ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now joining me to take a look through the Sunday papers this morning are the former head of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Blair, the Labour MP for Wigan Lisa Nandy and by the actress and comedian, Rebecca Front who can now add author to her list of occupations I’m told since she just wrote the book Curious True Stories and Loose Connections, and to save you getting the plug in I’ve got it here!  More anecdotes than anything else is it? 

REBECCA FRONT: Yes, that’s right, it’s not an autobiography but each of the stories begin with something autobiographical and then spin out into a wider context. 

DM: Okay, we’ve done that now, read the papers for us!  The first story is an interesting one because the father of many teens myself, I’ve noticed this, today’s teens are the most driven for a century.

REBECCA FRONT: Yes, I think it’s really interesting.  This is based on a report that was done by the National Citizen’s Service and I think it nicely flies in the face of our assumptions about teenage kids, I’ve got teenagers myself and I’ve got the delight of hoards of teenage boys running in and out of the house and yes, they are obsessed with Facebook and Instagram and all of those things but that doesn’t mean that they are not ambitious and I think we as parents tend to be falling into that trap of just thinking they are not as driven as we are because they don’t know the real world like we do.  They’re teenagers, of course they don’t know the real world like we do but according to this research they are in fact very driven, very career orientated and actually of course all this Instagram and Facebook stuff means that they are also very good at multi-tasking which is going to stand them in excellent stead. 

DM: You were driven were you?  I mean you became an actor. 

REBECCA FRONT: I know, exactly, it’s a ridiculous thing but I was driven, I was a swotty kid at school so I think you tend to look at your own children and their friends and think oh they’re not working as hard as us but actually this proves that we’re wrong. 

DM: An important counter balance I think to some of the popular imagery.  A worrying story, some teens involved in this of course, Lord Blair, in many, many of the papers, the jihadi brothers story and many others.  What do you make of this?

LORD BLAIR: Well I think, Dermot, this is actually extremely serious.  These two are just part of a pattern but I think if we go a bit further back, I noticed that John Prescott in the Sunday Mirror is blaming Tony which is quite interesting because he was the Deputy Prime Minister at the time. 

DM: Exactly, I talked to him last week and he blames him for invading Iraq in the first place.

LORD BLAIR: That’s right but I think you have to go a lot further back.  We are really looking at the break up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and the colonialists just drawing lines on a map and so you have actually got the Shi’ite Sunni divide right across the Middle East involving Syria, Iran, Iraq.

DM: But what’s going on, a lot of these children, and some of them are, a lot of these young men, they’re not going back to the Ottoman Empire, they are saying you lot are repressing our Muslim brothers and we are going to make you pay.

LORD BLAIR:  Yes but they are going to join an organisation that wants to form a caliphate somewhere in Iraq and Syria.  What we’ve got to look at is how are we dealing with this?  And we’ve got a very good counter-terrorism strategy called Contest and we’ve got a lot of it about objecting to radicalisation.  I think I agree completely with Sadiq Khan who you spoke to earlier on about the fact that we need more emphasis on de-radicalisation in prison but we really need to get the message out that if you go there, one you are going to be killed and secondly, the people don’t want you there. 

DM: And you might not be able to come back if we find out and remove your passport.  But what’s going on?  You have got a real insight into this, after 7/7 things changed didn’t they?  What are the security services doing, what are the police and others doing to protect us?  They must be doing things that we’ve got no idea about. 

LORD BLAIR: And also things that I am not going to tell you about here but they are working fantastically hard and I think it’s very good that broadly we have got cross-party support for counter-terrorism procedures.  I do think the coalition made a mistake by abolishing what are called control orders and I do think that has made the job harder for the police and the security services and I’m sure they will come back to look at that but I think it is 300 people who have gone, which is a lot but there are millions of people of that faith in the United Kingdom and 300 is very dangerous because some of them undoubtedly are going to come back and they will have been programmed, as it were. 

DM: Just turning thoughts now, Lisa, beyond dealing with it all, Lord Blair seems to be saying perhaps we’re doing quite well.

LORD BLAIR: I think we’re doing quite well but we are facing an extremely dangerous situation and I think it’s getting worse.

DM: It’s been going on a long time. 

LISA NANDY: I think one of the big problems as well is we don’t really know enough about where to find people and prevent this happening this in the first place.  Sadiq was right to talk about what’s happening in prisons but actually what we’ve seen over the last few weeks is real concern about what’s happening in our schools and Michael Gove is coming before the Education Select Committee soon and I think we’re going to see him come under real pressure to explain why it appears he has constructed a school system where he doesn’t actually know what on earth is going on in many of our schools. 

DM: Do you think it’s a political issue though?  Do you think it’s down to Michael Gove?  This radicalisation has been taking place for a long time. 

LISA NANDY: But I think there is a real problem with the schools model that he’s constructed which means that largely speaking there are things going on in some schools where it appears that you have to rely on whistle blowers to find out what’s happening and that is a real problem. 

LORD BLAIR: It is also quite a human issue, a little bit like the Spanish Civil War and how many young British men went out there.  It’s an appealing thing to do. 

REBECCA FRONT: There is a need to find a cause, there is some kind of visceral need I think that people have to find a banner to adhere to in some ways.

DM: Okay Lisa, bring us to your first story, free to rob and kill.  Tell us about it, criminals let out of open jail, it is more about these open jails. 

LISA NANDY:  This is quite a shocking story about a report that’s been leaked after six months which shows that three men, one of whom has murdered somebody, one of whom is a serial rapist, have been released on day release and what the report shows really is just complete and utter chaos in terms of assessing whether these men should have been released which the report says they absolutely shouldn’t.  It’s quite sad as well because it’s coupled with a survey about the loss of trust in the police service and I think the Mirror is right to highlight the fact that there are numerous reasons for this, it isn’t just this astonishing report that’s come out but there has also been a series of problems like Hillsborough that have come to light that have knocked people’s confidence in the police.

DM: I’ll have to bring Lord Blair in on that for his feelings.  Are the police getting it in the neck for something like this?  I mean this is the justice system and it has  got absolutely nothing to do with whether people escape from open prisons.

LORD BLAIR: They are two separate stories aren’t they?  The actual release from prison is a matter for the prison service and the parole board but I don’t dispute the fact that the police have had an extremely difficult period over these last four or five years. 

LISA NANDY: But it’s also, the big problem is that when things go wrong in the criminal justice system often people say what are the police doing?  As Victim Support are putting out in this report, the problem is of course that if people don’t trust the police then they don’t come forward to co-operate as witnesses and you get [inaudible] justice. 

DM: Rebecca, you have got a worrying story of our times and so many of the themes are playing out in our country as well but this from France, just tell us about it. 

REBECCA FRONT: This is an in-depth dispatch report written by Kim Wilshire and it’s about a young boy, a 16 year old boy who was very, very severely beaten and left on life support I think and he was from a Roma camp and it talks about the wider issues to do with Roma in France and how marginalised they are.  Of course it tells of a bigger and more important, well not more important, sorry, it’s an incredibly important story, but it tells of a general trend towards scapegoating minorities and when we look back at the elections recently and the move towards the far right in Europe and our own …

DM: The move towards the far right in France.

REBECCA FRONT: Very much so, yes.  And of course there is a lot of that going on here and I think it ties in with the stories we were talking about earlier as well with the fundamentalist training camps.  There is just this feeling of a fracturing society across Europe as well as across the world, of everybody regrouping, pulling back into their own little ethnic groups and saying we don’t want anything to do with them and of course that’s spinning out into violence and there is a huge rise in anti-Semitism, a huge rise in anti-Muslim attacks and this exemplifies that I think and the poor old Roma yet again right at the bottom of the heap and being trodden on.

LORD BLAIR: There is a side to this story that actually connects back to what we’ve just been saying.  The Fundamental Rights Agency which is part of the European Union has a report on how minorities are dealt with by the criminal justice system across all of Europe and guess which country comes out best?  The UK. 

DM: Well, well, well.  Thank you very much indeed for putting that our way.  Lisa, your next story is new kids on the block, a sporty one. 

LISA NANDY: Yes, now I picked this obviously thinking about a sporting story and I didn’t particularly want to talk about the World Cup.

REBECCA FRONT: Why not?

DM: There are several sports we could talk about where we are not doing too well – rugby, football, cricket.  

LORD BLAIR: We’re not doing too badly at cricket. 

LISA NANDY: This is my attempt to bring some positivity back to UK sport.  I have to admit I know absolutely nothing about tennis at all, let alone Wimbledon but this is quite a good story and it’s about the real rise in talent in the women’s game.  You’ve got Andy Murray with a female coach, it looks like women are taking over the sport of tennis and you’ve got Wimbledon coming up and it’s looking like the women’s game is shaping up to be one of the most exciting things so this is my desperate attempt to bring some positivity back to sport. 

DM: Thank you very much indeed for that but the problem is, on those other sports where there have been terrible failures and there is still this ongoing problem two years on with the Olympic legacy and we hear that fewer and fewer young people are participating in sports at schools.  It all seems to have ended with a whimper not a bang.

LISA NANDY: That is true but actually the media I think is obsessed with a very small number of sports and in my town rugby league is a huge sport and we have lots and lots of young talent coming through from our community so there is some good news out there, we just have to go and fix on it. 

REBECCA FRONT: But the media is also obsessed with the female angle, sorry with the male angle on a lot of those sports.  I’m not a sports fan but am I not right in thinking that in women’s cricket we are doing rather well and women’s football we are doing rather well, so perhaps isn’t that the answer then, we should stop watching the men and all start watching the women and then we can all feel really good about it?

DM: You could be right about that.  Lord Blair you have got the front page of the Observer, the leaked tape of a Health Ministers, tell us what it is all about.

LORD BLAIR: Well Jane Ellison, the Health Minister, the number two to Jeremy Hunt, has said that the NHS is out of control.

DM: Out of our control, not out of control. 

LORD BLAIR: Out of our control but in a sense this is not particularly surprising because actually that is the effect of Andrew Lansley’s reform.  When the Bill came up to the Lords, having been in the Commons for 17 days, the Lords pointed out that the words ‘The Secretary of State shall maintain and support the health service’ had been changed and it just read ‘Will support one’ so they had to put ‘maintaining’ one back in.  The NHS is now going to spread like a virus with private/public people in different places and actually for the government to control it is no longer possible. 

DM: I won’t have a discussion about that because I am discussing that very thing with the Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, at the top of the next hour so let’s move it on and Lisa, what’s the next story you’ve got for us.  Oh it’s the sad death of Gerry Conlon.

LISA NANDY: Yes, it’s a horrible story this, about Gerry Conlon who was wrongly imprisoned for the IRA bombing in Guildford.

DM: One of the Guildford Four.

LISA NANDY: One of the Guildford Four, a really, really sad death at the age of 60 after spending a long time in prison.  One of the things that really comes out of all of this is just how little support he had after being released and that’s something, as well as learning from the fact that we had this horrendous miscarriage of justice, I think that’s something else that we should learn from as well. 

DM: I remember I was on the news, presenting the news the day he came out and I can remember him standing outside the Old Bailey and he actually said, I’m coming out the front door, they said you can go out the side door but I’m coming out the front door.  I think the sheer drama and the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, a man who had been wrongly imprisoned for the most horrendous crime for 15 years, standing there saying I spent 15 years of my life in prison for a crime I didn’t do, and the telling line, I saw my father die in prison for a crime he didn’t do.  Absolutely raw drama and as you say, subsequently what happened to Gerry Conlon, very, very regrettable.  Let’s try and lift the mood a bit, Rebecca, you’ve got a story about vicars being taught to tell jokes.  It reminds me of vicars, they all try to tell jokes, some with more success than others.

REBECCA FRONT: That’s what I thought but apparently they are now trying to formalise this in some way and it’s a thing which I think I have to book in for, I think maybe we all should, called the Comedy for Clergy session. 

DM: Are you making this up?

REBECCA FRONT: No, it’s in the Sun so it must be true, Dermot. 

DM: Where is this taking place?

REBECCA FRONT: Do you really want to know because I can book you a ticket. 

LORD BLAIR: I may be overwhelmed by this.

REBECCA FRONT: It’s somewhere in London and various vicars are being taught by a comedian called Bentley Browning to just loosen up a bit.  That’s the kind of thing that would put you right off I think if you were in a congregation, if you could just tell that they were going, okay I’m going to do my bit about the Good Samaritan and then move on to … You’d just know wouldn’t you? 

DM: Have you ever done stand up yourself?

REBECCA FRONT: I’ve never done stand up and I’ve never been a vicar either.

LISA NANDY: Apparently they are offering free wine though which may help.

REBECCA FRONT: I think they’ve always done that haven’t they, historically? 

LORD BLAIR: There has been a long tradition of wine in the church.

DM: Yes, but not by the gallon.  Thank you all very much indeed for that excellent paper review, very good to see you all.