Murnaghan Interview with Ken Clarke
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now British politics has often been described as a bit of a circus. Well if that’s true then the people that Ken Clarke once described as clowns are doing rather well in it. I’m talking of course about UKIP, they won their second seat in the House of Commons this week, Mark Reckless proved that by swapping his blue rosette for a purple one and he could reach voters who would never vote Tory, he said. So are they still a collection of clowns? Well I am joined now by the former Home Secretary and former Chancellor as well, Ken Clarke, a very good morning to you Mr Clarke. There is a school of thought within the Conservative party itself … Sorry Mr Clarke, please continue.
KEN CLARKE: Well let’s not bore everybody, I have never called them clowns. That was one word taken out of the interview and spun by a newspaper years ago, the rest you quoted is fine but don’t let’s bog down. For the sake of the record I have never called them clowns.
DM: Okay, well let’s just play the quotation of what you said to me eighteen months ago, let’s see what you called them.
KEN CLARKE: [Speaking in 2013] The trouble with UKIP really is it is just a protest party, it is against the political parties, the political classes, it’s against foreigners, it’s against immigrants but it doesn’t have any very positive policies, I don't know what they’re for. It’s very tempting to vote for a collection of clowns or indignant angry people who promise that somehow they will allow you to take your revenge on the people who caused it. You should actually vote for the people who you think are going to be sensible county councillors.
DM: Well there we have it, Mr Clarke, clowns and indignant angry people you told me so you did use the clown word. Are they still a protest party?
KEN CLARKE: You took the whole sentence out before that, I was talking about Beppe Grillo of Italy and I was referring back to the two. I’ll tell you, it’s boring that. They are of course a right wing protest party, they know what they are against, they’re against foreigners, they are against Europe, they are against Westminster politicians, they are still not very pro anything and they are a threat and since you interviewed me they’ve grown, they’ve grown as a problem. I do think the tactics of the two major parties of government, the serious parties of government, Conservatives and Labour, trying to imitate UKIP since then has actually made them more credible and gifted them two by-elections because we were campaigning in a way that was supporting an anti-European, anti-immigration front running things and we probably provoked a whole fresh rash of demands from Eurosceptics in the media and in Parliament for yet more demands from Europe and leaving Europe and all this kind of thing. We’ve got to get back to a serious agenda where UKIP have no policies worth talking about on the economy, on the health service, on education and remind people that you are electing people who have got to govern a country, in the middle of a rather serious crisis still, in May.
DM: So how do you get, within your own party how do you get away from the issue of immigration when we know the Prime Minister is about to make a big speech on it, particularly about how to deal with migration from the European Union?
KEN CLARKE: Well I think you’ve got to emphasise that we are reducing the immigration into this country, that the biggest problems we have are with totally illegal immigrants and we are improving the effectiveness of our controls but in the modern world with millions of people coming in and out every day, it’s very difficult. What we mustn’t do is keep trailing all kinds of suggestions of things we can think of that might be nasty to Europeans on the benefit front. Some Eurosceptic think tank today, Open Europe, is floating the idea of withdrawing tax credits from Eastern Europeans working here which is totally discriminatory. You could have an Englishman working alongside a Pole doing the same job, they both pay the same taxes which amongst other things pay for tax credits, and the Englishman gets the tax credit and the Pole doesn’t. If I was a Polish politician I wouldn’t agree to that in a negotiation nor do I think it is a particular problem and I don't think it would pacify the UKIP people and the extreme Eurosceptic people.
DM: What, do you think your party and your leader should be going even further with immigration and saying, as you have just alluded to there, that there are many aspects of immigration, of migration to this country, that are very, very positive and that a large advanced economy such as ours needs migrants and they make a net contribution to the Exchequer?
KEN CLARKE: A lot of aspects of immigration are very positive to this country and on balance they make a very positive contribution. Indeed our economy would be weaker and poorer if we didn’t have access to skills we don’t require and to people doing jobs that we otherwise couldn’t fill, people who want to invest here, to management, to experts, people in multi-national companies – that’s a modern economy but the downside is that we still have to improve the control of immigration overall because we still have people abusing it. I think it’s a mistake to mix up the immigration issue, which is serious and important and concerns people, with the European issue which is actually a different one because the Eastern European or the Western European, the Frenchman in London or the Pole in Birmingham is not a serious problem if he or she is investing, working, providing skills to our economy. Just like the British people, almost two million of them, living in the rest of the European Union are no threat to the German economy and are not doing damage to France.
DM: Your views are well known, Mr Clarke, within the party but are there many more like you, would you say you were in the majority within your party or that the likes of Mr Reckless and Mr Carswell and those that still think like them in the Conservative party, have got the party by the scruff of the neck and are leading it down this path? Why don’t more of the people who think like you speak out?
KEN CLARKE: Well it’s very difficult firstly because the right wing popular newspapers will never report them. I haven’t done an exact test but I think there are people as pro-European as me which most Conservatives were. What I’m putting forward is the standard Conservative policy on Europe under all the Prime Ministers I’ve served with all the way up to John Major and still actually I think at heart the policy of the Cameron government as well. There are probably about 50 or 60 people who feel as I do very committed to the European Union, I think we slightly outnumber the hard line Eurosceptics who are against, all this rubbish that went into the newspapers about a hundred of them rebelling about the European Arrest Warrant was either some journalist or politician inventing a fanciful figure. I think most Conservative MPs to be fair are in the middle and are looking for sensible reforms that can be delivered, as indeed am I because there are plenty of things wrong with the European Union, there are plenty of things that you can reform and I think a mistake is to let UKIP tow us all off into this anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner stuff which doesn’t have much to do in the modern world with our relationship with the rest of the European Union.
DM: Could you still realistically see us joining the euro eventually?
KEN CLARKE: Not at the moment. They broke all the rules, I mean the euro would have saved us from most of this economic crisis if everybody had stuck to the Maastricht criteria. I won’t take you through all the technicalities but we can only dream now of nobody having more than a 3% deficit and nobody having more than 60% of GDP as debt. The finance ministers I worked with, we drew up all kinds of strict rules and would only admit countries that had convergent economies and had already satisfied the entry criteria. We weren’t in it so I can blame the Germans and the French for abandoning all that. They seemed to think, as everybody did in those mad days of the credit boom, that there was free money and you didn’t have to bother with these irksome rules. We didn’t join and still Gordon Brown broke the rules worse than anybody else, he had a bigger deficit in relation to GDP than the Greeks did and here we all are, we’re still in a grave financial crisis and we’ve still got to work to finish getting out of it and everybody’s living standards have been depressed in the last few years. Most families are less well off than they expected, some are very hard up and that is the fault of Gordon Brown and other finance ministers in America and across Europe. It’s not the fault of foreigners coming from Romania.
DM: Of course Gordon Brown succeeded you as Chancellor and he is expected to announce pretty soon that he is going to finally stand down from Parliament. You have overlapped, you two, for a long time in Parliament, what about your own future Mr Clarke?
KEN CLARKE: Oh I’m going to stand again. You are interviewing the prospective parliamentary candidate for Rushcliffe but my own future however rests in the hands of my constituents, it depends whether they are still prepared to put up with me. I’ll miss Gordon though. Funnily enough, except when I was criticising him when he used to get very offended when he was Chancellor, Vince Cable and I used to point out that he was being irresponsible and he didn’t like that, but actually privately Gordon and I get on very well and we obviously turned out not to agree on economic policy and of course, not surprisingly, on politics. I think if you have the benefit of being able to look back, I think I was right and he was very, very wrong.
DM: Okay but you agree quite often with Vince Cable on economic policies. He’s on the front page of the Observer this morning saying that the £7 billion odd of tax cuts that were promised by Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne at the party conference, he said that they are really unaffordable at a time of deficit reduction.
KEN CLARKE: My understanding is that the tax cuts that were announced at the party conference are for a whole parliament, for a five year parliament and they depend on getting the task completed of getting rid of the structural deficit, getting the deficit down, going into surplus, getting debt under control which we did intend to do in this parliament but I think George Osborne is one of the successes of the government. I think George was right to do it slower. If we had gone at the pace we had originally set out of getting rid of debt and deficit, then you’d have seen real austerity and actually the economy would be in a pretty grim state. We’re taking two parliaments, I think we’ve had to, that’s wise. The tax cuts will come as a reward for the achievement of debt and deficit reduction so don’t expect it on the day we’re re-elected, I think it will be towards the end of the parliament that those tax cuts will be delivered.
DM: Yes but nothing is certain as you well know in the economy and the red lights are flashing on the dashboard according to Mr Cameron. If it really goes critical then presumably those tax cuts wouldn’t be affordable.
KEN CLARKE: Well if we have another global crash then yes. Fortunately I think we’ll have George Osborne who I think does have the capacity to react to it properly. The red light flashing thing I thought was rather a truism, if you disagree with that I can give you a list of problems which might occur in China, in Russia, in Brazil, the Eurozone which has still got to get out to avoid deflation, even America where the recovery is a bit fragile. The only good thing – let’s not be too grim, the collapse of oil and commodity prices is the first really good news, unexpected news, unexpected two years ago, that’s hit us so there are prospects for it to continue. If you carry on having a sensible Chancellor, which we’ve got, an extremely successful Chancellor and if he is allowed to have the courage of his convictions, which more politicians need so if he carries on the way he has been conducting the last four years or his successor, if he moves to the Foreign Office, carries on then I think the chances of the British coming out more successfully than practically any other Western democracy are very high. What we are now talking about is a damn sight more sensible than how can we be rude to Europeans to cheer up UKIP.
DM: All right, Mr Clarke, good to talk to you. Thank you very much indeed, Kenneth Clarke there.
