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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now last week parliament voted narrowly against plans from the Labour peer Lord Dubbs to allow 3000 unaccompanied child refugees into the UK from Europe but MPs should have the chance to vote on the issue again next week with a government defeat now looking increasingly likely.  Well the Lib Dems have been leading the charge on Britain’s response to the refugee crisis and their leader, Tim Farron, joins me now, he’s in Kendal and a very good morning to you Mr Farron.  Well do you think the government’s response is just not good enough?  

TIM FARRON: It isn’t, it seems at a time when we are looking back over various anniversaries of our assistance of refugees in times past with the Kinder Transport immediately after the Second World War and of course the Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin in the 1970s, this is totally out of step with Britain’s values to be turning your back on 3000 child refugees, unaccompanied and alone in the camps in Europe, some of the most vulnerable refugees that there are.  It is really important to remember that what triggered my decision to press forward with this last summer was seeing some of the children in the camps and hearing from Save the Children that of the thousands of child refugees in Europe, something like 10,000 of them have gone missing because they are alone and unprotected and because they are in a situation where they are very likely in the hands of child traffickers and maybe in the hands of those wishing to exploit them sexually.  So this is an appalling outrage that we as a country can do something about alongside our European colleagues and we will be pressing again, if we get the opportunity, in a week or so’s time to force the governments hand and we are calling upon those Conservative MPs who can find it in their hearts to back us on this to vote to help those children.

DM: But what do you make of the government’s arguments that the UK is taking children and others from camps near to the affected zones and if you allow them into the UK from elsewhere it encourages them to make some very hazardous journeys?    

TIM FARRON: Well I think that’s a bogus argument and there is no evidence for it anyway but even if there was any, we’re not talking about children who are outside of Europe, we are talking about those who are inside Europe, who are unaccompanied, who are alone, who are very scared and many of them are orphans and are in a situation where they desperately need help.  The Prime Minister will often say, well we want to help those people who are not in Europe, they are safe if they’re in Europe.  They’re not safe because he’s not helping them and when I went to northern Greece just a couple of weeks ago, right on the border with Macedonia, the children I saw there who range from very, very, very young children, some of them part of families, up to teenagers and some of them not part of families, some of them alone, what these young people, these children have seen is unimaginably appalling. The reasons they fled or their families fled from their home country in the first place, what they’ve seen making their crossing has been equally appalling but what I think really scandalises me is of course they want to get to Europe and one of Europe’s most important, richest countries, the United Kingdom, won’t help them and that is completely against everything I believe are what British values are all about.

DM: Okay, it’s interesting that what you’re saying there is echoed very forcibly by many of your fellow MPs on the Labour side as well and the parallels there with the Kinder Transport have been made before so does it bemuse you then to find this anti-Semitism row taking place within the Labour party and do you think Mr Corbyn is being forceful enough in dealing with it?

TIM FARRON: Well anti-Semitism and all forms of racism are utterly intolerable and whenever they raise their head they must be challenged in whatever circumstances they are and that can happen in any part of society.  I’m not going to say that the Labour party’s problem is greater than any other part of society so first of all I absolutely find abhorrent the attempts to try and equate Hitler as a Zionist, that is absolutely bizarre and unacceptable but actually if you step away from the specifics of this issue, frankly here we are, four, five days away from not just local elections in England but the crucial Scottish and Welsh parliamentary assembly and London elections too and we have a junior doctors crisis, we have a threat to effectively privatise our schools, we have the government turning its back on orphaned refugees in Europe and what are we talking about?  A crisis in the Labour party.  It is a reminder that we have frankly the most ineffective and shambolic opposition in living memory and the terrible result we had a year ago I have just got to put behind me because it seems to me that it needs the Liberal Democrats to recover to provide that decent moderate effective opposition to challenge the government on junior doctors, on schools and on refugees and if that happens it must happen for the sake of the country.

DM: But Mr Farron, sorry to interject there, doesn’t that reflect on you and your party, this abject performance you describe by Labour to act as an opposition, there is precious little sign of any of those Labour moderates that you’ve called for repeatedly now over the last few months to jump ship and join you.

TIM FARRON: Well first of all you are absolutely right to say that our result last year puts us in a situation where we have got work to do, to say the very least but actually, if you look at the facts out there the Liberal Democrat membership has increased by 50%.  There is a spirit of a fight back across the country that is very real, a Conservative councillor in Yeovil defected to us – she worked by the way as a paid case worker for the Conservative MP there – just this week because she felt we had the right answers to the country’s problems that the Conservatives were taking for granted with those voters down there.  But in the votes in ballot boxes, Dermot, it happens every single Thursday, there’s always a set of council by-elections every Thursday evening and the Liberal Democrats against all expectations have gained more votes and more seats than any other political party since last May.  So there is a real sense of a come-back, we’re fielding more candidates than last year and on the ground wherever I go there is a sense of people listening to us, liking our message and the thing, particularly in local elections, is that people know that if they have a Liberal Democrat councillor we have a different culture about how we go about local government.  We work hard all year round, we are committed to our community, we get things done.  Other parties tend to win an election and then clear off for four years until they come back and seek your vote again so yes, I’ve got a challenge but it’s one I relish and I’m a glass half full kind of guy.  

DM: What about this June vote, the EU referendum, do you think what’s going on in Labour and other issues there might have an impact. Of course you are on the Remain side very strongly so, that it’s said that Labour gets a lot of young people out to vote but they don’t really seem, even before this, they don’t seem to have been campaigning very hard on the issue.  Do you think the vote could be lost for your side because of this?

TIM FARRON: Well every contest is nil-nil to start off with and if you view this referendum as either easily won or certain to be lost then you are taking the electorate for granted.  So I do get a little bit frustrated with those on both sides of the campaign who only want to personalise it and indeed some who don’t seem to want to put their back into it but I can only do what I can do and my absolute ambition for the Liberal Democrats is to lead the positive side of the Remain campaign.  Yes, there are dangers to be worried about when it comes to leaving the European Union and it is right that they’re flagged up but the Liberal Democrats approach will be utterly positive, it will be youthful, it will be about saying here are opportunities for our young people to go on Erasmus exchanges, to be able to work overseas, to be able to have new experiences.  It will be about maintaining that peace that we have been able to celebrate over these last 70 years and we need to put behind us the Cold War, only a generation ago.  These are positive uplifting reasons, the reasons why we need to help to defeat climate change and to stand up and tackle in a humanitarian way the refugee crisis.  So my job is to lead an uplifting positive campaign for us staying in the European Union, alongside people who take a similar view but have different arguments.  Yes, I am very much looking forward to the point where the debate on the European Union is not a debate between two Old Etonians throwing mud at each other because that doesn’t help anybody to make up their mind.

DM: Okay Mr Farron, great talking to you.  The Lib Dem leader there, Tim Farron in Kendal.