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COLIN BRAZIER: Now let’s have a look at the Sunday newspapers this morning and I’m joined by the former head of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Blair, a regular here, the Conservative MP Mark Field and the human rights activist, Bianca Gagger, welcome to you.  Bianca, you are going to start off with the Sunday Telegraph and a story about Sharia law. 

BIANCA JAGGER: It is a very disturbing article that solicitors have been told to draft Sharia law wills penalising widows and non-believers and what is extraordinary in it is it not only penalises women and widows but it would penalise any child who was born out of wedlock or any person who was adopted and it is quite amazing.  Baroness Cox says this violates everything that was done for us, it will make the Suffragettes turn in their graves and I am very disturbed to think this could be introduced and create a parallel legal system. 

CB: For some people this has already happened.

MARK FIELD: I think in fairness this is a slightly overblown story.  We’ve had Sharia compliant financial products for the last decade or so here in the UK and part of the idea is that under Sharia law you are not allowed to have credit and loans so you make them compliant so I think it would be wrong to suggest that what’s being proposed here is a massive overhaul of English law, it is to try and ensure that English law can be Sharia compliant in a minor way.  I don't think it is quite as fundamental a root and branch reform as is being suggested here by the Sunday Telegraph.

BIANCA JAGGER: And you think of the rights of women and of children out of wedlock will be protected?

MARK FIELD: I have a very strong sense that it will change at the margins but I don’t think that we’re going to see what is being focused on happening. 

CB:  From a criminal law perspective, Lord Blair, there is a view, isn’t there, that  a parallel situation is one which exists in some of our big cities?

LORD BLAIR: No, I don't think there is.  There is no parallel Sharia criminal law acceptable.  There have been these occasional vigilante groups walking around and they’ve been dealt with.  I tend to agree with Mark here that while we really need to keep an eye on this in terms of the rights of women and children, every time this gets mentioned it gets blown up into a bigger story, it’s like Rowan Williams giving a speech to some theological conference, do you remember, and we suddenly find …

CB: It has to be very carefully phrased. 

LORD BLAIR: But when you read it, that wasn’t the main thing so I think there’s something slightly, as Mark says, overblown about this one but it’s dangerous if it was to go to the place …

CB: I think overblown might be the right word to describe an obsession with microbes, so described in the Times, Lord Blair. 

LORD BLAIR: Well I just thought I’d start as a warm-up man for Mark really because actually it’s a story about Mark Field!  What I like about it is that this is an indication that there are other voices in the Conservative party than a line that just says all immigration is bad and I’ll leave Mark to say it. 

MARK FIELD: Thank you for teeing me up.  There is only one thing worse of course in politics than being in the papers and that’s not being in the papers but the point that I’m making, and I think quite a lot of my colleagues feel a little uneasy about this, is that we went into the last election with a frenzy about immigration across the political divide and therefore came up with this idea of net migration.  The trouble with net migration is you have so little control over it.  It is a net figure and in many ways actually the success of the British economy compared to many EU nations over the last four or five years has meant that more Spanish and French want to come here but by contrast many people who might otherwise have left haven’t and I think we need a policy on immigration, on migration, that isn’t about headline figures because what that has ended up doing is targeting  people who we shouldn’t be discouraging, students from across the globe, some really very talented individuals who are perhaps getting in here but it is taking a hell of a long time. 

CB: So when you picked up your newspaper on Friday morning and you saw Iain Duncan Smith – we’ve scheduled this wrongly haven’t we because we’ve just had him on, Iain Duncan Smith was talking about the necessity of making sure that British jobs go to British workers, does that represent dog-whistle politics to you?

MARK FIELD: It’s not so much dog-whistle politics because I think Ian Duncan Smith is right, where you have got relatively low skilled jobs, yes, we should be trying to get our unemployed people into those jobs but we are an open global economy, nowhere do I see that more than in London.  I accept I’m a central London MP and the nature of the seat I represent, 53% of my constituents including me for that matter, were born outside the UK but we need to encourage the brightest and best from across the globe, students in particular.  We have a fantastic offering with our higher education industry and what’s happening unfortunately is that many of those bright students are going to the US or to Australia and therefore are going to be ambassadors for those countries rather than for ours for the rest of their lives when they run successful businesses in the India’s and China’s and South Korea’s of this world. 

LORD BLAIR: And that’s not to mention nannies at all.

CB: Ouch.  We’ll talk about Ukraine in a moment but let’s move on if we can to the front page of the Observer, Bianca Jagger has picked that, Michelle Obama who has been in Beijing, she was playing Ping-Pong there a couple of days ago, wasn’t she, Michelle Obama, what’s she doing now? 

BIANCA JAGGER: Well I thought that she was very courageous.  She said at the University in Beijing that internet access was a universal right and I’m sure that she will be criticised by some but I feel that it’s great that Michelle Obama dare say that in China and that she had made an important point and I think that goes as well for what is happening in Turkey with Prime Minister Erdogan, forbidding or penalising Twitter.

CB: There’s a  question about whether he will be able to pull it off with Twitter isn’t there, he seeks to ban it. 

BIANCA JAGGER: Yes, but some can circumvent it and have been able to have access but it’s very, very difficult, you have to really know what you’re doing and be someone who is very active on Twitter.  I feel that is absolutely outrageous for countries who ban Twitter or any other use of social media. 

MARK FIELD: It Is very worrying what’s happening in Turkey actually. 

CB: Would they be allowed in the EU, they’d love to join wouldn’t they?

MARK FIELD: It’s a long, long way off them wanting to join and actually one of the interesting things is that Erdogan was a very forward looking premier in his early days but because of the coalition he’s had to form, particularly with small minority Islamist parties, he now is much more inward looking and you see this as part and parcel of this problem. 

CB: Should we talk pension?  You’re all right, Lord Blair, with a gold plated public sector pension, you don’t have to worry about pension contributions do you? 

LORD BLAIR: I think we all have to worry about this actually although I think Mac gets it best of all in the Telegraph, his cartoon has a Lamborghini garage with a notice saying ‘Only two pensioners at a time’ on it.  But the Observer runs with this story and so inside does Will Hutton commenting that this may be a pretty bad idea and I think what we’ve got here is a classic piece of politics, no consultation, suddenly emerged and has left the Labour party in a real pickle and I think what’s happened is this is a very clever policy.  The question is, is it the right policy because some of the long term implications of this are really difficult. 

CB: It is one of these absolute ideological dividers though isn’t it, between those people who feel you must be the author of your own fortune or your own doom or those more paternalistic people who feel actually people need to be sometimes protected from their own worst …

MARK FIELD: I’m more confident that people should be given the freedom to decide but where I think Ian is right on this is that this is very complicated and therefore not having had that consultation process in advance of the announcement, we shall see what happens in the next year or so as we begin to craft a bit of legislation to make it all operate.  The one thing that does occur to me is this, that one of the reasons we have a very generous tax regime for pensions is because the idea that you have this pot of money that will look after you in old age, insofar as you don’t have that money potentially long term and you can spend it in the shorter term, I think there will be ever more pressure to reduce those tax benefits for saving and I don't think that’s a healthy state of affairs.  I think we should be encouraging people, particularly as we all get older, to save as much as possible for their old age.

LORD BLAIR: And the other thing, this is, the coalition seems to be aiming at the older vote and for young people this is just another aspect of real difficulty because if these people then sell their pension annuity and buy a house to rent, all we are doing is pushing house prices up again so there is a long way to go for that. 

CB: The world has been gripped now for the best part of a fortnight by the fortunes or misfortunes of Flight MH370.  Mark you have a page from the Sun. 

MARK FIELD: Yes, I mean it’s a dreadful state of affairs.  I was in China the week before last and flew into Beijing literally about an hour after the MH370 was supposed to have landed and it’s a terrible human interest story because I think all of us who have flown in planes think gosh, how would we feel in the minutes if the plane was going out.  Also, dare I say it, we have got the world’s media out there in both Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and in Beijing trying to make sense of all of this, desperately trying to find a new angle on the story and the truth is we don’t know and I have a horrible sense that we may never, ever, rather like a Bermuda Triangle type plane, we may never find a way to …

CB: The Malaysians said on Friday, almost mantra like, reminding people it took two years to find the Air France flight and you wonder if they are starting to manage expectations slightly.  Bianca Jagger, can we move you on to the Times and the front page of the Times, this is a story about the National Health Service.

BIANCA JAGGER: This is a campaign that I would like to join and I already did this morning.  There is an enormous lapse in cancer care that is exposed this week and really it makes me terrified to think as a person who lives in this country that one in ten sufferers of bone, lung or gastric cancer take more than ten months to be diagnosed.  Really when I read this article the thing that really struck me is that we have rates below Poland and Slovenia for some cancers and the numbers that are in here are staggering.  The statement that was made by Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS England Medical Director who is backing the campaign, who says cancer survival rates have improved significantly but more action was required.  He says I’m not interested in an NHS that aspires to mediocrity and that is indeed what we are seeing today.

CB: You could argue that that was sloganeering, everybody wants an NHS that’s not going to aspire to mediocrity.

MARK FIELD: In fairness to Jeremy Hunt, who I think has done a very good job in putting himself forward as the patient’s champion, he is also very much focusing on things like dementia which is going to be looking to the future, is going be a long term problem.  Now that’s not in any way to denigrate the idea that cancer has to be looked after and whilst there have been improvements we are still quite low down the European ladders on this. 

BIANCA JAGGER: Do you agree with the fact that you need to see a doctor three times before you will be sent, if you have cancer, to go and see a specialist is something that is acceptable? 

MARK FIELD: No, it’s not.

BIANCA JAGGER: The critical time to be treated and the rates of survival are very low compared to many other European countries.

CB: We’re going to stay with the NHS, at least with general practice, the front page of the Observer.

LORD BLAIR: It actually links to Bianca’s story.  This is about the leader of the Royal College of GPs saying that the family doctor service is on the brink of extinction.  Again are we overblown or are we not overblown?  But the fact is, according to this newspaper here, general practice only receives 8% of the UKs health budget, 8% so 92% is spent elsewhere.  It’s a bit like in health, everybody knows that the real breakthroughs are public health but that the Nobel prizes go to interventionist surgery and in my business as was, everyone knows that neighbourhood policing is really the answer but the kudos goes to homicide detectives.  There’s something wrong if the cancer patients are taking this long to be diagnosed, we need some more GPs.  

MARK FIELD: On the brink of extinction again makes for great headlines and my own experience, and I am just one of 650 MPs but central London seems to have a very hyper mobile, hyper diverse population and we’ve seen a great improvement in our GP service.  I am not making a party political point here, it goes back a decade or 15 years, it’s just got a lot, lot better. Now it may be that whilst we’re doing good things in the middle of our big cities, it is less true in rural areas, I don't know if that was part of the point that was being made here but I think Ian’s right, the trouble really is that we tend to focus on particular elements of the health service with a lot of targets and a lot resource goes often to the exclusion of other areas and that applies on many areas of public service.  

CB: You can see Lord Blair putting away his reading spectacles which means we have come to the end of our newspaper review.  Ian, Mark and Bianca, thank you all very much for coming.