Murnaghan 3.03.13 Interview with Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well 25 years ago today the Liberal Democrat party was created, could they have imagined that a quarter of a century on they would be in government with the Conservatives? Well one man who was there at the start and before that is the former Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, I’ll speak to him in just a moment. Well let’s say a very good morning and I suppose congratulations on your 25th anniversary of the Lib Dems to Sir Menzies Campbell. Are the highs and lows of those 25 years encapsulated in the year 2010, the highs of course getting into government but the lows then dealing with this unprecedented deficit and all the downsides that brings for your party?
SIR MENZIES CAMPBELL: Well it’s been a roller coaster for the last 25 years and what’s interesting is that the creation of the new party which was formed by an alliance of the Social and Liberal Democrats and the Liberal party was designed to provide a rement of the centre left and here we are, 25 years on as you rightly point out, in government along with the right, the centre right so we’ve moved quite a long way in that time but I’m still a politician of the centre left, as indeed are many of those of us who are survivors of the last 25 years and that still remains the beating heart of the party but people like me accepted effectively in 2010 that we had to have a coalition of necessity because of the fragile state of the economy.
DM: And so therefore doing a lot of things, as we often hear from the leader, that you wouldn’t do as Liberals or Liberal Democrats and that leads us to Eastleigh. Can that be interpreted as an endorsement of what you are doing or a stay of execution? It was a Lib Dem seat, you did well on the ground but your vote did fall considerably and times could still get tough for your party in a general election.
SIR MC: Well there’s nothing inconsistent between a sigh of relief and hailing a stunning victory and both of these emotions were to be found in and around Eastleigh on Thursday evening. The narrative out there as you probably know, the Lib Dems are done and dusted, they will be annihilated at the next general election – lo and behold, they’re still there, lo and behold they hold a seat not just against the background of sometimes single figure opinion polls but against the background of the fact that the previous Liberal Democrat incumbent had to resign because he had committed a criminal act and of course at or about the time when most people were deciding how they were going to vote, these allegations – and remember, they are only allegations – against Lord Rennard began to surface. Now if you had said to us in 2010 you are going to fight a by-election at the beginning of 2013, the MP will have had to resign because of a criminal offence, there will be allegations of inappropriate conduct in relation to a former senior member of the party and by the way you’ll be at single figures …
DM: So in your estimation is that what dragged the Lib Dem vote down? It is nothing to do with volte faces, U-turns on tuition fees, on benefits, on so many other Liberal Democrat issues?
SIR MC: I think most people in this country accept the fact that we are in a very fragile economic position and that austerity, however unpleasant it is, is the way in which we can best resolve that difficulty. In Eastleigh, going round knocking on the doors as indeed many, many MPs were doing, I never got the sense that people would say this is about tuition fees. What people were saying it was about was my job, the economy, the ability of my children to buy a house, the availability of mortgages and these are all directly related to the economic position and that’s why we’ve got to get the economic position right.
DM: Okay, so that’s how your party is interpreting it, what about the Conservatives, your partners of course in government, saying no lurch to the right and yet we are reading today on our front pages various things about the European Court of Human Rights, the Human Rights Act, are they going to be repealed, are we going to leave them? Is that something where you would say, well the Conservatives are going to talk about it but it’s never going to happen, we wouldn’t allow it as Liberal Democrats?
SIR MC: Well we certainly wouldn’t allow it in this parliament but of course in the next parliament who knows what the outcome will be? Of course if it is a lurch to the right, it is a rather fragmented lurch because it seems that Chris Grayling and Theresa May are taking rather different positions and it sits very uneasily with the article which I’ve no doubt you referred to when you were dealing with the newspapers, written by the Prime Minister in the Telegraph, saying I am not going to lurch to the right. Here are two members of his Cabinet on the face of it determined to espouse something which they think, would hope would satisfy the right wing of their party.
DM: There’s another member of this Cabinet talking just at the end of last week, Philip Hammond, about he feels his department has been more or less cut to the bone, I paraphrase there, but saying we need more cuts in welfare. What do Lib Dems think about that?
SIR MC: Well I have some sympathy for Philip Hammond saying his department has been cut to the bone. I mean this has gone on for the 25 years we’ve been talking about, options for change, front line, first Labour’s defence review. We’ve been through the fat, we’ve been through the muscle and now we’re down to the bone and what people don’t appreciate is that when you get to the point we are now, it severely reduces the range of options available to the Prime Minister or indeed to the National Security Council which he has created. That could mean in certain circumstances the three heads of the armed forces would come to the Prime Minister and say, you want us to do something but I’m sorry we simply can’t do it.
DM: You’ve answered about the defence part but I was asking where about does the money come from required for further cuts to public spending? Philip Hammond suggesting there could be more, and it has been suggested before, there could be more to come from the welfare budget.
SIR MC: Well the welfare budget cannot be inviolate in a time of severe austerity.
DM: But we’ve already got the benefit cap and so many other issues.
SIR MC: The way I’m going to put it, if I may, is this – we’ve asked some of the poorest people in this country to take a pretty big hit and if we were looking for further cuts in public expenditure then we would have to bear that very, very seriously in mind. We’re all in it together is a phrase which has attracted a certain amount of criticism and also questions about whether it means anything in reality but speaking personally, and I’m not engaged in these discussions which are taking place no doubt amongst all Cabinet Ministers with the Treasury, speaking personally I would need an awful lot of persuasion before I could reach the conclusion that the way in which the deal with Philip Hammond’s quite legitimate point is by further serious reduction in the benefits. But remember this, health, education and defence all amount to less in public spending every year than welfare.
DM: Couldn’t the Liberal Democrats, also speaking personally, couldn’t they also go to the Conservative side of the coalition and say look, you won Eastleigh, you were pushed into third place, we therefore want now, we understand that’s why we are in coalition with you, we understand the parlous state of the nation’s finances, we now want our Mansion Tax, that’s the kind of thing, we want taxes on bankers bonuses, we know Liberal Democrats want that.
SIR MC: It’s not the way the coalition works. To make demands like that, you’ve got to persuade people. Now as we all know in this period there is some fierce hand to hand negotiation going on between Cabinet Ministers and the Treasury in particular and in that I’ve no doubt that many of these issues will be raised, but if you remember there was a consultative document produced the other day on behalf of the Liberal Democrats which talked about taxing the ring that your grandmother left you or something like that, which Vince Cable simple dismissed as, I think it was scatty or something like that.
DM: It was on this programme.
SIR MC: Yes, exactly, well all the better to remember what was on this programme. In that circumstance I think you’ve got to be thoroughly realistic about taxation because you are seeking to do two things, you are seeking to impose stability which is absolutely essential but you are also seeking not to choke off possible growth. That’s a very, very balance.
DM: Okay. Do they also have to be realistic about immigration particularly from within the European Union? I am about to interview the Romanian Foreign Minister and there is a great scare, and we’ve seen how UKIP have made political capital out of this issue, the Romanians and the Bulgarians who’ll be eligible to come here in 2014. As a Liberal Democrat you say we are fully paid up members of the European Union, of course they are fully entitled to come here as are any other members of the European Union.
SIR MC: Yes, and just think how many United Kingdom citizens live abroad, in particular in Spain and places like that. The freedom of movement operates in both directions but on the question of immigration, two things. First of all, I remember once going to a laboratory where they were seeking to find ways of using nanotechnology in order to deal with cancer, there were 30 people in the laboratory, 28 of them were from abroad. Front line cutting edge research being done by people from all over the world and also if you go into our hotels now, if it weren’t for immigrants, if you go into the hotel trade, if you go into the vegetable processing factory like the one in my constituency, all being staffed by people from abroad, these vitally important parts of our economy simply wouldn’t operate.
DM: And can I just ask you something lastly about, you mentioned Lord Rennard, I mean those investigations, those inquiries are getting underway, presumably you are going to talk to those inquiries about when you were working with him. What will you tell them about Lord Rennard, did you know anything about the allegations?
SIR MC: No, I did not, not until the period a few weeks before the Channel 4 exposé if that is the right word, there was a lot of gossip at that stage but during the time I was leader I heard nothing of any kind either specific or general.
DM: Nothing formally, nothing informally, even in the bars?
SIR MC: Nothing formally, nothing informally.
DM: Okay, Sir Menzies Campbell, thank you very much indeed for your time. Menzies Campbell there, former leader of the Lib Dems.
