ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN  SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now we’re going to have a look through the business pages of today’s newspapers and I’ve joined by John Longworth the former head of the British Chambers of Commerce and now the Chair of the Vote Leave Business Council and Debbie Wosskow, the entrepreneur of Love Home Swap, she’s backing Britain Stronger In.  Good morning to you both, good to have you here.  

[Story about the Norway model in the EU]

JOHN LONGWORTH: Well you’ll note first of all that the Vote Leave people are not proposing this, it’s been proposed by somebody else entirely.  

DM: But you are promoting all sorts of different things.

JOHN LONGWORTH: The second thing to note is I actually went to see the Norwegian Ambassador last year along with their economic advisor and they said they were very happy with their deal and the key thing about all these various deals that the countries have got that are not members of the EU is that it suits them and we will get a deal that suits the UK, not the Norway deal, not the Switzerland deal, a UK deal.  

DM: So what are you proposing?  It would have bits of Norway, bits of Albania, bits of Canada?  

JOHN LONGWORTH: It is very straightforward.  If we leave the European Union we will be better off even if we get no deal with the EU at all because we’ll get 1.1% extra GDP growth from the net contribution and deregulation of only 10% of the regulations because the regulatory costs to the EU according to our own Treasury is £125 billion a year.    

DM: But what about free movement of people?

JOHN LONGWORTH: Well if we go down that route that I’ve suggested there would be no need for us to do a deal on free movement of peoples, it would eliminate that completely.  

DM: John, this story has cropped up on many pages across the papers of Jeremy Corbyn dressed up there, blinged up there and this was on Friday night on the Last Leg on Channel 4, saying  he is no fan of the European Union although he is committed to the in campaign.

JOHN LONGWORTH: Well absolutely and in actual fact I have chosen this because I am quoted in the article because what I said, when I made my fateful speech at the British Chambers Conference on the European Union and said that I thought that we would prosper outside and I thought the EU was incapable of reform the first person to congratulate me on that speech as I left the stage was the next speaker on who was Jeremy Corbyn.

DM: What did he say?

JOHN LONGWORTH: He said what a great speech and how much I agree with you and shook my hand so I was very surprised that Corbyn took the view he took and it is particularly surprising because as I wrote in New Statesman this week, the EU has been a disaster for working people in the UK, it has created a low wage, low skill, low productivity economy, it is actually putting pressure on public services like the National Health Service, schools and housing and actually Labour have abandoned working people which is why working people are abandoning Labour.  

DM: So you must be quite pleased to have Jeremy Corbyn on the remain side if he agrees with you?   

JOHN LONGWORTH: Well I actually think he has got integrity in the sense that he sticks to his own principles and this is the one area which is very disappointing because it said to me that he hasn’t done that for whatever reason.  Maybe he is under a huge amount of pressure.  … As I travel around the country I see a whole groundswell of support for Leave particularly in the regions, I’m from the north of England, I know how people think in the north and they are leaving Labour in droves to actually vote for Brexit.  

DM: Do you think it is more fundamentally dividing the United Kingdom, we are talking about young and old, north and south, all kind of differences.  

JOHN LONGWORTH: What is also very important is that the latest and biggest business survey shows that the vast majority of UK businesses now support leaving and the British Chambers own survey looked at businesses that just operate in the UK and businesses that only export to the rest of the world, which is 87% of our economy and 94% of businesses, the vast majority now want to leave the European Union.  

DM: There is the political aspect here, John you picked this story, ‘Sorcerer Dave loses his magic touch’ and James Lyons in the Sunday Times has the PM’s seven deadly mistakes.   

JOHN LONGWORTH: I think it is a very important point actually about the way the Prime Minister has handled this, it’s one of the thing that tipped me over the edge into saying what I actually said at the conference.  First of all the Prime Minister decides that we need a referendum and he needs to renegotiate, so he obviously thought there was something wrong with our relationship with Europe otherwise he wouldn’t have gone down that route.  The next thing is he comes back with a pathetic set of negotiations that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on but instead of recommending to the country that therefore we vote to leave or even presenting both sides of the argument, he embarks on a vicious fear campaign right from the beginning of March and now of course having said we could do well outside the European Union at the CBI conference of all places he then says it is going to be an utter disaster.   

DM: He said we would do okay.

JOHN LONGWORTH: And if the markets are bobbing up and down it is because the government are creating the problem.  

DM: John and Debbie, very good to see you, thank you very much for coming in and for taking us through some of the business stories there in the papers.