ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: I am joined in the studio now by the Shadow Secretary for International Trade, Barry Gardiner.  Firstly, thanks for being with us after a difficult week for the party, we know that some of your Shadow Cabinet colleagues were, shall we say slightly more reluctant to be grilled on a Sunday morning political show.  

BARRY GARDINER: Oh no, surely not!  

SR: But thank you for being braver than they were.  We should start off by talking about Copeland, a seat that Labour had held since the 1930s, I mean that was a pretty devastating verdict on what your party’s offering wasn’t it?

BARRY GARDINER: Look, it was, it was a terrible night for us.  We went down by what, six almost seven percentage points in the polls in Copeland and this is a seat which, although it’s been reducing in the Labour majority for many, many years actually, if you look over 15 years it’s got less and less each time but nonetheless it was a seat that we desperately wanted to win.   

SR: There were 62 seats that were more marginal than Copeland so …  

BARRY GARDINER: Well yes but I think there were peculiarities about Copeland.  The electorate is always I think, rightly a bit fed up when a member of parliament decides that they are going to leave for their own reasons rather than the electorate.  

SR: So it was Jamie Reed’s fault?

BARRY GARDINER: No, no, absolutely not.  Look Jamie was a great MP and one of the things that of course that he did provide huge reassurance for the people of Copeland on was over the nuclear issue and it was one of the issues that really hit us in that by-election because of course it was so important, Sellafield being the major employer, Moorside being absolutely vital for future jobs in that area and the publicity put out by the other party was of course attacking …

SR: And decades of speeches that Jeremy Corbyn has made saying that he was opposed to nuclear power.

BARRY GARDINER: Yes and we tried to counter that, we tried to say very clearly look, Jeremy has always accepted that nuclear is part of the energy mix going forward, he …

SR: Has he always accepted that?

BARRY GARDINER: He has, it’s the Labour party position, in fact he produced speech after speech during that campaign saying precisely that but nonetheless we lost, that’s the bottom line and there’s no gilding that particular problem.  I think we have to look though more widely and we have to say, look, what’s happening in British politics is really a fundamental shifting of the ground.  This is not simply about Copeland, it’s not simply about … you see Stoke we won and I’m of course delighted that we did and I’m delighted that we defeated UKIP and Paul Nuttall there but actually in Stoke as well we lost share of the vote and we have to take that seriously too, there is a shift in politics.  

SR: But what do you make of how your leader and members of the Shadow Cabinet have reacted to this?  You say that we need to take it seriously, if we have a look now at some of the reasons that some of your Shadow Cabinet and Jeremy Corbyn gave for losing Copeland – fake news, a leadership election that ended five months ago, Tony Blair, the political establishment.  I mean if you look at that, it looks a bit like Labour is trying to blame everyone else apart from themselves, a bit like the kind of tactics you might see in the schoolyard.  

BARRY GARDINER: I’m not here to blame anybody else, okay and also I’m not here to lay the blame simply on our leader and I think far too much of British politics is personalised, it’s personalised around leaders, it’s personalised around individuals.  In fact I think – and it’s not just the Shadow Cabinet either – members of parliament, the Labour members of parliament are the leaders of the Labour party and we all have a responsibility to be getting our message across.  Now we’re on the back foot, Stoke and Copeland have put us on the back foot, that’s absolutely clear.  Out there in the electorate we’re on the back foot but in the House of Commons we are actually on the front foot.  In the House of Commons we’re the ones that are making the play and forcing the government on the back foot about social care, we are the ones that are …

SR: Although quite often it is the Conservative back benchers who are forcing the government on some …

BARRY GARDINER: They wouldn’t be doing it if we hadn’t been forcing the issue.  On business rates, on funding formulas, on all of these things are things that we in the Labour party … look at what Debbie Abrahams has been doing just over these past few days over the issue of disability benefits.  The courts say that the government should be giving £3.7 billion to disabled people in this country which the government is now trying to stop so actually what we’re doing in parliament has been really successful, there we’re actually holding them to account.  

SR: You say that it’s not about Jeremy Corbyn but it’s hard to escape the view that at least part of this is because of your leader, just look at some of the polls…

BARRY GARDINER: Sorry, I didn’t say that Sophy, I said it is not only about Jeremy Corbyn, we all share that responsibility.  Leadership is about all of the MPs, not just about one or two …

SR: So you accept then that he needs to take some blame for this?  

BARRY GARDINER: Of course, and he accepts that as well.  

SR: A ComRes Sunday Mirror poll out today, 77% of voters think he should be replaced, his personal approval rating is minus 38.  People have always told us that the more the public see of Jeremy Corbyn the more they’ll like him, but the opposite’s happening.  

BARRY GARDINER: Look, can I just say to you, the thing that would please the Conservative party more than anything else is if the Labour party went to yet another leadership election.  It would be insane.  We know that the public do not like divided parties, the Tories found that out to their cost a few years ago, we are now finding out to ours, okay but the divisions in the Labour party reflect – and this is the important thing here because this isn’t about a few politicians in Westminster, it’s about what’s happening in our country and how we’re responding to it.  What’s happening in the country is actually Brexit has divided us in a way that no other political issue has done for 50 years.  Brexit has actually meant that two-thirds of those Labour MPs who voted to remain are actually sitting in seats who voted to leave, they feel themselves desperately vulnerable and therefore they are deeply concerned about the future of the party.  Now they need to focus on how they connect with the electorate as all of us do but the other part of this is that two-thirds of Labour voters in the public at large actually wanted to remain so we in the Labour party are divided in a way that no other party is so our constituencies are going one way, our membership are going the other and what we’ve got to do as Labour members of parliament, as the leaders of the party, is to get out there and start talking to people, start saying to people okay, what are the issues, what are the things that really are making you afraid of how politics is going today.  When your children cannot get a mortgage because there are no houses being built, when there are insecure jobs, people are being put on zero-hours contracts and flexible working with no security …

SR: You talk about the challenges to Labour, there are clear challenges to Labour but something from an outside perspective it can seem that you are retreating onto comfortable territory.  Can I just show you quickly now what was written on some election material in Copeland – mothers will die, babies will die, babies will be brain damaged.  Putting to one side the fact that that’s got the subtlety of a hammer, you literally said that babies will die if the Conservatives get elected and people still voted Conservative.

BARRY GARDINER: Look, that’s a quote from a midwife, a midwife who knows that if you are in West Cumbria and being forced to travel forty miles in labour, in a difficult labour, to go to a hospital in Carlisle, that midwife was saying quite rightly that babies are then going to be vulnerable in that situation.

SR: I understand.  

BARRY GARDINER: But I understand your point as well and your point is we are retreating to the core issue of the NHS, we can’t be a single issue party, we are going to have to have a broader appeal.

SR: We are going to have to leave it there, Barry Gardiner thank you very much for being with us.

BARRY GARDINER: Thank you.