SKY NEWS – SUNDAY WITH NIALL PATERSON – 10.00 – 24.09.17 – INTERVIEW WITH TOM WATSON, DEPUTY LEADER OF THE LABOUR PARTY

NIALL PATERSON: We are joined now by the Deputy Labour Leader, Tom Watson.   Mr Watson, a very good morning to you.

TOM WATSON: Good morning to you.

NP: Let’s be clear about this, rewind a year, you were wrong weren’t you when you identified Jeremy Corbyn as posing an existential threat to the Labour party, you were absolutely wrong.

TOM WATSON: Well firstly your proposition is wrong, I didn’t say that he was an existential threat but I think what has moved on since the general election is Jeremy has renewed authority, to get 40% of the vote in a general election I think gives him the authority, the power and the right to make the reforms to our party that he sees fit. I hope the conference will back him this week, we have some tough discussions to have over the next few days and I hope that will take us to Wednesday for a united conference ready for his speech where he can outline his vision for changing our country and rewinding some of the terrible things the Tories have done in the last seven years in government.

NP: What convinced you?   Was it Jeremy Corbyn the man or was it the fact that he performed rather better than everyone expected in the general election?

TOM WATSON: Jeremy is incredibly full of self-confidence and he went through that general election with every commentator in the land saying that Labour wasn’t going to win and he defied his critics.   I think his critics in the PLP, his critics external to our party have recognised that he has great strength of character and he convinced people in that general election that you can put a proposition of hope not fear to people and people respond to it.   We got three million new votes, now that is a totally changed terrain for us and hopefully the conference this week will recognise that and we will be able to unite around him, he’ll be able to outline his vision for the country in his speech and then it will take us into the next period in parliament.

NP: Just in your answer there, you concede that there are divisions still within the Labour party?

TOM WATSON: Look, there are always divisions in all parties, it’s a game of relativism isn’t it?   If you look at the papers today, we started last year’s Labour conference with headlines saying Labour splits, Labour split down the middle.   Actually if you read the papers today it’s all about the government splits, it’s all about Theresa May and Boris Johnson, it’s about Philip Hammond giving up on…

NP: Where we are sitting, there are members of the Labour party calling for ?? to resign.

TOM WATSON: There are very small numbers of people saying that, that is not the view of Jeremy or me or members of the Shadow Cabinet, we are tremendously proud of our full time members of staff who delivered a very powerful general election campaign at very short notice, so those people that are demonstrating against our staff are not just bullying, they are wrong and Neil ?? enjoys our full support.

NP: Still, appropriately enough within spitting distance of where we are sitting at the moment there are people who not only want to see you moved away from the post of Deputy Leader but would rather not see you within the party itself.   That doesn’t scream unity to me.

TOM WATSON: Well again, that’s not the view of the vast majority of our 570,000 members.   Look, you are always going to get dissenters in political parties, there is always personal ambition and when you’re in these posts there are always people that want your job and one day someone will have this job and I won’t be the Deputy Leader but that is actually irrelevant to the millions of voters out there who want to see change in this country.   It feels like there are particles of hope in the air and that is down to one man, that is down to Jeremy Corbyn who …

NP: One of the questions most people asked me to ask you on social media this morning was would you resign and I think I know the answer to that question already however when you called on Jeremy Corbyn to look to his conscience when there was a mass resignation from the Shadow Cabinet, if there was a similar expression of dissatisfaction from the party membership would you step aside?

TOM WATSON: Well I did actually say to our parliamentary party that if I lost a vote of no-confidence I would stand down.   Now it is a totally different context now, Jeremy did lose a vote of no-confidence but he defied his critics and he went back to the membership and then we had a general election where he defied his critics again.   I think he deserves some space to outline his vision for the country and to shape the party in the direction he wants to take it and I’m certainly going to give him this week.

NP: So if Jeremy Corbyn is, as you allege, in control of the party why have we seen these changes for example to elections to the NEC, the changes that are mooted about the threshold at which someone can become a candidate for leadership.   If Jeremy Corbyn is in control, why these changes?

TOM WATSON: Well firstly let me say that I realise for your viewers me talking about the details of the Labour party rule book may be a little bit dull but one of the things we’re discussing this week is to give our members a bigger voice, a bigger say around our National Executive Committee.   That is actually something that people in the party have been arguing for many years, in fact Tony Blair argued for greater member representation on the NEC but it has taken Jeremy Corbyn to be able to convince our unions that improving the representation of our members on the NEC is a good thing and we were all united around that when we discussed it at our NEC this week.   I hope the conference will support him in that and indeed on the leadership he proposed a compromise position that one in ten Labour MPs would be able to nominate a candidate for leader, he was gracious enough not to suggest that for the Deputy Leadership so it took me to actually say let’s bring the threshold down for the Deputy Leadership as well.

NP:  You say it’s not of interest to the public but it’s an obsession of the party itself.   You have given an interview to the Birmingham Mail in which you say there was a danger the party could descend into internecine warfare and …

TOM WATSON: No, no, I didn’t say that, I said there is always a danger that that could happen but what I want to see this week is a united party and I think it will be.   These changes enjoy my support, Jeremy’s support, the vast majority of our members on the NEC and our unions and I hope we’ll have a good debate about what a good sensible functioning party looks like, how our members can greater participate in all our structures and policy making but ultimately actually the real issue is how are we going to address the concerns of the British people and that’s down to Jeremy and John McDonnell and …

NP: We will delve into policy in just a moment but it’s not as though the changes are going to stop there, the Katie Clarke Review which will be voted on this time next year includes for example enshrining the ability of party members to criticise Zionism – nothing could possibly go wrong with that; it talks about putting socialism back into Clause Four – the battles are going to continue.

TOM WATSON: Hold on, the conference will be deciding the parameters for that review but I’m not going to predict the outcome of that. There are half a million people who are going to be involved in this in their local parties, our MPs, our councillors, our MEPs will play a role and we want to make sure that we get a series of sensible changes through that mean we’re a professional, modern political party in a digital age.

NP: The last on this then, would you be happy to see socialism put back into Clause Four?

TOM WATSON: Of course, I’m a socialist, I’d like to see socialism and if our party members want to change our rule book or our constitution, that’s fine but I’m not predicting the outcome of a consultation that hasn’t even begun yet.

NP: Okay, this is my third show in the chair filling in for Sophy but let’s once again take a little bit of clarity   on the party’s position on Brexit.   Do you still believe that we could be in the single market after we leave the European Union?

TOM WATSON: Look, we said that the number one issue for us as a negotiation plan is to make this is jobs for us Brexit and that means supporting British workers and the interests of businesses so we think that access to the single market is the key thing so that we can get our goods to market and keep those workers in jobs.  

NP: After that transitional period?

TOM WATSON: That’s why we called for a transitional period.   We were very concerned with Theresa May calling the election and the first three rounds of talks failing has meant there is not enough time to get a proper negotiated settlement.   That’s why we called for a transition and when the transition ends the key thing is that we can still get tariff free access into the European market and that should be an objective.

NP: You have said in the past that there remains the potential for us to remain within the single market, if we are talking about dividing lines between the Labour and Conservative party at the moment, they have adopted the single market and customs union through the transitional period, this at least would give you a point of divergence.

TOM WATSON: Just to say on the single market, there has been a lot of newspaper stories written about a single sentence answer I gave in an interview on Newsnight that was actually about gambling and there was a multi-pronged question that you get on these things and I said that the single market might be an outcome of those negotiations.   Of course what I didn’t get chance to say was we’re not the negotiators, that’s the government and it is down to them to see what the outcome is so of course it’s a possible outcome but the outcome we want to see is an outcome that protects the interests of British workers and that means access to those markets, not necessarily in the form it takes at the moment but we want to make sure we can get tariff-free access for our goods and services.

NP: I’m sorry, but it is an important point because the fundamental dividing line that appears between hard and soft Brexit is to do with the single market and we’ve had a variety of responses, in the mere three weeks that I have been sitting in this year we have had a collection: John Ashworth telling me there is absolutely no chance we can be in the single market, you of course have said there is a potential we could, Jeremy Corbyn has said no we’re not and has also said yes we could.  

TOM WATSON: Well I hope I have clarified about why I’ve said there is a potential and also of course it is very easy for politicians to slightly give the wrong nuance in an interview.   I want to be clear to you, a negotiated position, should Kier Starmer be leading those negotiations after an early general election, would be to put jobs and business first.   We want transitional arrangements that retain those characteristics of access in a single market, the negotiated settlement after that we want tariff free access negotiated but of course that’s down to the negotiations so it is very hard to give you the clarity you’re looking for because a) we haven’t started those negotiations yet and b) we’re not the negotiating team.   I can just tell you the approach we would take to those negotiations were we to be so.

NP: But there is, what, 35% of Labour supporters are of the leave persuasion, do you think they would be satisfied if we had a deal post-Brexit that looked vaguely similar to the single market, with the concurrence of laws and legislation between the UK and the EU?

TOM WATSON: With half a million members we obviously have all different views on that but as a Shadow Cabinet we are absolutely united that we respect the decision of the British people in that referendum, that’s why we voted and whipped a vote to trigger Article 50 for our departure from the European Union but we are absolutely adamant that we want the negotiations to be about the interests of British workers and that means supporting businesses too.   Obviously our members have different views of how those negotiations should take place but I can assure you that Jeremy, John McDonnell, Kier Starmer, me, all our colleagues are absolutely united around the position that Kier Starmer elucidated earlier in the summer.  

NP: We are speaking to Dave Prentis a little later on in the show and we’ll be picking up on public sector pay but let’s be absolutely clear, as Dawn Butler said last week, things stand the Labour party is not advocating an above inflation pay rise in the public sector?

TOM WATSON: We’ve got the negotiating bodies that should agree those pay rises and we said that we don’t support the pay cut and actually we said that in our manifesto and we allocated a sum of about £4 billion to make sure that those public sector workers get adequate pay and that’s the approach we are going to take to this.

NP: But the £4 billion still represents a real terms pay cut when you factor in inflation.

TOM WATSON: Well the thing is, these things have got to be negotiated sector by sector.   The real principle in this is workers in this country, our public sector workers, our police, our nurses, have had effective pay cuts for seven years and if their independent pay review bodies are recommending above inflation pay rises this year, we think it is cruel and arbitrary for the government to apply that pay cut. That’s why we brought it to parliament the week before last, that’s why…

NP: The government’s costings don’t have the money to give an above inflation pay rise, the £4 billion a year that you’ve set aside doesn’t include enough money to give an above inflation pay rise.   I understand the point that you’re making but as things stand it does seem a bit rich for the Labour party to have a pop at the government for in essence handing over a pay cut to these public sector workers when your proposal would do exactly the same thing.

TOM WATSON: No, I’m telling you that we don’t want a pay cap and we would honour those independent pay review bodies and we would find the money to pay for that because we don’t think that our public sector workers, we think it has absolutely disbenefits to the system with people leaving the service early, with service breakdowns and having to pay overtime, all sorts of things that low morale brings to an institution and that’s why we’re going to support our public sector workers in that. Of course we’re not saying just lift the lid, there have got to be productivity gains and those independent review bodies are about negotiating an adequate settlement but we are not going to direct this from Whitehall if we are in government.   We’ve got a process in place and Ministers shouldn’t interfere with that.

NP: I understand that you and Len McCluskey don’t perhaps get on as well as you once did but when it comes to the idea of striking without reaching the ballot threshold, what’s your position?   What’s the position of the party?

TOM WATSON: There’s a lot of talk about this, I’ve actually received a letter from Len McCluskey this week where he says he accepts that Labour MPs aren’t going to support calls for illegal strike action.   Of course we’ve got to stay within the law but look at our manifesto, we’re going to change our trade union laws because we think they’re unfair and that’s the point that Len McCluskey was trying to make, that workers have been unfairly penalised from organising their affairs to campaign for better pay and better conditions and we’re not …

NP: But in any event you would not strike, you would condemn?

TOM WATSON: Look, we don’t support people breaking the law and Len McCluskey accepts that.

NP: That’s not condemning.

TOM WATSON: We don’t want people to break the law, we’re democrats but we’re going to change the law so that trade unionists can have greater rights because we think our current trade union laws are very unfair, particularly the last Trade Union Act which we campaigned against in parliament and the way to deal with this is to campaign against the government to change their own laws and if they don’t change them, elect a Labour government and we’ll change the law to make sure that our trade union laws are fair.

NP: Tom Watson, thank you very much for joining us and I hope you have a very enjoyable conference.

TOM WATSON: Thank you very much, you too.