ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Time now to take a look through today’s Sunday papers, I’m joined now by the former Labour Mayor London, Ken Livingstone, by UKIPs spokesman for communities and by Andrew RT Davies who is the Leader of the Conservatives in the Welsh Assembly, a very good morning to you all.  Let’s dive straight in, an awful lot of politics to discuss haven’t we.  Ken Livingstone, you picked the first one, have you? 

KEN LIVINGSTON: It’s in the Observer and it is actually quite interesting, it’s got how UKIP did in the local elections last year and this year and if you look at the front page you would assume UKIP was about to form the next government and in actual fact they have slipped from 23% last year to 17, both Labour and the Tories are up and I do think that the closer you get to the election, the last people are going to be casting a protest vote, they come down to the choice of do you want a Labour government or a Tory one and Sky’s predictions were the same of the BBCs actually, to within about one seat, Labour if it had been a general election on Thursday would have a 20 seat lead over the Tories and the Lib Dems and yet if you look at the front pages of the papers, it’s all ‘Red Ed about to be sacrificed’ and all that. 

DM: In this other poll, Lord Ashcroft’s marginal poll, it says Labour would have a very substantial lead. 

KEN LIVINGSTONE: And nobody is going to blame him of being a leftie! 

DM: I just want to throw in here, we can’t discuss any polling surrounding the European elections but Suzanne Evans, that’s a good point Ken Livingstone is making, actually you didn’t do as well as is being made out.

SUZANNE EVANS: It’s lies, lies and damn lies, that’s what it is.  If you actually look behind these figures that Ken would obviously like to believe we didn’t actually field a full slate of candidates so if you take the seats where we didn’t have candidates in place, our vote share is actually nearer 30% so it’s gone up, sorry Ken.   

DM: But you lost your seat didn’t you, Suzanne? 

SUZANNE EVANS: I personally lost my seat, I was restanding, I defected from the Conservatives, I was loyal to my seat and it was one of the …

ANDREW DAVIES: But surely the thing we should all focus on is look at what the turnout was.   At the end of the day it was what, 36% in England and in think in Wales it was 31, 32%.  At a general election if you get under two-thirds of the electorate voting that’s a disaster.  You’ve got to put a bit of rationale behind all this.  Yes, there’s a protest vote, yes some people have taken UKIP lightly and I don't think that should be the case because ultimately they are a serious force in politics now but what they are a serious force for is because they are seen as a repository for the protest vote that the Liberal Democrats used to be. 

DM: We’ll come back to that but Suzanne, show us your story, you’ve got the Times haven’t you? 

SUZANNE EVANS: Well yes, I was just saying that was a protest vote, well the protest vote when you stack them up in a pile look exactly the same as everybody else’s. 

ANDREW DAVIES: What are the policies you are offering on the health service, what are the policies on education, what are the policies on … ?

DM: We are waiting for their manifesto.

ANDREW DAVIES: But we want to know, what improvements are you going to make in people’s lives. 

DM: We don’t know yet.   

SUZANNE EVANS: Well Andrew, one of the things that Labour in particular have been spinning over the last few days is that we are going to charge people to see their GP.  Absolute rubbish.  UKIP is totally committed to having the NHS free at the point of contact. 

DM: Okay, we await that manifesto.  Just bring that back up again if we can see it on the screen, I wanted to ask you a question about this, Farage in the pub, it’s kicking out time.  I was hearing on the Marr Show today you have tipped to take over from him if he’s kicked out. 

SUZANNE EVANS: He’s not going to be kicked out and I don’t think I’m going to be taking over from anybody.

DM: Do you like a pint?

SUZANNE EVANS: I do actually, I prefer a glass of champagne but there you are.  Unlike being in the Conservative party, we’re allowed to drink whatever we like. 

ANDREW DAVIES: I’m a Guinness man so don’t put me in there. 

KEN LIVINGSTONE: Me and David Mellor have him on our LBC show and he’s great fun to be on but when you actually press he is really a Thatcherite, he is pro-banker and all that and it is a big mistake for the parties to say oh it’s all racist and all that but the real thing that will alienate a lot of his support is to say actually if he gets in he will cut taxes for the richest. 

SUZANNE EVANS: But more importantly we would take everyone on minimum wage out of tax altogether.  That’s the other side of the story that people don’t talk about.  I’m glad you agree with that, that’s very important, if you are on minimum wage.

ANDREW DAVIES: What is the package that you’re offering?  For Nigel to disown completely the manifesto from 2010 as being a load of old rubbish as he put it I believe, what people really need to know now and over the next ten months is what are you going to do for the health service, what are you going to do for education, what are you going to do for local government … ?

SUZANNE EVANS: Council meritocracy, something that the Conservatives refused to vote on.  Grammar schools …

ANDREW DAVIES: Well in Wales for example last August I launched that policy on education and it was bringing the best part of grammar schools back.  The middle phase is a key part of what we need to develop.

SUZANNE EVANS: Well what a shame that Michael Gove doesn’t agree with you. 

ANDREW DAVIES: That’s devolution for you. 

DM: Andrew, bring us to your school holidays story at the front of the Times. 

ANDREW DAVIES: Well this is an interesting one.  I’m a father of four children, I live on a farm so I can find plenty of things for them to do during the long summer holidays but ultimately this is an issue for many people, what do they do with the children during the summer holidays but importantly, how do they break up the family time because this story is focusing on some of the penalties that are put on parents if they take children out of school during term time.  It’s a fine balancing act and I can fully understand what Michael Gove and the education department is trying to do here by driving up standards but I can also understand and have huge sympathy with individual parents trying to balance the life experience they can give their kids by taking them on holiday, giving them different experiences and I personally believe that schools should have the autonomy to make those key decisions.  That’s what we have head teachers for, that’s what we pay them to do and governing bodies. 

DM:     But the point is it is the schools making those decisions but it’s the parents quite often who just disappear with their children. 

ANDREW DAVIES: But the schools aren’t being given the opportunity to do that now.

KEN LIVINGSTONE: And if you try to take your children on holiday during school holiday time you can pay twice as much than if you do it during term time.  The obvious way round this, why does every school have to have the same holidays?  You could stagger it, you could actually shift it around a bit, make it a bit easier.

DM: There is another answer, Ed Miliband with his magic price controls could come in and say right, you can’t charge more for those holidays.

KEN LIVINGSTONE: That might be tempting, that might be a step towards Stalinism. 

DM: I didn’t think you’d disapprove of that. 

SUZANNE EVANS: Schooling is not just about maths and English and all the rest of it, it’s about a rounded education and we focus so much on academia in our schools that we forget that perhaps taking a child out to do something particularly special or to take them to a particular place is part of a more rounded education so I’m with Andrew on this one. 

KEN LIVINGSTONE: When I went to school working class kids were given the skills to get a good job, all that’s gone.  It’s all a focus on GCSEs and A levels, everything is focused towards university and half our kids will never get in to university, they’ve got to have proper skills. 

SUZANNE EVANS: But Ken that was your party that focused on getting to university …

ANDREW DAVIES: I suggest that you read our education policy in Wales, that is about giving vocational and academic parity. 

DM: It sounds like you have got a universal panacea there Andrew …

ANDREW DAVIES: It is, it is.

DM: You’ve just got to get people to vote.  Ken, you’ve got this story about Alistair Campbell advising the Egyptian leader, what’s all that about?

KEN LIVINGSTONE:  Well it is difficult to pin it down because he’s very good at not answering questions from the Mail and the  Mail has been going after Blair pretty relentlessly all the time but he talks about Tony Blair supported this Egyptian dictatorship.  I just read Harold Macmillan’s diaries, he was Prime Minister in the 50s and 60s and in there, let me tell you, he says ‘I think it would be undignified for a former Prime Minister to turn up on the board of a bank or a building society.’  In those days people came out of Number Ten Downing Street, they did voluntary work, they served charity stuff and all that and this running round the world advising some of the most abhorrent regimes, this is damaging Labour because it reminds them what was wrong with that last Labour government. 

DM: Very interesting, Ken Livingstone there says Tony Blair should take a leaf out of Harold Macmillan’s book.  You really are well read, from Stalin to Harold Macmillan!

KEN LIVINSTONE: Macmillan is more honest than Stalin. 

DM: Suzanne, you’ve got this about the HS2 protestors.

SUZANNE EVANS: Actually what I really wanted to say is I was looking at the papers this morning, the HS2 budget is already overspent by £87 million just on consultants alone. The original budget has now gone up to £188 million.  This is an horrendous white elephant, people don’t want it.  We have the staggering arrogance of the Conservative members of parliament in the House of Commons a couple of weeks ago, refusing to turn up because it was a hot potato in their constituencies so they didn’t have a vote.  The country can’t afford it, the country doesn’t want it.  We have heard people talking today about after the election and UKIPs rise, we’re listening, we’re really listening to what the people are saying and we’re going to change.  Well unless they get rid of HS2 and scrap that, unless they cut the foreign aid budget, unless they actually do learn lessons as opposed to just this flannel about lessons learnt …

DM: Well we trust that will be in the transport manifesto then will it for the election? 

ANDREW DAVIES: We’ve got three high speed routes in UKIPs manifesto, wasn’t there, I think there were three different routes for high speech two.

SUZANNE EVANS: Well we are definitely opposed to this one. 

ANDREW DAVIES: And in two, two and a half years you can change your mind. 

DM: What’s the thought in Wales about HS2?  It’s got nothing to do with Wales, it’s not bringing anything to Wales.

ANDREW DAVIES: That’s not the case, North Wales in particular stands to benefit hugely from HS2 but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. The article we’re talking about talks about the petition system in the House of Commons, they’ve got 430 odd petitions before them at the moment, they say there could be as many as a thousand petitions in total. That has the potential to hold this project up.  We all know the controversies around it but there are huge benefits as well, about improving our transport infrastructure if we are going to be serious players economically in the 21st century and some tough decisions have to be taken.  

DM: I suspect, Suzanne is right, that is going to be more of an issue come the general election.  Listen, we have to end it there, thank you all very much indeed, Andrew, Suzanne, Ken, very good to see you all.