Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Jess Phillips – ‘I will fight’ to rejoin EU if I think it is right

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Much of the Sunday shows were taken up by Labour’s upcoming leadership contest. Jess Phillips, the MP for Birmingham Yardley who has been a thorn in the side of Jeremy Corbyn over the course of his leadership, spoke to Marr about her stance on the EU. Marr asked her if she would be minded to rejoin:

JP: You’d have to look at what was going on at the time… The reality is, if our country is safer, if it is more economically viable to be in the EU, then I will fight for that regardless of how difficult that argument is to make.

I would ‘absolutely’ take action to protect British lives
In the context of the Soleimani case, Phillips told Marr that she would be prepared, under the right circumstances, to commit British troops abroad if it meant saving the lives of British citizens:

JP: What we have to make sure is that when we take action, it is legal, it is proportionate, and that there is a moral case for it. And if those questions can be answered, then I would absolutely take action to protect British lives.

Emily Thornberry: Labour manifesto ‘just wasn’t convincing’

Thornberry is also one of the several runners and riders to have declared that she will run. Ridge asked her about what had gone wrong in the party’s election campaign last December:

ET: We weren’t sufficiently clear about what our priorities were… There was too much in [the manifesto]. It just wasn’t convincing… We won’t get the opportunity to serve if people don’t believe us and don’t believe in us.

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Sir Keir Starmer – ‘We all have to take responsibility’ for Labour’s defeat
Andrew Marr spoke to Sir Keir Starmer, who is the current favourite to be next leader after an opinion poll of members put him on 31 per cent. Marr asked if the blame for the defeat should lie squarely with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell:

KS: We all have to take responsibility for this. It’s a devastating result for the Labour party, for Labour MPs… candidates who should have been Labour MPs, for the millions of people who desperately needed change… So it’s beyond sorry – it’s devastating.

Voters wanted ‘clarity and leadership’ on Brexit stance
As Shadow Brexit Secretary, Starmer was a key figure in slowly manoeuvring Labour towards backing a second referendum. Starmer was unrepentant in his sympathies towards remaining in the EU, but said that he felt the ambiguity of Labour’s message had been costly:

AM: Do you think you would have won this election, or done much better, had you gone in… as a clearly Remain party?
KS: I think people wanted clarity and they wanted leadership. What was coming up on the doorsteps… was not so much people telling me ‘I don’t like Labour’s position’, but they had bought the idea that if you voted Tory you’d ‘get Brexit done’… We hadn’t destroyed and wrestled that phrase to the ground.

Lisa Nandy – Labour has ‘patronised’ people
Lisa Nandy, the MP for Wigan, has also formally announced that she will run for the leadership. Speaking to Ridge, she agreed that a key problem had been ‘trust’ in the Labour party. She went on to emphasise the disconnect between the increasingly metropolitan party and its heartlands:

LN: Labour in recent years has become a very paternalistic party. We commission think tanks to write us reports in central London, we sit behind desks in Westminster or Victoria Street commissioning opinion polls and focus groups, and then we tell people that ‘we’re going to fix it’… I think that is a way of patronising people.

Dominic Raab – The US have a right to exercise self-defence
Friday’s targeted drone strike in Iraq which killed General Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, was in response to an earlier attack on the US embassy in Baghdad, which in turn was instigated by Iranian-backed fighters. The Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab spoke to Sophy Ridge about the ongoing situation:

DR: [Soleimani] was a regional menace and we understand the position that the Americans found themselves in, and they have a right to exercise self-defence… We now want to see de-escalation and stabilisation of the situation, and a war in fact, is in no one’s interest.

The PM and I ‘are in regular contact’
Raab also defended the Prime Minister for not cutting short his holiday in Mustique to deal with the tensions in the Middle East:

DR: The Prime Minister is in charge. In fact, I’ve been in constant contact with him over the Christmas break… The whole government is working very closely together… and he’ll be back in the UK tomorrow.

‘There is no magic wand’ for British prisoners
Raab also appeared later on the Andrew Marr Show. Marr asked him if he had given up on diplomatic efforts to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other British nationals currently imprisoned in Iran:

DR: This is no magic wand we can exercise… All of our dual-nationals, Nazanin included, are at the forefront of our thinking on Iran… Of course, we will continue to pursue their release, but we cannot keep stepping back and allowing this aggressive behaviour to go unchecked.

‘We have very serious concerns’ over Cyprus case
In a case that has incensed campaigners, a Cypriot court has found a British teenager to have lied about being raped by 12 Israeli nationals while she was on holiday there. The victim says that she retracted her claims under duress, and the judge has come under fire for his handling of the case. Raab pledged to do his best to bring her home:

DR: My first priority is her welfare, to get her back home safe and sound… We’ve made very clear… that we have very serious concerns about her treatment throughout [this] process.

Emily Thornberry – We are taking ‘a major lurch towards war’
The Shadow Foreign Secretary also gave her verdict on the killing of General Soleimani. Thornberry sharply criticised President Trump and told Ridge that Friday’s actions made the chances of a war in the Middle East much more likely:

ET: We are taking a major lurch towards war, and we are doing that because the President is reckless and hasn’t thought through… what he’s doing. But it seems to me quite clear that the Iranians are going to counter attack, and it means that our people… are of course under threat.

UK should ‘say no’ to the US for once
Thornberry also said that it was up to the UK to try and exert some influence on the US by convening a session of the United Nations’ Security Council to highlight the international opposition to another war:

ET: Why aren’t we saying that there should be an emergency meeting of the Security Council in order to bring the world together and say ‘This must stop’. The illegal activity both of America and Iran must stop… We need to… actually say ‘no’ to the Americans for once.

HS2 figures have been ‘fiddled’
And finally, Lord Berkeley, who was the deputy chair of the government’s review of HS2, has argued that the project has been the subject of a level of creative accounting, which he says has amounted to Parliament being deceived:

LB: The project is completely out of control financially… They’ve fiddled the figures to improve the benefit-cost ratio… I believe that Parliament has been misled because the costs were clearly known to the Department of Transport, and I believe ministers, three or four years ago.

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