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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now it’s time to take a look through the morning papers and I’m joined by the Conservative MP, Nigel Evans, the broadcaster Esther Rantzen and the writer and campaigner for Scottish Independence, Adam Ramsay.   A very good morning to you all and we will as normal practice dive straight in, Nigel, with your first piece.  I know you have got a lot of expertise and interest in the row and many rows surrounding the Speaker.

NIGEL EVANS:  Yes, it’s term time tomorrow and the Prime Minster says ‘No ties’ but we are expecting it to kick off at 2.30 tomorrow with John Bercow. 

DM: Just give people a bit of background to this.

NIGEL EVANS: It is slightly complicated.  The Clerk, who is the chap who sits in front of the Speaker, resigned.  That person needs to be replaced, there was a panel set up under the Speaker to look at the candidates and they went further afield than they normally do, they got a head-hunter to come up with some people, they interviewed them and they decided on a lady from Australia called Carole Mills.   It has since transpired that whilst she is very good at administration apparently she knows nothing about the constitution, wouldn’t know what Erskine May is for instance which is the bible of the Chamber so therefore there has been a lot of unrest.   Bernard Jenkin, Chairman of the Select Committee on Public Administration, said why don’t we have a pre-appointment hearing?  In the meantime the Speaker has said why don’t we split the job?  Well if we split the job, which may have some sense, may not, therefore don’t you reopen the appointment  panel again to have a look because everybody should have a chance to have a bite at whichever of the two jobs. 

DM: This is about as simple as it gets!  I’ll tell you, a story itself though is about John Bercow’s 6000 mile trip to meet said candidate. 

NIGEL EVANS: Well I think this was planned a year ago so the fact is he is going to Australia, it’s something that he does and I’ve got no problem with him going to have chats with Speakers of other parliaments but I think the real issue is whether John is going to have the guts tomorrow to stand up in Parliament and say Carole Mills is no longer the appointee of a position that really now doesn’t exist, we need a panel to be set up to look at the job, what sort of job it is first and then when once we’ve sorted what the job is, then we can look at candidates.  Has he got the guts to do it?

DM: Have you any thoughts on it or is this just one for the parliamentarians?  Does it affect the rest of us? 

ESTHER RANTZEN: Well I think the thing that makes it a bit murky is that there are so many attacks on John Bercow, it becomes almost a sort of personal thing and having met him once or twice because he uses his house as a venue for charitable receptions, he is very, very good about that and espouses a lot of little charities who wouldn’t otherwise have that opportunity, I don't know why people are so mean about him and I wonder whether if it was another Speaker there would be quite this parliamentary concern. 

DM: Well we’ll let that question hang because we’ve got a lot of very important stories as well.  If we can hear from you Adam, the Scottish Sunday Herald front page and something you are very interested in, we all are, coming up in what, two weeks and four days, the referendum.  ‘Better Together are wrong, only independence can stop the health service being bled dry.’

ADAM RAMSAY: Yes, I think it’s important to understand the scale of this story.  A lot of the polls show that for undecided voters in the Scottish referendum the key issue is the NHS and you have the two sides both going at each other over this.  You have on the one side the Yes campaign saying in England the NHS is being privatised and devolution doesn’t give enough power in the long term to necessarily stop all of that in Scotland and stop there being impacts on the NHS.  In Scotland on the other hand you have Alistair Darling saying that’s fear mongering, that isn’t happening and so what’s happened today, Alison Pollock who is a very well known expert in England  on the NHS down here is saying that actually the Yes campaign is right, that although Holyrood can protect the NHS in Scotland to some extent, that funding cuts ultimately affect the funding Scotland gets, there’s only a limited extent to which Holyrood can so she is saying that if Scots do want to protect the NHS then they should vote Yes. 

DM: But independent or not, they would have to be magical if they could resist the demographic pressures that are driving the NHS, affecting the NHS at the moment, whether they be in Scotland or in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, we are talking about the huge attendant growing costs which means that NHS inflation, health inflation, is greater than the normal rate of inflation. 

ADAM RAMSAY: Yes, the point here is that Holyrood gets all of its funding in one block grant from Westminster so it doesn’t have the powers it needs to be able to resolve that problem in the way that it wants to and the difference is that Westminster is saying we are going to privatise the NHS, we are going to break it up, which I don't think is a solution, it is politically motivated …

DM: Westminster would say that they haven’t said that but it will bring in more competition and things like that. 

ADAM RAMSEY: So Alison Pollock is saying that they have and the significant thing is that the majority of people in Scotland, as in England, don’t support that and Holyrood is saying we want to protect, both Labour and the SNP want to protect the NHS but because of the total amount of funding Holyrood gets …

NIGEL EVANS: Quite frankly they do things in Scotland that they don’t do in England already.  They’ve got access to certain cancer drugs that we can’t get in England and it makes me very angry, it makes me very angry.  Why can’t my constituents get these drugs, maybe we should have independence for England.

ADAM RAMSAY: Ah, independence for England!  The point is that the overall level of funding is set by Westminster so yes of course Holyrood can divide it up differently but what they are saying is that as funding is being cut from Westminster, they can’t continue to preserve what they want to preserve. 

DM: Well we’ve got Alex Salmond coming on later, we can put some of that to him, I’m sure that’s something he’d want to raise.  Esther, your first story, the Lord Ahmed piece on the Rotherham abuse, of course just discussing that with Hazel Blears. 

ESTHER RANTZEN: My goodness me, this is such a tragic story isn’t it and we believe it is the tip of the iceberg don’t we, that Rotherham is not the only place where this has been going on and going on for years and years and years and there has been, it looks as if in Rotherham there has been a specific cover up.  It looks as if a small charity was preparing a report and had all their files taken by the police and that’s really serious, that in fact it wasn’t just bland political correctness but there was a specific attempt.  Now what Lord Ahmed is saying is that there is a link here between what is happening in the Pakistani community in Rotherham, and he is a Muslim and he comes from Rotherham, and the Jihadi kids who have gone out to create God knows what kind of crime and he says the problem is lack of leadership in the mosques and he is saying that the mosques are being run by elders who are so out of touch with their own young generation that really they have no idea what is going on in their own communities and that the mosques need to change their leadership.  I think something else should happen, I think that these enormously brave victims who have come forward talking about what has happened to them, could and should go into schools and talk about grooming.

DM: That’s a good point.

ESTHER RANTZEN: Because we already use ex-drug addicts, ex-prisoners, ex-gang members to talk about that experience to kids in schools and what the girls don’t realise is that young man who tells them they’re beautiful and that they love them and why not have a few drugs and some alcohol and be grown up, doesn’t really care about them at all but is using them as someone said as meat.     

DM: Typical of you, Esther, to come up with practical solutions there, well not solutions but something good I suppose, positive coming out from all that tragedy.  Nigel, Douglas Carswell? 

NIGEL EVANS: My mate Douglas. 

DM: Is he a mate?

NIGEL EVANS: Sort of.

DM: How worried should your party be?

NIGEL EVANS: I don't know.  I fought the Ribble Valley by-election in ’91, it was the 13th safest seat in the land and we lost it and a year later I was the MP.  So how important are these by-elections?  There is a little bit of me that says perhaps we should sit this one out and let Douglas get on with it because it’s a total distraction quite frankly.  I spent yesterday with about 250 people in Brighton working for Simon Kerr down there and so 250 young Tories feel desperately let down by Douglas Carswell.  We’ve made huge inroads and …

DM: I bet some of them agree with him.

NIGEL EVANS: None of the ones that spoke to me, they feel badly let down.  Most of them were eurosceptic that spoke to me yesterday so they believe exactly what Douglas feels, what they do believe is that the only way we are going to make any inroads into this is by having a referendum in 2017.  How are we going to do that?  The Tories winning in 2015.  What’s Douglas doing?  He’s setting that back and it really makes no sense to me at all.

DM: What’s your take on it, Adam?  I mean is it just something that they sit out and it blows over or is this the start of something big?

ADAM RAMSAY: I think it’s not the start of something big, I think it’s the middle of something big.  Let’s not pretend that UKIP isn’t majorly affecting the Conservative party and of course Nigel has to say they are not afraid but we all know in reality that David Cameron is very, very worried indeed.   This isn’t some minor figure, Douglas Carswell, I’m on the left and he’s on the right and I disagree with him on almost everything but he is clearly a bright and serious political figure and the Tories, Nigel has to say this on telly of course and I don’t blame him for doing so but the Tories are terrified.

DM: Okay, Esther, I think you go and stand there with your experience of standing in elections.

ESTHER RANTZEN: Thank you!  My experience is that this is, as you say, doesn’t work at general elections, it probably works at by-elections.  I speak as one that has lost my deposit at Luton South so I feel I am uniquely … did you lose your deposit?

NIGEL EVANS: No, no.  I’m ashamed, I clung on to it!  I should have worked a bit harder! 

DM: Maybe give it another go in 2015.  Adam, you’ve got this piece, this is Paddy Ashdown writing about the kneejerk Conservatives when it comes to the issue, I also discussed it with Hazel Blears, the issue of how to deal with radicalisation, people coming back to this country who have been fighting in Iraq and Syria.

ADAM RAMSAY: Yes, dear Paddy Ashdown, earlier in the week we had the former head of Counter Terrorism globally, MI5 and MI6, she’s now a major UN figure, saying the same thing, that what both Labour and the Conservatives are proposing really won’t help the situation.   I think the really significant thing that came out this week was the study at King’s College, London, where they have been following a lot of these people very closely.  It is worth remembering that a year ago David Cameron was suggesting that we should bomb Syria in order to support the rebels there and now he is saying that they represent a terrorist threat to us.  What this study said is that a lot of these people are young men, often teenagers, who got excited a year ago to go and fight against Assad and about nine out of ten of them are saying they want out, this isn’t what they were expecting, there is enormous violence, that isn’t what they are there for and an important thing …

DM: But do you think Paddy Ashdown is right, it is throwing the baby out with the bath water, we are really affecting civil liberties here?

ADAM RAMSAY: We are affecting civil liberties but also it is not going to help with the terrorism because the point that this study made is that nine out of ten of them want pathways out and if you give them pathways out and find a way to be normalised back into society, most of them, one in ten ….

DM: Pathways out?  I mean it takes a heck of a lot of effort to get out there, they must really want to go if they get there.

ADAM RAMSAY: But what they found is not what they expected.  What they found was what David Cameron was saying, they expected what David Cameron was saying a year ago which is that we should be bombing this country to support the rebels, they were going out to support the rebels but now this study shows one in ten of them have been killing people out there, they are really bloodthirsty and we should worry about them but the other nine out of ten, we need to give them ways out of this but what this is doing is shutting the door in their face.  Of course Al Qaeda was founded by people who weren’t allowed back to their own countries. 

DM: I’ve got more on that coming up with Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, in a moment or two but I just want to get this story in from Esther, everyone is talking about it and you picked the Sunday People’s coverage of it, the missing tumour boy and his father.  These are his parents, they think this is the best thing to do for him.  

ESTHER RANTZEN: These stories are always more complex than appears in the headline and I have worked with a family where the father went to prison because he didn’t accept his son should be locked up in a closed psychiatric unit because he had ME, chronic fatigue and at the time the medical establishment said that it wasn’t ME, that ME didn’t exist and that this would be a case of child abuse.  Now at the time my daughter had ME so I knew it was a real illness and now it is accepted as such but I worked with this family throughout this ordeal and I am very interested in what appears to be a complete collapse of communication between the health authorities in Southampton and the parents.  I can tell you this, Dermot, the worst thing for this little boy in his illness would be if his parents were arrested and put in jail.

DM: Well it seems they have been arrested by the Spanish and we don’t know what’s going to happen to them.

ESTHER RANTZEN: So if we care about the welfare of this child, the most important factor in this child’s life at the moment is the love and security of his parents.  If they are wrong medically then they need someone to explain to them why they are wrong medically but put the kid first.

DM: You’re nodding along there, do you go along with that?

NIGEL EVANS: I do actually, they should be kept together as much as they possibly can.  This child sadly seems to be incredibly ill and goodness knows why they did what they did but it must be out of love.  

DM: They are trying to get the best possible treatment for him.  This one as they say will run and run.  Thank you all very much indeed.  Adam, good to see you, thank you very much to Nigel and Esther as well.