ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS 

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, time to look through the Sunday papers and I’m joined by the author and journalist Rachel Johnson, the Labour peer and former Justice Secretary, Lord Falconer and the former union boss and now chair of ACAS, Sir Brendan Barber.  Let’s start with you, Lord Falconer, and the issue of assisted dying.  Quite a lot of it in the papers today, we’ve got Desmond Tutu in the Observer and the former head of Ofsted writing about it as well. 

LORD FALCONER: Yes, Desmond Tutu on the front page of the Observer in support of a change of the law in the UK referring to the awful, as he would see it, undignified end Nelson Mandela endured and saying although the sanctity of life is very important, not at any cost as he said and he is in favour of there being a change.  Chris Woodhead …

DM: He’s coming on the programme.

LORD FALCOLNER: Chris Woodhead who has got motor neurone disease has written an incredibly moving piece about how he, when the time comes and it’s not now for Chris Woodhead because he’s enjoying life, but he’s saying when the time comes he would like the option of an assistant death.  He refers to a consultant who told him, well if you want to end your life and you are terminally ill well you can just starve yourself and dehydrate but that is not the way to deal with that.

DM: Absolutely.  Well we know your own view on it, there would be safeguards, this is what people want to know, if it was pushed a little bit further forward. 

LORD FALCONER:  Chris Woodhead described it as a modest change to the law that I’m proposing, it would be one where if you’ve got six months or less to live, two doctors certify you are mentally competent to make the decision and it is your firm and settled view that you want to take your own life, then you should be allowed to do so because for some people fighting for those last few days or those last few weeks is not what they want.  They have said their goodbyes to those that they love and they just don’t want to go on.

DM: Just to be crystal clear about that act itself, take your own life.  Some people are in a position where they can’t take their own life so what happens then?

LORD FALCONER: For those who can’t, the option in my Bill would not be available because I think there is a line and the line is you should only be able to end your own life, nobody else’s. 

DM: So you would have the syringe or whatever it is, the button to …

LORD FALCONER: You’ve got to be able to do it yourself.  I think it’s very important that the line should not be crossed in relation to that so as Chris Woodhead says it’s a quite modest, very well safeguarded proposal and that’s what the Lords are going to debate on Friday and my hope is that they will go on and …

DM: Everybody has views on it, Rachel and Brendan, what do you think? 

RACHEL JOHNSON: I am very much in favour of Charlie’s Bill.  I think we need help to die in this country far more than we need help to buy.  The argument that people should dehydrate or starve themselves to death suggests that we actually treat our animals with more compassion than we do our human beings because actually when it comes to a loved family pet there is a sort of orderly end to it where everybody grieves and it works.  The system here doesn’t work, there are 300 complaints a day on how the elderly are treated in care homes, our end of life system is broken and I think this goes some way to fix it.  There’s just one thing though, if you have to administer the medicine yourself it wouldn’t really help Tony Nicklinson which is the reason why George Carey changed his view because he said he was so moved by Tony Nicklinson’s case.

DM: Brendan, quick thoughts, going far enough, not far enough, what?

BRENDAN BARBER: I support the Bill too and I hope it proceeds on Friday and just to be clear, Friday is not the final word.  Friday’s debate is about moving on to a much longer period where there can be a full debate and those who think that the safeguards may not be quite adequate enough, there will be plenty of opportunity to look at all of the issues behind the proposal but should the proposal be taken forward?  I think yes. 

LORD FALCONER: An important point is it will only be debated further than the Lords if there is not a wrecking amendment on Friday and my real concern is that the Lords should allow proper debate rather than trying to cut it off on Friday which is what some people might try to do.  I hope they are listening.

DM: Okay, let’s move it on, Rachel, a reshuffle coming up, expected in the next couple of days.  It’s in all the papers, you picked it up in the Mail and there is also an interesting piece in the Sun as well about your brother and George Osborne, wahey! 

RACHEL JOHNSON: Well it seems to me to do a reshuffle so close to the election is what the Labour MP, Caroline Flint, calls window dressing because it seems that Cameron is going to bring in a lot of women so if you are old white and male it is going to be a good reshuffle … sorry, a bad reshuffle!  If you are young white and female it is going to be a good reshuffle and including Liam Fox who is apparently tipped to make dramatic return.

DM: He’s white and male, is he old? 

RACHEL JOHNSON: I know, unless you are Liam Fox in which case it’s a good reshuffle.

DM: What about the power centres, jockeying for position to replace Mr Cameron?  George Osborne and Boris Johnson.

RACHEL JOHNSON: Every single thing that happens in Downing Street is now called a George Osborne manoeuvre so that he is manoeuvring his people and himself into pole position and so I couldn’t possibly comment.  So building up a power base that would exclude any possible support for a male or …

DM: You must have conversations over the dinner table with Boris and say look, are you getting back into parliament or what?

RACHEL JOHNSON: I’ll tell you, I am literally the last person he would ever tell.  He’d think, oh she’s coming on Murnaghan in the morning! 

LORD FALCONER: Rachel makes the important point, the one thing that does not appear to drive this reshuffle is the talent of the people who may be promoted or the talent of the people who may be removed. 

DM: So you’d go along with the window dressing remark.

LORD FALCONER: Well I don't know if it’s window dressing or not but the country presumably wants to be led by the best people available to the prime minister.

RACHEL JOHNSON: Whether they are in skirts or not. 

LORD FALCONER: There is no one saying this person has done really well or this person has done really badly, it’s all about how will it look subsequently.

DM: Brendan, you can come on this but also you have a story about Louise Mensch who of course used to be a Conservative MP but gave it all up.

BRENDAN BARBER: Yes, indeed.  One thing I will actually give David Cameron credit for is not reshuffling every year.  I think the degree of instability when it became the pattern in previous governments, every year sure as eggs were eggs, as soon as the sun started shining the Prime Minister started thinking about the changing the Cabinet and I think it’s to the credit of David Cameron that actually in the major offices of state we’ve had a degree of continuity.

DM: We’ve got a headline there, Brendan Barber thinks that … I know that we’ve got a but coming. 

BRENDAN BARBER: No, no.  Louise Mensch has got a couple of pieces in her column in the Sunday Sun, one about Harriet Harman and we may talk about Harriet’s remarks in the last week.

DM: That can come into this because what Harriet was saying was that particularly under Gordon Brown, that it was a problem within the Labour party, being sexist.  Do you agree with what she said?

LORD FALCONER: I think that politics is incredibly sexist.  I think the admirable thing about Harriet is that since she’s been a politician, since the early 80s when she became an MP, she has said the same thing consistently and bravely and because she’s not worried too much about the timing of when she says it, it’s got real voice. 

DM: It was a bit of a boys club.  When you used to sit round the sofa with Tony Blair it was a bit of a boys club.

LORD FALCONER: There were definitely women around the sofa as well I remember. 

DM: Joshing, watching the football? 

LORD FALCONER: No, they weren’t joshing and watching the football, they were contributing to the quality of the debate. 

DM: Of course they were.  Let’s get back to you Brendan and this column from Louise.

BRENDAN BARBER: Yes, the Louise Mensch piece I was particularly interested in was a comment to be headed at the moment it seems by Baroness Butler-Sloss where Louise Mensch argues very strongly that this is the wrong choice, the Prime Minister has made a mistake because of the conflict of interest, that if this inquiry is intended to cover the highest reaches of government then to have someone … the highest reaches of every part of the Establishment indeed, then there is an undeniable conflict of interest when not only was your brother a member of the government, he was one of the government’s law officers, a particular set of responsibilities so it seems to me that there is a conflict of interests that’s undeniable.

DM: So you don’t think she is the right person, you agree with Louise Mensch?

BRENDAN BARBER: I don’t think she’s the right person. I think she is one of the great eminences, has given great public service in a whole number of different ways but I think she has been put in an impossible position.

DM: Rachel Johnson, is she the right person for you?

RACHEL JOHNSON: I can’t really comment.  I do think the whole thing is a bit of a muddle because we do already have inquiries into people who have been sexually abused as children, the number of police in these particular cases has trebled so are we having individual inquiries or are we having an institutional inquiry?  What do we want out of this inquiry – do we want justice for the victims or do we want the entire Establishment in the dock and somehow held to account?  I think it’s a muddle and this is why I …

DM: You think it’s a bit of a sideshow.  What do you think about Baroness Butler-Sloss?

LORD FALCONER: She’s a brave, fearless person who will get to the truth but I agree with what Rachel and Brendan are saying in this respect, I have no idea what this inquiry is supposed to be investigating.  It can’t be investigating every single allegation of child abuse because as Rachel says, there are a myriad of inquiries.

DM: And that’s a job for the police.

LORD FALCONER: That’s a job for the police, exactly.  The Home Secretary has rightly said they don’t want to, as it were [inaudible].   If the inquiry is to look into how we as a society should deal with these without looking at individual things then I’m clear that Elizabeth Butler-Sloss is the right person to do it but if there are particular issues that are being looked at which might give rise to a conflict, she would be the first person to say I can’t do that.

DM: We also have to look, don’t we, there’s an issue of cover up as well isn’t there, when we are talking about the historical child abuse and this inquiry has to look at that.

RACHEL JOHNSON: Of course it does, yes.

BRENDAN BARBER: And there are allegations across some of the papers this morning of particular people and all the rest of it.  There is a danger that this becomes a totally unmanageable exercise and I think the point that Rachel makes about the lack of clarity about the terms of reference is a very important point.  There is a wish to get to the truth, particularly about this overarching allegation that there were elements of the Establishment, if that’s what you want to call it, that conspired to actually sit on serious allegations that should have been dealt with when they were made.  People want to get at the truth of that and somehow there has to be a process that delivers that clarity. 

DM: Okay, I want to get three more stories in, one minute each.  Lord Falconer, my goodness me, you’ve got a Rachel Johnson column.  Is she any good, can she write, string a couple of words together?

LORD FALCONER: This is Rachel’s column about Harriet that we have talked about already but there is a division of opinion in the newspapers and Rachel is on the side of Harriet in this respect.  Louise Mensch is horrible about Harriet and I’m on Rachel’s side in that.

DM: I’m not going to let Rachel comment on that, it would be very strange to have one of the paper reviewers reviewing the other paper reviewer’s column.  Rachel, Dominic Lawson column in the Times, what’s this about?

RACHEL JOHNSON: Well this picks up what we were talking about which is why are we having an inquiry and who benefits and what do we expect to get out of it?  He has written a piece in the Sunday Times which says one, that Butler-Sloss is probably the wrong person and two, inquiries are sort of Freudian displacement activity for not confronting the real and present dangers alive in current society, i.e. the fact that 12 year old girls are dressing as if up for it and so on and now we are going to go back 40 years and see what happened to minors then perpetrated by people who are now dead.  He is sort of saying we need to move on a bit and look at …

LORD FALCONER: [Inaudible] has picked up the same point that we are having all of  these inquiries and it is really about society changing, no longer to deferring to anybody in a leadership position, can you inquire into that?  You obviously can’t.

DM: Brendan, I want to end I suspect on this story, you’ve got a story, celebrities and tax again, how they have reputedly been avoiding tax.

BRENDAN BARBER: Yes, there’s a big piece in the Mail about Cheryl Cole, there are pieces in the other papers about some other celebrities and the tax avoidance arrangements that they’ve made and so on, where their defence has been look, I was advised by my accountant, it was a legitimate and entirely reasonable to make.  I am less interested in the celebrities frankly and I have some sympathy with their defence but the bigger issue actually is that we still have arrangements in place that allow avoidance on a massive scale.  The government has done something on this, it was floated as a major issue back in 2009 and in fact the financial crisis, when governments all around the world, not only the British government, were conscious of the pressures on public finances in the wake of the crisis, there have been some measures taken to improve transparency and so on but the big issue is that there are still tax havens, many of them British territories that are used to put huge, huge amounts of money.  Margaret Hodge has done great work in parliament with some of the big companies – Google, Starbucks, Amazon and all the rest of it – exposing how little tax they pay despite doing massive amounts in this country.

DM: Isn’t the big pressure on this going to be moral pressure?  Isn’t it you’ve got to say to people because they have got so much money, they have got clever accountants, they do travel the world – if you are born in this country, were educated in this country, you benefit from all its protections and all its freedoms and therefore just pay your tax. 

BRENDAN BARBER: I’d like to feel that moral pressure was enough but I fear that the evidence suggests that it’s not, that you actually have to close loopholes really vigorously.

DM: It’s like Whack a Mole, there’s always another loophole.

LORD FALCONER: Starbuck and Amazon – I may be wrong about Amazon but Starbucks have been in the news in relation to do it.  Do you not feel that oh, if they are keeping all their money offshore and taking all the money out, maybe we won’t use them as much?

DM: We’re running out of time, last word Rachel?

RACHEL JOHNSON: I think what we can conclude from this is that there are two certainties in life – death and taxes.

DM: Very nicely put, Rachel, thank you very much indeed.  Brendan, good to see you  and Lord Falconer, nice having you here, thank you all.