ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the head of the NHS in England has suggested this morning that the economic fall-out if we leave the EU could hurt the health service.  Writing in the Sunday Times, his predecessors also say there is also a risk it would be harder and more expensive to recruit NHS staff from the European Union.  Well I am joined now from Marlborough by the former Foreign Secretary and Health Minister, Lord Owen who is backing Vote Leave. A very good morning to you, Lord Owen, I want to touch on those issues but first of all this issue of Turkey, if it wanted to join the European Union some of the Vote Leave saying that Britain wouldn’t be able to veto it.  

LORD OWEN: Well let’s get a few facts on the table.  Nine weeks ago David Cameron and the European Council made a commitment to re-energise the negotiating process for Turkey to come into the European Union and to accelerate the process, those are words in the European Council decision and it seems to me we have to face it, that under very difficult circumstances – and I strongly want Turkey to remain a member of NATO – and dealing with the refugee crisis, we are now committed in all good faith to bring Turkey, which is an associate member of the European Union, into the European Union much earlier than most of us had envisaged.  I think that is a mistake, actually a profound mistake and for the past five years actually I’ve been arguing the way to encourage Turkey to remain very committed to NATO and to recognise they are both a European and a Middle East country, is to bring them into the single market which has countries which are not in the EU but without the freedom of movement of labour clause and the real problem for the EU is they will not shift, that if you are a member of the EU you have to exist with free movement of labour and people.  They are also insisting – and this is the foolish, the folly of it – that if you are a single market member you have to commit to that as well and that I believe is the real flaw in where Europe is heading at the moment.

DM: Okay but Lord Owen, the key point, just this basic point about how you are able to join the European Union, this is from the Treaty on the European Union title provisions, Article 49, it says here explicitly that the applicant state shall address its application to the council ‘which shall act unanimously’.  There is no doubt, you can’t deny that Britain has a veto.

LORD OWEN: Look, I wouldn’t dream of denying it but you also have good faith.  If you want to keep a country like Turkey alongside us, believing in our word, you can’t have a British Prime Minister nine weeks ago committing to accelerating membership and re-energising the process and suddenly say, well actually we don’t mean it at all.  What will happen if the Turkish people in the next few months or years feel that we are not keeping this whole process together, it’s a quid pro quo.  Firstly they won’t go on honouring their arrangement to try and keep as far as possible people fleeing from Syria in Turkey in camps there and not crossing over to Greece but they will also say, if you can’t keep your word on this, what’s the point of us being members of NATO?  So let’s be quite clear about it.  You are quite right in saying, I am not denying that at all, membership is unanimous and also France has been saying they won’t take Turkey into the European Union but their President, President Hollande, also made a commitment to accelerated membership and to re-energizing the process. Now if these words mean anything, don’t expect Turkey to take this lying down.  If we are shown not to really mean what we’re saying their obvious step is to go out of NATO and that would have very profound consequences for dealing with ISIL, for dealing with the whole of the problems of Syria and also of Iraq and we need them as friends and allies in this very, very important role within NATO.  

DM: But it seems there are some members, and a Minister appeared on television this morning, Penny Mordaunt, who don’t have that detailed understanding that you have of the accession process …

LORD OWEN: Well I was Foreign Secretary for two and a half years.  

DM: Well precisely, that’s why we’re talking to you, Lord Owen, but it seems you need to talk to Penny Mordaunt and say that if push came to shove, the government came round to your point of view Lord Owen, it does have a veto.  

LORD OWEN: I don’t deny … Look, the wording of the Treaty is absolutely clear, somebody may have made a misinterpretation of that issue but all I’m saying is it is very clear, nine weeks ago our Prime Minister with the European Council made commitments to Turkey to re-energise and accelerate the process of EU entry, that was a very foolish commitment to have made and it would have been far better to have said we will open the single market to countries in a wider part of Europe, not in the EU but however we will not allow freedom of movement of labour.  You don’t need freedom of movements of people and labour to make a single market work, you do need it to make a single currency work and also you need to be a single country for a single currency to work.  The basic flaw – and there are many now – emerging from the European Union is you can’t have a successful euro without creating a single country and many of them believe that and they want a single country.  The issue of this referendum is not half the trivia that’s being talked, all the blue on blue wars and other things, it is do you want to stay in the European Union which is heading to be a United States of Europe?  That is what is happening.  Well you can say you have a veto on that, yes, you’re right, you actually have a veto but the direction of travel of the current European Union is towards creating a country so that the eurozone works and this is the issue for the British people.  We shouldn’t deny it, they want the foreign policy the same, they want the same European defence policy even though we have NATO, the Americans constantly tell us or at least one part of the Americans which is the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence, that it is quite incompatible to have autonomous decisions on defence taken by the European Union alongside a NATO in which both sides claim for their rapid reaction forces exactly the same military numbers.  Now our generals know it’s all nonsense, our admirals know it’s all nonsense, most of the American people know it’s nonsense.

DM: It’s interesting talking to you Lord Owen in terms of Turkey and its accession or not to the European Union, given that on the Leave side this seems to have been spun – if I may use the word – into millions of Turks will come to the UK, some papers saying one million, some saying twelve million, and some of them will be criminals. You haven’t mentioned the immigration issue once.

LORD OWEN: No, because I think that immigration is a problem for the European Union as long as they stick to the fact that freedom of movement of labour and people still has to be absolute commitment for all members of the European Union.   Look, when we joined the European Union we were joining to a six to become nine, then nine became 15 and now we have 15 and 28 and we are bringing in a lot of countries from Eastern Europe that have emerged, some of them from under the Soviet Union, some very close. The pace at which they can come in is going to be slower than people seem to think, therefore they need an interim point.  We do need to encourage them, look I didn’t spend three years on behalf of the EU negotiating the Balkans to suddenly say I don’t want to help Serbia come into the European Union but it is years away.  I want a stepping stone for them to come into the single market, similarly for Bosnia-Herzegovina, similarly for Montenegro and similarly for Albania.  You know, I have a house in Greece, I watch these countries quite closely, it is a long, long way for them.  It’s a fact that they have serious problems with crime and mafias and things like that, they are overcoming them but they need time and we need to help them.  They want a European future, we should try to help them come in to that wider Europe which already exists in the single market and that would have been the right place for Britain to me.  We in this country don’t want this automatic commitment to freedom of movement of labour of every country that comes into the European Union, we want many of those countries to have a European future, we want to work with them, we want to trade with them and we are quite happy to encourage them but we do not any longer believe as the European Union gets ever greater in size, that you can offer freedom of movement of labour when we see the problems of immigration.  Look I see them around the country as I move around in this campaign, they’re in housing, they’re in health …

DM: That’s the thing I wanted to squeeze in, your expertise as a former health minister, just very briefly if you would, this assertion from Simon Stevens that if we left the EU it could damage the health service, your view?

LORD OWEN: Look, he’s providing over a three million deficit, he’s the manager of the National Health Service, stay with the job of running the National Health Service, which you’re not doing very well.  The National Health Service is in crisis at the moment, not only debt, it is not fulfilling almost any of its commitments of waiting times, commitments to the health of the country and I think the NHS manager who have not done very well with the health service – and admittedly this is a party political issue, the Health Service Act of 2012 was a disaster – they stick to the management of the health service and stop telling us about what … they’ve got a vote, let them vote on the European Union but they are part of this collection of people who are brought in, usually from abroad, to tell the British people how to vote.  Every individual British person will make up their own mind and a lot of them haven’t made up their mind and they’re right but these voices from institutions, banks, telling them how to vote, I think it’s better to learn the lesson of President Obama’s visit.  I support President Obama but actually his visit meant that opinion polls turned in favour of leaving.  

DM: Lord Owen, great talking to you as ever, thank you very much indeed.