ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well after a week that’s seen a Cabinet Minister bought down by an expenses scandal and allegations of widespread inappropriate behaviour at Westminster itself, has public trust in politicians ever been so low and what can be done to try to regain some trust.  Let’s say a very good morning to the Deputy Labour Leader, Harriet Harman and you’ve been in the House of Commons for over three decades, you must have seen some sights in the bars and the corridors in that time of inappropriate behaviour.

HARRIET HARMAN: Well I think in all workplaces there is sometimes bad behaviour but I think people feel very exasperated if they think they elect their MP, send them to the House of Commons to make the laws and run the country and they can’t even behave themselves and so even though it is just a minority, it is something that we should be concerned about and I think especially abuse or harassment, sexual harassment of staff is absolutely wrong in any workplace but very much so in the House of Commons where we should be setting an example and that’s why there need to be absolutely clear rules and that’s why we’ve revised our rules to make them absolutely clear and to make sure there is a complaints procedure where people feel can complain. 

DM: Within your party but the point is made isn’t there that there is a huge number of employees there, that it’s not a single entity and in fact MPs employ their own staff so you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of small employers.  Would there be a case for some kind of HR, human resources department, that could oversee it all?

HARRIET HARMAN: There already is to an extent.  When I first arrived unfortunately a lot of researchers or secretaries as they then were, didn’t even have proper contracts of employment and weren’t properly paid and there has been a bit of very welcome professionalization of the relationship but the question is, is if there’s abuse, there’s bad behaviour, when you’ve got a situation where there is a very powerful MP who’s high profile and you have got someone who wants to make their way into the way of work and it’s that inequality of power and actually it was very much worse in the past I think when there was very long hours and MPs would be there all night sometimes and that was a recipe for bad behaviour, especially when it was overwhelmingly male dominated so I think things have inched forward a bit but actually it is not good enough to say we are better than we were.  We have got to set the example, when people are struggling in their lives the idea that we’re splashing about on expenses, when we’re making the laws that govern other people’s behaviour and we don’t seem able to behave ourselves, that’s why we’ve got to put ourselves properly in order.

DM: Absolutely, I mean what about the case of subsidised drink being mentioned again, that addresses the cost of living crisis and the fact that MPs sometimes seem to indulge over-liberally, why should MPs get cheaper drink?

HARRIET HARMAN: Well I think it’s partly a legacy of the idea that MPs were around late at night and a lot has been done on the hours.  When I first arrived it was absolutely ridiculous, we would never finish before ten, often eleven-thirty at night and sometimes one o’clock in the morning and …

DM: That’s even less of an argument to have subsidised alcohol isn’t it?

HARRIET HARMAN: Well it was a real problem and some people, really good MPs, came down to the House of Commons and actually found that their lives then fell on the rocks of being in the bar so it didn’t do the MPs any favours either so I do think treating it as a proper place of work, having proper hours and not having it as a sort of gentleman’s club where a lot of people were doing their work during the day in the law courts as barristers or in the City as financiers and then they’d come along to what was a gentleman’s club of a House of Commons for a bit of legislating and a spot of dinner.  It was all ridiculous and that has changed very, very much but I still think there is further to go.

DM: The key to that as you’ve campaigned about and many others have campaigned about for a long time is getting more women in there, there are too few women of course.

HARRIET HARMAN: There are still very much too few women.  I mean we have made a lot of progress in the Labour party and a lot of people have criticised us and said this is political correctness but actually having women in parliament actually changes what is the political agenda so we have had things on the political agenda like childcare, like domestic violence, that we never could get on the agenda before when there weren’t women speaking up on these issues but we are still outnumbered.  The Labour party is best but we are still outnumbered, there’s only a third of Labour women MPs, there’s fewer than 20% in the Conservative party so although they sit a lot of women behind David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Question Time, don’t believe it …

DM: Well to be fair you all play that game don’t you?

HARRIET HARMAN: No, no, where the cameras can’t see there’s a sea of men there.  No, we have got a critical mass of women but we’ve still not got, we’re not on equal terms. 

DM: In the next general election, if you win a majority or you go into a coalition, is it your ambition to have – however many women are in the party altogether you could have 50% of the Cabinet as female couldn’t you?

HARRIET HARMAN: Our aim is to have 50% of the parliamentary Labour party as women and that’s not just a numbers game, we think that women …

DM: But you could have a half of the cabinet.

HARRIET HARMAN: First you have got to have equal numbers of women in the parliamentary Labour party because in this country there are 50% women and we expect to be treated equally in the 21st century and not have a load of decisions made by men that affect women’s lives so we need equal numbers of women in parliament.  We also need equal numbers of women in the cabinet.  In this day and age that out of the cabinet of David Cameron and Nick Clegg there are three women and twenty-two men and it’s so rude to women in this country that they have to be on the margins.  In the Labour party we have 50% of our shadow cabinet are women and …

DM: And that would stay in government?

HARRIET HARMAN: Well obviously it’s for the Prime Minister, if he were Prime Minister it would be for Ed Miliband to decide if we win the election but you can see he has always said he wants women and men working together on equal terms.  It’s not just a numbers game, it’s not just the right of a woman not to be rebuffed and discriminated against because she’s a woman, it matters to our politics, it has to be representative.  You have to have people in the House of Commons from all parts of the country, from all different backgrounds, from the different ethnicities that there in this country and also there should be, like this country, half women.

DM: A lot of this has flowed from the Nigel Evans case of course.  Do you think, of course he will be welcomed back into Parliament but do you think potentially he could become Deputy Speaker again?  Would you welcome that?

HARRIET HARMAN: Well I don't know what the situation with … first off I think he is going to have some discussions with the Tory Whips about whether or not he comes back, he was suspended from the Whip when he was put on trial and then the second question is whether or not he’s going to want to be again the Deputy Speaker.  There was a whole question, obviously he didn’t commit criminal offences but the whole question is whether he should be Deputy Speaker again and I think we’re facing an unprecedented situation, I don’t even know what the process for it is.

DM: Well he did talk about his inappropriate behaviour didn’t he during the course of trial, not criminal of course, but do you feel it was right of the CPS to go ahead with it?  There’s been a lot of criticism of that and of course it was Sir Kier Starmer who is now advising the Labour who took that decision when he was DPP, do you think they were right to go ahead and test it in court?

HARRIET HARMAN: Well basically this is done independently, politicians don’t decide who will be prosecuted, perish the thought, that would be completely wrong.  The police investigate, the Crown Prosecution Service then have to decide if there is evidence that means it is more likely than not that there’ll be a conviction, is there evidence that we should put before the jury.  Overwhelmingly when the CPS takes cases to court, it is something like an 86% conviction rate and a high conviction rate too for sexual offences.  Not everybody is convicted and you can understand for somebody like Nigel Evans, who has protested their innocence right from the outset and then is acquitted, people say they should never have taken this case in the first place but actually our system is that the jury has to decide.  Mostly the jury decides that actually somebody is guilty but sometimes they say they are not guilty and that’s what our process is.  It can feel very unfair I’m sure to the person who’s charged, absolutely harrowing experience.

DM: But there are questions that it throws up, again the issue of the anonymity of accused, especially in the light of an acquittal and also the costs, we’re hearing that Nigel Evans faces a six figure legal fee here and is entirely innocent.

HARRIET HARMAN: Again you can understand how absolutely harrowing it is to have your private activities and your sexual activities all dragged through the newspapers, day in and day out, but the alternative of having people on trial in secret unfortunately, and the important thing about our justice system is that we know who’s on trial, that justice is not only done but it’s seen to be done and you can’t have a situation where it is a normal person in their locality who is charged with some sort of offence, they’re in public but if it’s a celebrity that they are put on trial in private.  It is very difficult, it is very harrowing but I think that our system must be done in public and you certainly can’t have a situation where you say if it’s an allegation of a sexual offence then the defendant will be anonymous because that implies that in sexual offences uniquely that the victims or the people who are making the allegations are likely to be lying.

DM: Just lastly on the political side of all we’ve been discussing, it all seems to be rather benefitting UKIP doesn’t it?  We have seen their poll rating going up and up, 18% in one of the polls today for UKIP and also they are threat not just to the Conservative party but to your own as well.

HARRIET HARMAN: Well I think the concern is, and I have been all around the country talking to people on their doorsteps, is that if people feel that we don’t understand that they are really struggling to make ends meet, there is a cost of living crisis, that everybody is talking about the recovery but they’re still finding things hard, they think that people in politics don’t understand them and if they think that we’re misusing expenses, they think well things are hard for them and we seem to be just feather-bedded and that creates a cynicism and UKIP is the beneficiary because they pose as a non-party political party, almost like the outsiders and I think really it’s down to … we feel in the Labour party that we really need to show to people that we understand that things are hard, that we are on their side, that we realise that although the Tories are trumpeting the recovery it hasn’t come to their door and I think that’s the antidote to UKIP.

DM: Harriet Harman, very good to see you, thank you very much indeed.