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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: As many as 40 people including at least ten babies and young children have drowned after their boat capsized off the Turkish coast, it’s believed most of them were Syrians.  Well the refugee crisis is an issue on which the Liberal Democrats have been leading the charge, calling on the government to let unaccompanied children into the UK.  I’m joined now by their leader Tim Farron, a very good morning to you Mr Farron.  Just a quick reflection before we discuss Syria and refugees and other matters, a quick reflection on your thoughts on Sir Terry Wogan’s passing?   

TIM FARRON: I am genuinely very, very upset.  He formed an enormous part of my childhood, interviewing all sorts of people on his TV show but also the radio programmes, he was a peculiar and unique individual who appeals both to me – somebody who is obsessed with pop music – and my grandparents at the same time and I think that was his great strength, he spoke without arrogance or pomposity and he was a kind of warm and genuine figure in your living room and around the breakfast table and we’ll all very much miss him.  

DM: Thank you for that, Mr Farron.  Now on to more awful events on the high seas, the Aegean, these reports of about 40 people dying, many of them young children.  A direct question, is there anything more we could do to prevent this happening?

TIM FARRON: Yes, is the honest answer.  The fact is that in 2015 we had a million refugees enter Europe which is five times higher than the next highest number since the Second World War, this is an absolute humanitarian and political crisis and Britain isn’t involved in it so obviously I want Britain to take its fair share of refugees to help those orphans mostly, unaccompanied child refugees within Europe but more than that even, I want us to engage with our European partners so that we tackle this problem in a meaningful way and that means for example, if you talk through the European Union and with the United Nations Human Rights Commission, then we could perhaps come up with ways of having safe routes so that people are not making this incredibly dangerous journey across the Aegean, where I was just a few months ago and where tragically another several people lost their lives, including children, last night.  There must be a way of dealing with this which doesn’t involve turning our back on both the refugees and our neighbours in Europe.

DM: But you know the question that follows then, does that present the pull factor that not just Britain but many other European nations don’t want to create?  There’s a simple answer to stopping people setting sail in unseaworthy vessels in that the European nations, our own included, have plenty of seaworthy vessels in the Mediterranean, they could pick them up.

TIM FARRON: There’s always an excuse and sometimes there’s a logic behind them for not doing the right thing and the reality is that we are not going to turn off this tap of refugees.  These people are not, on the whole, economic migrants, they are not chancers, they are not people coming to take benefits – that’s not just my opinion, 50% of all the refugees who came into Europe last year came to the island of Lesbos that I visited a few months ago.  The United Nations there are very clear that 94% of those who are coming in were refugees by all United Nations standards, by all the standards that you and I would recognise as someone being a refugee, fleeing from persecution, war and terror and those are the people that we should open our arms to.  Now there is a massive logistical problem and I certainly wouldn’t argue that we should do the same as Angela Merkel has done in Germany but the other extreme is David Cameron’s position which is to disengage from the situation, to be pretty heartless and to not play your role as a full member of Europe in tackling what is the biggest crisis we’ve seen in several generations.  

DM: But you’re talking about the plight of the refugees who have made it into the European Union, what we’re talking about here and with reference to those who perished overnight, is those trying to get there in the first place.  What could we do and should we do in the UK to make that journey safer?    

TIM FARRON: So those people who cross into Europe, how do you make that journey safer?  Well indeed as you say, people can be picked up in the Mediterranean but it is far better though to establish safe routes or holding centres, reception centres.  I am absolutely open to something pragmatic where we discuss with the Turkish authorities to have something that is available there that allows people to claim asylum safely.  We have a similar problem nearer to home at Calais where our refusal to engage with the Calais authorities and the French government, our nearest and in many ways closest friend and ally, it’s a ridiculous situation to be in – we have those people held in those camps in Calais who make these dangerous, often fatal, attempts to cross the Channel when actually we should be allowing people to claim asylum from Calais, the same as people should be allowed to claim asylum in Europe from outside Europe.  Not so you let them all in but so you can judge people’s qualifications – if they are not refugees then you very, very decently and in a way which is completely humanitarian, take them back to a safe place from which they came but we cannot turn our back on what is the biggest humanitarian disaster facing Europe since the Second World War.  David Cameron is acting as though he is neutral in all this and if you are neutral you get nothing done.

DM: Okay and just give me your thoughts, Mr Farron, on the Prime Minister’s EU renegotiation efforts.  They are reaching quite a pace tonight right now with Donald Tusk, the meeting there in Downing Street, are you cheering him on and wishing him well?


TIM FARRON: Well certainly I very much hope that he will stand alongside me in calling for Britain to stay at the heart of Europe.  The economic interest of Britain being in the European Union, our ability to be able to stand tall in the world, to be relevant, to be powerful, to be the kind of outward looking decent country that looks to the outside world rather than being insular, demands that we remain at the heart of Europe and I very much hope he and I take the same view on that, so to that extent I wish him well in renegotiations.  I guess just for once I’ll agree with Steve Baker who you were talking to earlier on, that there is a sense in which this is just incidental and that what really matters, I think those people who are opposed like Steve and myself in favour, the renegotiations are a side issue.  What really is the issue is what kind of country are we?  Are we a country that wants to take advantage of the biggest market in the world, protect our jobs, to be an outward looking confident nation that’s part of the community of nations or do we want to  be small, insular and backward looking?  If you believe in the former like I do, then you are going to vote yes whatever he comes back with.

DM: And I guess you’ll be cheering the Prime Minister on in his pronouncements – and David Lammy, another of my guests, is helping him out with this – on bias and discrimination and diversity within societies when it comes to, amongst other things, universities and the legal system.  I know you are cheering him on but I guess it must be a source of concern to you that you have got about the least diverse party in the House of Commons.

TIM FARRON: We have a very small party in the House of Commons and so our scientific sample, well our sample is not very scientific shall we say?  But David Lammy is someone who I have got a massive regard for in his work in parliament over many years and he is a wise appointment by the Prime Minister.  The challenge that all us have in organisations is that you need to lead from the front and from the top and make those changes you must to make sure that in my case my party is representative of wider society.  That is why for example at the conference we have coming up in about six weeks’ time, the Liberal Democrats will be taking very radical moves towards a positive approach that will make sure we have a much more diverse range of members of parliament than in the past.  I will have to be a bit tongue in cheek and say our range of candidates at the last general election was very diverse and very balanced, it’s just too few of us got elected.  

DM: It would be better, I suppose you would tell me, if you got voting reform and we hear you are in secret talks and you have an emissary shuttling between you and Jeremy Corbyn to reach some kind of pact on that for the next general election.  

TIM FARRON: They are so secret that you are talking about it.  That’s not, it’s really not true.  I mean I am somebody who believes in talking and I have talked all the time I’ve been in parliament with people I agree with on issues I agree with them on, for example I’m talking to Conservatives who are pro Britain being in Europe about the pro-European campaign that we’re running as well and of course there are some people in the Labour party who historically have been in favour of electoral reform for a long time, I’m thinking of people like Chuka Umunna more recently and Stephen Twigg and we now hear Jeremy Corbyn himself is open to that.  Well that’s positive and what I really want to see is across the whole of the party spectrum people realising that the electoral system we’ve got is broken.  If you have a government with 100% of power on 37% of the votes, they can do incredibly reckless things like destroy social housing in this country, to destroy the green energy sector in this country, to undermine long-term investment particularly in the north of England, you think this seems to be very, very unfair so I think the time has come for electoral reform to be more than just a Liberal Democrat thing.  

DM: Mr Farron, thank you very much indeed, leader of the Liberal Democrats there, Tim Farron.