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ADAM BOULTON: We’re here at this final debate to take questions from the audience here in Gateshead and also from you online, we are going to be taking questions from that audience and just recap here, we have Jeremy Corbyn, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham.  So they can take questions from the audience here as they will in a moment and from the viewers at home and there is still a chance to get involved.  You can vote on the debate as it happens using our real-time Sky Pulse, you can do that via the Sky News website and you can also decide which of the questions you have already submitted on social media the candidates should be asked next, just follow Sky News on social media using the hashtag #labourdebate.  We are going to start with a question from our audience here in Gateshead and from Councillor Anne Wheeler.
CLLR ANNE WHEELER: What would you do about the refugee crisis?
ADAM BOULTON: Succinct, what would you do about the refugee crisis.  I should tell you that the government in the last half hour has said that its going to take 4000 extra refugees but from the camps established on the borders of the zone rather than from the boat people.  Jeremy Corbyn?
JEREMY CORBYN: 4000 doesn’t sound like enough but I think we have to look at the crisis in the widest possible context.  These are desperate people fleeing from a war in Syria and many other wars and human rights abuses all across the region, they are dying in the Mediterranean, some are getting across to Europe so we have to hold out the hand of humanity and support and friendship to give succour and comfort to people who are utterly desperate at the present time but we also …
ADAM BOULTON: Do you have any idea on numbers?
JEREMY CORBYN: But we also, I was going to say we also need a UN response world-wide because there are more displaced people in this world than there has been in recorded history.  There has to be a real movement to do something about the inequalities across the world but also the people who are the victims of war and environmental disasters.  
ADAM BOULTON: Given that, do you have any idea on numbers?
JEREMY CORBYN: Numbers to be taken immediately should be done fairly and every European country should do its best.  Germany has shown the way by its recognition of the desperate need and taken the largest number, I think they’ve taken 80,000 or so in the past year.  I don't know what number we need to take and I couldn’t put a figure on it but I think we have to look at this as a human and humanitarian crisis and not use abusive language against people who are in an utterly desperate situation as none of us would want to be in ourselves.
ADAM BOULTON: Yvette Cooper.
YVETTE COOPER: Well its welcome if the government has changed its position, I think that’s a response to the huge public pressure because I think that people across Britain are deeply troubled by the images that we’ve seen of desperate families, desperate refugees, the really heartbreaking images and pictures that we have seen but I think they are going to have to do more than this because it’s a good thing to take 4000 people from the camps and from those closest to Syria because that’s where the real problems have arisen from and where you have got millions of people who have left their homes but I think they also need to do something to help those who are now spread across Europe, where you’ve seen in Greece 50,000 refugees arriving in the space of a month and other countries are doing their bit, we have got to do more as well.  I call for people in cities like this across the country to come forward and say how many people can we help.  If every city, if every county, if every community across the country came forward and said we can help 10 refugee families we could help 10,000 people very, very quickly.  I think we should do that, I think we should ask across the country, I think British people have made clear they want to be able to do their bit to help refugees.  It is a moral obligation on us, we absolutely cannot turn our backs on this crisis.
ADAM BOULTON: Andy Burnham.
ANDY BURNHAM: To answer Anne’s question I would do two things, show compassion and show leadership and I’m afraid the government has been found wanting here hasn’t it?  Over the course of the summer this tragedy has been unfolding on our television screens and it’s got to the point today where we’ve seen an image that would make anybody, well it wouldn’t have left anybody unmoved in the country but any parent of a child that age would just feel sick to the pit of their stomach.  So things have got to change and the government has got to act now.  What I would be doing, because you asked that question, I would be getting on a plane to Brussels tomorrow, I would be sitting down with other heads of state from across Europe, I would be agreeing a plan to deal with this situation across Europe, I would be putting the British plan to parliament on Monday, I would be taking control if I was David Cameron. I am afraid he has shown a complete absence of leadership on this issue all across the summer and it is simply not good enough.
ADAM BOULTON: Liz Kendall.
LIZ KENDALL: What the government has proposed is nowhere near enough and my gut instinct is, in the face of this appalling humanitarian crisis and with Germany taking 800,000 refugees this year, that we should be taking something in the tens of thousands.  Over the past few days I’ve been ashamed of the British government, I think that David Cameron has appeared both heartless and powerless on the refugee crisis and my message to David Cameron is this: you now have an opportunity to do the right thing.  If you are worried about the political space, don’t, we will back you if we take the right decisions.  Let’s face up to the problems, Andy is right, there should be an immediate meeting of EU leaders not waiting until mid-September for a meeting of Interior Ministers and we should be calling together the leaders of councils right across this country.  Already the leader of Newcastle City Council I spoke to today is prepared to do more as is the leader of Camden Council.  There is a willingness out there and I think David Cameron is behind public opinion.  Do the right thing, take the opportunity, take action now.
ADAM BOULTON: But in the end, you can criticise the government position but in the end are any of you prepared to say we should take refugees including those people who are coming out illegally, crossing borders illegally on a scale with Germany because that probably amounts in terms of population to half a million people.  How can we absorb half a million people?
JEREMY CORBYN: I think we should be careful about using the words crossing borders illegally.  I think when people are fleeting from wars and oppression and human rights abuses it is a perfectly legitimate thing to do and the 1951 Geneva Convention recognises that so I think we should say desperate people seeking safety rather than dress it up in some quasi-legal term.  
ADAM BOULTON: I take your point but the government is clearly drawing a distinction between those people who go to the sanctioned refugee camps and those people who are crossing the Mediterranean by other means.
JEREMY CORBYN: We need to put far more resources into refugee camps, not just in Lebanon but also in Libya.  We need to give far more support in those situations.  We also need to take a reasonable fair share across Europe.  The British government refused to take part in a European programme, there hasn’t been a proper UN programme on this, there has to be a unified decision all across Europe and through the UN and …
ANDY BURNHAM: To pick up your point, because it is a reasonable point, you do have to be sure that people are genuine refugees.  I believe the government should be working with the UN to take people who are in camps on the Syrian border in Turkey because that means you don’t then give people an incentive to risk everything and cross the Mediterranean with their children.  If the word goes out that people will be taken from camps overseen by the UN, genuine refugees, then I think we would not send out the message to people that it was still worth crossing the Mediterranean, that is the plan that we need to be developed with all European countries so that message can go out to people and that of course means that the gangs and the traffickers who are benefiting from this awful situation would see that their lines of supply were cut off.
YVETTE COOPER: I think we can go much further.  What we’ve done this week together, what people have done across the country by showing their strong support for helping refugees is change the government’s policy in just a few days.  We can do much more than this, so yes there are things that should be happening across Europe, there are things that need to be taking place in terms of cracking down on the vile criminal gangs who are trading in humanity, who are making profit from what is effectively modern day slavery with what they are doing.  There are all sorts of those things that need to happen, making sure we take people directly from the camps in Syria is something that the Labour party has called for 18 months so there are all those things we should do but I think here in Britain this opportunity for us to do our bit, for every city and town to do our bit, the more you have cities and towns themselves coming forward and saying this is what we want to do, we want to be cities of sanctuary, we want to help, we want to say we’re proud of our tradition just going back to the Kinder Transport, all of that …
ADAM BOULTON: I just want to remind our viewers that they can give a verdict on what they are hearing on tonight’s debate as it’s happening using our digital Sky Pulse tool, just go to skynews.com to have your say and on social media you’ve been voting for the questions you want to put to the candidates next and these were the options of questions you suggested on the subject of immigration.  Here are the questions that you’ve been voting on and as you can see the most popular choice is question two from Samantha on Twitter who asks, “Will you continue the policies that are leading people to die in the Mediterranean?” with 32% of the vote calling for that question and …
YVETTE COOPER: You interrupted me, can I just finish the point? The reason I say this is that we have called on councils across the country this week to come forward with the number and they are doing so.  I’ll just say to people who are watching and people who are in this room, contact your local council and urge them to do more because they are doing so.  We are already doing this and I think that people across the country have the power in our hands at the moment to force the government to do more.  We must not stop, we have done so now, this is about a humanitarian crisis that we have to respond to.
ADAM BOULTON: Okay, Liz Kendall the specific question asked by Samantha is what do we do from here to stop the horrific traffic of people and the horrific casualty rate amongst people including that young child on the Turkish beach yesterday.
LIZ KENDALL: Absolutely and let me just say on the last point that Yvette made, yes it’s right that councils come forward with a plan but we need a Prime Minister who shows leadership on this issue and doesn’t just wait for others to come forward.  The crisis in the Mediterranean, it was appalling that at one point we stopped support for the search and rescue across the Mediterranean, that was a shaming moment for us.  I am glad that that has been put back in place but I think we need to urgently review whether enough support is happening for that programme as a first step. Secondly we need to look at the root causes of the problem and why people are fleeing.  There was a report on the BBC actually last night about the problems within Libya, the journalist had spoken to some of these vile traffickers who suggested that they were actually being supported or helped by some of the authorities there.  We have to get a proper settlement and build the capacity of the new Libyan government there, that is one of the root causes of the problem.  Similarly too, we have not yet seen a proper political strategy for dealing with the problem in Syria.  The Prime Minister has been correct that we face a generational struggle against ISIL but we haven’t seen anywhere near enough action working with countries in the region to try and bring more stability to that part of the world.  
ADAM BOULTON: You all hope to lead the Labour party back into government, I assume you do and Andy Burnham, you were talking earlier on this year about your concern about traditional Labour voters being attracted by UKIP.  Standing here and saying well maybe we have to take hundreds of thousands of the people involved in this crisis, is that going to bring back those UKIP inclined Labour voters?
ANDY BURNHAM: Well I haven’t used that figure but yes, we should all play our part to get people [inaudible] but it’s a different issue, isn’t it Adam, to offer people asylum as opposed to free movement of labour but here’s my point because actually in the end I believe these two things are linked. If David Cameron did show leadership, as Liz rightly says, then if he bought some goodwill from people around Europe he would then be in a better position to go to the rest of Europe and say do you know what, we want to see changes as part of free movement of Labour across Europe coming with the referendum that we’re holding in this country.  We want to see wages protected and not undercut, we want to see more support for communities most affected by EU migration, this is the point isn’t it?  If he did the right thing now he would be in a better place to get support from other countries to get changes we want to see brought about around free movement.
ADAM BOULTON: Angela Merkel has put a figure on the sort of scale of people she feels her country needs to absorb, can any of you do that?
YVETTE COOPER: I’ve already said that we ought to …
ADAM BOULTON: Tens of thousands you said.
YVETTE COOPER: Well I think you start with what people and councils will come forward and offer so I do think you should be able to talk about numbers, I think you can’t just hide away from the numbers discussion.  
ADAM BOULTON: The European model points to more than a hundred thousand.
YVETTE COOPER: Shared between countries.  But you made an important point about concern about immigration.  We have got to start treating immigration and asylum as different, they are completely different.  When you are talking about people who are travelling to work, who have got safe homes to go to and people who have no home to go to and if the government treats them the same it’s wrong.
ADAM BOULTON: I don't know if anyone from the audience wants to come in on this subject of migration at this moment.  The gentleman there.  
MAN: Yes, there has been a lot of talk about the EU being involved in this situation with these people and I’d like to refer to them as people rather than migrants which is a horrible name to be called but really it is a United Nations issue and Jeremy stated that at the beginning.  It is a United Nations issue and everybody should get involved to stop this appalling abuse.  Do you agree with that?
ADAM BOULTON: Well there is a global question isn’t there, but there is also what’s happening in Europe and we are part of the European Union.
MAN: I’m not being funny but where are the likes of the US in this, where are the likes of the Arab countries dealing with it, the likes of Kuwait and such?  What are they doing, what pressure has been put on to them, would you put pressure on to those countries?
WOMAN: It seems ironic that what we are saying now is that we need to work together and yet we have a referendum in a couple of years that would render our ability to work with others to be reduced to zero.
LIZ KENDALL: You raise such an important issue.  If you think about the huge challenges we face in this country over migration, over issues like climate change, trade in the global economy, if we pull out of Europe think of the devastation that would make for jobs, inward investment, trade but also tackling issues like migration. It is absolutely right that Alan Johnson is leading a Labour Yes campaign but he needs to be backed by a strong Labour leader who campaigns for a yes vote for us to remain part of it.  I believe that I am the strongest pro-European candidate in this contest and I think it is essential that we go out and make the positive case for Europe first last and always.
ADAM BOULTON: Mr Corbyn, are you a strong pro-European?
JEREMY CORBYN: I’m concerned about the way the European Union is increasingly operating like a free market across Europe, tearing up the social chapter, damaging working class and workers interests across Europe, hiding tax evasion in Luxemburg and other places and secretly negotiation the Trans- Atlantic … Can I finish?  Secretly negotiating a Trans-Atlantic Trade Investment Partnership.  I think we as a party need to be making strong demands of defending and expanding the social chapter, defending and expanding worker’s rights across Europe and chasing down these approved tax havens that exist by the European Union all across Europe and asking some serious questions about the way they have treated the people of Greece and other countries by their imposition of austerity measures on them.  
LIZ KENDALL: How can you change it if you’re out of it?  The people who are undermining the social chapter are the Tories, being dragged to the right by their own backbenchers.  
JEREMY CORBYN: This is why, the point I’m making is that Britain ought to be defending those social gains, we as the Labour party should be making demands on this and not leaving it to Cameron to go away and tear up the social chapter and tear up an awful lot of environmental protection and other issues and also the way in which the treaty is being negotiated.  I think we want a social Europe, a Europe of solidarity, what we’re in danger of getting with Cameron’s negotiations is a Europe of free market and very little social protection.
LIZ KENDALL: That’s what we’re doing … how can we have tougher action against the migration crisis if we are out of Europe?  But we’ve been round the block before.  
ADAM BOULTON: I think we’re likely to come back to the European question but just to end this section, just a quick comment from you.
YVETTE COOPER: Look, we’ve got to reform Europe, it’s terrible the way that Germany has been treating Greece but Britain should have been in there arguing for a better deal for Greece. Where was David Cameron? He should be in there and the problem with this, the disagreement between us, Jeremy, I agree that we have got to strongly reform Europe and we need Europe to be doing far more on a series of issues but if we pull back, if we just stand on the sidelines and shout, all that happens is that we will be affected by the decisions taken in Europe, we will be unable to change things, we will be unable to get a better deal for Greece because we’ll be [running] from the sidelines.
ANDY BURNHAM: Just to add a final comment on this, we could actually be a year away to be honest from a European referendum, a year away and this referendum will be the definitive moment in politics for a generation I believe in this country and I don’t believe the Labour party can come out of this leadership election and have any real ambivalence or equivocation about our position with respect to Europe.  I want to lead a pro-European party from day one, making the argument that it is in the interest of jobs in the north-east of England and across the country to stay in the European Union.  It is not perfect but Labour should always make the pro-European argument and win that referendum.