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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well the Labour leadership contest has been as divisive as it has been long so when the new leader is announced next weekend will the party be able unite and put the past behind them?  Liz Kendall is Labour MP for Leicester West and a candidate for the leadership of her party of course. A very good morning to you Liz Kendall, first of all on your own candidacy the writing has been on the wall for some time, you’re going to finish last.  Are you running up the white flag yet?    

LIZ KENDALL:  We don’t know that yet, we don’t know that yet.  

DM: Okay, you’re not going to finish first.  

LIZ KENDALL: Look, I know I’ve got a long way to go but there’s lots of party members who still haven’t voted yet and the question is, who is the candidate best placed to win in 2020 and to do that we need a leader who doesn’t want to take us back to the politics and the policies of the 1980s or the 1970s but also someone who can move us on from where we’ve been over the past five plus years.  

DM: And you think that is you but it’s not going to be you so isn’t it time to tell us if you are staying in it, where you want your second preferences to go?   

LIZ KENDALL: No, I’m not going to say where I’m going to put my second or third preferences and I’d say to people, think about who is best placed to lead us to beat the Tories in 2020.  

DM: But why make it a riddle?  I mean we know it’s not Corbyn so it’s Burnham or Cooper, which one is it?  

LIZ KENDALL: I think it either should be Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper but I’m not going to set out what I’m going to do, I’d ask people to really think about who they think is best placed to lead the party.   

DM: Well your campaign manager has said vote Cooper, get Corbyn so he thinks your second preferences should go to Andy Burnham.  

LIZ KENDALL: That’s totally his personal view and there will be some of my supporters who put Andy  second and some who put Yvette second but we’ve still got a week to go, we’ve still got almost half of our party members or supporters who haven’t voted and I’m going to be making a strong case this week about how we need to change to win in 2020 and beat the Tories, that’s what really should be on the ballot paper.   

DM: That means you are staying in the party but …

LIZ KENDALL: Of course.  

DM: … but were Jeremy Corbyn to make that case all the way up to 2020, whatever you may face?  

LIZ KENDALL: Of course.  I love this party, I think we’ve been the greatest champion of equality and opportunity the country has ever seen and I think our values are precisely the ones that the country needs to meet the challenges of the future.  Look what we’ve seen over the past week with the terrible refugee crisis, we are an internationalist party, we don’t believe that our values stop at our borders and it is only by working with others that we will get a solution to this problem.  We know that the economy still isn’t working for very many people in this country and we know that countries that are more unequal have shorter periods of growth and slower growth.  We need that fairer and more equal society if we are going to deliver a better economy for most people and that’s why I’ll always stay a champion of this party.   

DM: Alright but even if, and just staying with the internal party issues for a moment or two before we get onto refugees, even if as some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters or are loosely allied with him perhaps, people have been saying, they are going to weed out Blairites like you and try to deselect you.  

LIZ KENDALL: I don't think that that will happen.  We’ve always been a broad church as a party and you’re right, after this leadership election whoever wins we need to unite because divided parties don’t win elections.  But I actually think that this huge debate we’re having now has been inevitable, it’s been bubbling for a long time in the party.  I don't think we had this debate out in 2010, it’s right we’re having it now but the fundamentals aren’t going to change over the next five years which is unless we regain people’s trust on the economy and with the public finances and unless we have a message of hope for the future that the vast majority of people in this country can feel part of, we won’t win in 2020 and we won’t be able to put our values into practice.  

DM: Okay, onto the refugee crisis as you touched on there.  Just on the numbers, how many do you think the UK should take?  Yvette Cooper said initially 10,000, David Miliband said 20,000 or more, what’s your view?  

LIZ KENDALL: My gut instinct in the face of this appalling humanitarian crisis and with Germany taking 800,000 refugees in over the next year is that the number should be in the tens of thousands and I’m glad to see according to the newspapers that the Prime Minister has finally started moving on this.  You know, he has made our government seem small and uncaring and impotent …  

DM: Tens of thousands is a very broad sweep there, in the low tens of thousands, mid or high?

LIZ KENDALL: It’s hard to put an exact figure on it.  I think you’ve seen many people coming forward, many council leaders saying that they can take far more and I’m pleased that’s happening.  What I’d like to see happen this week is for the Prime Minister to have an urgent meeting with our local councils and council leaders, to be more really pressing the case in Europe.  I think he has been appalling over the last week and has failed to engage on this issue at a serious level with the highest positions in the rest of Europe.  Parliament will be rightly focused on it this week, we need to see a proper detailed plan of action and you know, we’ve actually dealt with issues like this before in this country.  I’m very proud to be an MP in Leicester and we know that back in the 1970s when Idi Amin expelled the Ugandan Asians, Britain, the UK actually took 30,000.

DM: That was a finite number of people.  

LIZ KENDALL: Yes it was but it happened within a very short period of time. They were told they had 90 days to leave and we were able to put a plan into place and I’d like to see that kind of focus and seriousness over the next few …

DM: But lots of people are asking then about the stress that puts on public services and how it will all be paid for and George Osborne seemed to indicate this morning that the aid budget, a lot of money we’re being told being focused to deal with the problem closer to Syria, well if some of those refugees come to the UK some of the aid budget diverted to the UK to help out.  What’s your view on that?

LIZ KENDALL: I think it is not enough simply to say we would take refugees from the camps in or close to Syria, we need to take action for the people who have already come across to Europe.  We have a huge problem still …

DM: But the question is about the money, should the money follow them?  If the aid money has been helping them in camps near Syria and now they come to the UK should the money follow them from the aid budget?  

LIZ KENDALL: I think we need to do both.  Removing some of that aid and development money from the real crisis that we’re seeing in the camps closer to Syria I think would be wrong, we need to see additional resources going into that.   

DM: And what about military action within Syria?  Again we’re hearing that there may be a vote coming up and the Chancellor saying he wouldn’t want it put forward unless there was cross-party agreement, Parliamentary consensus. Well Labour opposed military action against Syria in 2013, where would you stand if this were action aimed at Islamic State and trying to deal with the crisis at source?

LIZ KENDALL: I think we have to look seriously at any proposal the government comes forward with but the government would need to be very explicit about how any UK involvement would add to what the US is already doing in the area and it needs to be part of a wider political strategy.  We have to learn the lessons from what happened both in Iraq and actually Libya which is the failure to prepare for any aftermath and there remains a real need for the UK government along with the UN and Europe to engage with the countries in the area, do develop a wider political strategy to deal with this long running deep rooted schism between Sunni and Shia and we have to have a much greater focus on that I think.

DM: Okay, Liz Kendall, thank you very much indeed.