ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well who would have thought that as the Lib Dem conference got underway, Nick Clegg would be at number 34 in the iTunes chart? The musical parody of his tuition fees apology went viral this week and if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a bit of it … Well let’s say a very good morning then to Tim Farron, Lib Dem President, have you downloaded it yet then Mr Farron?

TIM FARRON: I haven’t had a chance to and I certainly will but I think it’s an outrage though. I spent four years as a teenager working my socks off in a band and we didn’t even get a record contract, he’s been doing this three days and he’s at number 36 or something.

DM: But are you joining in the joke or are you just grinning and bearing it, in all seriousness?

TF: No, I think it is a surrealist take on what we did and you’ve got to roll with it really. I think what Nick did was immensely gutsy and the right thing to do and I think the overwhelming majority of the British people I think accept the apology for what it is, a genuine apology. The way it has been taken up I think has been benign and surreal, the video, the song and I don’t think it does us any harm whatsoever and if you can’t laugh at yourself, well you’ll be on your own because most people are laughing at you.

DM: But it hasn’t really fixed it yet, has it? Of all the clouds that hang over the Liberal Democrats in general and Nick Clegg in particular it is the issue of tuition fees and it is reflected in his poll rating, he is one of the least popular leaders since Michael Foot thirty years ago. TF: Well Michael Foot got 28% and 209 MPs so we’ll have that. In the end I think you’ve got to look at where we are nationally. Undoubtedly the tuition fees issue and I thought the pledge was a fine pledge to make and we should have kept it and that’s why I voted against the fee rise, but I also recognise that many of my colleagues felt differently and also recognise that we shouldn’t have done what we did. Now how many politicians actually go out and say sorry? Miliband and co have not said sorry for the Iraq war, for crippling the NHS with PFI debts or for the many other awful things they did, crashing the economy above all else, and Nick Clegg has done something very, very unusual and said sorry. I don’t imagine it will fix the trust issue at all over night, reputations take years to build and seconds to lose, you have to be very careful and you have to work very hard over a number of years to regain that connection with the electorate but I think the fact that Nick has done what he’s done, he said it and we have to move on. People will not forgive us, some of them, and some people will and that’s up to them.

DM: It’s interesting, we have time on a Sunday show with the benefit of hindsight then, Nick Clegg now saying he wouldn’t have done it with the benefit of hindsight as I say, you saying at the time you wouldn’t have done it, so what should the Lib Dems have done not so very long ago? Walked out of government and had another election very soon after the last one?

TF: No, my view is that we did the right thing signing up to join the coalition. We had two options, one was to do just what you said, Dermot, which was to sit on our hands and let David Cameron call a second election in the October of 2010, he would have won that election almost certainly and then we would have had an awful lot worse situation than we’re in now. The pension would not have been increased, tax would not have been decreased for low earners …

DM: Sorry to butt in but just focusing it down on the issue of tuition fees, that’s what the apology is about, that’s what you all say now you wish you hadn’t done, what should you have done as you fought the Conservatives against doing it? Should you have threatened to have walked out?

TF: Well personally I think we should have argued for it much harder in the coalition negotiations and we should have made sure there was a red line there but this is the first coalition in peace time in living memory and we all make mistakes. The Tories did, we did and I’m afraid that’s something where we made an error, we should have been much, much harder on that issue. To me it mattered an awful lot. I think our manifesto policy, our proposal, was much more radical than the pledge to not increase tuition fees so I felt relatively comfortable signing the pledge because it was a relatively modest one. We should have fought harder to make sure we kept that promise and I think that’s what we are now rightly apologising for as a party, you get some things wrong.

DM: Looking to the future then, whether it be Labour or the Conservatives, if there is a hung parliament, you’re saying your personal view is you wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, you’d like this confidence in supply situation where you more or less vote on merit?

TF: No, no doubt we’ll make different mistakes, it would be nice to not make the same ones but all I’m saying is there are more alternatives. Last time round because we didn’t have a fixed term parliament, in other words David Cameron could have called an election any time he wanted, then it was essential that we formed a coalition. At the next election, if it’s a balanced parliament then yes, there could be coalition which may or may not involve the Liberal Democrats, who knows? I come from Cumbria where there is a Labour/Tory coalition running the county council, not very well, but there is a third option or a fourth option if you like which is next time round you could have a minority government simply because there would be a fixed term parliament and we’d know the next election would be another five years off. I’m not saying I favour that, Dermot, I’m just saying that we need to remember there are more than two or three options.

DM: In terms of who you might find more common ground with next time round in the event of a hung parliament, it’s got to be Labour hasn’t it? Here you are talking at that conference an awful lot about the rich and the wealthy bearing their fair share and I’ve just talked to Rachel Reeves from the Labour party saying a lot of what you’re saying is in tune with our thinking.

TF: Well it can’t be that in tune with their thinking given that they didn’t have thirteen years of opportunity to do something about all that. My take on it is that, first of all the result of the general election which is two and a half years away is in the hands of the British electorate, it’s up to them and as much as it’s nice for, forgive me, nerds like you and me to be talking about all this but the reality is that most people out there are more bothered about the amount of tax they’re paying now, the security of their job, what their mortgage or their rent costs them, whether they can even find a decent affordable home, those things matter now and it’s how we perform in these next two and a half years which will dictate whether the British people give us a good result, a poor result or something in the middle. After that, well we’ll interpret what the British people tell us.

DM: Right, specifics. We heard your leader say this morning that he wants to press on in this parliament with that issue of making the wealthy pay more, what is it? Is it beyond a mansion tax, is it a mishmash of clamping down on off-shore tax havens and looking more closely at people’s tax returns or is it something more specific?

TF: I’m sure mansion tax is a headline which we will certainly be pursuing and arguing for within coalition but there are a whole range of other wealth taxes that we need to be pursuing as well, not I should say out of the politics of envy or wanting to be punitive to people who create wealth, but actually to make sure those people who have benefited the most out of our society actually pay the fair share that they should be paying. The reality is that so many people at the bottom end of the income scale are paying more of their tax proportionately than the richest people and given that we are in immensely hard times and we are owing over a trillion pounds thanks to Labour’s record in government, we now have to do something to make up that deficit, to ensure that we improve our society and rescue our economy and we can’t be allowing that burden to fall on the shoulders of the poor which is what the Tories would probably want it to do and what Labour did allow it to do. We shall be making sure the richest people, those who particularly have unearned wealth, are paying their fair share. It is about designing taxes and we shall make sure that happens.

DM: But it all rings rather hollow. You had one and you voted to cut it, you had the top rate of income tax, the 50% rate which is coming down to 45% next year, for a millionaire that’s about 45 grand straight in the bank.

TF: That’s coalition for you, I’m afraid. The Liberal Democrats argued very strongly to cut tax for the lowest paid 23 million people in our society, the Tories wanted the 50p rate down to 45p to help 300,000 of the richest and I’m afraid it was a trade-off. We didn’t want to do it, we told them it was a stupid idea, we told them it would damage the government’s reputation and it has and I hope they may have learned from that rather foolish error. Our take though in return for that was to make sure we increased five-fold the wealth taxes we took from people, the tycoon tax and so on, that would actually replace what was lost through the 50p rate going on. But yes, absolutely, this government doesn’t only need to do the right thing, it needs to be seen to do the right thing.

DM: He’s made a lot of mistakes in your book, your leader Nick Clegg, in not being tough enough with his coalition partners. He wasn’t tough enough with tuition fees, he now admits that, he wasn’t tough enough over the top rate of tax, do you think you’d do a better job?

TF: No, I don’t. When all is said and done you’ve got to remember, you often talk and lots of other people talk about the Liberal Democrats as though we’d won the general election, as if we had some mandate to do everything we wanted. You do realise we got only 23% of the vote and only 8% of the MPs in parliament are Liberal Democrats and 92% therefore of the MPs in parliament are trying to stop us at every turn. What we need is the British people, we need public opinion to back us on campaigns for fairer taxes, for a more demand led approach to recovering the situation economically, for making sure we have a greener economy, we need public support because we have to win over the next two and a half years those battles in public opinion as well as in parliament. In a sense the next two and a half years is going to be a parliament within a parliament, there’s only two parties that matter, neither of them is Labour and us arguing for a better, fairer, greener Britain, that’s entirely down to us. The Tories and ourselves will be battling, it’ll be collegiate, there will be compromise, we’ll win some, we’ll lose some but we will be dependent on the British people’s support as we go forward and try and win those arguments in government in the next two and a half years.

DM: But do you think it’s worth apologising, you apologised for tuition fees, is it worth apologising for that cut in the top rate of tax? It would make what you’re saying about wealth taxes more credible wouldn’t it?

TF: Dermot, I’m sure you understand how coalition works and that is that two parties that think different things get together and compromise and sometimes you have to give away stuff you don’t like in order to get stuff you do. You’ve got to put yourself in Nick’s position, what would you do? You have the opportunity to liberate 23 million people from paying a significant amount of income tax in return for allowing 300,000 rich people getting some tax back, what do you do? Do you say no, you’re not giving tax cuts to your wealthy few mates but in return I can’t help the 23 million poorest people in this country? I would take the hit that Nick did, he made the right choice. I just think George Osborne made the wrong argument in the first place, he should have accepted the tax cuts for the least well off and not asked for a pound of flesh in return for the rich.

DM: Last though on Andrew Mitchell, beyond unacceptable, we know you think that, does that mean he’s beyond a place in government?

TF: I’ve only ever met Andrew Mitchell a couple of times and I personally found him to be a civilised guy but if what is reported is true, there’s all sorts of reports out there so I don’t want to be judge and jury on it, it certainly isn’t my decision, then what he said is utterly, utterly dreadful. To say to anybody actually but to say to a policewoman doing her duty, particularly dreadful in the current circumstances, and yes, he has got to answer for that but I couldn’t sack him, it’s not my job to make those decisions, it’s up to David Cameron. I think we have to wait and see how the truth pans out over the next day or two.

DM: Mr Farron, thank you very much. From one nerd to another, Tim Farron there at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton.