ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS, 29.01.17

SOPHY RIDGE: Now the Labour MP Dan Jarvis hasn’t quite been able to shake off the tag of being his party’s leader in waiting but he’s more concerned about tackling what he calls the burning injustice of child poverty.  I went to his Barnsley constituency to talk about the Bill he’s taking to parliament, Labour’s loosening grip on its Northern heartlands and, I just couldn’t avoid it, that party leadership question.  
In wards like St Helen’s you can understand why people are angry, child poverty here is double the national average, long-term unemployment more than double but if Labour want to change that they need to be in power first.  It’s a fact not lost on the local MP on a visit to Darton College to promote his Child Poverty Bill.   This week Dan Jarvis will introduce a Private Members Bill to try and force the government to put a new child poverty target in place after they scrapped the old one.  

DAN JARVIS: It’s about ensuring that where you grow up doesn’t determine where you end up and I listened very carefully to what the Prime Minister said when she stood on the steps of Downing Street and she said that she was going to fight burning injustices and I think it’s a burning injustice that now nearly four million children grow up in poverty, it’s a burning injustice that that makes it much harder for them to get the best possible education and a burning injustice that it makes it much harder for them to go on and lead fulfilling, challenging, professional careers.  My Bill, my Private Members Bill that I’ll be introducing to Parliament next week seeks to do something practically about that.  It’s not a contentious measure I don't think, it’s something that the previous Prime Minister David Cameron was able to support and I hope that we can work together, establish a cross-party consensus to say it isn’t acceptable in 2017 that we’ve got four million children growing up in poverty.

SR:  Well in Barnsley I think about one in five children are said to be growing up in poverty, what does that actually mean, for a child to be growing up in poverty?

DAN JARVIS: It means that it’s much harder for them to get on in life.  My great frustration with our country is that we’ve got huge potential, our people are amazing.  I’m always inspired when I come to places like this school to meet the children, to talk about the aspiration and the ambition that they have but if you are growing up in poverty it is much harder to do well at school, you don’t have the same life opportunities and let’s be very clear, the kind of people that we are talking about are those people who the Prime Minister referred to as the ‘just managing’.  Often the kids that we’re talking about who are growing up in poverty have parents who are in full-time work, these are people who are doing the right thing, who are working hard but at the end of each month are struggling to make ends meet.

SR: The issue with what you are saying though is that Labour can only do anything about this if they’re in power and if you look at the polls now, right now, it looks like Labour are unelectable.

DAN JARVIS: We’ve lost two general elections and we’ve lost them quite badly and I want to make sure that we don’t lose another one so all of us who believe in the value of Labour politics to achieve meaningful good for communities like Barnsley but around the country as well, have an absolute responsibility to get involved, to think long and hard about why it was that the public didn’t feel that they could trust us previously and to do the hard work that you have to do in opposition.

SR: If the polls don’t improve, should Jeremy Corbyn be considering his position?

DAN JARVIS: I think that we face a very significant challenge and polls are bad, they’re good, they blow in the wind.  We’ve lost two general elections, none of us want to lose a third one.  The leader in the end has to take responsibility for the direction of travel and the level of progress that we are making. I’m not sure if it is helpful for me to get into a running commentary about how well that’s going.

SR: Do you think he would make a good Prime Minister?

DAN JARVIS: Politics is so complex, it’s so fluid. If we’d sat here two years ago discussing Britain leaving the European Union, President Trump in the White House, David Cameron standing down as the Prime Minister, these would all have come as huge surprises so I think Jeremy Corbyn has developed his durability.  He has won now twice and been elected as the leader of the Labour party and on that basis he deserves our loyalty and our respect and he also deserves all of us to get involved and to support the work that he’s doing, to come up with this analysis of the challenges that the country faces so in the end it’s not whether I think he’d make a good Prime Minister, it’s about the public, they get to decide and actually I think they are very canny at making the decision.  We’ve got to convince them that when it comes to the big issues like national security, like keeping the country safe and making those really, really difficult decisions about the economy and safeguarding the public finances, can they place their faith and trust in him?  If he can convince them that he can, then that’s a great thing and we’ll be in a strong position to win and we need to support him in that process but none of us should underestimate how difficult that is going to be.

SR: So Jeremy Corbyn, the man who has rebelled over 400 times against his own party’s whip is now imposing a three-line whip on his own MPs over Article 50.  Is it the right thing to do?

DAN JARVIS: I think Jeremy is right on this, this is the biggest challenge that our country faces and it is right that as a Labour party we come together, we establish a consensus amongst ourselves so I think it is the right decision. I absolutely acknowledge that for many colleagues that will present a massive choice that they have to make, in the end I am sure people will vote with their conscience and do what they think is the right think for their constituencies and for their constituents but on such a major issue such as this I think it is the right thing for the leader to take a view and to ensure that colleagues to an extent are bound by that decision.

SR: And are you voting for Article 50 yourself then?

DAN JARVIS: Yes, I think I’ve listened very carefully to what people have said here in my constituency, 70% of my constituents voted to leave the European Union, I think it is the right thing to do to trigger Article 50 and we begin that process of negotiation but what I’ll be doing throughout that process is scrutinising the government and the actions that they take and seeking to ensure that we secure the best possible deal for my constituents here in Yorkshire.  They voted to leave the European Union but nobody voted to be poorer.

SR: You say it’s important for Labour to show that you’re understanding people’s concerns so what’s the party’s position now on immigration?

DAN JARVIS: I think the party’s position on immigration is to do two things: the first is absolutely to recognise the benefits, we are economically better off because people come here from within the European Union and from other parts of the world to make an economic and a social and a cultural contribution.  So it is to understand the benefits but it is also to recognise the concerns and as a party we can never afford to look like we don’t understand the concerns that millions of people …

SR: Do you think that you risk looking like that, that you don’t understand the concerns?

DAN JARVIS: Yes, I do think that for too long in the previous parliament and in this one as well we have run the risk of demonstrating to people that we don’t understand the concerns that they have.  It isn’t racist to have concerns about the impact that migration has on our country and we have to demonstrate that we are listening to those people who do have genuine concerns, who do believe that immigration could be managed more effectively in the interests of our country.  We have to demonstrate to them that we’re listening and that we take their concerns very seriously.

SR: You have clearly spent quite a lot of time thinking about the future of Labour, issues like child poverty that you feel very passionately about.  Do you ever look back and think I wish I’d run for Labour leader when I had the chance?

DAN JARVIS: I don’t think back, I don’t think back to that moment very often because I’m sort of quite busy looking forward.  It’s quite a tough time to be in politics, I’m really sad that a couple of my Labour colleagues have stood down but I don't think this is the time to stand down, I think this is the time frankly to step up.  There are huge challenges that we all face, it can be quite hard going but the truth of the matter is serving politics is a great privilege.

SR: Dan Jarvis there.