ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now we’re going to look through the Sunday papers and I’m joined by Liberty Director, Shami Chakrabati, the Observer’s Chief Political Commentator, Andrew Rawnsley and the Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party, Michael Fabricant. A very good morning to you all and thanks for volunteering for the task, we will commence. I want to start with this, because we’ve been talking about it an awful lot on the programme today, migrants facing some kind of council house limits. Michael, start us off with this, we’re going to hear more of this in a speech from the Prime Minister tomorrow, it’s going to be enormously popular with members of your party isn’t it?

MICHAEL FABRICANT: It will and I think it will be popular generally. Part of the problem has been, hasn’t it, that you’ve had particular tensions in places like east London and other parts where people are saying look, you’ve got migrants coming in, bumping us off the housing list and all the rest of it but the problem has been that we can’t discriminate against other European Union members so what he’s saying, and it’s quite clever this I think, is to say you’ve got to be resident in a particular areas, whether you’re British or whether you’re a migrant, for two to five years before you can get on that housing list. It just stops people coming in and bumping more resident people off that list and I think it will actually be a good thing for race relations.

DM: So clever politically then, Andrew, I mean obviously the threat of UKIP is there?

ANDREW RAWNSLEY: Yes, it will play to quite a lot of voters I’m sure, especially UKIP inclined voters who the Conservatives have been losing to UKIP and people like Michael are very worried about it. I do worry though about the … I mean there is a case for updating the EU’s laws on these things as well because they are a bit out of date but I do worry about the underlying implication that Britain has become a magnet for foreign scroungers. Actually if you look at the figures from Iain Duncan Smith’s own department, 7% of working age migrants claim benefits, 17% of Brits claim benefits – most migrants coming to Britain are coming because they want to build a life, they are probably enterprising folk who in other speeches David Cameron will celebrate immigration, say they have enriched our country. I think Michael’s party has to sort its head out a bit on this. I mean are we saying to the rest of the world and it’s talent stay out or are you saying we welcome people who are …

DM: Shami, do you think this specific policy, do you think it’s legal? There might be some human rights here, you come here, get a job here, you haven’t been here for five years but end up losing your job and being forced to sleep on the street or whatever?

SHAMI CHAKRABATI: You know, the nasty rhetoric is almost worse than anything that will actually come out I suspect in the detail of the policy and Chris Bryant earlier was saying to us that he thinks councils already have the power to act in this way and if that’s true then it is particularly distasteful that what we’ve got is reaching for that nasty xenophobic button because we’re trying to …

MF: But people are worried though, aren’t they, Shami?

SC: People are worried, how do you deal with people’s worries? Do you deal with people’s worries in a calm rational way or do you start making nasty speeches about …

MF: Do you think David Cameron will be nasty? He doesn’t do that .

SC: I don't know, I’ll wait to hear the speech but my own view is that if you want to compete with UKIP and the BNP and parties that are a little bit nasty about race and immigration, it is better to challenge them with calm reasoned argument.

DM: Andrew, it’s interesting isn’t it that all the parties are being pulled this way on the debate. Nick Clegg has …

AR: Yes, he’s adjusted his position and so has Labour a bit although I’m not sure they are always reading the voters right because when the British Social Attitudes – and I’ll be brief Dermot – asked people about this, they found most people actually had a quite utilitarian attitude towards immigration, they didn’t judge people by their colour of their skin or their religion or what part of the world they came from, they just said if immigrants are going to come and they enrich our country, we should welcome them.

SC: But there isn’t enough housing, there should be more housing.

DM: That will take us into the budget. Michael, show us this story in the Telegraph, ‘Church split as parishes defy ban on gay blessings’. What’s this about? I thought you had rather cleverly come up with more or less an exemption for the Church of England in your party?

MF: Well one of the great problems I think has been for the Conservative party, and I think it’s a temporary one, is the whole question of the gay marriage vote. A lot of Conservatives on the grass roots have got very upset by it. Myself, I think if two people want to get together, be happy and it doesn’t hurt anybody else, why not? But hey, that’s me. But I was just intrigued by this thing in the Telegraph which I’ve only just noticed by the way, it is beside the two Popes hugging each other which I think is a rather unfortunate juxtaposition, but we have a quote from the Bishop of Buckingham saying that the ban on offering blessings for civil partnerships is now being flouted by several parishes right across the United Kingdom and he says this was because he felt the blessings were logical, natural and compassionate.

SC: Surely this is just a question of religious freedom. I wouldn’t force any religion to do these blessings if they don’t want to, I don’t see that the Church of England should be forcing people not to.

AR: And we know it’s been split and this was always quite likely to happen that you would get some parishes that were very friendly on this issue and say yes, we have no problem with it and the more traditional ones would have nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s okay for the moment as a solution.

MF: And there is quite an age divide. It’s interesting in the UK as a whole that younger people will say what’s the issue, what is the problem?

DM: Indeed. Shami, your first story for us, secret courts which is incredibly important but a lot of people aren’t really aware what’s going on. There is a big vote coming up in the Lords this week isn’t there?

SC: There’s a big vote coming up in the Lords on Tuesday and I would say this wouldn’t I but this is a thoroughly disgusting piece of legislation that will turn our courts, the ordinary civil courts, the high court and so on, into Kafka-esque secret courts.

DM: What has Ken Clarke done?

SC: What he’s done is to say during the earlier passage of the Bill that it won’t apply to people’s liberty, it wouldn’t apply when people were applying for habeas corpus, when people are in custody and they want to be released, that would not ever engage a secret court and now it turns out that the government has changed its position on that so it seems like the government doesn’t even know what its legislation is going to do.

DM: So technically you could be arrested and more or less disappear then because nobody knows what’s going on?

SC: Basically you are trying to challenge, it now emerges that you could be trying to challenge your detention and the government is saying it’s a national security case. You and your lawyers are out of court, the press and the public are out of court and government lawyers get to have a secret chat with the judge. Now I’m sorry, that is not justice.

MF: Hang on, a couple of issues here. I just want to say first of all, when you read more into this article it says that in the same session – it is actually a non-story – it says in the same session that Ken Clarke corrected himself in saying that actually the official line is you can’t envisage a situation where habeas corpus is … but as far as the issues of the courts themselves are concerned, which is what Shami has been talking about, we are talking about security cases. I don't think it’s a case, Dermot, of you being taken away and your wife asking where you are, it is where intelligence information has to be given and there has been a number … let me just finish for a moment, there have been a number of instances recently where convictions have failed because intelligence services can’t give their information out in a public court because it endangers the lives of the security agents involved.

SC: No, Michael, it’s not about convictions, I’m sorry you’re just incorrect. This is not about criminal cases, you talked about convictions but this is about civil courts, this is about people who bring claims against the government or it could be against the police or the army or whatever and they say the state has abused its power and a Minister says it is a national security case. It could be a public order case, it could be someone whose loved one was killed in friendly fire in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever and they sue the government and the government gets to have a private chat with the judge and stitch up the case. That is not justice.

MF: Do you think judges can be stitched up that easily?

SC: A judge who doesn’t see one side of the argument may be stitched up.

DM: We’re moving on to a story that is on everyone’s lips, the weather. What is going on at the moment?

AR: The Mail on Sunday has got a nice front page and it says ‘When will it ever end?’ Well of course it will end at some point, I don't think it’s going to be snowing in July but also, it is quite a pretty picture they’ve got but of course also on this front page it tells us there is a serious side to this and they come up with a figure of 5000 deaths being blamed on the big freeze. I’m not quite sure how they arrived at that but showing that for some people it has consequences. In other papers there is this alarming prospect that we might simply run out of gas because our storage facilities are so poor and some experts are saying we are about a week away from having to turn off the lights and that is very, very worrying.

DM: It’s a strange policy, reading into it. The policy seems to be, given our reliance on gas and okay we used to supply quite a lot of it ourselves but we just pay more and the ships at sea with liquid petroleum gas on it, they’ll come to us because we’ll pay them more. That doesn’t seem much of a policy to me.

AR: And it also means that the consequence a bit further down in the line is that your power bills go through the roof, again, as if they hadn’t been rising.

MF: How did this story arise? Because we’ve got three interconnectors, that’s a posh word for pipes, between the UK and the continent and one of them went down for a couple of hours and there was horror, shock. It was reopened again but it did show the vulnerability.

AR: And it does underline how you don’t want to be too dependent on one form of fuel mainly supplied from abroad because a lot of our gas also comes through the Straits of Hormuz, from Qatar and …

MF: And that’s why we should be getting the nuclear power stations opened sooner rather than later in my view.

AR: Well you could equally conclude we should be investing in more renewables so we’re not dependent on foreign supplies.

MF: As long as there are no wind farms in Lichfield.

DM: Shami, I’m going to jump a story here and I want to highlight this one, I like this one, David Bowie, the pop star poet and what a resurgence and what a clever marketing campaign he has and he hasn’t spent anything on it.

SC: Well there’s an exhibition at the V&A which looks at this remarkable artist and remarkable career and yes, it coincides with a new album. I’m a fan and I love the new album and you know with these things it’s always fashionable to rubbish an artist’s more recent work and say nothing’s been good since Hunkydory but I think the new album The Next Day is really wonderful, a wonderful album.

DM: It’s that last word in the headline, enigma, that’s worked really well for him, this ever changing personality.

AR: Brilliant, all these different identities, who’s the real David Bowie, well of course he’s all of them and a master of reinvention to sustain his career and still be doing very creative things.

SC: And he’s a visual artist, he’s a poet, he’s a musician, he’s so many things.

DM: A renaissance man. Andrew, you’ve got this story on the Russians, we’ve been talking about them with Berezovsky but of course their role in the Cyprus crisis, Cyprus went to them to see if they would help to bail them out and they came back with a flea in their ear so they’re not happy, Putin’s not happy.

AR: Certainly not happy and they are bringing a whole new dimension to this as this grows saying that the Kremlin could punish Europe in reprisal for Cyprus. Well as we know Europe is quite dependant on them for gas for instance, it goes back to that earlier story, they have the gas weapon and they’re also saying, well of course – there is somebody quoted here, a former Kremlin advisor, saying of course there are lots of German assets for instance in Russia, maybe we could retaliate by freezing or sequestering some of them. So although everybody says Cyprus is very small and it is relatively small in EU terms, but it’s getting quite big in the geopolitics stakes.

MF: And it is a worry for the euro and I must come up with this marvellous quote from Jean-Claude Trichet, the head of the European Central Bank, back in 2008 he said – I won’t put on the French accent …

AR: Oh go on, go on.

MF: For Cyprus the adoption of Europe provides protection against financial turbulence.

DM: And on that note we must end it, thank you all very much indeed. Michael, Andrew, Shami, very good to see you.