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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now Jeremy Corbyn has insisted the reshuffle of his top team last week has made Labour actually stronger despite reports that a fourth MP has resigned her post this weekend.  Alison McGowan, who was leading a review into child poverty has stepped down about comments made by the Shadow Chancellor describing some in the party as a ring wing clique.  Well Pat McFadden was one of the casualties of last week’s reshuffle, one of the highest profile sacked over claims over his disloyalty and he joins me now, a very good morning to you Mr McFadden.  Let’s take that comment from Jeremy Corbyn that the party is now stronger and referred to the particular brief that you were covering as Europe Minister, is the party stronger when it comes to issues like that?

PAT McFADDEN: Well I hope it’s strong on Europe because this is such an important issue for the country over the next year, we could have this referendum on EU membership as early as June of this year depending on whether or not the government negotiates a deal.  The Conservative party is split from top to bottom on Europe, the biggest evidence was this suspension of collective cabinet responsibility earlier in the week.  That means Ministers can campaign for in or out, any way that they choose. I think there is both an obligation and a responsibility on the Labour party in those circumstances because whatever else is going on in the Labour party we are pretty united on Europe so whatever the other consequences of the reshuffle are, I hope they don’t mean a watering down of the position that we have had up until now which has been very clearly to campaign for Britain to stay in the EU.

DM: Okay but are you confident from your conversations with Jeremy Corbyn while you were in post that he is of that mind because from his open pronouncements in the past he seems a bit equivocal?

PAT McFADDEN: Sure.  Look, he comes from a more eurosceptic background but he has made quite a number of statements that Labour will campaign to stay in, he said it in the House of Commons chamber this week, he repeated that in his article in the Observer this morning so while it might not be his historic position, that is his view now and it certainly is very strongly the view of Hilary Benn, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Alan Johnson, who is leading the Labour campaign on this.

DM: Okay, let’s go through some of the reasons that were quoted for your sacking and in particular a speech that you made in the House of Commons, talking about the motivation of terrorists, that we would be deluding ourselves if we thought that in some sense it was a response to the military actions of the West.  Do you feel that there are those at the very top of the party who do hold that analysis?

PAT McFADDEN: I think this is a difference of substance between me and Mr Corbyn and maybe some others.  This is an issue I feel very, very strongly about.  Whenever we have a terrorist attack I don't think that the first question we should ask is why did we make them angry, what did we do to make them angry?  I think there are two problems with that kind of response, the first is it underestimates the threat that we face. This isn’t all about us, this is an ideology of its own, that’s why terrorism affects countries that have had nothing to do with western intervention, for example Boko Haram in Nigeria, you remember the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign. Nigeria didn’t go round invading anywhere but they still have got a problem with this Islamist extremism and I think there might be an inference of this.  You say to people well if we leave you alone will you leave us alone?  I don't think we can franchise out our decision making for the approval of the people who are attacking us so I think there is a big danger in taking that kind of view. There is one other thing about it, which is it is not robust enough in terms of defending our own society, what’s good about our own society.  The terrorists called Paris a  den of vice, I think we should say no, cities like Paris and London are not dens of vice, they are places where we have got freedom of religion, where we believe in equality of men and women, democracy – these things the terrorists stand against so we have got to be more robust in terms of sticking up for what’s good about our society.

DM: Let me take you back to the day after your sacking, it was Wednesday wasn’t it, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had made a speech saying perhaps everything economically in the garden is not as rosy as it seems as recently as when he delivered the autumn statement in December.  Your Shadow Chancellor was touring the news studios including our very own, accusing you and others of serial disloyalty.

PAT McFADDEN: Well I’ve been in the Labour party for over 30 years, I go back to working for leaders before Tony Blair, I worked for John Smith and so I’ve spent my whole life trying to make the Labour party electable, trying to see it in power.  In the time I’ve been an MP I’ve never voted against the Labour whip so I don't think there is any question over my loyalty and commitment to the Labour party but I think comments like that are very unwise because what the Labour party leads having lost an election badly last year is the ability to think and speak without people being demonised or labelled as being unacceptable or hard right wing or red Tories and Tory light and these kind of phrases.  It’s not just a nasty thing to say but it’s also a strategic handicap for the Labour party, we’re excluding thought, we’re excluding ideas, we’re excluding people.  We’ve got to be run as a great political party, not as a faction or a sect.

DM: Okay, well within all that, you’ve got this Momentum group, the pressure group, do you feel as Michael Dugher was saying is that they are trying to take over the Labour party?  A lot of them are Ken Livingstone’s – the ones closest to Jeremy Corbyn, a lot of them are Ken Livingstone’s old guard.

PAT McFADDEN: We’ve had an upsurge in membership and that’s a good thing but what I hope that we don’t have is an organised attempt to put pressure on MPs and stop them speaking out…

DM: But is it like the Militant Tendency of the 80s?

PAT McFADDEN: … that wouldn’t help.  I don't know if it is quite like that, the Militant Tendency were another political party who kind of sat on top of and fed off the Labour party like a sort of parasite. What strikes me is the Labour party, it’s role in opposition is to be so good that the Tories fear us, that they are looking over their shoulder all the time and the worst abdication you can make is for the Tories not to fear you, to feel that they can get away with anything and I think we’re seeing a bit of that at the moment.  We’ve had George Osborne making a speech this week which you referred to, trying to get his excuses in early about future economic problems.  We’ve got legislation going through which is designed to defenestrate the Labour party in terms of its finances, we’ve got the Business Department abandoning any talk of industrial strategy.  I don’t want to see the government thinking they can get away with anything, I want to have a Labour party that they fear and I’m not sure that they fear the Labour party.

DM: Well you’ve got to address that question then about the leadership, do you think that the party led by the people who are there at the moment, namely Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, can make the Conservatives fear them?

PAT McFADDEN: Well that’s the job of …

DM: But can they given what’s gone on for the last five months?

PAT McFADDEN: They’ve only been there a few months, I certainly hope they can but I think you can’t run it as a sort of sect or faction, calling people who say things that you don’t like hard right cliques and things like that.  I worked for a lot of leaders in the past and they were big people, they took criticism, they accommodated different views and a lot of these people have spent a lot of time I think in sects and factions in the past and once you are occupying a position of leadership I think you have to operate in a bigger way and when you do that and you have the open pluralistic politics that was promised, then I think it benefits the party and I hope we see more of that in the future than we’ve seen this week.

DM: Okay, Pat McFadden, thank you very much indeed, very good to see you.