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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now I want to talk to the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Chris Leslie, a very good morning to you Mr Leslie. Let’s talk about, I mean the economic stuff we’ve been talking about there with Mr Alexander and first of all this idea, a good idea is it not in your book, of pushing the tax threshold up even higher, meaning that people on low and middle incomes benefit even more?

CHRIS LESLIE: Well that’s of course if they can get agreement about it. I mean we hear they are arguing about it month after month and of course it’s right now that we’ve got this cost of living crisis that is absolutely oppressing and immediate and we need action straight away. It’s all very well that they can’t agree on tax cuts that might help lower and middle income families but they can definitely agree on a tax cut for the very wealthiest 1%. If you are on over £150,000, well they have no problem reaching that agreement, that 50p rate came straight down to 45p. So I just think it is very telling that they can’t agree on helping hard pressed families and …

DM: Just while we’re on that, we haven’t had it clearly from Labour yet whether that tax rate is going back up again because I was mentioning to the Chief Secretary this statistic that the top 1% of earners already pay 30% of tax.

CHRIS LESLIE: We’ll set out all our plans in 2015 in the manifesto, we’ve still got what, eighteen months or so before that general election and heaven knows what state the public finances are going to be in by then because of course the deficit reduction issue has stalled, we still have a phenomenal amount of borrowing because of the costs of three years of economic failure so we have to make a prudent judgement in the manifesto for 2015 and we will certainly set out our plans then but we wouldn’t have cut that top rate of tax for the wealthiest millionaires in the country at a time when there is such a massive set of cost of living pressures on low and middle incomes.

DM: Well let’s look at the trajectory of your argument there on your economy over the last three years. You started off by saying it was being done too far too fast, deficit reduction, then of course the economy sprung back into life it seems. That seems to have gone a bit quiet, you’ve changed your attack into a cost of living, who benefits, a cost of living crisis.

CHRIS LESLIE: Well there is definitely a cost of living crisis and Ministers don’t want to talk about it but that is certainly I think mostly accepted by people. But you’ve got to … hang on a minute, don’t forget there was a three year period in between that so we had growth beginning to come through in 2010, the government smothered that out because of course they took away confidence, they raised VAT, they cut people’s tax credits and so forth and that has taken three years for the economy to weather through that. So people look at the state of the economy, George Osborne thinks that we’re now getting growth because of him, I think most people realise it’s despite the policies that the Chancellor …

DM: So you think the policies that Labour would have had … ?

CHRIS LESLIE: I think we could have got growth going far sooner and if we had got growth going, most people recognise that growth is the best way to solve the deficit. If you don’t have revenues being generated by business, if you don’t get the right numbers of people in long term sustainable employment, then you are not going to generate the tax revenues and save on the welfare costs in order to tackle that problem.

DM: What do you make of the review into the unions and some of their activities? A lot of it flowing of course from Unite at Grangemouth, do you think this is something that we need at this point?

CHRIS LESLIE: Well obviously everybody is against intimidatory tactics and practices, whether it is by unions or managers by the way. In any dispute you have got to focus on getting people round the table, solving those particular things. The key thing is that there are laws that exist on harassment, malicious communication, anybody with any allegations of those needs to report those to the police. I think though there is a pretty transparent exercise going on here by David Cameron, it is pretty thinly disguised. He wants to change the agenda away from the cost of living issues and politicise this, make it a party political thing.

DM: Do you think so? It seems like it is going to be an independent review, looking at both sides.

CHRIS LESLIE: The fact that David Cameron is desperately grasping at any opportunity to not talk about the key things, the agenda that most people care about, is I think very telling and I think there is a lot of puff …

DM: But if there is, he is talking about the power of the trade unions and maybe he has got his opportunity because you the Labour party failed to fully investigate and let us know what went on in Falkirk, dimensions of Unite?

CHRIS LESLIE: I don't think so. If you look at what was happening in that particular situation, the candidate has withdrawn, the constituency party has been put into special measures …

DM: But you tell us they have withdrawn their testimony and you then tell the papers that they haven’t withdrawn it.

CHRIS LESLIE: All of those inquiries are going on. There is a bit of police enquiry into the matter and in fact beyond just that, Ed Miliband I think has taken pretty strong action to initiate wider reforms of the membership that even Tony Blair has said he wishes he had done in his time. So throughout this whole process Ed Miliband has been acting very swiftly and thoroughly throughout and I think that again, obviously the Conservatives are going to try and grasp on any story they can to divert away from the things that the public care about most which is why their wages are not keeping pace with prices for 40 out of 41 months that David Cameron has been in Number Ten.

DM: Okay, another big talking point today, I’m sure the public will be talking about it, proposals to discuss lowering the age of consent to 15. Does the Labour party have a position on at least having a discussion?

CHRIS LESLIE: Well I’m against that. I don't think there’s a groundswell of desire across the country to see such a move. I agree with Danny Alexander about these things, and you don’t often hear us say things like this, I don't believe it should be on the agenda.

DM: Okay, Chris Leslie, thank you very much indeed for your time, very good to see you.