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ANNA JONES: Time now to take a look through the Sunday papers with the former England footballer Sol Campbell, the Labour MP Diane Abbott and the journalist and free school founder, Toby Young.  A very good morning to all of you.  The political story on the front of some of the papers this morning is this row between Theresa May and Michael Gove and the fallout from that.  The Sunday Telegraph you’ve picked as our first story to talk about.

DIANE ABBOTT: Well there are two sides to this story, there’s a battle for the Tory succession between Theresa May and George Osborne and Gove is acting as a proxy for Osborne in this case and that’s all good clean fun and we can all look on and enjoy it. There is also another side to this story which I believe is an attempt to say, and I think Toby can speak to this, that somehow if you are a devout Muslim you are also liable to be some kind of political terrorist and I think that is a very dangerous road to go down but maybe Toby will explain that.  He’s called devout Muslims medieval fanatics, I think that’s a bit over the top.

AJ: At the heart of this story, and we’ll talk about the political side of it in just a minute, at the source of this story is concern about Islamic extremism in schools, are those fears do you think overblown?

TOBY YOUNG: I don't think they are.  We’re going to see the detailed Ofsted reports on all the schools tomorrow and it’s going to recommend that five or six be placed in special measures because of the extent to which they’ve been infiltrated by Islamic extremists.  I certainly wouldn’t want to tar all Muslims with an extremist brush but I think one of the reasons why this kind of thing has been allowed to happen and hasn’t been rooted out earlier is because of the fear that if anyone speaks up they’ll immediately be branded Islamophobic and be accused of trying to condemn all Muslims.  It’s not all Muslims by any stretch of the imagination, I should imagine most Muslim people in this country will be as shocked as I am and as other people are on discovering what’s going on in these schools.  It is shocking and something needs to be done about it but it’s a shame that it has been overshadowed by this rather trivial Tory split argument.

DIANE ABBOTT: These schools were inspected by Ofsted within the last twelve months and some of them at least were described as outstanding and I’ll be interested to see what has happened.  The Head of Ofsted visited them, some because they were supposed to be such good schools, one of them, so something seems to have happened.  The thing one is worried about is political pressure on Ofsted but the idea that because you are a devout Muslim that makes you a political extremist, that’s a bit like saying because you are a devout Catholic you are a supporter of the IRA.  You might be but the two things shouldn’t be conflated.

AJ: What about the questions over the Department of Education’s control over it as well?  Part of the reforming of schools has meant that a lot of the control has gone back to the Department of Education and has been taken away from local areas.  Could this have been better sorted out if that power had remained there?

TOBY YOUNG: Well I think in the case of these schools they have been under the control of Birmingham City Council for a long time and have only recently become Academies so it has only been comparatively recently that the Secretary of State for Education has had the power to intervene.

AJ: But as the founder of a free school you don’t think that’s a problem further down the line, that the Department of Education can’t keep an eye on some of the intricacies of local schools.

TOBY YOUNG: Well I think one of the things that the government is doing is to create a tier of regional commissioners who will be able to keep an eye on schools within their particular patch so it won’t all fall to the Secretary of State for Education to look after thousands of schools and know what’s going on in all of them.

DIANE ABBOTT: But why create an extra tier when local education authorities in principle should be able to do it?  Why create more bureaucrats?

TOBY YOUNG: It’s also your policy to create an extra tier for the government’s policy.

DIANE ABBOTT: Well I would say on that as well why create extra bureaucrats?  Local education authorities have a history, they know the schools …

TOBY YOUNG: You’re criticising your own party’s policy on this.

DIANE ABBOTT: I have never been frightened to criticise a policy when it’s wrong, I don’t see …

TOBY YOUNG: This is a strong leading policy of Labour to create a new tier of intermediaries.

DIANE ABBOTT: I don’t believe and the public doesn’t believe in creating bureaucracy where you don’t need to do it but as I say, we really don’t want to get into a witch hunt against Muslim governed schools.

TOBY YOUNG: Diane, it’s not fair to say that anyone who criticises what is going on in some of these schools is just criticising them for being devout Muslims and claiming that all devout Muslims are terrorists …

DIANE ABBOTT: You called them medieval fanatics, that’s not very fair.

TOBY YOUNG: Yes but a particular strand, a particularly pernicious medieval strand of Islam which has been imported from Bangladesh and Pakistan.

DIANE ABBOTT:  You were saying these governors are medieval fanatics, these are governors who were praised by Ofsted less than twelve months ago.

TOBY YOUNG:  Well the particular strand of Islam which has found its way into some of these schools in Birmingham is a medieval strand of Islam, they don’t believe for instance in teaching children about the arts and music because within their hard line interpretation of Islam they believe it’s wrong for children to be exposed to art and music.

DIANE ABBOTT: We will see what the facts are.

AJ: We will find out, as you say, more from Ofsted tomorrow but very quickly, before we bring in Sol Campbell in a moment – apologies Sol – just one word about the politics of this, do you feel this has been adequately dealt with with the resignation of Theresa May’s assistant and an apology from Michael Gove or does more need to be done?

DIANE ABBOTT: Well I imagine that Cameron thinks he’s closed it down and poor Gove and poor Theresa for that matter will watch themselves certainly in the short term.

AJ: Okay, more about that political fallout later on, but Sol, let’s turn our attention now to the World Cup and welcome you to the show.  The Sunday Times again has more revelations this week after yesterday’s allegations concerning the Qatar bid.  We should stress of course all along that Qatar denies all these allegations.

SOL CAMPBELL: Yes, we have got to be careful what we say.  Well this story keeps on running, the Sunday Times broke it, there is a lot of information out there and at the moment it is just allegations but it seems to be not going away, there is money sloshing around and people being paid off which is very hard to see but I’ve looked at a couple of the articles and I’ve seen $5 million which for me, winning the World Cup for $5 million is quite cheap in comparison, there is a lot of money to be made by actually hosting the World Cup and all the sponsors but I think today Sony was voicing their opinion and their concerns that we want to see a bit more detail because you’ve got to have a fair clean fight.

AJ: Well yes, Sony is calling for an appropriate investigation into the claims of wrongdoing, how much extra pressure does that put on FIFA when a sponsor starts speaking out?

SOL CAMPBELL: That’s when it really starts for them sinking in and the penny’s dropped but as we’ve seen with FIFA, they’ve done it time and time again, you’ve got a lot of people with their jobs at stake, a lot of people who can blame each other but it’s a difficult situation because they are all in the same boat.  No one wants to say anything because if one person says something it all goes down so it is difficult

DIANE ABBOTT: You have to go back and say it was a bizarre choice to put the World Cup in Qatar which has no tradition of football and is so hot the pitches all have to be air conditioned but I saw an interesting story in the Indie on this because everyone has been saying if you take the World Cup from Qatar they’ll sue but the Independent on Sunday says Qatar will not be able to mount a legal challenge to FIFA because they signed away their rights to take any form of legal action when they made their original tender for the tournament and I think that’s interesting.

SOL CAMPBELL: Also you can’t say that, you know, you are saying that Qataris have never had football there and they have no tradition, that can’t be the reason to say they can’t have the World Cup, it should be for everybody.

DIANE ABBOTT: No, no, I’m just saying it looked strange right from the beginning.

AJ: There is talk of rerunning the World Cup, rerunning the bid process.  Ed Miliband has been calling today for it to be rerun should these allegations prove true and clearly there are still investigations to be done but that would be a massive undertaking, wouldn’t it, Toby Young, the idea of stopping it in one country when a lot of money has been spent already and starting it again somewhere else, I mean logistically that’s a huge headache. 

TOBY YOUNG: It’s a headache but if these allegations turn out to be true I think it’s unavoidable and I hope that actually Britain gets to host the World Cup in 2022 and that would be a fantastic outcome.  I hoped it would have been the outcome last time, it should have been the outcome last time and perhaps it might have been had money not changed hands, we don’t know.  I am very interested, Sol, I don't know if you stayed up, like me, to the small hours of the morning yesterday to watch England draw with Honduras, what’s your view of that?

SOL CAMPBELL:  I think everybody, they have been together for three weeks, they are trying to click together, they are trying to find the right combinations.  I think it was a little bit more dynamic when Ross Barclay came on and Jack Wilshere, there’s a couple of guys who have come back from suspension, Sterling, so that will add a little bit dynamics going forward but generally we know where we are, we want to be solid, hard to beat and go from there. Stephen Gerrard is going to be very important to pull the strings going forward but really it would have been nice to maybe win the game, we had a couple of chances as well but I think …

AJ: How far do you think England can go?

SOL CAMPBELL: We can definitely get out the group. It’s going to be difficult because I think Costa Rica is going to be a bogey team for one of the teams because all three, there’s three teams could actually go out and only two can go but Costa Rica is going to hold the key, they are going to give someone a bad result which is going to go against them in getting out the group.

AJ: You’ve played in the World Cup before, do you read the newspapers while you are away?  Do allegations like that feed into the dressing room and unsettle players at all do you think?

SOL CAMPBELL: It doesn’t unsettle but if you are sitting round the dinner table and there are all these articles it’s not going to be to your liking but most of the players are big enough to say look, we are here to do a job, yes we’re going to have good games, yes we’re going to have bad games but it is all about moving forward, seeing how we can progress and get out and do good and see how far we can go in the World Cup.

AJ: Okay, let’s move on to a story, Sol, you’ve picked out about Ed’s triple tax hike, this is a story in the Mail on Sunday I should say.

SOL CAMPBELL: Yes, for me I look at a lot of these political parties and everyone is looking at how to get money out of people’s right to live here.  I have a situation where I look at Britain, I look at England and I say to myself why don’t you tax big corporations who are from other countries who are in this country making a lot of money.  Yes, they are employing a lot of people but they are not paying a lot of tax really, they have got these clever kind of schemes that are based in Ireland or wherever so why don’t you actually say look, we want more money from you because they’re making a hell of a lot of money?

AJ: Just to read some of the details from the story, it says secret Labour plans for a multi-billion pound package of new property wealth taxes to hammer London and the wealthy counties of southern England were leaked last night.

DIANE ABBOTT: Let me just say, we are going to see these scare stories on an almost weekly basis in the Tory press all the way until we actually publish our manifesto.  This is a report which has been commissioned, it is not our policy and really I think that people should talk about the policies that we have announced and will announce and not these scare stories.  The next thing it’ll be Labour plans the death of all first born, silly stuff.

AJ: What do you think of it, a bad idea then?

DIANE ABBOTT: I  think it is a silly story, it’s not Labour party policy.  I’m not talking about the specifics of any of these but I’m just saying taking some report which someone has written, the journalist values of taking some report that someone has written somewhere and saying this is Labour party policy, it’s a nonsense.

TOBY YOUNG: It seems to me to be completely uncontroversial that the Labour party if they are re-elected are going to raise taxes, they’ve made that completely clear.  Until very recently Ed Miliband’s role model was Francois Hollande in France and we now see that Hollande’s tax and spend policies have been absolutely devastating for the French economy.

DIANE ABBOTT: Come on Toby, where has Ed Balls said he is going to raise taxes, Ed Balls who is the guy who actually decides all this, he has never said he is going to raise taxes and particularly never talked about…

TOBY YOUNG: What about property tax, are you denying the Labour party would introduce a property tax?

DIANE ABBOTT:  I don’t know what we’re going to do.

TOBY YOUNG: Come on, that’s a banner policy.

DIANE ABBOTT: I don't know, it’s not been drafted, it’s not been agreed.  You can comment when we have actually published our policies, this sort of stuff is just silly.

TOBY YOUNG: I have no doubt that property taxes, new taxes on farmers, new taxes on small business will all be in the Labour party manifesto so it won’t be long before you can’t dismiss them as Tory smears.  I think Labour have been extremely lucky that last week was overshadowed by this row between Gove and May because actually what happened in the Newark by-election in which Labour came third less than a year before a general election in a constituency that they actually won in ’97 would have produced calamitous consequences for Ed Miliband and we can see traces of it in today’s papers.  Just below this story is a story where Rachel Reeves has said that the Labour party under Ed Miliband has lost its mojo.  On page two of the Sun today is a story about all these local Labour party associations criticising Ed Miliband’s ineffective weak leadership and actually Labour is in trouble, Ed Miliband is in trouble and they are lucky that that’s been obscured by this Gove May row.

DIANE ABBOTT: Ed Miliband is not in trouble, he is going to lead us into the general election and we’re going to win and actually as you might know because you have a school in the area, we had some excellent results in London including Hammersmith and Fulham.  So clearly not everyone where you live agrees with you because we won the council for the first time in generations, we’ve had excellent results and this is all froth.

TONY YOUNG: Diane, on another programme like this I bet Ken Livingstone £100 that Ed Miliband would not win an overall majority in the next general election. If you want to take that  bet too I’ll take you on as well.

DIANE ABBOTT: … I never bet.

AJ: Are you going to bet on the World Cup though?

DIANE ABBOTT: No, no. 

AJ: Because we’re going back to the World Cup, you picked up a story from the FT about penalties.

DIANE ABBOTT: I think this is a great story.  I’m not a football expert like Sol or Toby even but I do know that penalty shoot outs, England just isn’t very good at them and actually the last penalty shoot-out I saw was Arsenal in the Cup Final and I found that incredibly nerve-wracking and I thought this story was incredibly interesting because it said it was all about psychology, all about psychology.  When you see somebody about to take a penalty turn his back on the goal keeper and walk to the spot, he is not going to do well.  When people …

AJ: You can’t see the faces that Sol’s pulling.  Is that right or not, what’s your take on it?

SOL CAMPBELL: I’ve not read the article but of course it comes down to psychology.  Sometimes it comes down to if you had a really good game in that particular game and you go to the penalty takers, there’s a lot of things …

AJ: But England are particularly bad, aren’t they, at penalties, we do have a bad record.

DIANE ABBOTT: What the article says is because England has a bad record that creates more pressure.  If you have a good record on penalties, the team will do well, if you have a bad record like the England team, they will do badly.  I think it’s fascinating, you should read it.

AJ: But what is the secret to taking good penalties?

SOL CAMPBELL: I have never taken one.

AJ: You’ve never taken a penalty?

SOL CAMPBELL: No, I’ve never taken one, no. 

AJ: So we won’t ask you then!

SOL CAMPBELL: No, obviously some people who take them are very confident with the pressure and where they want to hit the ball and sometimes you have just got to say to yourself well I’ve got to pick one spot and that’s it and just don’t change your mind. 

AJ: Okay, well on that note, good luck to England, any penalties that come their way, let’s hope they do well.  Very good to see all of you, thanks very much indeed.