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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now to the Labour party and Ed Miliband will try to present himself as a Prime Minister in waiting at the Labour Party Conference this week. With just over a year and a half to go until the next general election he’s unveiling policies, pledges and promises but there are question marks over how he will pay for them. Well let’s discuss that all, I’m joined in the studio by the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone and Medhi Hassan who has written a biography about Ed Miliband and he’s political director with the Huffington Post and from the Labour conference in Brighton, the former Justice Secretary, Lord Falconer. A very good morning to you all. We’re on you Lord Falconer, there has been much criticism of Mr Miliband and his senior team for not perhaps introducing us to enough policies, they seem to be flooding out now at this conference. From your experience with Tony Blair, is that good timing?

LORD FALCONER: Well I think as we move in to the conference season and we get closer to the general election, whatever has happened in the past the idea of having some concrete policies which we can debate and which set out the direction of travel, it’s a good thing. It’s been a difficult summer but that gives opportunity to create a clear line and then move forward from there and that’s what’s happening at the moment. As you rightly say, there has been a whole series of policy announcements over the last few days and it gives people a clue as to the direction that the Labour party is moving in.

DM: Let’s talk about that direction. Ken Livingstone, do you like the glimpse we’ve got of the direction of travel?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: I think it’s absolutely right because we’ve had the most awful five years in which ordinary people have been really clobbered and Ed Miliband is saying what are the things we can do to help. Having childcare available at schools so that parents can get back to work, that’s a big help. I mean, you’ll get a huge extra increase in tax because parents won’t have to give up their jobs. So many people, particularly in the south-east where childcare is so expensive, they can’t afford to work because it costs so much for the childcare. Things like that can all turn this round. Whenever I’m talking to Ed, and I’m on Labour’s NEC, he’s absolutely very clear when people say we should do this, we should do that ….

DM: You talk to him a lot don’t you?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: I do, I like him a lot. I’ve dealt with every Labour leader since Harold Wilson and I think this one unlike so many of the others, he’s not focused on what’s in the media but on what he is actually going to do when he gets in. If you go and read Alistair Campbell’s diaries, there’s never a point in the run up to the general election where they are talking about the future, it’s all about next week’s media. Ed doesn’t give a damn about the media, he is focused on how can we lift the country out of this without increasing debt. That’s difficult.

DM: Okay, Medhi Hassan on that direction of travel, what we have heard and on the timing of it, which Ken touched on as did Charlie Falconer, you don’t want to show too much too early.

MEDHI HASSAN: No, of course and just a point on the building coalitions and winning people over, Ed Miliband as a Labour leader interestingly on the Sunday morning of his conference can have Charlie Falconer, quote unquote ‘Blairite’, Ken Livingstone, the voice of Labour left, both come on and praise him. I mean that’s a good position to be in as a Labour leader given all the Blair-Brown wars we’ve had and one we could probably carry on discussing. On the specific issues of policy, there is always a problem for a leader of the opposition that if you don’t unveil enough policy people say you are a blank sheet of paper, a phrase that Ed himself unfortunately used, and if you unveil too much the Tories either mock it and ridicule it, or they nick it and say we’ll do it better. So that is a problem for every opposition, the Tories had the same problem when they were in opposition. In fact at this stage in the last parliament the Tories had released far less than Labour have released. If you look at this weekend’s papers there are a fair few announcements. Ken mentioned childcare, there’s the house building initiative, he talked about house building yesterday, we’ve got the whole British companies training apprentices if they hire skilled workers from outside the EU, strengthening the enforcement of the minimum wage – I think the blank policy paper attack won’t work anymore.

DM: Talking about the coalition, let’s ask ‘Blairite’ Charlie Falconer, Lord Falconer, about this. I mean we heard last year from Ed Miliband that he was a one nation leader of a one nation party and there it is again but some of what we’re hearing does seem to be a divide and especially when we heard him yesterday saying to a question from a passer-by, yes, we are bringing back socialism.

LORD FALCONER: I think what he is trying to establish is that we are seeking to ensure that there is a recovery for the many and not for the few and if that is socialism then I think most people in the Labour party would support it because there is a clear dividing line between the Tories on the one hand, supported by the Liberal Democrats, who are providing a recovery which involves reducing the top rate of tax so that the people that can really benefit from it are the rich and on the other side there is Labour, and they are the only party saying this now, who are looking to see that the recovery will actually be something that brings benefits to individual people and that is a really, really important line. Just to pick up the point that ….

DM: Sorry to interrupt, Lord Falconer, but Tony Blair made much headway by saying he wouldn’t put up the top rate of tax. Tony Blair would never have said that and he wouldn’t have said, if you happen to have a house that is worth quite a lot of money and it may not be because you are very rich, we will tax that. That is not Blairite.

LORD FALCONER: Look, I think you are talking about two different times. As we went into the 1997 election it was a period when we were not just coming out of the worst recession with the slowest recovery in a hundred years and to make the comparison between 1997 and now does not give a clear picture of the sorts of challenges that would face somebody going into Downing Street in 2015. So I don't think that’s a fair point.
DM: Okay, Mehdi Hassan?

MEHDI HASSAN: I think Charlie’s got a point there. There are going to be people voting in 2015 who were not born when Tony Blair and Cherie walked through the door of Number Ten so it is a different generation and Charlie is right about the coming out of a recession. The problem of course for Labour is despite coming out of the slowest, longest recovery in a hundred years, Labour are not winning on the economy, that is a big problem, no one is pretending that isn’t a problem. When you look at the latest polls the gap is widening between George Osborne and David Cameron’s trust, credibility on the economy versus Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, that’s an issue. I think Ed Miliband is right to make this a cost of living conference. Now the cost of living issue works both ways, Ronald Reagan famously asked in 1980 are you better off now than you were four years ago and won an election off the basis of it. Mitt Romney, another Republican, tried the same line against Barack Obama last year and it didn’t work. Why? Because he was up against a leader who was able to show that actually he was leading a bit of a recovery so Obama’s model for Cameron …

DM: But Ken Livingstone, can Labour afford in this position to say to part of the electorate, we really aren’t for you anymore? The aspirational people on fifty, sixty thousand pounds a year, that seems to be the level it’s pitched at, that you will have to pay more tax?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: I think the top 1% will undoubtedly will have to pay more in that sense and that’s about 150. We’ve made it absolutely clear that people under 50 or 60 shouldn’t pay any more. You’ll have to wait and see, it might be that the recovery picks up and you start to get some real increase in investment, so far there’s been none. What we are facing the prospect of is perhaps another 18 months of growth fuelled by a housing boom and by people borrowing, without any real increase in the structure of the economy. Now that won’t be sustainable. This sounds awfully like the 1964 election when Labour won an election and the first thing the Governor of the Bank of England said is you’ve got to clamp down on this boom, it’s not sustainable. So this could be a very difficult time but what it will mean is, people aren’t stupid, they are going to see in 18 months has there been any real growth in the economy, are there really good new jobs in manufacturing or construction coming along or is it all a bubble in London and south-east? I think we’re stuck into that bubble. What we’ve had – we’ve now got growth, yes, the British economy has grown by nearly £15 billion but government spending has increased by slightly over £15 billion. They’ve panicked, all those rigorous cuts that they made in the first two years …
DM: So you can’t criticise them for the cuts then can you?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: I wouldn’t mind them spending another £15 billion if they were building homes and putting people back to work but fuelling …

DM: What are they doing? Servicing the debt that was built up by Labour.

KEN LIVINGSTONE: No, the debt is still growing, this is the problem. When Labour came to power it was 40% of GDP, before the banking crisis it was still 40%. We’re heading towards perhaps nearly 100% at the next election, that’s why Ed Miliband in all our private debates in the NEC are saying we can’t make commitments unless we can show where the money is coming from.

DM: Okay, the other thing we’ve got to discuss now, and it may be the so-called Westminster bubble story, it’s not about the price of bread in the shops, Lord Falconer it is of course the issue of Damian McBride, former spinner so-called for Gordon Brown. I mean it’s beyond possibility that Ed Balls and Ed Miliband who were in that inner circle, they claim that they knew nothing about what Damian McBride was doing, we all know that’s not true.

LORD FALCONER: That’s not what Ed Miliband is saying. Ed Miliband is saying that he remonstrated with Gordon Brown about the way that Damian McBride was behaving. I think anybody involved in politics would think that the way that Damian McBride behaved was absolutely repulsive and the way that he has described it in his book, in a way that is determined as far as I can see to do as much damage to the Labour party as possible, shows that he was never a supporter of the Labour party in the first place. As far as politics going forward is concerned, one has to completely repudiate what Damian McBride did, he was a very malevolent figure and that is what Ed Miliband has done, is doing at the moment and did at the time.

DM: But he was doing his master, Gordon Brown’s, bidding wasn’t he?

LORD FALCONER: Who, Damian McBride?

DM: Yes.

LORD FALCONER: Search me. Well, it was a stream of vileness obviously done to help Gordon Brown. I have got absolutely no idea what the relationship between the two of them was.

DM: So was it one way traffic?

LORD FALCONER: Was it one way traffic? I absolutely do not accept that there is any equivalence between what was happening Downing Street and … Read what Damian McBride is saying.

DM: I know but it wasn’t one way traffic was it?

LORD FALCONER: The way that you try and make it seem that both sides were equal is completely wrong.

DM: I didn’t say that but both sides dipped their hand in the blood. Didn’t Alistair Campbell call Gordon Brown psychologically flawed?

LORD FALCONER: Damian McBride is a force that is exceptional in its awfulness.

DM: Ken Livingstone, you must have been a target of Damian McBride several times were you not?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: I was smeared by Brown’s people, I was smeared by Blair’s people, I’ve been smeared by the Tories. When I was the leader of the GLC, Tory Central Office approached the journalist Trudy Pactor and assured her I had been at a pub in the East End where six men in succession had had sex with me and it took it all of an hour to find out this wasn’t my natural inclination but it’s always been a filthy dirty game. What’s happened here is that that the public …

DM: Is it dirty and filthy now?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: What I find attractive about Ed Miliband, it’s why we all like him, you sit down and he’s talking about policy. I went through two years of campaigning with Ed Miliband to try to defeat Boris Johnson, I failed but never once in all of that did Ed Miliband talk about a smear or negative campaigning. It was about positive policies, cutting the fares, building homes, that’s why so many people actually like Ed Miliband.

DM: Do they? But the public on the whole …

KEN LIVINGSTONE: This is why Cameron and the Tory party are starting to say we don’t want any televised debates at the next election …

DM: That’s because they don’t want Nigel Farage.

KEN LIVINGSTONE: No, Cameron is talking about just one. They don’t want the public to be able to see Ed and David Cameron and Clegg in a serious debate because they’ll make up their own mind. All they get at the moment is what’s coming out of the Tory press which is rubbishing it.

MEDHI HASSAN: On McBride, just taking you back to the general question about Ed Miliband and Tessa Jowell who talked on Friday about he must have known what was going on, I think Ed would be pleased to see Alistair Campbell’s blog today where he says Ed Miliband did know about it but he knew about it because he was trying to join with me to stop this stuff. The Blairites used to call Ed Miliband the emissary from Planet Beep and as I revealed a couple of years ago in the book on Ed Miliband, he actually rang up Damian McBride and attacked Damian McBride on the phone and said you’re lying against me, you’re briefing against me. McBride denied it and Ed said you’re lying and never spoke to him after that. So this is great stuff in the Westminster world, whether it will cut through I don't know but clearly it doesn’t help Labour to have all this reminiscing over Blair and Brown and New Labour …

DM: The broader point and the one that Ken Livingstone made, he is a likeable guy Ed Miliband and I can’t possibly comment either way can I but the fact is he has to get that appeal more broadly out there which he clearly isn’t doing. I think some of the people around him are in denial if they think he is. I’ve been having conversations with people around Ed Miliband for three years now and they keep saying, it’s coming, it’s coming, we’re turning a corner, it’s changing. The polls suggest it isn’t. Now whether or not that means he’ll lose the next election is a separate question but there is no denying that he hasn’t cut through as an individual party leader. Whether that will help on Tuesday or not I don't know.

DM: Lord Falconer, do you go along with that? He’s still got a way to go if he is going to get the public to like him and indeed trust him.

LORD FALCONER: I think the McBride type stuff filling the airwaves makes it all the more important that as Ken rightly says the debate moves on to policy and what does the Labour party offer to the public and that is plainly what this conference is designed to do. It is designed to show the substance, show what the brief is in Labour and show our direction of travel. If that cuts through then that will be …

DM: But you know more about it than I do, it’s not just about the message, it’s about who delivers it. Why did we see Ed Miliband out with his wife and his children cavorting on the beach the other day?

MEDHI HASSAN: Finally.

DM: Finally says Mehdi Hassan but that’s a so-called media opportunity, it’s saying to the public, like me, I’m a family guy.

LORD FALCONER: Of course but the media opportunity is not just to show the colour of a jumper, it is in order to get a platform in which your policies and your direction of travel become known to the public. Of course you’re right, Dermot, the public need to know the person that’s giving the message but they respect the guy, they respect the politician who has got something to say and something to say about the lives of the votes they’re seeking. And that’s what Ed is doing at this conference.

DM: Do you think that is going to have resonance, this relentless focus now on practical issues, the cost of living?

MEDHI HASSAN: I think it has to have resonance. Let me go back to a point I made earlier which was that Mitt Romney tried the cost of living and it didn’t work. The difference here and where Ed Miliband can take some hope is, of course Mitt Romney came across as a plutocrat, wealthy, out of touch and in this country, whether he likes it or not, that translates into David Cameron and not Ed Miliband. The one poll rating that Ed Miliband trounces David Cameron on is in touch with ordinary people so it makes sense to focus on that and some of the policies are very good and popular policies.

DM: So you go along with that Ken?

KEN LIVINGSTONE: Yes and let’s not forget, when Mrs Thatcher won that election in ’79, Jim Callaghan was about 20 points ahead of her in the personal ratings but her economic message chimed with the public, that’s why Labour lost.

DM: Interesting. Ken Livingstone, Medhi Hassan and to Lord Falconer in Brighton, thank you all very much indeed, very interesting.