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ANNA JONES: Now exactly a month ago Labour suffered its most bitterly disappointing election result for a generation but with battles over Scotland and Europe looming, how does the party pick itself up and get back on fighting form in a hurry?   Well I am joined now by the Shadow Leader of the Commons and contender for the party’s deputy leadership, Angela Eagle MP.  Welcome to you, first of all why are going for the job as deputy leader?  

ANGELA EAGLE: Well I think I’m a unity candidate, I think I’m not from one particular faction or another.  I’ve been in parliament 23 years, I’ve got a record which is recognised of bringing the party together in my 13 years on the NEC, Chair of the party, Chair of the National Policy Forum and I just love the Labour party and I want it to succeed and I want to try to play my part in making sure we are fit to win again in 2020.   

AJ: If you’ve got so much to offer why are you not going for the top job then?  What is different about the deputy leadership job, what is a deputy leader’s job?  

ANGELA EAGLE: Well look, I want to be a deputy leader who is a campaigner in the country, a reformer in the party and who will talk truth to …

AJ: But why can’t you do that as leader?

ANGELA EAGLE: Well the leadership role is different, you’ve got to go out and be the front person.  I think my parliamentary career and my character more suits the deputy leadership role and I want to be as supportive as I can because I think it’s really important that we get the party back and fit to fight in 2020 and because the defeat was so difficult, because we went backwards rather than making progress, we really have got a huge task ahead of us and we’ve got to persuade Conservative voters in England that we can be trusted.  That means reforming the party organisationally and politically and it’s a lot of hard work and I think I’m experienced enough to be able to contribute in a really positive way.  

AJ: Well you have got to convince voters across the country but particularly in the south and in Scotland where Labour did extraordinarily badly, didn’t it?  How can you as an MP from Wallasey do that and appeal to voters in those parts of the country?   

ANGELA EAGLE: Well firstly I took a marginal seat which had never been Labour in its life when I won in 1992 and I still hold it all these years later.  In fact I doubled my majority and had a 9% swing from the Conservatives to Labour in my seat this time but I also think I speak to metropolitan voters as well.  I’m the first out gay woman in parliament, I think I understand new politics as well as the politics of our core vote.    

AJ: And what about Scotland?

ANGELA EAGLE: Well look, I think what happened in Scotland, a tsunami of support for the SNP, is not going to be disentangled easily.  We’ve got to listen to our colleagues up there about what happened but I think the key thing is we’ve got to revive the party at grassroots, we’ve got to make the party stronger, we’ve got to make it present in all of our communities and we’ve got to stand up and fight to protect people who are going to be particularly hurt by some of the things that this Conservative government is planning to do which we didn’t get to talk about in the election because the fear and smear about an SNP Labour led coalition drowned out a lot of the policies which this government is now going to pursue which will tear our social fabric.  

AJ: Andy Burnham is considered to be the frontrunner for leadership at the moment according to the polls.  If you won the deputy leadership, one more question on this issue, you would both be from Northern constituencies, couldn’t that turn off a lot of voters in those areas that I’ve been talking about?

ANGELA EAGLE: Well as I say, I think that I’ve got a lot to offer in other ways as well.  You can have gender balance, you can have geographical balance, there’s all kinds of balances you can try and seek but the party structures in the way that these elections are running don’t allow party members to make those balances because the election is being run at the same time so we’ve all got to get out there and listen to why we were defeated and I think there were lessons, very strong and hard lessons we need to learn.  

AJ: Peter Mandelson has been talking about some of the reasons why Labour was defeated, he said today that Labour failed to come up with a decent alternative to George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse idea, this idea of decentralising power away from London, is that a factor?

ANGELA EAGLE: He stole it from us.  We were doing some very important policy development which was taken away and stolen while we were developing it.  Look, we’ve got to ensure that our country is far more decentralised than it is now, that we grow our economies in the north, in the north-east, in Scotland and in the south-west in fact, more locally so that we’re not so centralised economically and we’ve got to do that by having things like regional investment banks, by growing economic strength so in some senses he’s correct but you know, I think what we did is we didn’t really communicate a lot of the policies that we had which would have tended towards that, in a way that people understood and we hadn’t dealt with the myths about spending, our spending on schools and hospitals which did not cause the global economic crisis.  So people weren’t listening to us.  

AJ: If you had these reservations about the message not getting through, why didn’t you raise them during the campaign?  

ANGELA EAGLE: Oh I did, all sorts of issues were raised but I’m not the sort of person that raises things publicly because I don’t believe in tearing down a leader or being disloyal.  

AJ: You talk about the leader, was Ed Miliband a problem?

ANGELA EAGLE: Well clearly the polls demonstrated that Ed had a problem being seen as a Prime Minister but I think that this is a failure of the whole party, we have to take collective responsibility for it rather than blame individuals. Being in politics is a difficult place to be and I don't think it helps to be uncomradely to people who are in the same party and say somehow it’s all his personality problem.  It isn’t, it’s a collective failure and we have to take responsibility for it and put it right so that we are ready to win in 2020 and help those people that we came into politics to help, those that suffer, those that don’t do well, those that have their potential taken off them because of where they come from.

AJ: As Shadow Leader of the House, I want to put to you the issue of MPs pay, IPSA has recommended, the independent body has recommended a 10% pay rise, will you accept this pay rise?   

ANGELA EAGLE: Well look this is still something that IPSA is consulting and I’ll tell you what, I used to be very embarrassed to have to be made to vote on whether we had pay rises as MPs or not I remember there was a huge outcry to say we should not be allowed to vote on our pay rises so we’ve set up an independent body.  That independent body is doing its job now, we are in the middle of a consultation, if people have got an issue with what it is suggesting they must deal with that independent body.  I think it is invidious for me as Shadow Leader of the House to be asked to comment on everybody else’s pay.

AJ: I’m not, I’m asking what you would do, would you accept the pay rise?   

ANGELA EAGLE: I am actually waiting to see what IPSA come up with, we are still …   

AJ: If they come up with a 10% pay rise will you take it?  

ANGELA EAGLE: I am not going to get into hypothetical questions.  IPSA are an independent body, I think we have to note because it’s not mentioned that IPSA have said this pay rise will be cost neutral to the public purse and certainly if a pay rise goes ahead then I think the government should make certain that it honours the outcome of other pay review bodies too.  

AJ: Okay, Angela Eagle, thank you very much indeed for your time.  

ANGELA EAGLE: Thanks very much.