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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well he has held two of the great offices of state and been a Labour MP for more than three decades but this weekend Jack Straw has said he will not run for parliament again. He says it will be a terrible wrench to leave the House of Commons and he joins me now from Manchester. A very good morning to you, Mr Straw. My first question is about what you’re going to do when you finally leave parliament and I’m just looking at the scene behind you, is that guitar giving us a clue?

JACK STRAW: No! That’s my son-in-law, my wife and I are staying at our daughter and son-in-law’s, they have just had our first grandchild actually so no, he’s the guy on the guitar, not me!

DM: There is a globe behind you as well so maybe I can use that for the analogies but the serious question is you are a very well-connected and very intelligent man who has been across world affairs for three decades and more, are you going to do something like Mr Blair with your time and start going around the globe and making some decent money?

JACK STRAW: Well I’m not Mr Blair. I’ve got great respect for him but what I want to do for the next 18 months is represent my constituents as actively as I have done in the previous 34 years and actually just to see what then happens. I want to keep my connection with Blackburn, for example I have been on the governors of Blackburn College for about 20 years and I am really committed to that. We have got a University Centre now and I want to see that grow and I want to make my contribution to that and funnily enough, I’ll actually have a bit more time to do that. I’ve taken an active interest in foreign policy whilst I’ve been on the back benches so for example next weekend we have the annual weekend for the British Turkish Forum, this time in Edinburgh, which is terrific. I’m heavily involved in issues like Iran and take a very close interest in that so I think there is going to be plenty to do as well as the grandchild here and the other grandchild who turned up two days later in London.

DM: You make it sound all pro bono, there must be some commercial opportunities out there, you must have a few directorships perhaps been offered to you, a few seats on the board to advise strategically?

JACK STRAW: Look, if you look on the website you’ll find I do earn quite a lot of money at the moment as an advisor to one company and making speeches and my guess is that will go on but the crucial thing is to secure a balance here in my view. I want to stay active in domestic politics, so as I say my priority is to ensure that I leave as Blackburn’s MP the consistency in the best possible shape, that I do everything I can to help Ed Miliband become Prime Minister and for there to be a good Labour majority with a good Labour government after May 7^th 2015. I think what’s quite interesting, Dermot, is that in the last three months people have realised that Ed Miliband really is the man who has got the character, the determination and the ability to become Prime Minister and by God, he had Mr Cameron on the ropes on Wednesday. It was almost cruel to watch. Not too cruel though.

DM: Okay, well put! Well you raised that subject, let’s talk about energy and cost of living and again with a north-west question in mind here, one of the solutions it is said by other parties to the rising costs of energy for the future is to really start to exploit all the shale gas that may be under our earth and our shores, a lot of it under parts of the country you represent at the moment. What do you think about fracking?

JACK STRAW: I’m very strongly in favour of fracking. I’ve looked very carefully at this issue and I think the risks are entirely manageable. Interestingly enough, I think what people don’t realise is that shale gas by fracking has been extracted, on a relatively modest scale albeit, in Lancashire for the last 20 years. I visited the well head a few weeks ago in a little village called Ellswick and no one has noticed. It has transformed the American economy, it’s cut the cost of American energy and it is also, by the way, the key reason why the economics of running great plants like that at Grangemouth in Scotland are so intense and marginal now. The shale under Lancashire, the Bowland shale, is a mile thick, much thicker than you get for example in Texas and, as a Texan said to me, he had no problem in finding enough water in the north-west, water which you need for the fracking process is very short in Texas. So this is a terrific technology, of course we’ve got to make sure that it’s safe but we have also got to bluntly face down those people who decide this is the next thing to protest about and on the whole those people are people who do not understand and have no interest in the economy and the prosperity of the majority of people in the north-west. But it is a great opportunity and I was talking to the Lancashire Economic Partnership and parliamentary and political colleagues from all sides in Lancashire on Thursday evening about how we exploit this safely but for the benefit not least of the people of Lancashire.

DM: Can I ask you, Mr Straw, about that extraordinary time as Foreign Secretary, those years from ’01 to ’06 with 9/11, 7/7 of course, Iraq there in between them, in relation to what the debate is now about the security services and their attempt to protect us all from more atrocities like that. As you saw the increase in surveillance building up there, and I know there is a lot you can’t tell us about what you did at the time, do you think you built into the system enough surveillance of those who carry out the surveillance, enough public scrutiny?

JACK STRAW: As the Prime Minister said the other day, our security and intelligence agencies are subject to very intense levels of accountability. By definition this can’t be the same level of accountability or even the same way, in respect of public policy but not only is the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament very powerful and recently given more powers, they are also the Intelligence Service Commissioners who are retired senior Court of Appeal judges who I can tell you, having been as it were on the receiving end, really do work through all the decisions that are made, the individual ones, to check whether you’ve kept within the law. There is of course a real balance here between the need for intelligence to keep us safe, to protect, to avoid another 7/7 for example and the need to protect privacy but what I noted was that when there was a minor scandal about some breach of privacy people would fret about that but the minute there was a terrorist atrocity, for example in Bali, for example on 7/7, the issue wasn’t whether we had protected effectively the privacy of the terrorist’s families and all those people living around them who were innocent but whether we had sufficient intelligence that could have prevented those atrocities and that’s where the balance is. Achieving that is very difficult but I think we get it pretty right in this country.

DM: What about the Home Secretary years and the debate now about the police, obviously it overlaps slightly with what we’ve just been discussing – do you think the police are having a crisis of confidence and that the public confidence needs to be rebuilt within them?

JACK STRAW: There is a problem inside the police service. The police service have improved dramatically over the past 20 or 30 years, back in the 1950s and 1960s when Dixon of Dock Green was being shown on the screens with a most extraordinary notion about policemen being gentle kindly souls – the truth was that British police were violent and pretty corrupt, particularly in our big cities. That’s changed and levels of accountability in the police service have significantly improved but there are major problems and we’ve seen them recently over the Andrew Mitchell affair, over other affairs, too great a propensity amongst a few police officers I think to cover up wrongdoing and insufficient strength at a leadership level, again by some chief constables, not by any means by all, to allow unacceptable things to happen. So there have got be cultural changes, personally I think there have got to be organisational changes as well. Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary, some time ago asked Lord Stephens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who served when I was Home Secretary, indeed I appointed him, and was and is one of the finest police officers we’ve ever seen, he is conducting an independent inquiry into the future structure of the police. Personally I don't think we can carry on with 43 police services, we’ve now got a division in East Lancashire, one division under a chief superintendent, which is larger than quite a number of police force areas with their own Chief Constable so it doesn’t make sense. I think the challenge is both to expand the territorial cover of individual police services, for example you could have one in the North-West but also give local communities, for example Blackburn to take one, must greater control over the policing in their areas. That’s so you both go more national and more local and that I think is what John Stephens is looking at at the moment.

DM: Okay, I’ve got a last question Mr Straw, in relation to Blackburn and it is about HS2 and the debate that seems to be going on now about whether it is a project worth continuing with. As we know Mr Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, is saying he is going to keep a very close eye on the costs but at the moment Labour has said it is still committed to it but those wobbles within Labour about HS2 – you’ll be aware the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saying Labour is betraying the great cities of the north like yours if it doesn’t stick with HS2, what do you think it should do?

JACK STRAW: Well we are committed to HS2. Of course I understand that Ed Balls should worry about the cost, any Shadow Chancellor or Chancellor is going to worry about the costs and we have to make sure these costs are very carefully controlled. I am completely committed to HS2 and it will hugely benefit the north-west of England and indeed metropolitan Yorkshire as well. There are people who say if you have spent all this money, it is some billions, running a new high speed rail link to the north-west and to Yorkshire, then that is less money available for local improvements to the railway services in Lancashire and Greater Manchester and Yorkshire. I don’t accept that because one of the reasons why the lion’s share by far of all the money on suburban and urban transport has gone to London and the south-east in recent years is because they are so well-connected through inter-city services. So if we get this extra capacity into Manchester, into Leeds, into Sheffield, into Liverpool actually that will hugely benefit and trigger much greater usage of the railway services as well as helping this economic regeneration of the country and particularly this area. Don’t forget, if we had been having this conversation a hundred years ago or more, Lancashire would have been seen absolutely accurately as being the economic powerhouse of this country. Now over the last hundred years that’s shifted but great strides have been made, not least within the city of Manchester under its brilliant leader Richard Leese, to regenerate these cities and we’ve benefited further north in areas like Blackburn but that’s got to continue and HS2 is one way in which we rebalance our economy north and south and ensure the level of public as well as private investment going into this area is improved.

DM: All right Mr Straw, sorry we’re out of time, great to talk to you. Jack Straw there.