ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now there might not be a date for a referendum yet but the battle lines have already been drawn over Britain’s membership of the European Union.  Just a moment ago we heard from Richard Reed, the founder of Innocent Drinks and the Deputy Chair of the in campaign, well on the other side of the fence is the Conservative MP Owen Paterson who was Environment Secretary until last year and you’ll remember he’s in Shropshire.  A very good morning to you Mr Paterson, just let me get it very clear where you stand on Mr Cameron and others in their renegotiations, do you have a scintilla even of belief that he might get something substantial enough to satisfy you that UK should stay in the EU?

OWEN PATERSON: Well first of all the EU is leaving us, they are going to move towards an integrated country that was lined up in the Bertelsmann Spinelli Report 2013 and you got that on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph today so they will form a new coherent integrated country where you can shift money around from the parts that can’t make money to those that sadly can’t and we are going to be left outside with something called Associate Status.  Now what it looks like is that is being rebranded as some exciting new position and it’s absolute rubbish, it’s not.   It’s rather worse than where we are at the moment.  What I want to have is a complete new relationship with our European neighbours based on trade and friendly co-operation but above all, making our own laws in our own parliament and that sadly does not appear to be what the negotiators on behalf of the UK are looking for.  

DM: I just want to bring in on that my last guest’s point, Richard Reed from Innocent Drinks, who does 50% of his business with our European Union partners at the moment and his point is that why would you leave the biggest trading group in the world just to try to rejoin it in some form?  

OWEN PATERSON: Because only a madman would actually leave the market.  It’s not the EU which is a political organisation delivering the prosperity in buying our goods, it’s the market, it’s the members of the market and we will carry on trading with the market but are we really suggesting that the fifth largest economy in the world is not going to come to a satisfactory trading arrangement with the EU?  Are we going to be like Sudan and North Korea?  I mean it’s ludicrous this idea that we are going to leap off a cliff into a dark space.  We will carry on trading.  We have a massive deficit with them, there is a huge interest across the EU to continue trading with the UK, the whole of the European car industry is integrated, something like five million jobs in the EU depend on exports to the UK so of course we’ll come to a trade deal with them but what is really important is that we get our full seat back on the world organisations which create the laws and the regulations that dominate trade now.  So you take the World Trade Organisation, we are currently represented I’m sure by a highly intelligent brilliant person but she’s a Swedish psychiatric nurse who last taught sociology at Gothenburg University – not my personal first choice to have someone representing the fifth largest country in the world and she only represents the 28th.  We want to get a full seat back in these bodies so you look at Lord Rose’s article in the Sunday Times, he says we do very well quite rightly in NATO, we have a full seat, in the UN we have a full seat – all these world global trade organisations we have a 28th of a seat so we would massively enhance our position in the world, we would regalvanise world free trade, we would regalvanise the Anglosphere with the States, Australia, Canada, we would regalvanise trade negotiations with the Commonwealth.  Look at places like Australia and New Zealand, they’ve done bilateral deals with China on their own, we would do deals.  I was part of the British government, I went to the States, these long laborious negotiations with TTIP, there’s all sorts of bilateral deals we could do in the States, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, we could do deals with them if we were a proper independent nation.  

DM: We can see how passionate you are Mr Paterson.  It’s normally the interviewees that say can I get a word edgeways but I just wanted to …    

OWEN PATERSON: Sorry.  

DM: Well it’s that story on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph today and I know what you’re going to tell me but I’m going to put it to you anyway, saying that they’ve seen some of the things that Mr Cameron and others are going to ask for which include explicit states about not being part of a super state or ever closer union, an explicit statement also on joining the euro, that Britain would never be forced into that and that issue you touched on there, that the 19 members of the euro group wouldn’t dominate the other nine.  Number Ten also adding into that that it’s inaccurate that article because it leaves out in particular the welfare reforms that would deal in part with migration issues.  What do you make of that?  

OWEN PATERSON: Well I touched on that earlier, this is just confirming the intention of the EU, they outlined it in the Bertelsmann Spinelli Report, then we had the Five Presidents Report, we had Junker’s State of the Union address pronouncing that there will be a White Paper in Spring 2017 creating a new nation from which we will be excluded because we’re not part of euro and we’re not part of Schengen.  We will have something called Associate Status, dressing that up as some exciting new position where we renounce ever closer union is simply not good enough.  We will still be bound by all the other arrangements with the EU, it’s not clear where we will be.  What we have is a golden opportunity to let them go on their way, we cease to be the pebble in the shoe holding things up.  They can go on, create their new country and we in return for going along with the necessary treaty change, our bargaining and it’s such a tragedy we’re not using this bargaining power, we can then go back to what we originally were told we’d joined which is an arrangement where we trade and co-operate freely but we make our own laws in our own parliament.  

DM: Okay you’ve made that point but just lastly Mr Paterson and time is fairly limited, just as a political campaigner within you, that side of it, do you think the message is going to be unified from those like you who think we should go?  There seem to be an awful lot of different campaigns setting up.  

OWEN PATERSON: Well I think in some ways the more the merrier.  You had Nigel Farage on earlier saying the different campaigns were complementary.  The one I’m part of obviously as a Westminster politician has begun in Westminster but we’re working with what was Business for Britain which has huge membership right across the whole of the UK and we will be building up membership and support across a whole range of voluntary organisations.  We meet on a regular basis, we have members of the Labour party  with links to the unions, we have the only UKIP MP, we have members of other parties coming along so we will be broadly based.  Obviously we began in Westminster but we’ll be reaching out right across the country but this is not a party political issue, it’s really important this, this is the biggest decision any of us will make in our lifetime, probably one of the biggest political decisions since the Reformation and this cannot be seen in party political terms.  

DM: Sorry Mr Paterson, we are now out of time.  Thank you for talking to us in beautiful Shropshire there, Owen Paterson.