Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Chuka Umunna Labour MP

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

SR: Well we’ve just been talking about the Labour MP, Chuka Umunna, and the speech that he made yesterday calling on the party leadership to ‘call off the dogs’ after two more Labour MPs lost the confidence of their local association so let’s go straight to Chuka Umunna and get your reactions.

CHUKA UMUNNA: Morning Sophy.

SR: Morning, nice to have you on the show.

CHUKA UMUNNA: It’s nice to be back on your show.

SR: Thank you. Ian Lavery, party Chairman, had some pretty choice words for you just before the break, you probably heard them – you’re disrespectful talking to Labour membership like that. What would you say to him?

CHUKA UMUNNA: Look, I mean the phrase that I used is a metaphor, a figure of speech. In fact John McDonnell used the same phrase to Gordon Brown in 2007 and I think as some of your former colleagues on the Sun, I think you worked on the Sun with Kevin Schofield, pointed out this is a figure of speech and this is being used to deflect from the real issue and the real issue here is the extraordinary has become the new normal in the Labour party and it is not normal. It is not normal what we are seeing where you have a Labour MP, well respected on both sides of the House, like Frank Field for example, resigning the whip because of the culture in the party and because of anti-Semitism. It’s not normal to have two Jewish Labour MPs to give impassioned moving speeches in the House of Commons outlining in detail the racism to which they have been subject, including by supporters and members, of the Labour party. It is not normal for Iranian State TV to live stream and broadcast a Labour party meeting at which an excellent local MP like Joan Ryan has a motion passed against her. Let’s not forget, all of the Members of Parliament that I’m talking about were democratically elected by their constituents just a year ago and it would appear now that people are seeking to hound them from office. Now my biggest gripe about all of this in many respects is the distracting from the big issue for me which is Brexit. We’re facing the biggest issue since the Second World War in this country which is going to do disproportionate damage – and already is doing disproportionate damage to low and middle income families in this country who are represented by the Labour party. All of this distracts from us being able to properly do our job in Brexit.

SR: We’ll talk about Brexit later in the interview but I’m keen just to focus for a little bit on the Labour party and issues within the Labour party. You were talking then about Jewish MPs, do you think that the Labour party is effectively institutionally racist?

CHUKA UMUNNA: Yes, I do. If you look at the definition of institutional racism as outlined by Sir William McPherson in the McPherson Report and the McPherson Inquiry produced the institutional racism definition, the Labour party is beyond doubt for me that it’s met it. It’s very painful for me to say that. Part of the reason that I joined the Labour party, my party, my family started supporting the party was because it was an anti-racist party and I think the failure to deal with the racism that is anti-Semitism is particular and clearly is a problem. It’s a sadness to listen to you talk about what has happened and transpired over the summer, because we failed to deal with this issue properly and most recently whether or not we adopt the International Holocaust Memorial Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which we should have done right at the beginning of the summer, had we done that we could have talked about the big issues where we had new information being exposed around climate change, around social care, around the fact that we are still seeing wages stagnate after the global financial crash – those are the kind of issues, in addition of course to Brexit, that we should have been talking about in the summer and not anti-Semitism.

SR: The Labour party would say that they have now adopted that definition and Ian Lavery has said that they are now going through any complaints …

CHUKA UMUNNA: But you put to him the point that this has taken months and months and months and months and there are still outstanding complaints. There have been reports this week that there have been threats of violence against Members of Parliament which the Labour party has known of but has not told Members of Parliament which is extraordinary. So the whole way that this issue has been dealt with has been clearly deficient and the leadership have acknowledged that to be the case and as you said, you are still talking about it right now.

SR: I’ve got to ask you, if you think Labour is institutionally racist, why are you still in the party?

CHUKA UMUNNA: Because I want it to change. Look, there is institutional racism in many institutions in our country and if you simply leave the field as it were, instead of try and argue and see change through in an organisation, then I’m not sure you always necessarily make progress and that’s the reason why.

SR: It’s a question – we normally ask people on social media if they have got any questions for our guests and that was a question that came up again and again, to ask you why it is that you are still in the party. Here’s Gareth Philips for example, ‘Why won’t Chuka accept that the Labour party as he knew it is finished. He and those like him have a responsibility now to form a new party.’ So can you categorically rule out leaving the Labour party?

CHUKA UMUNNA: I don’t want to leave the Labour party …

SR: Can you rule it out though?

CHUKA UMUNNA: Well who knows what I’ll be doing when I’m 80. Look, I’ve been a member of the Labour party for more than 20 years and I joined with the intention of never leaving it. I wanted to be a member of the Labour party on my death bed and I hope that that is the case but ultimately this issue, what I’d say to people – and lots of people ask me this all over the country, I was in Birmingham this week and it came up actually just randomly as you do when you are going around – and lots of people ask this question but really I’m not the person to ask this question of. The point of my speech yesterday was to say actually ultimately the job of leadership, of the leadership of the Labour party, is to keep the party united and together and to illustrate not just by what they say but what they do that they see the centre left social democratic tradition in the Labour party as legitimate and by the actions both of supporters and members of different traditions in the Labour party, we see that they don’t think the tradition that I belong to, social democracy, centre left Labour values, doesn’t belong in the party so it’s for them to show that it does. Untold numbers of people have said that they don’t feel welcome in my tradition, we’ve been clear about how we feel, what are they actually going to do? So this issue of division and splits etc, is not an issue for me, that’s the job of leaders to keep the party together.

SR: Now I want to talk to you about Brexit and this week we have a film later in the show, I went to Goole, a place where people voted very heavily to leave the EU and your campaign for a People’s Vote, for a second referendum on the final deal, however you wish to phrase it, is going down shall we say pretty badly in places like Goole. One woman, for example, was saying to me that people like you think that she’s thick, that she needs to think again and she said to me, well I’ve already done my thinking. She’s got a point hasn’t she?

CHUKA UMUNNA: No, look, it’s nothing to do with what I think of anybody’s intelligence, that’s a complete irrelevance to me. What matters here is the national interest and the material circumstances of the lady that you’re talking about. I think what we do know is our country is still divided on this, as you no doubt discovered and we’ll see in your package later, but I do think there is a shift. I am not going to pretend that there is a huge shift but I think there is a shift. Certainly increasingly we see polls illustrating that people want a say on the final Brexit deal, that’s very clear. Now what they do after that is perhaps a bit more questionable but the point is I suppose, however you voted in 2016, nobody voted for this chaos and mess and there are many things that we now know that we didn’t know then. That we for example will have to pay a £40 billion divorce bill, for example there isn’t going to be that £350 million per week going to the NHS and in fact what we’ve got is EU doctors and nurses, EU citizen doctors and nurses leaving the NHS in droves when we’ve got over 100,000 vacancies which need to be filled. We also see businesses – Panasonic is a good example, it’s moving its headquarters away from the UK – beginning to move their operations to the continent. Now that’s before we have even left and I think also wherever you are in the argument, the idea that we leave and go to this unknown world, a kind of blindfolded Brexit where we leave and we don’t know where we’re going to, troubles people massively. So I think that’s where people are, there is this real sense that okay, maybe I voted for this but my gosh, I didn’t vote for this mess.

SR: Are you not playing a pretty high stakes game here by not backing the Chequers deal that’s on the table because by not backing the Chequers deal you are effectively maybe making the chances of no Brexit more likely but you are also making the chances of no deal more likely. I mean we’ve seen Boris Johnson for example in the newspapers today with some pretty choice words for that Chequers deal and for Theresa May, you are effectively siding with him.

CHUKA UMUNNA: Well Boris Johnson is a disgrace. There’s this myth that’s been peddled in relation to Brexit that somehow it’s a fight of the people against the elite but let’s be absolutely clear, Brexit is a project of the elite for the elite. I mean Boris Johnson who argued for this proposition has walked off the field of delivery of what he promised, has gone into his £250,000 a year job at the Telegraph. You’ve got Nigel Lawson, another big proponent, wanting to go and get residency in France. You’ve got Jacob Rees Mogg’s investment firm setting up a fund on the continent because of the fall-out from Brexit. So those guys will be all right but the Bank of England figures are telling us that on average people are already £900 a year worse off as a result of this project. So let’s be clear, this is a project of the elite and for the elite and the problem that we’ve got in the House of Commons is that there is no consensus. I think definitely there is no majority for us to leave without a deal and I don't think there is a majority for a hard, extreme Brexit but there is no consensus on what the alternative should be and this is the problem, because if you cannot have this exchange with the Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab in the House of Commons this week – because I said look, if that’s the case, how else are you going to resolve the impasse that we know is coming in Westminster on this issue, if not by referring it back to the people so that they ultimately are the ones in control of their destiny.

SR: Okay, Chuka Umunna, thank you very much.

CHUKA UMUNNA: Thank you.