ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The Conservative’s expectations for last week it’s fair to say were fairly low and it is also fair to say their expectations were therefore met.  So what does that say about a party in government?  In a moment I’ll speak to the Conservative MP for Runneymede and Weybridge who also happens to be the Secretary of State for Defence, Philip Hammond.  Well before I speak to Philip Hammond, here’s what Conservative MP Jackie Doyle-Price had to say to Sky’s Jason Farrell about the party’s performance on Friday.

JACKIE DOYLE-PRICE: We can represent people in communities like this and we need to be more out on the front foot.  I think it’s going to be a ground war more than an air war and the political classes have spent far too much time, dare I say it, worrying about what people like you are going to say about us rather than worrying about what people who live here think about us and that’s what’s got to change. 

DM: So let’s say a very good morning then to Philip Hammond and taking on board what was just said there, you are presumably part of the political classes.  You’re not listening and you’re not understanding what real people think, how are you going to respond to that?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well I think Jackie’s right, we have to clearly hear the message that we’re receiving.  UKIP is a protest party, most of the people who are voting for UKIP – not all of them but most of them – are disillusioned voters of other parties who have moved to UKIP to send us a message and we’ve got a year to show them that we’ve got that message.  We’ve got to reiterate our continuing story about how our economic plan is delivering for Britain, recognising that not everybody is feeling the benefit of that yet, we’ve got to make sure they do and we’ve also got to express the specific concerns that people are articulating about immigration and about Europe.

DM: That’s the point isn’t it, pretty explicit messages as you say from those UKIP supporters whether they are there to stay or not so what practically do you do?   How do you respond to that?  You’ve had a long time to listen and understand, we know what those UKIP supporters are saying primarily about immigration, how will you respond to those and how will you get immigration down, net migration down to that target of tens of thousands?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well it’s partly about communicating better what we are doing because we’re already doing quite a lot but these things take time to deliver effect and it’s partly about going further and we will look at every avenue available to us to reduce net migration still further in pursuit of the target which we have.  We’re looking at ways in which we can deal with people coming from the European Union who are not genuinely exercising their freedom of movement  to work but are abusing that freedom of movement but in the long term, the way to fix the problem of European Union migration is to renegotiate the relationship we have with the EU, change the rules in agreement with our European neighbours to stop this vast mass movement of people across the continent which is destabilising not only Britain but other high income countries in the European Union as well.

DM: Well let’s deal more explicitly then with some of those measures, you are talking about in the shorter term, I’m hearing that you are considering measures to be announced in the Queen’s Speech to further discourage people coming here to claim benefits, making the time they spend here, they have to be here for a longer time without being able to claim benefits, is that the kind of thing you can move on, discouragement?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Yes, we’ve already announced some measures and we haven’t stopped looking for more things that we can do.  I don't think anybody that knows Iain Duncan Smith or Theresa May would doubt for a moment their determination to leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of additional tools that we can use to achieve our target of getting net migration down to the tens of thousands.

DM: Interesting you mention the referendum there and you mentioned Iain Duncan Smith because the Work and Pensions Secretary said that while he was out on the doorstep campaigning during the course of these elections, he said a lot of people didn’t know about the Conservative pledge to hold a referendum. 

PHILIP HAMMOND: One of the enduring lessons of the political bubble is however often you say something, there are still people who haven’t heard it so as I said a moment ago, part of this is about communicating the message of what we have done and the commitments that we have already made, that we have made an irrevocable pledge to an in/out referendum in the next parliament.

DM: There are suggestions that you should bring that forward to 2016, that pledge, rather than 2017.

PHILIP HAMMOND: I personally don’t think that makes sense. I think if we are going to renegotiate the relationship that Britain has with the European Union, we should do that as a serious exercise, working with countries like Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, who are also deeply concerned about these issues.  There’s an earthquake going on in Europe, it’s not just Britain.

DM: What about enshrining that though in law?  We remember the private members bill, it got through the first reading in the House of Commons, could you bring that back and give it a second reading?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well we are very much hoping that in the private member’s ballot after this Queen’s Speech there will be another Conservative member, highly placed, who will be prepared to take up such a bill and give it another go.

DM: So you could have that enshrined in law by the time of the next general election?

PHILIP HAMMOND: We can’t do it as a government bill because our Liberal Democrat coalition partners won’t allow us to put through a government bill but the Conservative party is absolutely committed to this and if we can enshrine it in law through a private members bill we will do so but of course the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party are flat out opposed to a referendum that would give the British people the final say on our membership of the European Union and they will oppose such a bill in parliament.

DM:     You mention your Liberal Democrat colleagues in government, you must be reading today about this letter, this petition that some Lib Dems have come up with to get rid, ask Nick Clegg to stand down, whatever it is.  Would that damage the coalition should that happen?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well it’s not for me to say who should lead the Liberal Democrat party, that’s their business but I will say this, the Liberal Democrats came in to coalition with us to do a job.  We don’t agree on everything, in fact we disagree on many things but we do agree that there was an urgent need to deal with Britain’s economic and fiscal problems and we’ve made excellent progress in addressing those issues but we haven’t yet finished the job.  If the Liberal Democrats as a party want to be credible, I would suggest they are not going to enhance their credibility by pulling out of the coalition with the job half done.

DM: One further question then about the UKIP supporters, whether they are lent, borrowed or to stay, there comes a point though doesn’t there, Secretary of State, where you have to depart from them.  Some of the core UKIPpers, the leadership, want to leave the European Union, presumably when you have those renegotiations with the powers that be if you are back in government, there comes a point where you have to go to the country and say we recommend that we stay in, you are actually wrong about us leaving.  We can control migration, we can do other things, we can reform our relationship with the European Union but we want to stay in.

PHILIP HAMMOND: If we can get a good enough deal in our renegotiation with the European Union, then we want to look at the benefits of being in the single market principally and the ability to control to a certain extent what’s going on, against the costs.  There will always be some costs, there is always some trade off when you are in a collective organisation but the important thing is, it’s not us that will make that decision, it’s not a little group in a room in Downing Street, it is the British people in a referendum and the only party that can deliver a referendum is the Conservative party.  UKIP won’t be able to deliver a referendum, Liberal Democrats and Labour refuse to allow the British people to have their say in a referendum.

DM: But it’s that referendum itself, when it comes, the expectation is that if the negotiations go successfully from your point of view, you have vote yes in it and there are the diehard UKIPpers, not even the diehards, that’s what the party is all about, they are going to vote no.  They regard it as irredeemably flawed, it doesn’t matter about the negotiations, you must have heard what Mr Farage says about it, it’s over for Britain in the European Union whatever happens.

PHILIP HAMMOND: There are three types of UKIP voters, there are absolutely core committed UKIP voters, there is a ring of people around that who are very concerned about this issue and may stick with UKIP but it is up to us to produce a credible alternative and then there are the lender voters, people who I’ve met on the doorsteps in my constituency and many of my colleagues have met who say this is a European election, a local election, we’re going to vote UKIP to give you a kicking but don’t worry, we’ll be voting Conservative in the general election.

DM: And how many of those you think are lender voters, what is the proportion there?  Because we understand about half the UKIP vote seems to have come from the Conservatives.

PHILIP HAMMOND: It is a significant number of people but over the past couple of years there is no doubt that UKIP has been taking votes disproportionately from the Conservatives but it is also clear in this election that their appeal is changing, that they are now taking Labour voters and they will, if they are going to be credible as party, they will have to tackle Labour voters, core Labour voters in the run up to the general election.

DM: Just a quick question on perhaps the Cheeky Rafiki, the search for that yacht and it seems the unfortunate outcome of that.  They are saying that Britain wasn’t able to participate very well in that search because we have lost all of our maritime search aircraft.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well air/sea rescue is organised on a geographical basis and this particular very tragic incident happened in the United States air/sea rescue area. 

DM: But you got rid of all the Nimrod.

PHILIP HAMMOND: Yes, but it’s in the United States area, this would always have been a search by the United States coastguard. Because the US went the extra mile and continued the search far longer than they would normally have done because of our good government to government relations, we contributed a C130 to that search.  That is very unusual, it wouldn’t normally be our responsibility to …

DM: A C130 with binoculars and eyeballs we were told by those on board, that was the kind technology they had.

PHILIP HAMMOND: It was carrying out a visual search, that’s right.

DM: But if that had happened closer to our shores we couldn’t have put any Nimrods in the air.

PHILIP HAMMOND: I’ve read a lot of nonsense about what the Nimrod MRA4 could and couldn’t do, the truth is it couldn’t fly, that’s why we abandoned the project, it couldn’t get certificated for safe flying because of the massive problems in the project.  We had spent £800 million more than the budget and we were nowhere near having an aircraft that flew, this is one of the worst legacies we inherited from the Labour government and we had to scrap it in the interests of keeping the defence budget credible.

DM: A quick last question on Prince Charles’s reported comments about the Russian president and his actions in Crimea, likening him in some respects to Hitler in the Sudetenland, do you think that has damaged relations with Russia?  Well we know that it has enraged President Putin.

PHILIP HAMMOND: I think our relations with Russia are pretty damaged by events over the last few months.  We’ve spent twenty odd years trying to draw Russia into the community of nations where we solve differences through diplomacy, where we recognise that you can’t change international boundaries by military force and unfortunately what we’ve learned over the last few months is that Russia rejects that rules based international system, operates entirely in its own self-interest, believes that it can settle international disputes by the use of military force and that means that we will have a different type of relationship with Russia in the future.

DM: So Prince Charles was right, there are a lot of parallels with 1938?

PHILIP HAMMOND: Well I’m not going to comment on Prince Charles’s comments, what he said.  You asked me about our relationship with Russia, how relationship with Russia is a lot more frosty today than it was six months ago and I expect that we will have a very different and more distant relationship with Russia in the future.

DM: Secretary of State, thank you very much indeed for your time.  Defence Secretary Philip Hammond there.