Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Alan Johnson, Labour, 7.05.17

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: After 20 years in parliament and serving in governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the former Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, is stepping down from his seat in Hull at this election.  He joins us now from his constituency, hello and thank you for being with us this morning.  Now Mr Johnson, you’ve spent 20 years as an MP in one of the most solidly Labour places in the country, do you feel that voters in areas like Hull are losing their connection with the party?

ALAN JOHNSON: No, I don’t.  In fact in Hull there is a renaissance going on.  It didn’t happen by accident and we are the UK City of Culture this year, you’ll have to come up Sophy, we’ve got this huge investment by Siemens, biggest investment anywhere in the world. We’ve had £3 billion of investment in the city since the Year of Culture was announced, thousands of jobs being created, it was all part of a plan, part of a plan by the Labour council and Labour MPs so no, quite the opposite, there is a renaissance here.  In a way we have got our own little ecosystem up here in Hull, we’re geographically isolated and we’ve been doing it for ourselves and doing it with some success.

SR: You talk about the success of Hull  but the bigger picture, if you look at the local elections, may not be quite so rosy.  Now you’re somebody who grew up in quite a working class area, in the Notting Hill slums, you were looked after by your 16 year old sister after your mother died, does it worry you that Labour is in danger of losing touch with its working class traditional voters?

ALAN JOHNSON: Yes, it does because we have got no God-given right to represent those communities and we must never be blasé and complacent about the trust but if you look from my childhood onwards at the huge social improvements both in terms of housing but also in terms of way that black people, the way that women were treated back in the 50s, the way the disabled were treated, all of those have been an advance in social issues and most of them, I have to say, led by the Labour party but not too long ago there was a prediction that because UKIP was now being led by Scouser with working class credentials we were going to lose all this support to UKIP.  We had dreadful results last week but UKIP in a sense had worse results and where we worked really hard – I saw you just talking to Anna Soubry, not far from there in Gedling, we held all seven Labour seats on Nottinghamshire council because we had a great local MP, Vernon Coker and great local councillors who were working hard, and that’s going to pay dividends I hope.  Certainly Jeremy Corbyn now over the next 32 days has a huge opportunity which he needs to take.  The leader of the Labour party, unlike some of the smaller parties and other parties, people judge them on do I want that person to be Prime Minister and that’s what Jeremy has got to show in the run up to June 8th.

SR: And do you think that people want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister?

ALAN JOHNSON: Do I think he wants to be Prime Minister?  Yes, you don’t run  for leader of the Labour party unless you want to be …

SR: Do you think people want him to be Prime Minister?

ALAN JOHNSON: I’m sorry Sophy, do I think people want him to be Prime Minister?  That’s the acid test, that’s what he has to demonstrate, not just to hundreds of supporters at rallies in safe Labour territory, we have to win Stevenage, we have to win the Milton Keynes seats, we have to win those seats we have to if we are going to be a party of government and we are a party of government, that’s what we were created for so he has to, he has to prove that.  There has been a lot of talk about not getting enough exposure and Jeremy not being able to get his message across and certainly I find lots of young people have been excited by Jeremy Corbyn in a way perhaps I’m immune to, given my age, but here is a chance for him to do that and he has to grasp that because Labour still, in terms of left of centre politics, we have a great deal to offer and I would have huge traumas and trepidation about the next three, four, five years which are going to be very difficult for this country, without Labour having a voice in government.

SR: You say that Jeremy Corbyn needs to prove himself to the voters, today we’ve got a policy out from Labour saying that they are guaranteeing no income tax rises for people on under £80,000 a year.  Are you happy with the idea that that is leaving the door open to tax rises for those on over £80,000?

ALAN JOHNSON: Well two things about this.  First of all we have to be clear that we are not looking to lower the upper threshold of £150,000, I think that would be a mistake for the kind of seats that we need to win across the country and again, in terms of how we operate, people know that we have got lots of policies to spend money, we have to show that we’ve got policies to save money as well.  But I would say this, there has been a lot of dishonesty about tax and a lot of mistakes made.  I think David Cameron and George Osborne made a fundamental mistake by pledging in 2015 that there would be no increase in any taxes when we knew we were heading into difficult economic headwinds and now we know we have got the added problem of leaving the European Union which is at some stage, believe me, going to cause even more problems.  We are already 15% poorer because of the pound’s devaluation so actually treating the electorate as if they are too infantile to understand that at some stage you may need to put up taxes to deal with these problems, whether it’s in the NHS or whether it’s in adult social care or anywhere else.  So I’m glad that we are being clear about this and not just going in like Trappist monks on tax and saying everything will be fine and we won’t raise any taxes.  I think what the Conservatives are going to try and do is say as little as possible and in a sense that’s not being honest with the electorate about the economic period that we face.

SR: You are talking about the economic period that we face, of course with Brexit looming.  How worried are you about the shape of Brexit if Theresa May does walk away from this election with a big majority which is of course what the polls suggest is exactly what is going to happen?

ALAN JOHNSON: Well I do worry about it and I think a big majority for Theresa May, unlike Anna Soubry who says she is a one nation Tory, everything I’ve been hearing is this kind of imbecilic chauvinistic appeal to the Daily Mail.  That’s not bringing the country together, her job is to bring the country together and the country is very divided over this.  We know we’re leaving the European Union but we shouldn’t adopt UKIP’s manifesto who claim that leaving the single market is what we voted on, leaving the customs union was what we voted on, leaving the European Medicines Agency, anything with Europe in front of it.  I’m encouraged by her letter to Donald Tusk which had a much more reasoned view of this and accepted that it would be disastrous frankly if we left the European Union with no deal and went to WTO and I am also encouraged by David Davis who is an MP not far from here who I’ve worked with over the years.  He seems to be accepting the need in negotiation not just to shout and bawl and say what you want to do, not just be bloody difficult but actually to craft a solution and to work with the European Union not as these Johnny Foreigners who we need to run rings round, this imbecilic stuff that we hear, but as people we have to forge a new partnership with because we might be leaving the European Union but we are not leaving the continent and what happens on the continent of Europe will affect us.  So I’ve got mixed views on how she has approached this, what she says and what she does are two entirely different things but what I do know is, a huge majority for the Conservative party who in a sense have just fought a battle with UKIP which they seem to have won on the local election results, but look at the devastation around us that we are potentially facing in a divided country that doesn’t look like being reunited any time soon.  

SR: You see you say you are worried about Theresa May’s negotiating strategy but from the public perspective, if you look at the polls, if you look at the local election results, it looks as though they trust Theresa May over Jeremy Corbyn to handle those negotiations.  Now in the past you have described Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, as a man who is totally incompetent and incapable.  I mean how can ask people to vote for a man who you’ve described in those terms?

ALAN JOHNSON: I’m not standing in this election.  It’s a pleasure to be talking to you but I said that when it was a leadership election and I said in the two leadership elections I would support another candidate, so that was part of my feedback.  He won, so now here’s his big chance.  I think you are right about Theresa May and the way she has projected this because in a sense she has managed to get those people that want a soft Brexit, let’s talk in those terms, that she should have a big majority because that will give her some control over the swivel eyed ones on her own backbenches.  She has also managed to convince people who want a hard Brexit that she should have a majority because that’s what she believes in as well, so I think she has been very clever and very astute in the way she’s positioned herself but it is just positioning and I think what we’ll find in the next 32 days up to June 8th is the British public kind of see through things when they are just there as a kind of image, they get to the thrust of this.  Now Theresa May has refused to take part in the debates, I think that says a lot about how worried she is and about how keen she is to keep an image, a façade.  She has also made a lot of errors I think in terms of her record as Home Secretary.  You know, it’s not impeccable.  She said she’d get net migration down to the tens of thousands, it’s actually at record levels.  There are a whole series of other things that have happened on her watch.  So all of that tends to get exposed and damage the veneer that spin doctors etc – and we’ve done the same in the past – try to put on a leader so I think she’s vulnerable to that, which is why I think the period up to June 8th is going to be really interesting.  Maybe we’ll see – and half the people who vote in the general election voted in these local elections this week, no one around Hull, none of the big cities really apart from the Mayoral elections, most of which we won.  So I don't think these predictions of this landslide are built on anything much more than a bit of wishful thinking in some aspects of the print media.

SR: It’s a very optimistic note you’re striking, at the same time though we have seen Labour voters deserting the party in its heartlands and places like Nottingham where we are today, there seems to be a struggle over Brexit.  A very quick thought from you just to end, Mr Johnson, is this a battle for the very existence of the Labour party?

ALAN JOHNSON: Yes, it is, because you lose two elections and that’s bad enough.  To lose three elections on the trot at such a difficult period for our country, that’s why Jeremy Corbyn has got to step up to the plate, that’s why he has got to do all the things that his supporters believe he can do.  It is an existential threat to the party.

SR: Mr Johnson, thank you very much for your thoughts, I’m afraid we are going to have to leave it there.