ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the Prime Minister is on the offensive again this morning with the warning that state pensions, NHS spending and even free bus passes could be put at risk if Britain votes to leave the European Union.  In fact even Samantha Cameron is joining in the action, urging voters to trust her husband’s judgment.  Well I am joined now by Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader, he is of course firmly in the remain camp I suspect and here we are – a very good morning to you Nick Clegg – here we are a year and a bit after all that damage being in coalition with Mr Cameron did to your part, here you are campaigning with him again.

NICK CLEGG: I’ve always believed all my life, all my political life, and I will continue to that if we as a country want to make sense of the world we inhabit it’s best doing that hand in glove with our European neighbours, I just don’t think you gain very much by turning your back on the world.  We live in an era of globalisation from climate change to cross-border crime to economic financial flows around the world, the stuff that we can get done together that we can’t possibly do apart.  It was a very similar argument made of course at the time of the Scottish referendum and it is an argument I will make regardless of who my fellow travellers are.

DM: I suppose it is a little bit about the campaign, there is a lot of discussion about the strange bedfellows on all sides that this European referendum and there you are, as I say, a lot of damage – you’ve accepted that – caused to your party by the sacrifices you say you made to join that coalition for five years, there you are campaigning hand in glove with Mr Cameron once again, that causes your party damage and other parties are refusing to do that.  

NICK CLEGG: Look, there’s the SNP, the Greens, there’s large parts of the Conservatives, there’s Labour, there’s Liberal Democrats – I honestly don’t think or at least I hope when people decide where to put their cross on that all important ballot paper on 23rd June and all the clichés that have been applied to this vote are true – it is immeasurably more important than any other election than certainly my generation will ever experience, I hope people won’t actually think about this politician or that politician or this party or that party, they’ll think about their country and in particularly the future of our country or indeed whether our country will have a future at all because as Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have put us on notice, if we were to pull out of the European Union there is a strong chance that they will then succeed in their ambition of yanking Scotland out of what remains of the United Kingdom.  So I hope in these final frenetic stages of the referendum campaign, people will focus on the bigger picture.  There have been lots of claims and counter claims and statistics and counter statistics but in my view there are certain basic underlying truths which don’t change which is there is safety in numbers in an uncertain world which we gain by being part of this European club, flawed though it undoubtedly is.

DM: But in those parties who don’t like the Conservatives, and your party is one of the many members who don’t like the Conservatives of course they don’t, are they people you think are going to say we are not going to vote because Mr Cameron …

NICK CLEGG: Well I certainly think, and I was out and about in the last several days in my own constituency in South Yorkshire, in Sheffield and there are lots of people, they are just fed up to the back teeth with George versus Boris versus Michael versus Dave, all these former friends who have now fallen out spectacularly with each other.  Do you know what my answer is?  I don’t care who runs the Conservative party, this in my view in the last year has proved to be one of the most spectacularly dysfunctional governments in recent times.  They’re not governing for the country, they’re just squabbling amongst themselves.  I care passionately about the country I love and I just think more and more people are realising that actually this goes way beyond this silly petty playground drama between these Conservatives rivals for the future leadership of their party, it’s about us, it’s about our nation.

DM: But how do you deal with that core, I suppose thinking from people in your party, as I say, in the Labour party, in the SNP and so many other parties who are going to say I am not going to go and vote, I never have voted, I’ve never agreed with anything David Cameron or anyone else has done, I’m not going to vote that way, if he is telling me to do that I’m going to do the opposite?

NICK CLEGG: Well if you are Lib Dem agree with the Lib Dems who agree you should stay or if you are Labour agree with Jeremy Corbyn or if you are Green and agree with what Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett are saying.  Certainly the people I speak to recognise that this is unlike a partisan election, the things that you need to ask yourself is do you think the country is going to be safer, stronger, better off in or out?  Now my view is and remains that the risks of leaving far outweigh the inconveniences of staying.  Of course there are inconveniences of staying, there are flaws in Westminster and Whitehall as well but we don’t respond to the flaws in our own political system by razing it to the ground and walking off, you work and work again to make it better which is what the United Kingdom can and must do.

DM: Your visions, and there are multiple visions of what in looks like for the future, you differ, we know for a fact that you differ comprehensively with the Prime Minister’s vision of Britain in Europe.  You think that immigration is wholly a good thing or by and large a good thing for the United Kingdom and you hope eventually we might join the euro.

NICK CLEGG: No, I don’t think so actually and I think the way the euro was established – none of us could have told at the time – was a really botched job and we shouldn’t join it now but look, actually it is not quite the right characterisation of immigration but setting that aside for a moment, you’re right, of course there are different areas of emphasis.  I care more about the European Union’s capacity for instance to deal with climate change than the Conservatives traditionally do, Jeremy Corbyn cares more about worker’s rights than Conservatives do but those differences are nothing as compared to the differences in the Brexit camp and this is astonishing, they are asking us to take the most momentous decision this country, this leap into the dark, that this country would have done for generations and they can’t even agree amongst themselves what happens on 24th June. It beggars belief, it is this great sort of con trick, they keep promising us this world of milk and honey if we were to leave the European Union, I think a lot of people would feel very, very betrayed if they vote for Brexit and they then discover that the leaders of the Brexit campaign don’t know what happens next and that actually we’d be poorer, we wouldn’t have more money and we would have less money to spend on the NHS and …

DM: But people don’t really know what happens next, and you can’t tell us what happens next, if the vote is remain and the European Union shuts the door and says right, you’ve had your vote, you’re certainly not having another one, we can do what we like to you.

NICK CLEGG: No, that certainly won’t happen because of course our rights as one of the biggest and strongest members of the European Union are retained.  Of course my crystal ball is no clearer than anybody else’s that the European Union will evolve but one thing I do know is that the European Union single market will remain by far our most important marketplace for our exports right on our doorstep, I do know that you cannot keep our streets safe from international crime the tentacles of which reach into every community in our country other than working with our partners in the European Union, I do know that we won’t be able to deal with the mass movement of people across the European continent without working with the countries in that continent so flawed though it definitely is and though it desperately needs to be reformed in certain respects, I think that compares favourably to the huge uncertainties of a Brexit campaign that doesn’t even know whether it wants to be Albania or Norway or Switzerland or Canada.  I still don’t know what their future …

DM: But what about those people, and the polls tell us this, so many people who are uncertain, not decided and unclear about all the facts and say okay, I may be listening to Nick Clegg here and agreeing with a lot of what he says but aren’t the Remain side overdoing it?  Here we have got the Prime Minister again today saying it could affect pensions, the NHS and indeed free bus passes might go.  I mean that is Project Fear.

NICK CLEGG: Well I think the problem is we have Project Fear on one hand and Project Fib on the other, it is an absolute massive con trick that the Brexit lot … but I agree with you, even though I am a Remain campaigner, some of the claims they’ve made have a sort of specious precision to them.  They predict exactly what in 20 years’ time will be the state of your household budget. Of course the precision of those figures can be overdone but I still happen to think however that what the Prime Minister appears to be saying today is plainly obvious – if you make yourself poorer, you have less money to spend on the things that you want, schools, pensions, defence and so on so you need to make some very difficult choices if you have less money to go around, that seems to me actually to be stating the obvious.  But yes of course and I have certainly met a lot of people as you imply who are getting pretty sick to the back teeth with all these claims and counter-claims so at the end of the day you need to ask yourself not just what you feel about Brussels today but what do you think is right for our country and future generations, given that we live in an era of globalisation, given that I cannot envisage of a single challenge which will face my small children and indeed future generations, whether it is climate change, crime, globalisation, international trade talks – where we are not stronger together in the European Union as opposed to weaker, isolated and apart.

DM: Just tell me your take on the Leave side, making great headway it seems in the polls and raising immigration and Nigel Farage?  Let’s cut to the point, do you think he is being racist, borderline racist?

NICK CLEGG: Oh I think he’s got a very nasty slightly vindictive view of things.  He is like populists everywhere, you see Trump, Penn, Geert Wilders, in a sense he is in good company, there are populists now, chauvinists and particularly nationalists across the developed world and what they do is they take people’s fears – and people are very fearful, I understand that, there is a lot to be fearful and indeed angry, about these days – and then they say we can solve all of those problems.  Trump says all he needs to do is build a wall to keep the Mexicans out and everybody’s problems will go, Farage says just put that cross on that Brexit choice and all the problems will go and that’s what I find so dishonest about Nigel Farage and indeed other populists across the developed world at the moment, is they take complex problems and then they fool people into thinking that they have simple solutions and do you know what, most people most of the time know that sometimes it is not as simple as building a wall or simply sticking up two fingers to our neighbours across the Channel.

DM: And what about that question about Jeremy Corbyn, is he doing enough to mobilise his troops?

NICK CLEGG:  Look, I’m stating the obvious, it would be great if the Labour party could really get out there in a full throated way and speak to the millions of people who voted for the Labour party and leave no one in any doubt and then they can make their own decisions but no one should be in any doubt where the Labour party stands and some of the evidence recently is that some Labour supporters –  and even in the depths of our electoral doldrums last year we had two and a half million people, a million more than voted for the SNP voted for the Liberal Democrats  and I hope there isn’t a single Liberal Democrat voter who is in any doubt that we should remain.

DM: So the message is what, hold your nose, whatever you think about Cameron and the Conservatives, hold your nose, this is bigger than that?

NICK CLEGG: Do what’s right for the country, forget the Conservatives if you are a non-Conservative voter.

DM: Nick Clegg, very good to see you, thank you very much indeed.