership. Obviously they are all very different, you had Jeremy on earlier, he’s got different views to Liz Kendall but the great thing about this new selection is about a third of a million people will decide who the Labour leader is, not trade union general secretaries or MPs in Westminster.  

DM: Yes but who do you sit closest politically to?  Are you an out and out anti-austerity man?  

TOM WATSON: Well for me I try to define this job as the campaigns and elections job.  The leader of the party has got to cast a new vision for the country for 2020, we engage those millions of people who chose not to come back to Labour in May and I think they need a deputy who can campaign in the country to amalgamate the politics of ideas with the politics of organisation, a bit like the role that John Prescott played in the 90s.  

DM: So what does that mean?  What does that mean your attitude to austerity, your attitude to cuts and the pace of them?  

TOM WATSON: Well certainly I thought the budget this week wrote off a generation of young people, the opportunities that our under 25s have got to make better of themselves now will be severely reduced by that budget and I also thought that to cast forward four years for a pay freeze for public sector workers after a five year pay freeze was not just unfair, it seems illogical to me Dermot because I think it will have a hugely distorting effect in the Labour market.  I can’t see nurses hanging around in the same jobs if they have not had a pay rise for nearly a decade and that means the government will have to lend more reliance on agency workers which we know cost the tax payer ultimately more money so I didn’t think that was very sensible and I think Labour needs to challenge it.  

DM: It is interesting you drawing that parallel with John Prescott who was sat it was thought to the left of Tony Blair, is that the way you could see it working, a more centrist Labour leader and you sitting in that Prescott role?  

TOM WATSON: The decision who our leader is is down to our members and if Liz Kendall wins, she represents that strand of pro-European social democracy which has been part of the Labour party for many decades now, then you have got Jeremy on the left of her who represents a stronger more traditional socialist tradition.  Whoever the party wants to lead them, they have got to get a campaigner behind them.  It will be a very different kind of campaign depending on who wins, Dermot, but I can work with all four candidates.  

DM: Okay, I tried but clearly hedging your bets, Mr Watson but as a Labour party member, 21st century party, progressive to its core, it would be a pity wouldn’t it if you had two middle aged white men leading it?

TOM WATSON: Well actually for the first time ever our members have got a choice to have two women leading and deputy leading them and some of those female candidates have been very irritated that the assumption in the media is always that two men might win but if we do end up arithmetically with two men I think we can put that right quite quickly by changing our rules to either split the deputy role to have gender parity or to make sure that going forward in the future we have at least one of the posts male and female but the bigger issue for the country, Dermot, is how do we reconnect with those millions of voters who haven’t come back to Labour and we’ve got a big job of work to do as soon as this election is over.  

DM: That is the point, isn’t it, how do you reconnect?  It goes down the United Kingdom doesn’t it, how do you reconnect with the Scots, how do you reconnect with Northerners, Northern Labour supporters who voted for UKIP and how do you win any seats south of the Wash?

TOM WATSON: Yes, that’s going to be tough but I think it’s not beyond our ability to do that.  I have been in Scotland this week, I’ve been in Aberdeen, Perth, Stirling, Inverness, Glasgow, Edinburgh, listening to our members and they say that what Labour has to do is recognise that the devolution settlement is changing, there needs to be more autonomy with co-operation for the work we do in the Scottish parliament there but that lends a debate further down in the country.  For me I think the devolving power to the English regions is absolutely where Labour should be.  The Northern Powerhouse is a Labour party construct, eleven leaders of local authorities have negotiated over many years to try and get a role that they can take a strategic view of things like transport infrastructure in the north, I think that’s the model we need to replicate across the whole of England and I think that will be part of our policy development over the next few years.  

DM: Lastly, and on another issue Mr Watson, people know you for your long standing campaigning into investigations into allegations of historical child abuse and we’ve finally, well got the rumblings of that inquiry underway.  Are you confident, have you got more information to bring to it, are you confident that it will get right to the root of things?

TOM WATSON: Well the Goddard Inquiry is very important and I think they have got off to a good start but what’s absolutely central, they need to get access to intelligence files where there may have been knowledge of police enquiries that were covered up.   There is a remarkable story in the Independent on Sunday today which links a convicted child abuser, Dr Maurice Fraser, to the Kincora scandal.  Now Dr Maurice Fraser was also very closely linked to the Paedophile Information Exchange and for me, that’s the first time we’ve seen an allegation linking Kincora to the events that took place on the mainland and that is it why it is absolutely central that this inquiry gets access not just to intelligence files but the files of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.  If we are going to unravel the truth that’s the only way I think Goddard will be able to do it.  

DM: Okay Mr Watson, good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed for your time.  Tom Watson there.