ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Let’s talk through some of the papers now. I’m joined by the Labour MP and Shadow Public Health Minister, Luciana Berger; the editor of the Independent, Amol Rajan and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lamont. A very good morning to you and we’ll stay with you, Lord Lamont, to kick us off, something right up your street. You’ve picked this story about the recovery and I suppose it is all about how well-established it is.

LORD LAMONT: Well I picked an article by David Smith in the Business section of the Sunday Times but there are lots of articles in the papers and he is really discussing whether the economy has reached what the Governor of the Bank of England called escape velocity, that is to say we’ll be able to move towards the ending of quantitative easing, the creation of money and the economy has got its own momentum. He is saying the Bank of England are now much more optimistic that the growth is going to accelerate from this point on.

DM: But then a crunch point will come at which, when we’ve talked to the Bank of England we know that when interest rates do move there is only one way they are going to go and there is a crunch point at which you have to decide when to start nudging rates back up.

LORD LAMONT: Well that is absolutely correct and that requires a very fine judgement but I think we should remember this, when interest rates go up that actually will be a sign that we’ve moved back to normal. People are getting used to what they call the new normal, rates at half a percent. We haven’t had rates of half a percent for this long for 300 years and actually it would be a sign that the economy will not fully have recovered until interest rates do go up.

DM: Luciana, as you listen to this debate about the strength of the economic recovery, does it make you think that actually Labour’s analysis has been wrong over the last three years, that we need a plan B? Plan A seems to have worked perfectly well.

LUCIANA BERGER: Well I think if you go out and speak to the British public, be that on their doorstep or in their businesses, you’ll hear the real story that with prices rising faster than wages for 31 out of the last 40 months, people are really, really feeling the pinch and they are struggling to get by. When we look at this article about …

DM: But if you look at what Plan B was saying, it was effectively saying that we need to spend more money on the economy to kick-start growth but growth is here. The next stage is to talk about the distribution, the fruits of growth, but the growth is beginning to show through Plan A.

LUCIANA BERGER: Well the growth, as you describe it, is a fraction of what the government said our economy would look like at this stage three and a half years down the line. It’s pretty weak and again I reflect on people’s personal experiences and the people up and down the country who have to choose between heating their homes and eating and that is a reality for too many people in our country.

AMOL RAJAN: The key thing is what is fuelling this growth I think largely is consumer spending and that’s fuelled by rising confidence and that in turn comes from the disgraceful – and I’m sure Norman might agree with this – the disgraceful government housing policy. So things like Help to Buy which will create, especially in London, this astonishing asset bubble which we are inflating again and there is something quite rankly hypocritical about it which I spent years at the Independent writing editorials about how George Osborne and David Cameron hated the idea of a housing bubble. Two years from an election, growth desperately needed, what do you do? You put your foot on the bubble. I completely agree with …

DM: Well you pose it for Lord Lamont because you had to pick up the pieces after the last housing boom – well not the last one, the one before the last one – went bust. Is there another one happening here?

LORD LAMONT: Well I have some sympathy with what you say but it is very, very complicated because actually there are massive divergences in house prices and although house prices have risen and are now about the 2007 level in London and the south-east, in parts of the north they have fallen 40%. So you really have two housing markets in the country and the difficulty for the Governor of the Bank of England and for the government is that they have to make policy for the whole country and you can …

DM: We could have the whole debate obviously about this but we are reviewing the papers. Luciana, bring in another story for us, this is the prospect of the Liberal Democrats, particularly female Liberal Democrat MPs, being wiped out at the next election.

LUCIANA BERGER: This is a story covered in a number of papers, in the Mirror we’ve got it as ‘Lib Dem women will be wiped out’. We’ve got another newspaper saying that Nick Clegg from 2020 might consider addressing the situation if it turns out at the 2015 election that they don’t have any female MPs. I think this is a shocking reflection on our democracy. Currently there are 147 out of 650 MPs are women and we need to be improving that situation, not thinking about what maybe happens come 2020. The fact that the Lib Dems have got as many men with a knighthood as they do women MPs is indicative of the scale of the challenge. To say that they might do something in seven years’ time is frankly pitifully inadequate.

DM: Well it is a challenge though for all the parties as you put it. What is your view, Amol, do we need women only shortlists and things like that? Some kind of positive discrimination?

AMOL RAJAN: I’ll tell you, I’m slightly torn on all-women shortlists as I am torn about any kind of positive discrimination because I think if you have all-women shortlists you end up selecting people not on the basis of merit and I think that is curiously quite patronising. Having said that, I think that what make all-women shortlists going from being a bad idea to being a good idea is this crisis of representation that we have at the moment is an astonishing shortage of women MPs. It is actually a much more broader problem, it is not just to do with women MPs but our whole parliamentary make-up, as Norman can tell you, is becoming more and more divorced from the country as a whole. There are fewer teachers, doctors and nurses and I think it may take a bit of this kind of positive discrimination which instinctively I’m against to try and sort out the astonishing democratic deficit that we have in Westminster.

DM: And what about for the Conservatives, Lord Lamont? I posed it there for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, all the parties have an issue don’t they about adequately representing the gender balance of the country?

LORD LAMONT: I totally agree with you, we don’t have nearly enough women Conservative MPs and we’ve got to do something about it but I don’t actually think all-women shortlists are the way. We’ve got to educate our grassroots and get them to be more open to selecting women.

LUCIANA BERGER: Can I just say though, within the Labour party …

DM: I thought you might.

LUCIANA BERGER: In the 2010 intake there were 64 new Labour MPs and I was one of 32 women so actually we did a lot to ensure that within the new intake we were 50% of each but it is not just women, it is right across the board that we have a whole spread of people from different backgrounds, different ages, we don’t have enough people in parliament with a disability to reflect our country too. There are so many different things that we need to be working on to ensure that we are better represented. The fact that we are 65th in the world for female representation …

LORD LAMONT: I agree with you say but the strange thing is that in some ways the House of Lords has a more representative selection, there are more disabled…

DM: Perhaps that’s because you don’t bother with democracy, you just appoint them.

LORD LAMONT: Well that is true but ethnic minorities and disabled people and women I think are well represented in the House of Lords.

DM: That is another interesting debate we could have but I want another story, Amol, from the Sunday Telegraph front page, a warning from Grant Shapps to the BBC.

AMOL RAJAN: Yes, Grant Shapps is the Chairman of the Conservative Party and I think it is fair to say that the current batch or the current Conservative leadership has not always had a particularly positive relationship with the BBC and Grant Shapps is issuing a warning that if the BBC can’t get control of the astonishing scandals taking root there – he talks about secrecy, waste and unbalanced reporting – then the BBC may lose its exclusive right to a licence fee. The thing that he hints at in this very good Telegraph splash which he doesn’t go into enough detail on is executive pay which I think is a real disgrace at the BBC where an astonishing number of people are paid huge sums to do jobs which even they frankly …

DM: But does part of the warning about the journalism, does it have a resonance with you working in newspapers? Here we have a politician with enormous power because of the licence fee saying, well we have little concerns about part of your operation but part of it is about the nature of your journalism. You wouldn’t like that in newspapers would you?

AMOL RAJAN: Of course not and obviously The Independent would never go for biased journalism.

DM: But it’s about politicians getting involved and here we’re seeing it.

AMOL RAJAN: No, exactly. I think it’s the nature … the Conservative party has often said that the BBC leans to the left and I think the actual political problem that the BBC has is not a left/right problem but the metropolitan, the city/rural problem if you like and it is run to some extent, it perhaps leans towards people who live in big cities including London and I think that’s a bias they need to look at.

DM: Okay, we need to get another story in and Luciana, this is on the Observer front page and this is, excuse the pun, one of the burning issues of the day ‘Energy giant rakes in £20 million profit’. How so and tell us more about it?

LUCIANA BERGER: This is one of many stories today, yet another day of energy stories and today we find out that British Gas are raking in £20 million worth of profits from over-estimated bills. These people are over-paying by their direct debits and then moving on to a different supplier afterwards and not receiving anything that they’ve overpaid.

DM: Do you think it proves Labour’s point then that they are out of control and they need to have a cap on their profits?

LUCIANA BERGER: I think this is yet another example of showing where our energy market is broken and why we desperately need to reset it, why we need an energy market that is fair, that is transparent and at a time where people have energy bills of £1400 for the average household is a struggle and this doesn’t help it. That’s why we have said as the Labour party that our proposal for energy is that we should have an open pool where at the moment all these energy giants, all six of them, they generate 70% of our energy and we don’t know how much that costs and how much it costs them to sell on to the suppliers.

DM: You go to the heart of it there. I think all parties agree that somehow the market needs to be reset is the phrase, so was privatisation bodged, Lord Lamont?

LORD LAMONT: No, I don’t think privatisation was bodged. I think two things are wrong, firstly the Labour government abolished the pool, there was a pool, a competitive pool from which the companies actually had to bid, I think that was a great mistake. Secondly, I think we’ve phased out coal too early, too quickly, before we actually had the replacement investment. We have a shortage of capacity, that is one thing. Then we’ve had the green measures on top which have probably added about 10%. When you take that, plus the European policy for phasing out coal …

DM: Can I just ask you about Sir John Major’s proposal? We’ve got from Ed Miliband, right, we’re going to freeze prices for 20 months and Sir John Major says more or less the same thing, let’s hit them with a windfall levy.

LORD LAMONT: Well I don't think there are signs that they are making excess profits, defined by the return on capital. These are regulated industries, there is a regulator in charge of them, he looks at their profitability and decides whether they are excessive. I think one-off taxes are arbitrary, unpredictable, damaging to confidence and not a good …

DM: Just the last thought on that from Amol.

AMOL RAJAN: I think it’s astonishing that the two big ideas we’ve got on energy are a windfall tax which everyone thinks is a bad idea and a price freeze which everyone apart from Labour thinks is a bad idea. What I would love to know is what is it about the nature of the energy market, which Norman talks about, that means we don’t have a solution to this. I mean every single week on the front pages during the week and on Sunday we have an astonishing energy scandal – there is another one which is very good on the front of the Independent on Sunday. As a consumer I find it absolutely astonishing that there is something about the energy market specifically that means we can’t come up with a solution to this problem.

LUCIANA BERGER: If there wasn’t a problem with our energy market then the Prime Minister this week wouldn’t have announced an investigation, essentially a Competition Commission investigation. We are saying let’s do something today. My constituents this winter are having to pay thousands of pounds on their energy bills, let’s do something about it now.

DM: Thank you all very much indeed for reviewing the papers for me, Luciana Berger, Amol Rajan and Lord Lamont.