ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well of course the last week has been a devastating one for Westminster.  On Thursday the Labour MP Jo Cox was killed in her constituency and in her memory the Chancellor has now appealed for a change in tone in the final days of the EU referendum campaigning and parliament of course will be recalled tomorrow so politicians can pay tribute to her.  Well I am joined now by John Mann, one of Jo’s fellow Labour MPs of course and good morning to you, Mr Mann.  Just tell us first of all your memories of Jo and your sense of her potential in her contribution to parliament.  

JOHN MANN: Everyone recognises that she was a brilliant, a brilliant MP and if you’d have said to me a week ago, you’d have said Jo Cox, give me a comment on her, I’d have said well she’s got her priorities the right way round because she was very noticeably, determinedly doing what we call building her local base.  In other words, even though she came from the area, going back to it, establishing herself, representing local people, families, on their individual concerns which is what an MP should be doing and without question, she would have been a huge star in the future.  

DM: And what she was doing on Thursday.  And your sense of tomorrow in the House of Commons, it’s going to be extraordinary.  

JOHN MANN: Parliament will come together as one, united, including all the different staff there as well as the Members of Parliament.  People are still shaken, I’m still shaken by it.  

DM: I can tell.

JOHN MANN: In Parliament you get this stuff all the time, the horrendous stuff you see but it’s slightly at a distance and so we get to see it, we get to think about it, we get to understand it, we get to discuss it but this is kind of … this is within the family and that is different.  And also the brutality of it and the fact that it was in the constituency doing the constituency work, that kind of hits us even harder.

DM: As MPs.  Do you think it will lead – I mean the Chancellor writing today about the need for less inflammatory rhetoric, we’ve been hearing that from so many MPs, including there’ll be a coming together tomorrow, but do you really think it will last?

JOHN MANN: Well I’m sure the next few days of political debate will be more mature, less exaggerated, which would be helpful but I look at my timeline on social media, I haven’t noticed a great deal of change frankly.  I think there are other issues to be thought through in challenging the way in which discourse takes place.   

DM: Okay that’s the long term but we’ve got that referendum on Thursday haven’t we and so much to play for and so much heavy fire being exchanged by both sides, can I ask you from an element of the Leave campaign what you made of that Nigel Farage poster, the long snaking queue of refugees and underneath it all it said Breaking Point.  What did you make of that?

JOHN MANN: It contributed nothing relevant, nothing positive, Farage should withdraw that poster, it’s got nothing to do with what’s motivating 99.99% of people who have voted Leave or are thinking of voting Leave on Thursday and they are not the big issues, the big concerns.  He is trying to play on fears, it’s highly inappropriate but whatever happens on Thursday particularly – and there is a bit of a class divide in how people are voting, that’s generalising but it is an accurate generalisation.  The issues that are really motivating people are about zero hours contracts, this big growth in agency work, what people perceive as cutbacks in the National Health Service, the fact that schools in working class communities are not getting the resources that they require, those are going to remain whatever the vote.  

DM: But that’s underwritten by fears about migration, the pressures that are being put on public services, the pressures on wages, that people have legitimately voiced fears about migration.  It seems that fears that your leader today doesn’t accept, he more or less accepted in an interview on the Marr Show, that there can’t really be an upper limit on migration.

JOHN MANN: Well it’s not that people are fearful about agencies, people are hit by them, people don’t like agency work, people don’t like the fact that their employer can go and get other people and bring them in and do their job, they turn up for work and don’t know how many hours they are going to get.  That’s become the reality for vast numbers of people in this country and it is the fundamental issue whether we leave or whether we remain, that hasn’t been addressed.  That’s the one that underwrites the mood in working class communities today.  

DM: A quick question, a last question Mr Mann, about Ken Livingstone and that notable spat you had with him a few weeks ago, just outside this building in actual fact.  We heard him, didn’t we, before the Home Affairs Select Committee last week saying a handful of Labour MPs have used this issue about Hitler and smeared me because they wish to undermine the leader of the Labour party.  It’s a reference to you isn’t it?   

JOHN MANN: It’s got nothing to do with the leader of the Labour party, it’s got nothing to do with Mr Livingstone, it’s his remarks that were offensive and I’ve been asked if I’ll go in front of the Home Affairs Committee, of course I will and I’ll correct the historical record and explain why what he said was entirely fictitious, how it is him that dreamt it up and the damage that it does inside the Jewish community so there’ll be a chance to put the record straight then.  

DM: John Mann, thank you very indeed for coming in and our best wishes of course for tomorrow.