ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now angry Lib Dems, more wet weather and swimming cows, it can only be the Sunday papers. All will be explained! Let’s take a look through most of those with the columnist and comedian Shazia Mirza, the Labour MP for Worsley and Eccles South in Greater Manchester, Barbara Keeley and by the Conservative leader in the Welsh Assembly, Andrew RT Davies, very good to see you all. Shazia, I wanted to start with you because you used to be a teacher didn’t you?

SHAZIA MIRZA: I was a teacher for twelve years in inner city schools in London mainly in deprived areas like Tower Hamlets and Dagenham and Michael Gove has come out today and said that he orders a return to old fashioned school discipline with pupils writing lines, weeding out school grounds, tidying classrooms and reporting to the school gates. I can’t tell you how out of touch this man really is.

DM: Why though? You must have seen discipline problems having taught where you taught.

SHAZIA MIRZA: Horrific discipline problems. If you have a child that has special educational needs, if you have a child where English is a second language and they are trying to divert away from those issues by behaving badly, telling them to sit down and write lines is not going to help that issue. This might work in a private school where you have ten students in a class and they have a good discipline structure at home but a lot of these students that I used to teach were from single parent families, no parent families, where they don’t have a discipline structure at home therefore they come to school, they behave badly and then telling them to write lines is not a sufficient discipline structure. He is very negative about this, he says that any punishment is good and he uses the word punishment which is a very negative word. In the good schools where I’ve taught they have a positive structure for behaviour where they would have things like ladder of consequence or a reward structure and he thinks that writing lines is a punishment but it doesn’t deal with the actual issue behaviour.

ANDREW DAVIES: Can I just come in on that? In Wales we have obviously a totally different education system now devolved UK and actually we look rather enviously at what’s going on in England. 250,000 kids have been moved up the ladder as it were into better performing schools, we’ve had our own reports over the last couple of weeks, Estyn – which is our equivalent of Ofsted – has highlighted a huge failure in the system. The First Minister, who is a Labour First Minister, has identified they took their eye off the ball and the Education Minister has actually been forced, a chap called Huw Lewis, was actually forced to apologise for letting children down so there’s a balance to be struck.

DM: Okay, I want to bring in Barbara here because I want to throw this story into the mix, because that’s not all with Mr Gove is it? We’ve got this political row, Mr Gove accused of politicising the inspection organisation Ofsted, what about that Barbara?

BARBARA KEELEY: It’s been a peculiar week for the coalition and we’re starting to see more splits in the coalition. This story is really astonishing, somebody doing an excellent job, Baroness Sally Morgan, being thrown out of that position as Chair of Ofsted, really it looks like to make way for somebody who is a Conservative supporter. There are strong rumours that somebody who has made a lot of donations to the Conservative party is going to be moved in.

DM: And Labour of course wouldn’t have done that whilst it was in power.

BARBARA KEELEY: Well why have this disruption when it’s not needed? Sally Morgan said yesterday that it’s a pattern, there’s been a series of public appointments where the effective chair has been moved out and a Tory supporting person has been moved in but the key thing I think about this story is that Ofsted is the regulator. Andrew has just given us an important example of a regulation issue in Wales, regulators are meant to be impartial, regulators are not meant to be run by party appointees, regulators have that important role in terms of setting standards and now if we have a Tory appointee at Ofsted, we’ve already got in the NHS Tory appointees at the Care Quality Commission, Tory MPs at …

DM: It sounds like David Laws might have something to say about that. Andrew, just the overall feel on Michael Gove, he never seems to be out of the papers and a lot of it seems to be, let’s say peripheral to his core brief in terms of things like the First World War and things like that. He is a journalist by training, he knows how to get the headlines.

ANDREW DAVIES: And he knows how to make improvements in education in fairness. I used the matter of 250,000 pupils have gone up the ladder in English education into better performing schools, you only have to look at what Labour potentially could to do education in England by what’s gone on in Wales. As I said, our own First Minister, who is a Labour First Minister, education has been run in Wales now for 14 years and on any international benchmark you care to use regrettably we are falling behind the UK and other parts of Europe. It’s a sad situation, it’s a sad situation.

DM: I want to bring you back in Shazia, do you accept that there have been improvements as Michael Gove said, whether or not writing lines or clearing up the school grounds is the way forward on discipline, it’s still getting better.

SHAZIA MIRZA: Generally behaviour in schools is not as bad as he’s making out that it is. He is focusing on things like parents taking out kids for a summer holiday and making big news about that whereas behaviour issues are not that bad. But I don’t think he is. For ordinary school kids in inner city schools, he doesn’t know about those kids, he’s not a teacher, he’s never been a teacher, he doesn’t work with teachers, he doesn’t go into the classroom to see what’s happening. He’s stuck in the 1950s which is totally out of …

DM: A lot of teachers have been making that very point. Andrew, I want to go back to you here, you’ve got this interview with Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish Secretary, which is in the Observer and they say that Scotland may have different values but that’s not true he says. Does that go for Wales as well?

ANDREW DAVIES: It’s a very powerful interview in fact and some of the language that is used in it, Alistair Carmichael actually uses the words that he has been compared to Quisling and also the Nazi occupation of countries in Europe by the Nationalists, that’s very, very strong language and I have to say refuted in fairness on the yes side, their director of the campaign, but it does sadly show that instead of some of the issues that need to be focused on, maybe because the yes campaign is training so heavily in the polls, the actual arguments are turning quite nasty up there now and that’s regrettable.

DM: How closely is the campaign being watched in Wales and is it causing rumblings there? Do you think Wales could be next?

ANDREW DAVIES: Well I think the important thing to remember is that independence in Wales just doesn’t feature. When it’s surveyed it’s between 9-12% of the population. Obviously we live in a devolved United Kingdom now, there is a change in dynamics within the United Kingdom, I’ve written an article, commented on an article in one of our own papers in Wales today, which says the elephant in the room is actually what does England want in a new United Kingdom? I’m a passionate Unionist but I do think that’s the elephant in the room in that if there was to be a discussion after the referendum, and I passionately hope Scotland decides to stay within the Union, what does the largest part of that Union want from the Union going forward in the 21st century?

DM: That was a subject I was discussing in some depth last week actually, we should have had you on. Barbara, another story here, on the issue of the weather and still no sign of leadership, you’ve got in the Independent on Sunday. No sign of leadership from who or whom?

BARBARA KEELEY: Sign of leadership from the government. I mean the Environment Secretary, Owen Patterson, ignored a report a year ago – you may have touched on this this morning – that without river maintenance there were going to be issues. Now it’s interesting that there seems to be a move this weekend to turn round on Chris Smith and try to blame the Environment Agency. The Environment Agency has actually lost 20% of its budget within six months and I think it’s quite clear now, it’s not everything, there are other factors too but if you remove resources so that projects have to be shut down, dredging stops, river maintenance stops, then you are going to get this sort of problem. I think what we have seen over the last few days is the Prime Minister sending sympathy to the people on the Somerset Levels, those people – including their local MP Ian Liddell-Granger – don’t want sympathy, they want action and how much action are they going to see without the funding for the Environment Agency? The Environment Agency has got a very wide range of responsibilities, for instance they have taken on this shale gas fracking which is in my constituency, yet they have had their budget cut by 20% and I think it is really time that we asked the question are they resourced enough to tackle it? The cost is falling on these communities that are suffering, that are cut off and they will have to claim on insurance and I think that that’s wrong. So let’s stop sending sympathy to the people of the Somerset Levels, let’s start doing something.

DM: Shazia, you’ve got a very interesting story you’ve picked out, it’s quite a small article down at the bottom of a page deep inside the Mail on Sunday – ‘balcony for pay out ban’. What’s that about? I mean a lot of people will be affected by this.

SHAZIA MIRZA: Well insurance companies are cracking down on claims by holiday makers injured in falls from hotel balconies. Apparently a lot of people, young people, are diving from balconies, jumping from balcony to balcony …

DM: Diving into the pool and things like that.

SHAZIA MIRZA: Yes, or moving from balcony to balcony, moving across, hanging off balconies and insurance companies are refusing to make pay outs for this. There has apparently been an increase in this, last year there were 18 incidents worldwide in which Britons were killed or very seriously hurt in balcony falls. I think what’s happened is there have been a few celebrities that have been caught hanging from balconies or taking photos of themselves standing on top of a balcony and young people think this is a really cool thing to do. It mainly happens when young people are drunk or on drugs and so they have copied this – oh my favourite pop star, I saw him hanging off a balcony – so they’ve started to do this, not realising the effects of this happening. So because there’s been an increase in this, insurance companies like Aviva are reluctant to make pay outs.

DM: So they just need to get the message out there that it’s not big, it’s not clever, it ain’t funny and you might die.

ANDREW DAVIES: I think another thing as well – and I’ve got four kids, two of them are teenagers now – is this Snapchat and all the stuff that needs to be taken instantly and it’s almost pushing it to go to the extreme and that bit further to get the better photo as it were.

DM: With people hanging off cranes and things like that.

ANDREW DAVIES: And sadly we see these stories, especially in the summer months, the big resorts in the Mediterranean, teenager aged 18 has sadly passed away, it’s pushing it.

SHAZIA MIRZA: Tell them to use the lift or the stairs, you don’t need to go from balcony to balcony.

DM: And you don’t need to jump, just stand by the side of it. Andrew, talking about cameras, ‘Smile you’re on Dashcam camera’. Now I’ve noticed this, I was in a cab the other day where he said he’s recently installed a camera there to take pictures of all the traffic that’s moving around him and indeed of the passengers in the cab. I wondered if there were data protection issues there but this is getting much more common isn’t it?

ANDREW DAVIES: Well it’s a large article. The RAC, the gentleman quoted from there say this is the gadget to have for 2014, it’s catching in real time what’s going on either if you’re a cyclist or a motorist. On the way up from the promised land, Wales, to London today, we passed one …

DM: Presumably not on a cycle!

ANDREW DAVIES: Well with a figure like mine you don’t do a lot of cycling because people don’t like me in Lycra. But I passed quite a few accidents sadly and obviously the police are on scene and then there’s all the insurance to be sorted out whereas if you’ve got everything filmed, then the arguments basically are taken out of it because the legal people have to look at that film, interpret it and it saves a lot of grief. As I said, the RAC are pointing at this particular gadget, shall we call it, as being the must-have of 2014.

DM: You were discussing, Shazia, the insurance, I can see a position where as they get cheaper and cheaper and last longer and longer, where insurance companies say right, you’ve got to put one in your car.

SHAZIA MIRZA: But do we want everything to be filmed? There is always somebody with an I-phone nearby filming something, taking a photo of something, do we want cameras everywhere?

ANDREW DAVIES: Well I agree with that because I am very concerned, shall we say, at everything is filmed today. If you look at young people, we talked about that this morning, in university people are being clipped and all the rest of it and then ten years into their careers those clips suddenly come out and what seemed good in university doesn’t necessarily seem a sensible thing when you are in full time employment but this from the insurance industry seems to be lowering premiums because the article also covers that. The RAC who have a real understanding, I would suggest, of motoring do clearly endorse it to a point saying it is the must-have and it does take that grief from that legal argument, certainly to a certain level, out of the equation which a lot of people obviously end up finding themselves tied up in court.

DM: Barbara again, a good mix of stories here, this is a fascinating one, ‘Manchester’s make over moves closer’. The skyline of the city is changing and a club called City are planning to take total control, this is moneybags Manchester City.

BARBARA KEELEY: Absolutely but the thing about this story is what it doesn’t say. What it doesn’t say is that Manchester City have just had a really important relaunch of a women’s team. Now that gets no mention., women’s sport gets no mention. Women’s sport tends to only get 5% of coverage which really stops women developing in sport, stops sponsorship, stops people getting good salaries which are all important points. Here there is a really big article and there is no mention of this important launch, which only happened just over a week ago, but there have been some great signings into that team, an England national is playing for Manchester City, Manchester City Women’s team, not ladies but Women’s team, are probably going to be one of the leading teams this season in the Women’s Superleague, so where is the mention? How can we have an article about the makeover and I think …

DM: So what is the article concerning itself with then? The amount of money that they’re spending?

BARBARA KEELEY: Yes, indeed but in fact it’s important that not only are they investing in the men’s team, they are investing in the women’s team. The Manchester City women’s team will have their own stadium to play in and that’s a very unusual thing. Let’s see the women’s team coverage.

DM: And they are calling it women’s football as well, not ladies or girls, even worse. Shazia, last story, ‘When self-service doesn’t pay’.

SHAZIA MIRZA: This is when you go into a supermarket and there has been an increase in people stealing from the self-service tills. So people go to the till, I don't know how this happens because any time I go anywhere near a till I just hear alarms going off saying there is something inappropriate in the bagging area. Initially it started off that people were making mistakes but then they cashed in on this and thought, oh I got away with that croissant, why don’t I do that again? So that’s increased and enticed people to steal now but apparently supermarkets are saying it’s still worth it to have the self-service checkouts because it’s less money than employing people on actual checkouts.

DM: Well we’ll end on that thought, something going on in the bagging department! Thank you all very much indeed.

ANDREW DAVIES: And you’ve got to pay 5p in Wales for a bag.

DM: Well we’ll debate that more at another stage. Thank you all very much.