Tim Farron was on Sky News Murnaghan this morning. It was quite refreshing to hear him introduced as “leading the charge” on the refugee crisis. It is actually blindingly obvious that we have been, but it’s not so often acknowledged.
The Murnaghan programme provides very helpful transcripts of their interviews, for which I am very grateful.
Terry Wogan
He was interviewed only an hour or so after the news that Terry Wogan had died and was asked for his reaction:
I am genuinely very, very upset. He formed an enormous part of my childhood, interviewing all sorts of people on his TV show but also the radio programmes, he was a peculiar and unique individual who appeals both to me – somebody who is obsessed with pop music – and my grandparents at the same time and I think that was his great strength, he spoke without arrogance or pomposity and he was a kind of warm and genuine figure in your living room and around the breakfast table and we’ll all very much miss him.
Refugee crisis
On refugees, he was asked if we should avoid creating a “pull factor:. He was clear that the way to do this was by creating safe and legal routes for refugees.
Well indeed as you say, people can be picked up in the Mediterranean but it is far better though to establish safe routes or holding centres, reception centres. I am absolutely open to something pragmatic where we discuss with the Turkish authorities to have something that is available there that allows people to claim asylum safely. We have a similar problem nearer to home at Calais where our refusal to engage with the Calais authorities and the French government, our nearest and in many ways closest friend and ally, it’s a ridiculous situation to be in – we have those people held in those camps in Calais who make these dangerous, often fatal, attempts to cross the Channel when actually we should be allowing people to claim asylum from Calais, the same as people should be allowed to claim asylum in Europe from outside Europe.
There’s always an excuse and sometimes there’s a logic behind them for not doing the right thing and the reality is that we are not going to turn off this tap of refugees. These people are not, on the whole, economic migrants, they are not chancers, they are not people coming to take benefits – that’s not just my opinion, 50% of all the refugees who came into Europe last year came to the island of Lesbos that I visited a few months ago. The United Nations there are very clear that 94% of those who are coming in were refugees by all United Nations standards, by all the standards that you and I would recognise as someone being a refugee, fleeing from persecution, war and terror and those are the people that we should open our arms to.
The irrelevance of Cameron’s EU renegotiation
He’s right – if you’ve made up your mind, it doesn’t matter what Cameron manages to negotiate. He also might have said enough to appeal to those in the middle that Cameron is trying to win over with
What really is the issue is what kind of country are we? Are we a country that wants to take advantage of the biggest market in the world, protect our jobs, to be an outward looking confident nation that’s part of the community of nations or do we want to be small, insular and backward looking? If you believe in the former like I do, then you are going to vote yes whatever he comes back with.
Diversity
Where I have a fairly strong disagreement with Tim is on his answer to a question prompted by David Lammy’s appointment to look at racism in the justice system. The lack of diversity in our party is an easy target and in my view Tim went too far in defending it.
The challenge that all us have in organisations is that you need to lead from the front and from the top and make those changes you must to make sure that in my case my party is representative of wider society. That is why for example at the conference we have coming up in about six weeks’ time, the Liberal Democrats will be taking very radical moves towards a positive approach that will make sure we have a much more diverse range of members of parliament than in the past. I will have to be a bit tongue in cheek and say our range of candidates at the last general election was very diverse and very balanced, it’s just too few of us got elected.
That “oh but we had such a good range of candidates” is a lazy cop-out. Had we taken action to ensure a balanced slate of candidates ahead of the 1997 election, where we made a huge breakthrough, the chances are we would not be in the mess we are in today. 0/8 is terrible, but we have to remember that we had 7/57 in the last Parliament and that really wasn’t anything to be proud of. We also have to look at Nick’s failure to put a woman in the Cabinet or to radically alter the gender balance in the Lords, or even at his “gongs for the boys” dissolution honours to realise that there is much to be done to change the culture of this party. Tim really needs to challenge us more on this. We have failed miserably at diversity for decades and we can’t afford to do so any longer. Credit to Tim for trying to do something about it now, but he needs to understand the extent of and impact of our previous failures.
And those secret talks on PR?
Basically, he’s happy to work cross-party on this and all sorts of issues, but there aren’t any secret talks. The case for electoral reform should be embraced by more parties, though:
If you have a government with 100% of power on 37% of the votes, they can do incredibly reckless things like destroy social housing in this country, to destroy the green energy sector in this country, to undermine long-term investment particularly in the north of England, you think this seems to be very, very unfair so I think the time has come for electoral reform to be more than just a Liberal Democrat thing.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
3 Comments
I’m sure Terry Wogan was a pleasant enough fellow and provided harmless entertainment. I’m sorry that his family will be grieving
……but, I do wish politicians would not feel obliged to make soundbites about so called ‘celebrities’. I see Cameron and Corbyn have already said their bit.
4 March 2007 “The BBC has said it is “not ashamed” of paying Sir Terry Wogan a fee for hosting the annual Children In Need charity fund-raising gala. Sir Terry, who is the only celebrity to receive a fee, has been paid since he began presenting the show in 1980. The fee was revealed to be £ 9,065 for seven hours work. (a tad more than Philippa Whitford’s £ 57.60 per house for performing cancer surgery).
Sir Terry’s ordinary contract with the BBC was £ 800,000 per annum. He was one of the ‘investors’ in the Flow lands of Caithness & Sutherland. Until 1988, investment in woodland could be written off against personal income tax and celebrities including Terry Wogan, Nick Faldo and Cliff Richard were among the unlikely landowners who planted trees.
The aim of the scheme was to support the forestry industry and create jobs, but it was condemned by conservationists because of its effect on the largest expanse of blanket peat bog anywhere in the world. Trees use up large amounts of water and the effect was to dry up the peatlands that are an internationally recognised habitat and home to rare nesting birds, including the black-throated diver and hen harrier.
“I am absolutely open to something pragmatic where we discuss with the Turkish authorities to have something that is available there that allows people to claim asylum safely.”
Cameron is already doing that – and Farron has been slating him for it. But hopefully this sudden attack of “pragmatism” signals a realisation from Farron that it’s neither sensible nor compassionate to insist that refugees undertake a potentially deadly sea voyage to Europe before we’ll consider helping them, which has been his policy thus far.
I think what is to be criticised about what Cameron has proposed is that it is a unrealistic approach to the problem is screening refugees. This should happen wherever they happen to be now.
Restricting this to mainland Asia Minor or people already in the UK (+ those that the law says should be), is too unambitious.