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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now there is just 24 hours or so to go until nominations close for the Labour leadership, it looks like a three horse race between Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall but as far as readers of a popular Labour magazine are concerned, an outsider has a clear lead.  A poll for Labour List this week had he left winger Jeremy Corbyn leagues ahead of his rivals on 47% but will he manage to secure the all-important 35 MPs nominations he needs to make it on to the ballot paper?  Well Jeremy Corbyn joins me now, a very good morning to you.  This is an issue isn’t it because to be on the ballot paper you need those 35 MPs and you have turned down an offer of help, so-called, from Andy Burnham, to lend you some of his supporters.  

JEREMY CORBYN: Well I think there was also a misunderstanding of the rules.  Labour MPs are the gatekeepers to the leadership contest, it requires 15% of all MPs to nominate a candidate and that means 35.  Once an MP has nominated somebody, unless that candidate themselves withdraw, they cannot change their nomination and so I think it may well have been a misunderstanding of the rules.  The idea that an MP could go into the Parliamentary Labour Party office and say sorry, you know I nominated X an hour ago, I now want to back Y, it would be a bit chaotic wouldn’t it?

DM: Are you going to make the 35 then?  

JEREMY CORBYN: I don’t know.  We’re up to 18 as of Friday and I’ve had some very nice phone calls last night and this morning and during the day yesterday and we’ve got four more names who have already agreed to nominate tomorrow morning so that puts us up to 22.  

DM: And the argument you’re going to make, it’s said you’re going to argue from the left, you felt for instance that your recent manifesto in the election wasn’t particularly left wing.  What are the core arguments you would make?

JEREMY CORBYN: I think there was a confusion in the election.  Ed Miliband made some great points about zero hours contracts, about the living wage, about rights at work, great stuff.  He also made great stuff about nursery education, all those issues, good. The problem was that the fundamental economic message was that we were going to pay off the debt and balance the books in one parliament.  By doing that therefore there’s going to be huge cuts somewhere and if you protect the education and health budgets which I would obviously want to do, then you are going to hit local government very hard and that’s going to be to …

DM: But you must have listened to Chuka Umunna, who for a brief time was a candidate himself and now supporting Liz Kendall, he said that deficit reduction is actually a progressive policy.  

JEREMY CORBYN: Well I find it an odd definition of the word progressive actually.  Deficit reduction means what?  That we cut public expenditure and by and large …

DM: Well it means we don’t saddle future generations with debt.  

JEREMY CORBYN: Well, but you also maintain the life chances and opportunities of the current generation so those living in housing stress, those that are homeless, those that are sleeping on the streets, those kids that are not able to get work, all those things, they’re a generation that is going to be damaged by this.  Take it over a longer period, take it over a longer time, rebalance the economy and above all invest in the economy and invest in people.  

DM: So what does the party look like if you either don’t make it on to the ballot paper or you don’t make it beyond that, you don’t become leader, when you have got the Liz Kendall’s, the Chuka Umunna’s and others arguing things like that.  You have got this huge support from a grassroots publication, is there a danger of a split or at least continuing tensions within the party?

JEREMY CORBYN: Well the Labour party has always been a pretty broad church and it has always been a bit of a coalition of itself.  What I am trying to do is say there is a Labour tradition here, a Labour tradition of public enterprise, of public ownership, a Labour tradition of investment in social health services which I think is a very strong one and what brings a lot of people into the party and brings a lot of people to vote for us in the first place so I want to raise those issues.  I also want to raise the issue of nuclear weapons, of Trident, human rights and justice, just to say to everyone in the party there are a lot of people out there who actually want the Labour party to represent what they in their gut feelings are all about.  Now I am not looking for this for some personal aggrandisement, I am much too old for that kind of thing, I’m doing this because I want there to be a serious debate in the party in which those points of view are heard, are put and are debated and I’ll be organising, irrespective of what happens on Monday, tomorrow, an economic seminar, conference, in which we will hear those radical views and also look at the consequences for other socialist parties that have got involved in debt payment systems such as in Greece and what happened to them when they ended up imposing austerity on their people.  

DM: Okay, Jeremy Corbyn, great talking to you, thank you very much indeed.