ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well all bets are off in the Scottish independence referendum.  With less than two weeks to go the Yes Campaign have taken the lead in a YouGov poll for the first time.  Yesterday I went to speak to the former Prime Minister and leading Better Together campaigner, Gordon Brown, about the state of the campaign.  So I started of course by asking him how worried he was by the closeness of the polls.

GORDON BROWN: Nobody should ever be complacent about the outcome of any contest.  I think what we are seeing is something significant, people want change, the underlying mood of the electorate voting in this referendum is that they want change and I think it is about two visions of Scotland’s future, different from the future that might have been predicted a few years ago.   The first is obviously the nationalists who want to break entirely with the United Kingdom and break all connections and the second is what I would call the patriotic vision of Scotland’s future, my vision.  I feel passionately Scots, I am proud of our institutions, I’ll be supporting Scotland playing Germany on Sunday night, I’ll be remembering the last time we beat the world champions we beat England in 1967, so I’m passionately Scots.   I want a Scottish parliament, I want stronger powers and therefore I want change to make it stronger but I also want to share our resources with the rest of the United Kingdom and that will mean better pensions, better healthcare, more jobs, better security and I think most Scots are in a position where they want change, they will want a stronger parliament and they will want to stay part of the United Kingdom for these basic services that are important to all of us.

DM: But as you touched on there, and you talked a lot about it when you were Prime Minister and when you were Chancellor indeed, is there a tension between being British and Scottish?  It’s a charge being made by some of the Yes campaign, Jim Murphy has been hearing it whilst he’s been out on the campaign trail, that you can’t be a patriotic Scot and vote no.

GORDON BROWN: We’ve done something quite unique in the United Kingdom.  As Scots we actually led the way so that we shared resources for common services so there are no four nations in the world – Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland – where you have the equal and same right to healthcare free at the point of need, if you are unemployed to get help, your pension and every person, irrespective of nationality has exactly the same rights and this is something that makes me proud of what Britain has achieved.  America can’t do it even with its one nation and a number of separate states, the Germans won’t help the Greeks in the way that the Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Ireland work together and this is something that makes me proud of what Britain can achieve when we work together while at the same time people can feel perfectly patriotic about the distinctive identities of Scots or English or Welsh.  These are part of the fabric of our history but they also mean something when you pay in for your pension, you get it at a UK level and irrespective of whether you are Scottish or English, you are going to get the same deal.

DM: Let me pick up on the working together bit and apply that to the dynamics of the Better Together campaign.  Have you been hamstrung by the coalition which of necessity has had to be put together?  I mean you don’t have a lot in common politically with David Cameron, you have even less in common, if anything, with Nigel Farage.  Would you rather that they weren’t part of the Better Together campaign, are they hamstringing you?

GORDON BROWN: I hate the Bedroom Tax and therefore I blame the coalition of being insensitive to people’s needs.  I don’t like the idea that we’re having social security cuts for people at a time when the Tories have been giving very big tax cuts to people who are very rich.  I don’t like the attitude of the Conservative party or UKIP to Europe but I feel that most people in England share the views that we have about the National Health Service, I think that most people in England share the same views we have about pensions.   I think there is a similarity of values about liberty and fairness and social responsibility and whatever government is in power temporarily, you have got to look at the long-term picture.  You’ve got to look 50 years ahead, 100 years ahead, this is an irreversible decision and …

DM: But you’ve got to look 12 days ahead and Nigel Farage has said he’s coming up to Scotland again.  Wouldn’t you say to him please, for goodness sake, Mr Farage, if you want the union to stick together, stay away.  It would be manna from heaven if he turns up for Alex Salmond.

GORDON BROWN: Well I have no truck with Nigel Farage’s politics, I don't think he’s …

DM: Do you want him to stay away from Scotland?

GORDON BROWN: I don't think he’s going to make a very big positive impact in a visit to Scotland but I don't think people are going to take him seriously in Scotland so I think the debate really is between these two separate visions of Scotland’s future, the patriotic one that I’m speaking to where we stay part of Britain but have a strong Scottish parliament and I’m interested in how the parties can come together to make the powers of the Scottish parliament stronger and to do so quickly and to do so, if possible, by agreement and I’m calling a debate in the House of Commons in October as we get back so that we can actually push the timetable further along.  I think the issue then comes down to do you want to break every single political link you have with the rest of the United Kingdom, that’s the nationalist position.  We are not voting on whether we’re Scottish, we are Scottish.  We’re not voting on whether we have a Scottish parliament, we have a Scottish parliament.  We are voting on whether you want to break, sever every single constitutional link with the United Kingdom.   I don't think at the end of the day when people look at pensions and healthcare and they look at jobs or the currency or they look at defence, particularly at this time of terrorist threat, I don't think that people want to break all these links.

DM: So you want to put together this ‘Devo Max’ offering.  Just give me your sense of what that offers Scots above and beyond what they have got already under existing devolved powers.

GORDON BROWN: We’ve had the experience of 15 years now of a Scottish parliament, the Welsh have had the experience of their Assembly, London has got its own authority, there is some pressure in England for more regional devolution and I think what we’ve learned in Scotland is that you can co-ordinate things more effectively in some cases where power is devolved more close to people’s lives and therefore for example, attendance allowance or housing benefit, you wouldn’t have a Bedroom Tax in future able to be imposed by the will of London, it would be a decision of Scotland, so you have devolution in social policy, more devolution in economic policy so that you can make decisions about jobs and work programmes, about training and skills and apprenticeships.  You can get local authorities more involved in regional and local economic development, you can plan your transport network more successfully, more powers over the railways and of course more powers of taxation so that you can be accountable at home for the decisions you’re making about how you spend money so most of income tax will be devolved as well as property taxes and …

DM: Most of income tax or all of income tax?

GORDON BROWN: Under Labour’s proposals most of income tax, under other people’s proposals possibly all of income tax.  I think you’ve got to get the balance right you see between the services that are UK wide services like pensions, like the healthcare funding, these are paid for by UK taxes and it’s right they continue to do so, in my view, because we’ve got the equal right to the same service but then you can look at the other services, housing, transport and so on, which are devolved matters under the Scottish parliament and they could be covered by taxes raised in Scotland.  You’ve got to get the balance right and I think that’s a debate that could be had between the parties.

DM: You mentioned the word debate and the thought is occurring to me as I listen to this and as our viewers are listening to this just how across the detail you are.  Did you ever bite your lip as you were watching those debates between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling and wish it were you there debating the detail?

GORDON BROWN: No!  No, I don't think so.  Look, Alistair’s done a great job.  These debates are television theatre and I think actually the issues are now being decided on the ground when people are talking to each other.  They’re talking to their friends first of all, listening to the arguments in different programmes, hopefully listening to this programme, and at the same time there are a lot of public meetings.  I’m starting a tour round the country … look, this is a decision not about me or about this generation, it’s a decision for my children, it’s a decision about their future, their children’s future, it’s irreversible and it’s not one you can make without getting your views across to the maximum number of people.  I wouldn’t return to frontline politics were it not for the fact that this is a completely different kind of decision.

DM: Well let me ask you about that, you said it’s irreversible and of course it is if it’s yes but what happens the day after if it is a very close no?  That means perhaps that this is a ‘neverendum’, that the issue doesn’t go away, it’s not done and dusted.

GORDON BROWN: I know but I think it’s idle to speculate about what happens afterwards.  Our attention has got to be focused on the next few days.   Whatever the vote, the majority will be decisive, whoever holds the majority that will be the decisive thing.   I think that to hypothecate certain scenarios afterwards is not really healthy or productive at the moment, I think we should focus on the issues.

DM: Let me ask you about one of the intangibles.  It is often said and we can see it for ourselves can’t we, that Alex Salmond brings a lot of charisma, whatever else he brings, to the Yes campaign.  With the best will in the world, do you feel that yourself and Alistair Darling can’t really match him for panache?

GORDON BROWN: I’ve never got into personalities, maybe that’s why you’ve reached that conclusion.  I don’t want to comment on people’s personal characteristics, this in the end is too important to be about the jokes that someone makes or the way that they make their argument or how they dress or what sort of presentational issues.  It must be about the bigger issues.  Look, we’re about to enter an economic minefield if we have independence and people have got to focus on that.

DM: The reason I put that is because that element presumably is appealing to some of your Labour voters, we hear up to 30% Scottish Labour voters are thinking of voting Yes.  Now they didn’t vote for the SNP before, they are thinking of voting for Alex Salmond and his campaign now.  What would you say to them, those Labour voters that might just carry it for Alex Salmond?

GORDON BROWN: I would say to people that I understand the protest, I understand the desire for change, I understand that people actually want a change of government, I do understand all these things but the way to get the change that we’re talking about – better pensions or more jobs, to have stronger defences, to have a better health service – is going in the end not to be some easy shortcut through independence which is I say an economic minefield, where there are huge fiscal and other problems to deal with.  The way to do it over these next few months is to elect a Labour government, to strengthen the Scottish parliament and make it more capable of doing the things we want to do and to focus on the issues of college places, of improved healthcare and try to get an attention back to the issues that really matter to people instead of just the constitutional issues.  I also think that the SNP have got their policies wrong for Scotland and I think when people look at the small print, because there was this big manifesto that was published saying this is what we do in an independent Scotland, they find that the SNP haven’t got policies for a fairer Scotland, they haven’t got the detailed tax changes that would make Scotland a more equal place.  Their biggest proposal, and I think people will be shocked when they hear this, is not to get more money to pensioners through tax credits or to get more money to children through higher rates of income tax to fund the welfare state, their biggest policy tax change is to cut corporation tax by three pence and that money would go to the privatised gas and electricity companies, the people who have made the biggest profits would be the biggest beneficiaries of independence.  Now that doesn’t seem to me to be a fairer Scotland. 

DM: So do you think Mr Miliband helped the Better Together campaign when he came up to Scotland and he made a lot of those points?

GORDON BROWN: Of course, of course.

DM: And some said therefore signalling that a Labour government that he would lead has shifted to the left of the one that you led and that you were part of.