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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The Home Secretary has climbed down from plans to allow the security services full access to people’s internet browsing history.  It’s after concerns the government wouldn’t have enough support to pass the Investigatory Powers Bill.  It’s been overall a rather difficult week for the government with planned cuts to tax credits derailed by the Lords and nearly 20 Tory MPs also rebelled.  I am joined now by one of the so-called big beasts of the Conservative Party, Kenneth Clarke, he served of course as Chancellor, Home Secretary and Justice Secretary amongst other jobs, he’s in South Wales.  A very good morning to you Mr Clarke.  So the Investigatory Powers Bill, does it seem now that you are feeling your way to getting the balance just about right between civil liberties and protecting the public?

KENNETH CLARKE: Well it sounds very encouraging.  We need this Bill because everybody agrees that the law has gone out of date because technology has moved faster and the law hasn’t.  We’re all agreed, everybody is briefing the newspapers to say that we do need to be protected against terrorists and serious criminals. I think when our spies, when our senior policemen have the right to access communications it is really just a modern version of steaming open envelopes which they used to do in the 19th century and there is no reason why the police and security services should be left behind by technology and let criminals have the advantage of the technology.  But I want to be reassured that it is properly supervised with proper authority and is only used in cases which are so serious that they justify this, what is called proportionality.  Of course we all want to protect ourselves, we must against terrorists; of course we must stop drug smugglers, child abusers and so on but at the moment police, local authorities, vast numbers of people have had access to powers to intercept to stop fly tipping and to see whether people live in a school catchment area or various other things and I think it should be tightly limited to serious crime and it should be properly authorised by somebody who agrees that the security service or the police have some really good reason for suspecting that they need this information.  

DM: But it is going to take an awful lot of oversight, there’s an awful lot of data out there, an awful lot of people in the country on the internet, how many judges and different bodies are we going to need?

KENNETH CLARKE: Well if you actually used it proportionally you’d reduce the number. When I was Home Secretary I used to do these warrants and every day quite a bit of time had to be given up to looking at these and deciding whether you were going to approve them or not.  I doubt whether the volume had gone down since my day, I suspect it has gone up but the volume would be much reduced if you took a stricter view of what you were using it for.  Then there are all the other areas which need various types of approval.  We do a great deal of intercepting for commercial reasons in trade deals, of course there is the routine spying on other governments, some friendly governments but mostly hostile governments and so on and the Act will probably give us a chance to have a good overall look at how we control all these things.  If you don’t control it there are dangers and I am worried about politicians being the only things who control it. I think Home Secretaries in this country have conscientiously done what they need to do in the public interest and that’s Theresa, Labour Home Secretaries, I don't think anybody has abused it but in America these powers have over the years routinely been used to bug your political opponents.  Back in the Nixon era and so on, heaven knows what went on and heaven knows what goes on now and I do think we need some stronger checks than just a senior politician authorising interceptions.  

DM: Moving on to your time as Chancellor, your advice for the current one on this issue of tax credits. He says he is going to listen now, we expect perhaps some changes in the Autumn Statement but there’s an old adage isn’t there that when you’re Chancellor and you are at the beginning of a new term you get the bad stuff out of the way quickly.  Should he stick to his guns?

KENNETH CLARKE: Well I hope so, he certainly needs to save the money.  We do have to face up to the fact that whenever you reduce public spending it tends to be unpopular, you’ve got to decide whether this is public spending which is really justified and the welfare state is essential, it’s the duty of government to look after the poor and the vulnerable, to supplement the income of those who cannot look after themselves.  Whether you need to actually give a government top up to the incomes of three million people on top of what they get in pay from their employers, I very much doubt.  It was introduced as a way of buying votes, Gordon introduced it before an election and kept putting it up before elections and it’s quite difficult to get rid of it but so long as you actually move in other areas to get a more sensible welfare state in place by doing things like providing more free childcare and so on, raising the tax threshold on which people pay tax, I would get on with it but of course he has got to make sure he gets the balance right and I hope in the Autumn Statement the sensible welfare state can be reinforced to help people who would otherwise have difficulty.

DM: Of course as a by-product of all of this, what about the House of Lords?  Lord Strathclyde is looking into that and we’re told that some recommendations will be made fairly soon.  It is something that has been wrestled with by the House of Commons ever since you joined it and presumably will be wrestled with a long time after that too.

KENNETH CLARKE: Well I think Lord Strathclyde will just restate the constitution as we’ve all known it was actually since 1911.  The then Conservative [interference] of the House of Commons to reject large parts of Lloyd George’s budget in 1909 and to say the House of Lords would overrule tax and spending decisions if it wanted to and they haven’t tried to do that since.  It’s a pity that because the Labour and Liberal parties now find that by chance they have a big party majority in the House of Lords, they have cast a big party political vote to throw out £4.5 billion worth of budget spending decisions.  What I hope Tom Strathclyde will do, and I will personally recommend it to him, is recommend that as quickly as possible we put into law and don’t just rely on convention, that it is the House of Commons that decides tax and public spending.  This isn’t just an MP being proud and pompous within the institution but we need a government that can do things, you don’t want an American situation.  Even the Italians have just reduced the power of their Senate to block the Commons because we all know governments sometimes have to do tough and difficult things.  The government has to take its own economic policy so that the government can be accountable for the results, you can’t have the House of Lords just reading the newspapers, the Labour and Liberal parties deciding they agree with each other on a measure where the government is having a row and a controversy and voting it down so I hope Tom will put our constitution on a clearer legal footing. I mean having to go on to appoint 150 new peers and all that kind of thing would otherwise make this unnecessary constitutional crisis somewhat ridiculous.  

DM: Let me ask you about the European referendum and the Prime Minister and the Chancellor’s demands from Brussels.  Some of your senior colleagues seem to be keeping their options open about how they would vote depending on what is achieved there and Theresa May seems, appears to be one of them from what she said this morning.  With one eye on the 1975 campaign, do you think that cabinet members should be free to campaign and vote as they wish in the referendum campaign when it comes?

KENNETH CLARKE: I’ll leave that to David, he’s got a difficult enough position, he’ll have a job I think getting them all to be on the same side.  Hard line Eurosceptics are going to reject whatever the reforms, the vote won’t just be on the reforms, the vote’s the big question.  What is the role of this country politically in the world, how do we have a modern economy and what’s the basis for our economy for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years?  What are our children and grandchildren going to have to protect their interests in the world and to develop a modern economy?  So it won’t all be bogged down on the outcome of these reforms I very much hope, I prefer the debate to turn to the alternative – do any of the Eurosceptics know exactly what kind of economic trading or other relationships they are going to have with the rest of the world because were they to vote no, as the Treaty provides, you then have two years of negotiation with the Commission in which the Commission try to get the 27 other governments to reach an understanding with our government on precisely what the relationship is.  Now therefore the fact that some of our Eurosceptic back benchers would reject absolutely anything that David brought back from Brussels, they are the events of the moment.  When we get to the referendum that’s the big question – what is Britain’s role in the 21st century, how do we deal with a world dominated by Americans, Chinese, Indians, big trading blocs, that we are going to have to decide.

DM: Just to be clear here, if you were a Cabinet Minister or indeed a Minister, and the Prime Minister says I recommend and will be campaigning for a yes and you want to vote no, you’d have to resign presumably?

KENNETH CLARKE: Well this always assumes … we normally have a parliamentary democracy and a government with collective responsibility and I actually think that is a very good way of running a government and governing a country like ours in these modern sophisticated times.  The referendums which we are getting into the habit of having, sort of alter all those rules or people they do.  Harold Wilson didn’t want any of his ministers to campaign at all, Harold was genuinely surprised when having announced his referendum he found within a few hours all his Cabinet had broken up and were busily campaigning against each other on starkly opposite sides and Harold actually found he couldn’t stop it happening.  I think our government internally is unified, it doesn’t have the tensions that the Labour party had back then which is why Harold had called the referendum in the first place and I would hope they will stay together but one or two or them may well be tempted to want to campaign no.  I don’t envy David Cameron the decision quite honestly and again I’m not sure it will be critical in the outcome of the vote.  The thing with referendums if you’re not careful, they are dominated by news about the personalities and the events about the fortnight before you cast the vote.  People should bear in mind when you vote in the referendum you are deciding how powerful a country your grandchildren are going to be living in in 40 or 50 years’ time.  

DM: Mr Clarke, thank you very much indeed for your time.  Kenneth Clarke there.