ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So as we just heard, Tony Blair has apologised apparently made in the planning and aftermath of the Iraq War, that’s on the front of today’s Mail on Sunday.  Joining me to discuss that and the rest of today’s top stories are Trevor Phillips, the writer and broadcaster, former Chair of course of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Ben Bradshaw alongside him, the Labour MP and former Culture Secretary and we’ve also got Laura Perrins, who is co-editor of The Conservative Woman.  On the front page of the Mail, ‘I’m sorry’, apparently from Tony Blair.  Ben, what do you make of it?  You lived through it of course as well.

BEN BRADSHAW: I can’t see anything new in this at all, Dermot, to be honest.  It’s based on a CNN interview which I haven’t seen and I’m always rather reluctant to comment on interviews I haven’t actually seen. It doesn’t seem to have anything new of substance at all, it’s part of the Mail’s historic campaign against Tony Blair, they hated him when he was in office because he won us three elections and they’ve campaigned against his record ever since. I think we should all just calm down and wait for the Chilcot Inquiry, it’s all about flamming up in the advance of the Chilcot Inquiry.

DM: Okay but it is important that he’s apologised but haven’t we heard it before about the flawed intelligence evidence and aftermath and rotten planning?

BEN BRADSHAW: Yes, he’s made exactly the same points before, he’s admitted to those mistakes, he’s apologised for those mistakes but he has made the perfectly valid point which opponents of the war never seem able to answer which is what would you have done?  Would you have rather left Saddam Hussein in power and what would Iraq look like now if that was the case.

DM: And would you stand by that with him?  I have interviewed him and he said exactly that to me before.

BEN BRADSHAW: Yes, absolutely.

DM: Saddam gone makes Iraq still a better place even than it is now.

BEN BRADSHAW: Yes and we don’t ever ask the Iraqis what they actually think about this.  The vast majority of Iraqis are absolutely delighted about not living under Saddam Hussein anymore.  

DM: Trevor, your take on it, is there much new there?

TREVOR PHILLIPS: I’m pretty hard line on it. I think basically what he is saying is I’m bored witless answering this question so for God’s sake, oh yeah, right, got it but actually what he says fundamentally is the answer to the question ‘Would I do the same thing again?’ he is absolutely rock solid on that.  For my money, the Mail on Sunday which usually gets its front pages absolutely right has probably got these front page stories the wrong way round, the one about when Rupert met Jerry is actually the more interesting story for me.  I know that sounds trivial but Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, that’s what most people here looking at this front page will be most interested in.

DM: And probably buying that newspaper for indeed.  Ben, kick us off with the first story you’ve selected, this is tax credit cuts, such a thorny issue.

BEN BRADSHAW: Yes, the Conservatives mess over tax credits is over all of the newspaper including a lot of the Conservative supporting ones and I’ve highlighted the Telegraph’s splash because it actually suggests there are splits right up to Cabinet level.  We have got the vote in the House of Lords tomorrow, there are going to be other votes in the next days and weeks.  Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, his comment piece, he uses the old adage of when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

DM: The Denis Healey line, has stood the test of time.  

BEN BRADSHAW: Absolutely and depending who you read, which newspaper you read, either George Osborne is going to do a U-turn, there’s going to be some mitigating measures but actually from what he’s said on the record he seems absolutely resolute in not backing down on this.

DM: I’m talking next to Frank Field, your colleague on the Work and Pensions Select Committee and it is not necessarily the case for reform, which Frank Field goes along with, I wonder if you go along with that, but it’s the method by which it has been introduced, there is a case for reform.

BEN BRADSHAW: Yes, absolutely but the hard fact is more than three million families will lose out to the tune of more than £1000 a year from next year and I think Tory MPs, particularly those in marginal seats, are beginning to wake up to that fact.  

TREVOR PHILLIPS: It will be difficult but I think people are misreading this and, as usual, underestimating George Osborne because I think the important thing about what Osborne is doing here hasn’t really got that much to do with individual families.  What he’s actually doing is withdrawing something which has become a subsidy for employers.  This started as a one billion measure to try to deal with some problems in the welfare system, it has now become a £30 billion subsidy for employers who have shop assistants and so on, on low pay.  If the Labour party had done this everybody would have been shouting Trotskyist madness, attack on business but actually Osborne is making employers now pay the difference.  

DM: But the point is it’s that word ‘now’, it’s not now, there isn’t an overlap, we have to wait until 2020 until we get the National Living Wage hitting £9.

TREVOR PHILLIPS: The National Living Wage will start to go up from next year and every employer will start to pay some of it but the essential strategic point about what Osborne is doing is he is shifting what was a payment by the state back on to employers and in that sense actually what he is doing is actually quite smart because he is doing something that in my view Labour should do which is to make employers pay decent wages.  

DM: PM no second chances in the EU referendum, Trevor.  We kind of know that don’t we, that there’s no going back.

TREVOR PHILLIPS: We haven’t absolutely got into this campaign yet and when we get into the swing of it I think it will actually be quite savage, it will be a bigger question not just about the EU but about what kind of country we want to be.  I think  these are the opening shots and for my money the Leave Campaign – and I declare an interest, I am a supporter of the in campaign – the no campaign are making quite a big mistake here because what they are basically arguing is let’s vote out so we can then have negotiation and argument and then come back in and that’s just crazy.  They seem to be missing for example Norway’s position, they always say Norway is outside, it’s rich, got a lot of oil but actually the basic point about Norway is that they are outside but in order to be able to sell their goods in the EU they have to follow the EU’s Labour market regulations without any possibility of influencing what they are.  So it seems to me what Number 10 is doing is already saying, because this is Cameron saying actually if you guys on the leave campaign are serious, don’t go down this road, you’ve already made your first mistake.  

TREVOR PHILLIPS: But it’s freedom for our workers too.

DM: I remember Auf Weidersein Pet, they went over to Germany and ended up on the dole.  Ben, come in on this and introduce your story because this is the kind of thing that leads people to wonder about Europe.  You’ve picked another rebellion in which the government could be defeated and this is over sanitary products, the VAT which the European Union forces the UK to levy.

BEN BRADSHAW: Yes and just before I do, the freedom of movement is also the three million UK pensions who are retired in the rest of Europe.  I highlighted this because Paula Sharif who is a new Labour MP is already making a name for herself as a star of the future in my view, she has had a successful campaign already to persuade or to force W.H. Smith to drop their prices in their shops in hospitals which was a scandal she uncovered and campaigned successfully on.  She has now turned her campaigning zeal to this situation where we have a VAT rate on sanitary products which women’s campaigners have long campaigned against, she has assembled a coalition of MPs across the House and apparently we have quite a good chance of defeating the government tomorrow which I think will be the first time we’ve defeated the government since the election so I was highlighting this really because in all the difficulties that my party is going through we have some brilliant new MPs who have already proved themselves as fantastic campaigners.  

DM: But on the broad issue this does illustrate this is the EU making the UK do it.

BEN BRADSHAW: Well no, we negotiate these rates.  All Paula is asking and all this amendment does is to ask Cameron to include this in his wonderful renegotiation.  I suspect it will be a little bit easier for him to get this than it will be to get a movement on freedom of movement.  

DM: But the EU force the UK to tax it as a luxury rather than as an essential.  

BEN BRADSHAW: A sugar tax would more than compensate for the loss in revenue!  

DM: I think we’ve got time for one more, the tables are turned on men only boardrooms, does this have a bearing on the gender pay gap as well, Trevor?

TREVOR PHILLIPS: Yes, I think it’s a terrific thing.  They announced this week that the FTSE top 100 companies have reached a 25% gender diversity target on boards and I think that’s a good thing.  What’s interesting is the government says that it is going to insist that every company in the FSTE 250 should have at least one woman and they are going to announce new measures on discrimination and to help ethnic minorities succeed.  That’s all good but I have to say as a Labour supporter I find it all a bit depressing to be frank that this government is taking steps that some of us were agitating for five or six years ago, then included as a campaigner for equality and that it’s a Tory government that is actually doing this.  

DM: Why isn’t Labour pushing this, is it the fact that you are in disarray at the moment and haven’t got down to these nitty-gritty micro-managed policies?

BEN BRADSHAW: No, it’s the fact that we’re not in government.  If we were in government we’d be doing this.  Labour has an absolutely superb record on equality, all of the equality legislation that has been passed in the last 20 years has been passed by a Labour government.  I am very pleased whenever the Labour government pick up something and learn from their mistakes in the past, I always celebrate it.  

TREVOR PHILLIPS: And there is a campaign to get more women into engineering.  

DM: Listen, we’ve got to wind it up there.  Laura Perrin, Ben Bradshaw and Trevor Phillips, thank you very much indeed.