Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Dame Margaret Beckett, Labour MP 7.05.17

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

SOPHY RIDGE: First, she’s represented Labour in Derby South since 1983, in the process becoming the longest serving woman MP in history.  If there’s one person who knows the politics of this area better than anyone else, it’s the former Foreign Secretary, Dame Margaret Beckett.  Thank you very much for joining us on the programme here today.  Before we talk about what happened in the local elections, I’m quite interested to get your thoughts on Labour’s new policy announced today, that they want to guarantee no tax rises for people earning under £80,000 a year, leaving the door open of course for higher taxes for those on over that amount.  Do you think that’s a good policy for them to be having?

MARGARET BECKETT: Yes, I do.  I think it’s very sensible.  We want to make it clear that no matter what might be said about us, we are actually on the side of ordinary families wanting to get on, having aspirations, having ambitions for their future and that we want to be fair to people across the board and I think the pledge on things like VAT is particularly important because that has always been the Conservative’s weapon of choice.

SR: Don’t you tie your hands though by refusing to put up taxes for such a large number of people?

MARGARET BECKETT: Well to a certain extent, yes, but so many people are really under pressure, really feeling much worse off and a lot of people are suffering from cuts to things like tax credits and so on, so I think it’s the right thing to do to give people reassurance because the Conservatives are bound to say that we will put up everybody’s taxes massively because they always say that, no matter what it says in our manifesto, no matter what the likelihood.

SR: Now you’ve represented Derby South since 1983 and this year of course Derbyshire Council turned from red to blue, the first time that’s happened when Labour’s the opposition. For someone representing the area and having such a long history with the area, that must have been pretty heartbreaking to see.

MARGARET BECKETT: Yes, I was very sorry to see it and it’s unfortunate because I think they were a good county council and the last time we had a Conservative county council I think a lot of people who voted for them regretted it very sharply afterwards but these things happen.  It may be the first time we’ve lost when we’re the opposition but it isn’t the first time we’ve lost the county council, we just have to work hard to get it back.

SR: So why do you think it is that people in Derbyshire, in the constituencies that you represent, why are they turning away from Labour?

MARGARET BECKETT: Well in my constituency there wasn’t an election, this was a county council election and people are disillusioned, people are fed up and it’s natural.  To be fair, the government has done a very, very good job of blaming local authorities for all the problems people are facing and very many people seem to have swallowed the government line that oh, it is your council that is doing this to you, when actually councils – Tory, Labour, Liberal or whatever they are – are being driven by cuts from the government.

SR: You say that people are fed up so why are they not taking it out on the Conservatives, why are they taking it out on Labour then, that’s what I’m struggling to understand.

MARGARET BECKETT: We’ve got a mixed picture, it hasn’t happened everywhere.

SR: That’s a very optimistic way of looking at it.

MARGARET BECKETT: Well no, I was talking to my colleague Vernon Coker who tells me that in his constituency they returned all of the county councillors for Labour.

SR: But you lost nearly 400 ….

MARGARET BECKETT: Don’t get me wrong, I am not pretending it wasn’t a really bad result, I am not saying that.  All I’m saying is it wasn’t true everywhere and what we’ve got to do is find out where things went right and repeat it.  

SR: Jeremy Corbyn said in the wake of those council results that Labour was closing the gap on the Conservatives, John McDonnell was talking about Wales for example and said it wasn’t the wipe-out people expected, there was that almost celebratory conference in Manchester after Andy Burnham won there where Rebecca Long-Bailey describes Jeremy Corbyn as the next Prime Minister.  On a day when you lost all those seats, do you think the leadership and those around the leadership really get the fight that Labour’s in right now?

MARGARET BECKETT: I think they do but I think that you don’t encourage people to realise that it’s important how they vote and to vote for you by being totally defeatist.  The other morning I heard somebody on the radio saying – and it made my blood run cold to be honest – that the Prime Minister hasn’t just got a plan for Brexit, she’s got a plan for Britain.  Well I believe that and I don’t like the sound of it.  One of the things I was thinking about just recently, I don't know if you saw the stories of the man who died and made a point of pointing out how much less his widow and family would get if he lived beyond a date which I think was about a week ago and indeed that has happened.  Widowed mothers now have 18 months grace when they will get some support from the state for themselves and their children to get over the loss of a partner.  Not’s not the kind of country I want to live in and that is the kind of country Theresa May is promoting.

SR: So why is it then that Labour’s traditional voters, people who would be affected by the policies you describe, are leaving the party in droves and going towards the Conservatives?

MARGARET BECKETT: I think there are two problems which – everybody always says it’s classical, it doesn’t mean it is completely wrong.  One of the problems is that they don’t necessarily know what we are saying although hopefully we will redress that. A bigger problem I think is that it is not really being brought home to them yet what the present government are actually doing.  In my opinion that’s the key reason why Theresa May went for an election, it’s for party purposes, not because of the national interest but I think the key thing is, she knows perfectly well that a lot of these changes are in the law but they are only just coming in.  By the autumn people might have caught on, at the moment they haven’t really and if it doesn’t affect them, it hasn’t sort of been brought home to them and I think it’s that lack of focus on what the government is doing to families that is one of our biggest problems.

SR: So the electorate have been fooled do you think?

MARGARET BECKETT: No, I think they are just not being kept very well informed.

SR: Very diplomatic.

MARGARET BECKETT: If people don’t fully realise what’s happening and haven’t taken it in, they don’t start to get indignant and they don’t realise the risks that they may be running.  If she gets a landslide, heaven help our health service, our school service, our public services as a whole.

SR: Now of course the polls suggest if not a landslide she is going to win an emphatic majority.  There was a report this week in the Times that Labour MPs had got together and said that if Jeremy Corbyn, if Labour lost more than 150 seats – which of course you did – in the local council elections, then someone should call on Jeremy Corbyn to go.  You were identified as someone in this article as someone having sufficient authority and respect to make that plea to Jeremy Corbyn, did you ever have any of those conversations?

MARGARET BECKETT: No!  I wouldn’t know if anybody has had those conversations but certainly nobody has had them with me, I can assure you.

SR: Do you think that it would help if Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t the leader ahead of the general election?

MARGARET BECKETT: I think if there is one thing that the public do not want to hear from Labour at the moment, it is about any internal differences that we have.  This is a general election, we are fighting to try and protect the national interest and the people we were elected to represent.  If we take time off from that to argue about our own internal differences, we’re mad.

SR: You said you were a moron for nominating him for the leadership.

MARGARET BECKETT: No, somebody else said it actually.

SR: And you agreed?

MARGARET BECKETT: Well, I thought let it go.

SR: So you don’t think you are a moron then?

MARGARET BECKETT: No, all I’m saying is that now I think it’s really important that we are addressing and standing up for the national interest and for the people in this country, that’s what we should all be doing.

SR: And if Labour do lose this election, should Jeremy Corbyn resign then?

MARGARET BECKETT: Well we’ll worry about that when it happens.  It hasn’t happened yet.  You know all my life people have talked as if the outcome of elections was a foregone conclusion, oh so-and-so can’t, people will never do that.  People can do, especially in our electoral system, people can do what they like.  How they cast their votes will make a difference to the outcome and people should remember that they might get what they vote for and look at what it is they’d get.

SR: To move on from Jeremy Corbyn, because of course it is easy just to scapegoat the leader for all of Labour’s issue and actually they run far deeper don’t they?

MARGARET BECKETT: Yes.

SR: It does feel in some ways that Labour is struggling to find a voice when on Brexit for example when Labour supporters are so divided between leave and remain, there seems to have been almost a dearth of ideas from …

MARGARET BECKETT: I think people across the country are divided.  One of the things the Prime Minister said which I think is totally wrong, she said the people are coming together and Westminster is not.  I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say it but I don’t see the people coming together over Brexit.  I think those of who fear that Brexit could be extremely damaging to our economy and to our country’s future are very fearful, remain very fearful and people who thought Brexit was the right thing are full of hope.  I’d love to think they’re right.

SR: And do you think that Labour is doing enough as an opposition to try and shape Brexit because it does feel as an outsider sometimes that the party’s position is very nuanced and so there is a risk of just falling down beneath the cracks, not really being solidly for Brexit, not really being solidly for Remain, such as the Liberal Democrats?

MARGARET BECKETT: You see I think the easy thing is to say, as for example the Liberal Democrats do, oh let’s just undo it all, let’s just reverse it.  That doesn’t respect the decision of the British people.  I don’t like, I won’t pretend, I don’t like the decision of the people at all, I am very fearful for the future of my constituents but I accept that that’s the decision they made and so we have to make the best of it.   Making the best of things isn’t always clear cut and glamorous but it is actually what practical politicians are supposed to do and I wish I thought it was what the Prime Minister is doing.

SR: Now you were commissioned to write a report into why Labour lost the 2015 General Election, I am just going to have a look now at some of your conclusions which was an inability to deal with issues of connection like immigration, a leader who wasn’t judged as strong as the leader of the Conservatives, exceptionally vitriolic and personal attacks in the press.  I mean it’s remarkable because you could be talking about the current situation for the Labour party there couldn’t you?

MARGARET BECKETT:  Well yes, there’s a lot in common with what was happening then.  We weren’t able to overcome it last time, we’ve got to try harder.

SR: Do you think there’s a risk though that Labour can identify the problems as you did there but there’s not much in the way of solution?

MARGARET BECKETT: No, I think a lot of our policies are the right policies, they are geared to help the people who – well actually the majority of people and particularly the people who most need help.  I think there is a lot to be said for what the Labour party is saying and standing for.

SR: But this is the issue isn’t it?  You’re right, some of the polling does suggest that Labour’s policies are popular but they still really don’t like the messenger, they are not benefiting you, the message isn’t getting through.

MARGARET BECKETT: One of the things that I think is really awkward, almost unpleasant, about the background to this election is the kind of triumphalist, we must soar over everything, we want a massive majority, I want a massive mandate. To my mind, and I say this with respect because I do respect Theresa as a human being, but I think I have had rather more experience of international negotiation than Theresa May, I don't think it makes a blind bit of difference.  As long as she’s the Prime Minister, that’s what makes the difference.  It doesn’t matter how big a majority she gets, that is all nonsense, it is all to serve the interests of the Conservative party but I do worry that the bigger the majority, the more they will feel they can ride roughshod.  There’s an awful lot of public spending cuts in the pipeline that haven’t hit people yet.  Why has she gone now?  Because in a year’s time things might look very different.  People ought to think about that when they decide where to put their cross.

SR: Now you mentioned in that answer your experience as a politician and I am quite interested in your personal journey and your years in parliament because you actually started off much closer to Jeremy Corbyn on some issues, more left on some issues.  You voted for Tony Benn for example in that infamous deputy leadership election …

MARGARET BECKETT: I did.

SR: So Jeremy Corbyn appears to have stayed with those principles, what’s changed for you?

MARGARET BECKETT: I think you’ll find I haven’t changed all that much either.  If I may say so, part of the problem with people in your profession is that you have little boxes and you put people in them and I’ve always been in the little box labelled something of the order of soft left, centre left.  I haven’t particularly moved, the landscape has moved around me quite often.  I’ll tell you one area where I genuinely have changed and that is over Europe.  I was very, very much opposed and people say ‘Oh nobody told us this, that and the other’.  Yes, actually, those of us who didn’t want to stay in the Common Market did point out to all the implications of us doing so but we did and then the Common Market itself changed.  All right, it’s not exactly the trading group that people thought but the Scandinavian countries have come in, it is now very much Europe and I have become a pro-European because I think it is in Britain’s interests.  

SR: As someone who lived through the effective civil war really that Labour was in at that time, how does it compare to now?

MARGARET BECKETT: Oh I’m happy to say that people are much more collegiate and friendly these days.

SR: Really?

MARGARET BECKETT: Genuinely.  I don’t mean there isn’t bad feeling sometimes, I don’t mean that people don’t get very angry – of course they do but there was a level of rage and bitterness, before I became an MP but when I was working around the party, that there isn’t now. People have grown up,  it’s a lot nicer. There are a lot more women, that might have helped.

SR: That might have helped and the fact that you’re not on Twitter might have helped as well.

MARGARET BECKETT: Oh yes, absolutely, I’m not on Twitter.  

SR: Dame Margaret Beckett, thank you very much for your time.