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SOPHY RIDGE: First though, the remarkable rise of Jeremy Corbyn seems to be reaching new heights this weekend, cheered on by a crowd of tens of thousands of people at the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and the ultimate accolade, his name is being chanted to a tune normally reserved for premier league superstars. Well we are joined now by one of his closest allies in the Shadow Cabinet, the Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti, thanks very much for being with us. Well we’ve all seen those pretty remarkable scenes at Glastonbury Festival with Jeremy Corbyn’s name being chanted by tens of thousands of people but he’s had a lot of criticism this year though hasn’t he, including from people in his own party, so what would you say now to those Labour detractors who simply weren’t convinced by him?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: I would say that the Labour party and the Labour movement has pulled together. It has united yes, around a leader but Jeremy would be the first person to say with both his feet firmly on the ground that it united around a manifesto that was built on Labour values and that’s what’s really working and that’s what’s resonating with people including those enthusiasts down at Glastonbury.

SR: I can see why Labour feel a bit glowing at the moment but do you think there’s a risk of getting a bit carried away with the situation? We can have a look now hopefully at something that you said last week, ‘If anyone won that election it was Jeremy Corbyn’. I mean that’s not right is it?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: Well that is out of context, it was in a bigger exchange, a heated exchange on Question Time so what I would say if I could have a longer passage is that Jeremy was a remarkable campaigner, he took on a lot of abuse and he kept calm and he got past it but it was the manifesto that was the ultimate star of that campaign.

SR: But he still lost the election didn’t he, he didn’t win.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: Well we didn’t get the most seats and we’re not in a position to form a majority government but if you look at where we started and if you look at the odds that were stacked against us, it was possibly the greatest reversal of fortune since 1945 and we’re now in a place to move forward I think and that’s what I would say but I’d say that calmly with both feet firmly on the ground, there’s a lot more to do.

SR: I’m keen to talk to you as well about fire safety, the story that has obviously dominated since that appalling tragedy in Grenfell and so far every single piece of cladding tested from local authorities, that’s 34 buildings in total, has failed those tests. What needs to happen now?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: Well it is incredibly alarming and I know that there will be people all over the country who are really worried about their own buildings, not just tower blocks but other buildings too but I will say that I hope that people who for years were denigrating this concept of health and safety alongside human rights and other things will now think again about that and will think about austerity and will think about deregulation and will realise that these aren’t just convenient policies and sound bites, they put people’s lives at risk so what we need to do now is carry on with the testing obviously. The government needs to do more to make sure that local authorities have the emergency money that they need now to house people so that we don’t have the situation that we perhaps have in Camden where you have to get people out. There is no question, you have to get people out when the fire service tell you to, but there is sufficient emergency funding for people to be housed in the short term and the medium term and going forward we need more social housing in this country. We’re promising to build a million new homes and many of those in the affordable rental sector and in social housing, that’s what we want to do.

SR: You were talking there about austerity but you can’t just blame the Conservative party and austerity can you? Because if you look at Camden for example where people were evacuated from their houses, that cladding was put up in 2006 so that was the last Labour government.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: I’m not going to play party politics with public safety but what I will say is that whatever party you’re in and however you voted, whatever you thought in the past about things like austerity and in particular things like health and safety, health and safety is incredibly important and we mustn’t cut corners.

SR: So do you think the last Labour administration perhaps got it wrong then with health and safety?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: Well to be fair it wasn’t a Labour government that was saying we should scrap health and healthy safety legislation, it was a great Conservative mantra for many years alongside scrapping human rights and other things but I hope going forward we can do this in a relatively cross-party way because there were people, including in parliament of all parties, expressing concerns about fire safety over many years and now their voices need to be heard.

SR: Talking about cross-party allegiances, there is a movement to build a cross-party consensus on Brexit as well. We’ve got the Queen’s Speech vote next week, lots of amendments we’re expecting to be added to that but we know that the Lib Dems are going to be calling for the UK not to be brought out of the single market. How do you feel about that, do you feel that the UK should leave the single market?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: We’ve been really clear. I know it hasn’t always come across that way and there’s spin and reporting and so on but it is the second of our Brexit tests that any conclusion to negotiations must involve Britain having access to the single market and …

SR: I’m going to stop you there because I do understand you are saying you want to have free access to the single market but Labour is also saying you want to have control over free movement of people. I mean that sounds a bit Boris Johnson, how can you ….?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: We haven’t said we’ll have control of free movement of people, you can’t necessarily have complete control but what we want is to be able to have fair migration that avoids people’s jobs being undercut.

SR: But in the Labour manifesto you said that free movement of people will end.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: Okay, let me try and clarify this. When you leave the European Union formally there is no longer free movement under the treaty.

SR: But you can stay in the single market and have free movement if you take the Norway model though can’t you?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: But you have to negotiate that and it may not be called staying in the free market and having free movement, it may be called something else but what it’s called doesn’t matter, what’s important is that jobs come first, the economy comes first and that means getting tariff free access to the single market and the formalities we will negotiate.

SR: The thing is though, let’s get real here, you want to form the next government, at some point you are going to have to decide whether you want to prioritise immigration or the economy.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: The economy comes first.

SR: To you the economy comes first, so in other words you are happy to sacrifice more control over immigration to protect jobs?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: I think the entire Shadow Cabinet has been absolutely clear, this has to be a jobs first economy first Brexit and everything else has to be negotiated with that priority in mind.

SR: So something similar to free movement of people, just under a different name could happen?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: There’s a lot of room for negotiation about what types of free movement, what kind of priority. It is possible for friendly countries in and outside Europe to give priority to certain nationals, we did it for many years with the Commonwealth, we have looser visa regimes with some countries compared to others so there’s a lot of room for manoeuvre but the priority is clear, it’s the jobs and it’s the economy first.

SR: Interesting. Now just to end, in the election Labour swept most of London, where you didn’t perhaps do so well was in four seats that have been described by the Jewish Chronicle as the Jewish firewall for Labour, so four seats with big Jewish populations that didn’t swing to Labour in the same manner that many of their neighbouring seats did. Do you think that concern over your anti-Semitism report and anti-Semitism in the Labour party might have actually been the one thing that allowed Theresa May to get a majority of sorts?

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: I don't know but I want to be clear and I was actually clear in my report, we’ve had some problems and we’ve tried to address those and look at ourselves in the mirror and perhaps there’s more work to do to get that across to a community that has been really concerned about rising anti-Semitism, not just in politics, not just in Britain but all over Europe and if there’s more reaching out to be done, if there’s more assurance to be given I think that has to happen.

SR: Okay, Baroness Chakrabarti, thank you very much for coming on the show today.