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

SOPHY RIDGE: Joining me in the studio now is the Shadow International Trade Secretary, Barry Gardiner, hello and thanks for being with us this morning.  Now you’re not going to thank me for this but I feel we have got to start with the polls that are around in today’s newspapers because they don’t make pretty reading for your party.  This is the ComRes Sunday Mirror poll, 50% for the Conservatives, I mean that is the highest percentage for any party since 2002, the highest for the Conservatives since 1991.  Look at this, it’s going to be a bloodbath isn’t it?

BARRY GARDINER: Well flick on up and you’ll see the Sunday Mail, the Mail on Sunday, and they are saying that the Tory lead has halved in the latest poll from last night to eleven points.  Look, Sophy …

SR: I’m surprised you’re celebrating an eleven point lead for the Conservatives.

BARRY GARDINER: No, no, I’m not, what I’m saying is I’m trying to show you that there is a fluctuation in what the polls are saying between a 25% and an 11%.  We have a lot of ground to cover over the next six or seven week, I’m very confident that when people start looking not at what the polls are saying but what the policies of each of the parties are, they are then going to say actually I don’t trust the Tories on tax because I’ve seen what Philip Hammond wanted to do in raising NIC in the budget.  They are refusing to abide by their promise that they made in 2015 in their manifesto that they wouldn’t raise national insurance contributions, they are refusing to say that they won’t put up VAT again and actually Philip Hammond when he was last week at the IMF in Washington said all Chancellors would like greater flexibility on tax.  It’s very clear they are abandoning those promises and I think the electorate are going to look at that and say, why is it that they are abandoning the triple lock on pensions?  This is something that people are deeply worried about because we need to give elderly people dignity and security in retirement, we are committed to that but the Tories won’t.

SR: We will come on to policy later but at the same time though, if you poll for policy Labour are doing quite well if you just look the policies in isolation but the problem is people just don’t trust you, they don’t believe you.  You are talking about the Mail on Sunday poll which actually compares two different polls so it is very difficult to draw too much onto that Mail on Sunday poll and of course we don’t trust polls but at the same time the polls have never been this wrong have they?  By all accounts you are heading for a crashing defeat.

BARRY GARDINER: Shall I tell you when they were last this wrong?  When Donald Trump won the White House and when Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour party, that’s when they were last this wrong.

SR: But polls, we’re talking about the betting markets for Jeremy Corbyn not the polls.

BARRY GARDINER: Well the betting markets and the polls.  Who thought two years’ ago that Jeremy Corbyn would become the leader of the Labour party?  When you talk about trust …

SR: But that’s when we started to think about it isn’t it, when the polls of Labour members started to indicate that he would.  

BARRY GARDINER: Well let’s be clear on trust, this is somebody who is leading the Labour party now, who has been absolutely consistent over the years – many people dislike his consistency but he has been absolutely consistent, he has never said one thing and then gone against it, he’s not that sort of person and if you look at what Theresa May is doing, within two years of having promised things on her manifesto at the last general election where she was a senior member of the Cabinet as Home Secretary, she is now rowing back on all the promises she’s made.  That’s why she’s called this election, because she wants to be able to get rid of those promises and actually be freed up she thinks, here’s a political opportunity to be freed up to do what I like and it’s tough.  What she’s going to bring in is going to be hard for British people, it’s going to be hard for all our businesses in negotiating a hard Brexit because that’s what she’s about and this is going to be really, really difficult for Britain if she gets the mandate that she wants.  

SR: There is one thing that I do want to ask you about because I’m slightly confused because back in 2008 you called for Gordon Brown to resign and call a leadership contest because, and this is your words at the time, “The public has stopped listening to him”, in 2008 …

BARRY GARDINER: Gosh, look at my beard!  I’m shocked by the photograph, goodness me!  

SR: You look much smarter now, Barry, don’t worry.  So the public have stopped listening to Gordon Brown, you said he should resign, the polls show that the public have stopped listening to Jeremy Corbyn so why aren’t you calling for him to resign, is it just because you’ve got a better job this time?

BARRY GARDINER: Play the rest of my quote there, I said it was because he had shown complete vacillation, complete vacillation.  If you run the rest of that quote you will see all the points that I made.  He had said that he was going to set out his case to the British public, that’s why he hadn’t called a general election a year previously, and he didn’t.  He had vacillated on policies at that time, I wanted clear direction and strong leadership and he wasn’t offering it at that point.  I have to say, six months later when it came to the global financial crisis, resolving that in the G20 in London, he was brilliant.  He suddenly became superman and he did a fantastic job there but at the point when I called for him to go actually I think there has been a year of real crisis, perhaps personal crisis but also in terms of just not knowing what he wanted to do being in Number Ten.  Jeremy Corbyn knows that very clearly, he is absolutely clear about what he wants to do in Number Ten and what way he wants this country to go.

SR: A very loyal response there to Jeremy Corbyn.  Now I’m keen to talk about your big policy announcement today which is the new Bank Holidays, four new Bank Holidays, have things got so bad now you are bribing voters with the idea of more time off work?

BARRY GARDINER: No, I don't think it’s about bribing voters at all.  Look, our four nations in the United Kingdom have really never been quite as divided as we are at the moment and I think it’s great that in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales they should be celebrating the 23rd April, which by the way today …

SR: So this is your idea of saving the union is it, bank holidays?

BARRY GARDINER: … is not only Shakespeare’s birthday but St George’s and it is also my brother’s birthday and I have to apologise on TV if I may that I haven’t sent him a birthday card with the election last week but I will get round to it, I promise.  But it’s great that we’re actually talking about celebrating those things which bring us together and having a holiday is a good way of doing that.  We have less holidays than anybody else in the G20, this would only take us up to the G20 average of holidays, 12 a year.  We have less than France, less than Germany, we’ve half as many as Japan which has 16 public holidays each year and yet they are the third largest economy in the world.  So I think we can do this and it won’t have to impact and affect our productivity.

SR: Now of course you can only do this if you get somewhere near power.  It’s the same with your own brief, Shadow International Trade, with Donald Trump warning that Britain will be put to the back of the queue when it comes to the trade deals, that the EU would be prioritised.  Do you have any impact on this?  You are going to have to be in power aren’t you?

BARRY GARDINER: Isn’t that extraordinary?  Now we know that when Donald Trump took Theresa May’s hand at the White House he really was walking her down the garden path.  At that point people said oh, Britain has gone to the front of the queue for a trade deal.  Last week we heard that actually we’re not at the front of the queue at all, we’ve now gone to the back of the queue behind the European Union and it has already taken four years to try and fail to negotiate the TTIP agreement which is between the European Union and the United States.  So the idea that we are at the front of the queue has now gone, not only that but we heard Theresa May saying that she would be quite relaxed about opening up our health services to big American healthcare companies.  Now this is something that people really need to understand, the way in which our country will change as a result of our changing trade policy is dramatic.  They need to understand that at all levels and if you look at what happened just two days ago in the European Union, the leaked document from the Commission showed that they are now encouraging European companies, encouraging them, to discriminate against British companies in tenders for European work.  Now where was the government, where was Theresa May?  She was out electioneering, it was the Labour party that had to send a complaint about the European Commission to the European Ombudsman. The Commission is supposed to be the guardian of the treaty, the treaty says that if you are a member state you cannot discriminate against any member state and the Commission is supposed to guarantee that.  They failed to do it but this government completely failed to notice, did nothing about it and it took for me to put that complaint in to the Ombudsman because the government has lost its eye on the main deal about Brexit.  The government is now looking simply to the election and we’re in the midst of a two year fixed period of negotiation and Theresa May has taken two years out, that is arrogant for Britain and it is also reckless in terms of the negotiation.

SR: A quick thought from you on tax as well, clearly it’s going to be a huge issue in this election.  John McDonnell seemed to suggest that if you are on £70,000 or more then you are rich and you can be paying more tax, do you agree with him?

BARRY GARDINER: Look, Members of Parliament are in that bracket, £70,000 and you’re in the top 5% of the population, let’s understand that the average wage in this country has gone down in real terms by 10% since 2007 so actually what we’re talking about is a £10 minimum wage for all those 5.6 million at the bottom of the pile and that will actually boost our economy because those people tend to spend their income more and yes, I do believe that people at the top and certainly big companies, should be paying more tax and the way we’ll do that is because we’ve pledged to make those very large companies have to publish their tax returns to show they are paying exactly what tax they need to …

SR: Before you go because we haven’t got too long …

BARRY GARDINER: Can I also just say and our late payment policy which says that big companies will have to stop using small companies as their bankers, they will have to pay up in time instead of waiting three or four months.

SR: Now you’ve been in parliament for a long time now, a couple of decades, perhaps you haven’t quite seen anything like what you saw this week after you gave a particularly feisty set of interviews.  You were described as the chuckling assassins, the people’s Gardiner …

BARRY GARDINER: I did chuckle didn’t I?

SR: This is one of your fans on Twitter, we can have a look at one particular Twitter post here from SmartySue “I love badass Baz”, is this the beginning of Bazmania?

BARRY GARDINER: I’ve always said that I prefer policy to politics and very often we get into personality politics.  I don’t believe in that and I think very often what’s wrong with a lot of the way that the polls and the newspapers conduct things is that they go, who’s up or who’s down in the personality contest?  I think we need to fight this election on policies and on that basis I think we should win.

SR: Bazmania is over, you heard it here first.  Barry Gardiner, thank you very much for that.