Murnaghan 24.01.16 Paper Review with Suzanne Evans, Deputy Chairman of UKIP [only]

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Let’s start by taking a look through today’s newspapers and I’m joined by UKIP’s Deputy Chairman Suzanne Evans, the broadcaster John Sergeant and the journalist and documentary maker Jenny Kleeman, a very good morning to you all.  The first story, the gloves are off as the Tory rift widens.  This story, if true, must be music to your ears Suzanne, a sense of ‘I told you so’.

SUZANNE EVANS:  There’s always of course ‘I told you so’.  I mean Cameron is Europhile through and through, he does not want to leave the European Union, this renegotiation process is a complete sham, he is staging bang the table rows with the Commissioners to basically try and keep the status quo and as John said, we do need to be frightened in a sense because voting to stay in the European Union doesn’t mean we’ll be voting to keep the status quo, it will be full steam ahead to full political and federal union, an EU army, an EU wide police force, complete open borders, we’ll eventually be forced to adopt the euro I’m quite sure so fear has got to come into it, I agree we need to put a view of what we’d look like as well but …

JOHN SERGEANT: That is a very old fashioned view of the way Europe comes together when it’s clearly splitting apart, I’ll just make that point.

SUZANNE EVANS:  Well that’s another issue, yes, ultimately.  

DM: Suzanne, the Mail on Sunday’s lead today about a Jihadi dad.

SUZANNE EVANS:  Yes, a most horrific story, a six year old – there’s the picture, a six year old being groomed in ISIS theology, ISIS propaganda and not shown in the paper is this little girl as well, a tiny little girl dressed up in a pink hijab we’re told.  Huge radicalisation going on clearly in some minority of Muslim families in Britain but also you look at, there’s a piece in the Sunday Times today as well about an Islamic school that has banned pupils, boys and girls from talking to each other.  It’s a private secondary school in Croydon, it prohibits any kind of interaction between boys and girls in the school, absolutely appalling, a Saudi ideology there.

DM: So do you think what’s happening in British society is we’re talking the talk, we hear pronouncements almost on a weekly basis from various government ministers about fighting extremism, the messages of hate and poison but it seems to go in certain areas uninterrupted.

SUZANNE EVANS:   Well it seems to go on and also of course the way that the government is trying to respond to this now is to say that any organisation interacting with a child for more than six hours a week should be subject to Ofsted registration, they’re using a sledgehammer to crack a nut here and this of course is going to take in things like Sunday schools, scout groups and so on and so forth and be a real problem, it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  We all know where the problem is, the problem is in a small number of madrassas in this country, the problem is in families that are promoting this kind of ideology, it’s in Islamic schools, again a minority.

DM: So what do you do, close those madrassas and those schools down and arrest those parents?

SUZANNE EVANS:  Absolutely, absolutely, you don’t pick on other church schools as well, Sunday schools are not a problem, they’re not promoting extremism or violent extremism.

DM: Should we feel sorry for MPs who say they’re scared, they’re worried about their voters?  
SUZANNE EVANS:  Just because you’re in the public eye doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the same protection of the law of the land as everybody else and it doesn’t mean you have the right to be a figure of bullying and intimidation.  I’m sure all of us who are in public life have had that on social media haven’t we?   I’ve been spat at once in the street and been the subject of people yelling at me in the street actually when I was a Conservative councillor as well.  Interestingly the survey that Jenny mentioned, local councillors came a little bit higher up the list in terms of public trust which is funny because of course many local councillors go on to become Members of Parliament, presumably they become completely untrustworthy at that point.  

DM: Let’s move on to Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to the refugee camp in France, Suzanne you picked this out as a headline ‘Let in all refugee children’.

SUZANNE EVANS:   It’s very easy to look at a refugee child and absolutely want to mother them and to look after them and to take them in but you have to ask the question, who is going to pick up the tab?  I visited Kent recently and I met up with the leader of Kent Council, they have 720 unaccompanied refugee children who they are looking after at the moment and a 6.5 million shortfall in the funding to look after those children.  There comes a point where you have to say there just isn’t the public money to be able to be as welcoming as we would like to be.

DM: Doesn’t there come a point where the moral and humanitarian imperative is so strong?  There are suggestions today that some ministers are saying to Mr Cameron, well 3500 unaccompanied children, parallels with the Kinder Transport of the 1930s, we are a rich nation, we have problems but what about those 3000?

SUZANNE EVANS:  Well absolutely we need to do as much as we possibly can but there has to be a limit.  What happens when social services get so stretched that we see another Baby P or another Victoria Climbé?  The resources that we have available in social services are limited and we must not do anything beyond what we can do that we put other people at risk.

JOHN SERGEANT: That’s the old argument I’m afraid, just because you can’t do it all doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t try.

SUZANNE EVANS:  But we are doing a lot, we take 2000 asylum seekers every year.

JOHN SERGEANT: The Kinder Transport comparison is a very strong one and you think of those people even now, old people talking about how they were saved.  

SUZANNE EVANS:  If we can have some sort of system whereby we, like we had in the war, we take people in but there has to be … the ultimate solution has to be security in the countries they have come from so they can go back when they reach adulthood.  

DM: The next story is also about coming into Britain but if you are very rich it is easy, how our fawning politicians welcome the world’s rich, many of them Russians.  

SUZANNE EVANS:  I am absolutely horrified by this.  As Jenny says, what we call the ‘buy to leave’ market in London is huge now, wealthy foreigners buying up property, never actually living in them. Interestingly Boris actually, I am absolutely going to nail Boris for this.  I went to a Boris public questions at City Hall quite recently when one of the Green members of the London Assembly questioned why he is constantly letting foreign buyers buy more and more property in London and he called them xenophobic.  This isn’t xenophobia, there’s a housing crisis, this is an issue that needs to be addressed.  Kit Mulhouse, deputy mayor, again I heard him speak in Wimbledon, he talked about how wonderful it would be if the Chinese could buy up all of Wimbledon Broadway.  I thought what planet are you on, by what measure is that a sensible suggestion?

DM: Well we’re on live television and our time has run out I’m afraid, thank you very much indeed helping us go through some of the stories in the Sunday papers.

SUZANNE EVANS:  There’s never enough time!