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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, the world’s first comprehensive climate change agreement was reached in Paris yesterday.  It’s being hailed by President Obama and others as the best chance we have to save the planet.  The core of the deal is legally binding committing nearly 200 countries who took part to take action to address global warming and climate change.  Well I’m joined now from Hull by John Prescott, Lord Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister of course and now Chair of the Council of Europe’s Environment Committee.  He was the negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a very good morning to you Lord Prescott and tell me then, mentioning 1997, how does this agreement build on the groundwork you and others achieved back then?

JOHN PRESCOTT: Well this is a remarkable deal but to compare it to Kyoto, I was negotiating for the 40 industrial countries and America were with us, it was only when President Bush came in that he took out of the agreement so it was a smaller group but it did recognise carbon, climate change and temperature.  That has now gone in the last 20 years to this new deal.  It is a remarkable deal, it is global, it accepts the science and I have met with the French Minister and indeed Miliband and we gave him this report, we hoped to work with him if we had won the election and all the points in this, 12 major points, are now in this new agreement so I’m quite pleased with it. It recognises the science, it sets a target, it has a legal framework, it recognises we must switch from oil and coal and now into the renewables, that was embodied in this agreement so of course we must say, [I only pity] we’ve been there in the negotiations.

DM: Well of course Labour not leading the negotiations for the UK, so what do you make then of the UKs commitment to all this?  As a fully industrialised country we are meant to be an example in particular to the developing world yet domestically we see things like subsidies to some renewables being cut.

JOHN PRESCOTT:  Yes, this is an important point.  You had to get an agreement between the developing countries and the rich countries.  We didn’t have to deal with that at Kyoto, it was only the rich countries, now you have to have a global agreement, they’ve all signed up for it but do bear in mind, if you notice there wasn’t a vote on this one, there wasn’t a vote at the Kyoto, you have to then begin to put it into a protocol and then you have to sign up for it.  We’ll see what happens then but unfortunately this government has moved away from the main recommendations, it is reducing the subsidies for renewables which the conference you must not do and give up some of the call, and it is giving to the oil industry that we’re trying to move away from, an economy on fuel, on oil, on coal.  But India and China are still going to do some of that so there are difficult things to come and that’s why in Britain we brought in the Climate Change Act.  No other country has got that Act, with an independent review, so I welcome the review in the beginning but the next stage must be now to strengthen parliamentarians to make sure when they ratify the agreement, when it comes to be ratified by national parliaments, that they carry out their promise.  We are moving to a new stage now, everybody should have a Climate Change Act committed legally in every country and enforced by the back benchers.

DM: But do you think, I mean with the UKs Climate Change Act that you mentioned there from 2008, that this government may not hit the targets or indeed there is provision for the Secretary of State to vary the targets?

JOHN PRESCOTT: No, what it has to do under the legislation you are required to come back to parliament to repeal it.  They tried to do that in Australia but the government didn’t have a majority.  The real problem is, what they were telling me in Paris, the government is going in the opposite direction.  It’s giving subsidies to the oil industry and removing it from the renewables, it’s actually scraped the zero control on housing for the insulation and that is another thing, it’s got rid of the Carbon Storage Act just recently during the time of the conference.  Everything on carbon they say is value for money, what the conference is saying is we must make a fundamental change about saving the planet, not necessarily saving the money which seems to be the obsession of this government.

DM: You talked there Lord Prescott about …

JOHN PRESCOTT: By the way, I must tell you, if you look at all the evidence it shows you on energy changes you can save a lot more money.  For example when we brought in the Climate Change Act we brought in the Climate Levy and we put that on to the industry.  The industry said that was wrong to begin with but then they found they weren’t using energy efficiently enough and they made money on it so that was something that was agreed between the private sector and the government, not posed by legislation but by the sheer sense that it was more efficient, more effective, you saved on carbon and you made more money.  We’ve got to move to a green economy.

DM: Well you are clearly of the view that Britain’s commitment to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions would be safer under a Labour government but of course the prospect of that happening under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership still seems to be very far away, the attacks just keep coming, one of the very latest from Tony Blair calling him a tragedy.  


JOHN PRESCOTT: Well everyone is entitled to their view, a lot of people voted for Jeremy as their leader and he’s the one who’s leading us at the moment.  Interesting, he supports the climate change, the Tories don’t really, they want to undermine what we did but at the end of the day the party will sort it out, he’s only been in a few months for goodness sake.  Let us keep going, an awful lot of people support him and we’ll get on with getting the policy concentrated.  I know that the press are obsessed with Jeremy, well they’ve always been obsessed with Labour leadership whoever it was.  Let’s get on with the job and give him a chance, for God’s sake.

DM: But it’s about a united Labour party isn’t it?  There is all this talk about Jeremy Corbyn now having won Oldham and given that free vote on Syria, recasting the party, the front bench team, more in his own image.  Do you think that would be a wise way to approach the future?  

JOHN PRESCOTT: Well I’ve been in Parliament for forty odd years, I’ve seen a number of leaders come along and they change it as they think but what Jeremy seems to be saying is that I want the party more involved in it.  Well that’s an argument for us to have.  As the leader he has earned the right democratically to lead the party, what we now are doing is going through the process but there are some people in the party who I call the Bitterites who want to continue the war that they lost.  The party has spoken, we have the leader and he has to recognise being a leader perhaps rather than representing a protest movement.  Either way, he’s a different man isn’t he?  Either way, people seem to be saying we want him there but at the end of the day Jeremy will have to decide there is a balance between what is the leadership of the Labour party and representing that, a very difficult job and the one of having to carry out commitments to say Stop the War.  He’s been in that all of the years, do you just want him to say sorry, I’m not going to do it?  It’s only a few MPs demanding that by the way, not all the MPs.  He’s keeping to what he thinks are his principles and I have to say, the electorate do seem to like to have a politician who still continues to do what he believes in.  That’s the difficult balance for Jeremy and he’ll have to carry that out.

DM: I’m also reading, I’m not sure if it’s true but in one of the Sunday papers anyway, that he might try to put Ken Livingstone into the House of Lords, Lord Livingstone.  That would be a bigger turn up for the books than you ending up there.  

JOHN PRESCOTT: Nothing’s a surprise with Livingstone is it?  I mean I’ve been on the Executive and had to vote for him and hold my nose because he didn’t want to carry out the party’s policy, that’s Ken Livingstone.    

DM: And that’s John Prescott.   Thank you very much indeed Lord Prescott, very good to talk to you.