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PRESENTER: Nick Clarke
PANELLISTS:
Polly Toynbee
Bob Marshall Andrews
Julian Fellowes
Lord Lawson
FROM: Carshalton Boys Sports College, Surrey
CLARKE
Welcome to Carshalton in Surrey, part of the London borough of Sutton. We're the guests of Carshalton Boys Sports College, which was awarded that specialist status five years ago. It is one of the city's training schools and this year has helped launch 40 new teachers into their careers. It also features a lottery funded healthy living unit and looking around the audience it shows.
Our panel: Lord Lawson is the former Conservative Chancellor whose popular diet book is a tribute to his own healthy living. In the early '80s he also held the post of energy secretary, which may have fuelled his current interest in climate change. He challenges the conventional view that carbon emissions are to blame, insisting that what we're seeing is simply the latest natural swing in the world's weather pendulum.
Polly Toynbee has been writing for the Guardian since 1988. Her columns, along with a series of books, most recently Better or Worse has Labour Delivered? have something of a running commentary on Tony Blair's government from a critical friends. She's just been voted the number one columnist in a poll by opinion leader research by her fellow columnists, no pressure here to perform then.
Julian Fellowes is an actor and dramatist, currently hosting a quiz show about punctuation. He's working on two film projects - a thriller and a love story - his adaptation of Mary Poppins opens on Broadway soon. But he has recently found time to espouse the Conservative cause, he's quoted as saying that he's terribly keen on the present government losing the next election.
And finally Bob Marshall Andrews, the Labour MP, who sometimes seems to feel the same way, if his numerous rebellions are anything to go by. He hung on to his Medway seat last year, much to his own evident surprise, thus allowing him to return to Westminster once again to bay outside Tony Blair's window.
Ladies and gentlemen, our panel. [CLAPPING]
May we have our first question please?
PEGLER
Maureen Pegler. Will the government's energy review help deal with climate change?
CLARKE Thank you. An energy review has been published in the past week, Tony Blair's been talking about the need for nuclear power stations and a lot more renewable energy. Bob Marshall Andrews what do you think?
MARSHALL ANDREWS Well in part yes it will and part of it is to be welcomed. The billion pounds to go into renewable energy, yes, so three out of ten. Where it will emphatically not help is the - is the emphasis on nuclear, it is an emphasis on nuclear power. Nuclear power will not assist in our problems, indeed it will gravely exacerbate our problems, it doesn't take - it takes no account whatsoever of the enormous energy drain which is involved in the creation of fuel, the milling of a thousand tons of rock in order to obtain one ton of cake, from which you then have to extrapolate the nuclear fuel that you need. It takes no account, at the end of the day, of the massive cost - fuel and energy costs - of decommissioning nuclear - nuclear plants. And to say that the government will not subsidise nuclear is of course an illusion because anybody who is going to build a nuclear power station knows perfectly well, as they've known before, that at the end of its 24 year life the government has to bear the cost of decommissioning because you cannot have nuclear radioactive waste without - without government control. And so at the end of the day we - and of course it has a half life - radioactive half life - not of thousands, not of millions but of billions of years. So we are attempting to solve a problem of our own making by creating a massive problem for the future. It is something that must be resisted at all costs. The way that we deal with this is that we stop the appalling profligate use of energy, which we are all, to a certain extent, guilty. And if you want me to just start with one example ...
CLARKE A brief one please.
MARSHALL ANDREWS .. it is aviation - it is aviation, that is where we need to stop, aviation industry, which is a huge contributor to global warming and has had effectively a tax break for the last 30 years. Now that's where we [CLAPPING] ...
CLARKE Now Lord Lawson I read out a little bit about some of your current thinking on this subject but presumably you looked at the review askance did you?
LAWSON I wasn't terribly impressed by the review. The - let me say that the first thing is on nuclear, which has been mentioned. Nuclear power is something which I looked into a great deal when I was energy secretary, indeed I set up the Sizewall B inquiry in 1982 which was an inquiry which lasted for more than five years and finished in 1987. I think it's the longest inquiry we've ever - public inquiry - we've had in this country. And I'm absolutely satisfied that nuclear power is safe. This country was the first country in the world to have electricity in our homes generated by nuclear power. We've had it for 50 years. And there's never been any serious accident, indeed the record is better than almost any other heavy industry you care to name. Having said that I share Bob Andrews - Bob Marshall Andrews concern in one respect that it may not be economic, compared with conventional - conventional power stations because in order to maintain the safety you do have the heavy cost of decommissioning the power station at the end of its life, which has to be done safely because it's radioactive and you have the problem of the disposal - safe disposal - of the nuclear waste. So it may not be wholly economic. Having said that it is dead cheap compared with wind power, for example, compared with renewables. I mean wind power is a complete nonsense. What people don't realise is that electricity - electricity has to be on tap all the time, wind power is intermittent and you can't store electricity except at totally prohibitive costs. And therefore if you are going to have wind power you have to have backup, conventional power stations, for the times when the wind is not blowing. That is a fact. And the cost is totally exorbitant, it is a total nonsense, and every expert inquiry which has looked into this has come to this conclusion.
CLARKE But if the review is designed mainly to tackle the problem of carbon emissions do you not - maybe I've misinterpreted what you've said - do you simply believe that they're barking up the wrong tree, is this a problem we don't really have?
LAWSON I think they may well be. The - I think it may well be totally unnecessary to cut down on carbon emissions. The facts are these: That certainly there's been a great deal - there's been a great increase in carbon emissions over the past centenary as a result of mankind and carbon emissions - carbon - CO2, carbon dioxide, is not a pollutant, it is what plants need to grow on, it is actually a life force like oxygen. The - but the nevertheless there has been a big increase. What has happened to the world's temperature so far - over the past 100 years - and this is not in dispute, this is accepted on all sides - the temperature of - the average temperature of the world has increased by two thirds of one degree centigrade. If tomorrow the temperature here is two thirds of a degree different from what it is today you wouldn't notice it, and that's from one day to the next, this is what's happened over a whole year - century - that's all. So the thing - and all this alarmism is very ill founded. Nevertheless, there's always a risk that carbon dioxide emissions may contribute more, they've contributed something to this two thirds of a degree and therefore it is sensible to take out an insurance policy and may be nuclear power is a sensible insurance policy to take out.
CLARKE Polly Toynbee.
TOYNBEE Well I find that very interesting I think Lord Lawson is one of the last of a very rare breed that perhaps we ought to be protecting. He is a climate change denier. And there are almost none of them left. I used to get loads of e-mails and loads of correspondence on this from various scientists all over the world and they have all shut up and gone away, except for Lord Lawson. There is virtually nobody and certainly no reputable scientist left and even George Bush has had to face up to the unpalatable truth that global warming is certainly happening and we are to blame. And I think there's no doubt about it at all now [CLAPPING] - the hottest 10 years on record have all happened in the last 14 years. The trajectory ahead is absolutely terrifying, it isn't clear that even if we did everything we possibly could that the planet is saveable. But I think this energy review doesn't begin to get there, for one thing it's only dealing with electricity, it's not dealing with the main causes which are transport, and as Bob said aviation. Good that we're having extra money for renewables but it's a tiny sum of money. We could save 30% energy save - just on energy saving, it requires laws and regulation to do that and politicians are too scared. David Cameron says he wants to go green but we can do it with no pain. Well it really is, I'm afraid, no pain, no gain on this, we all do have to take action and we have to be made to because people aren't going to do it voluntarily if they see people next door not doing it. As for nuclear, I don't think it's actually going to happen, if the government is honest when it says level playing field, if they're honest when they say no subsidies, no hidden subsidy, they'll pay their energy commissioning costs, they'll pay their own insurance, so that it may be a tiny risk of a Chernobyl but a tiny risk of a vast expense, I don't think you'll find the private sector willing to do it. Lord Lawson himself tried to get the private sector to build it, Margaret Thatcher wanted the private sector to do it, in 27 years nobody has built one, they've just started to build one in Finland with an enormous subsidy as a kind of lost leader for companies for want to build them. I don't think it's actually going to happen, so long as the one thing we make sure of that it is a level playing field with all other sorts of alternatives and then I think people would rather build wind farms, wave energy and a lot of other things will become a great deal more economic than nuclear could ever be.
CLARKE Julian Fellowes. [CLAPPING]
FELLOWES I think we are an oddly alarmist generation, I mean there have been generations of triumphalism but we seem to feast on these looming disasters and we see an enormous number of things in the absolutely blackest possible terms. However, of course it doesn't mean it isn't true. I think I do have a sort of resistance to nuclear power, I suspect it's emotional rather than rational but the concept of nuclear waste never losing its force does frighten me. I just feel with energy altogether, the whole field of energy, this is something I would love to see taken out of the political arena, because it is in all our interests to have the most efficient, least damaging, best use of our resources and I hate this scoring of points in these areas where we are the losers. It seems to me that in a lot of it it's just a question of us finding out the facts, some of them are very hard to find but we should all be simply seeking the truths of these elements of providing energy and coming up with the best solution. And I think it should not be an area where politicians strike points off each other. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE Thank you. A lot more could be said on that subject and may be will be in Any Answers after the Saturday edition of the programme. The number to ring is 08700 100 444, 08700 100 444, you're welcome to e-mail us too any.answers@bbc.co.uk. Next question please.
LEONARD
Richard Leonard. Does the targeting of civilian and civilian infrastructure by one side of the conflict justify and legitimise the response of the deliberating targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure on the other side?
CLARKE And you're talking about the Middle East presumably?
LEONARD I put it as a matter of principle because ... as a principle.
CLARKE But this is what's on your mind I guess today and do you have a particular view on this yourself, do you come from one side of this conflict or another yourself, do you have any particular strong feeling?
LEONARD I'm a humane Englishman of the Jewish faith.
CLARKE Okay. Nigel Lawson.
LAWSON I'm afraid to say that it is not really a question of whether it justifies it or not, this is what is going to happen if one side is being attacked, that side - whichever the side is - is going to retaliate. The sooner they get round the table and can talk about it and reach some agreement, some settlement, obviously the better. And it's obviously highly undesirable what is going on at the present time but I'm afraid it is not a question of justification, it's not a question of going to courts of law and anything like that, it is a matter of reality, hard reality, and it is a matter of the - the countries, the parties to this conflict eventually feeling that they will be better off negotiating a settlement than carrying on in this appalling way. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE This is probably very unfair but this is - the way this question has been phrased is Israel's constant plea, isn't it, this is what Israel always says about what's been happening in south Lebanon, what's been happening in the Gaza strip and so on. What do you think about that - does it strike more of a chord to you, you're being very even handed at the moment?
LAWSON I am even handed, I hope I am even handed, I have no reason not to be even handed. The - I think it is absolutely clear that the Hezbollah were a very unpleasant lot are making - with a kind of terror against - against Israel, Israel is responding with a kind of terror against the Lebanon where the Hezbollah are. It is altogether a most unsavoury business. But I stick by the reply that I gave to the original question.
CLARKE Polly Toynbee.
TOYNBEE Well it's very difficult isn't it, you know three minutes to go over the whole terrible fraught history of the Middle East and who's to blame most for what. I think it does look as if we are on the brink, unless we can manage to pull back or help them pull back from a really terrible configuration worse than we've seen before, enormously dangerous. Yes of course Hezbollah and Hamas with the support and encouragement of Syria and Iran have attacked Israel, but as ever the retaliation is so wildly disproportionate that who started it stops [CLAPPING] changes it all. As ever Israel manages to snatch its sense of rightness by the wrongness of the way it responds and it's a tragedy it repeats over and over again and this time I fear it's much more serious. The poor innocent people of Lebanon who were unable to control a weak country just getting back on its feet, unable to control Hezbollah, not responsible for Hezbollah and not able to cleanse the country of them have been appalling and brutally bombed in a way that is utterly unjustifiable and quite disproportionate to the original attack that was made. Of course Hezbollah and Hamas want it to happen, they're pleased when there's retaliation, they don't mind what they bring about to their own people in the way of retaliation. Only now serious effective outside influences can step in and try and bring everybody around the table. It's hard to be optimistic.
CLARKE Julian Fellowes.
FELLOWES Yes I mean I think - Nigel's absolutely correct - that whoever launched the first strike knew what they were going to get in return. I don't think there can be any question about that, that was what was going to happen. What depresses me - you know we talk about getting round a table and all this stuff, there was some situation at the end of the 19th Century, I forget what it was now, but the minister concerned said - Anyone who thinks they have the solution is not in possession of all the facts. And it's hard not to feel that about this particular struggle. My father spent is life working in the Middle East and with Middle Eastern concerns and I remember the moment, sometime in the '70s, when he said I think the great difficulty of the rise of fundamentalism is that Israel no longer has a territorial solution. And I don't know how we get past that. I mean they have my best wishes and I hope we do and I hope we get everyone to a table and I hope there is a lasting solution but it is very, very difficult not to feel tremendously pessimistic about it.
CLARKE Bob Marshall Andrews.
MARSHALL ANDREWS Yes I believe passionately and fundamentally that the cause of terrorism is not in itself fundamentalism, the cause of terrorism is injustice and poverty. [CLAPPING] We spend a great deal of time being even handed about the Middle East and I am profoundly in favour of the State of Israel, I'm not pro-Zionist but I am certainly not in any sense anti-Semitic. However, it is impossible not to observe that Israel has been in illegal occupation of a very large part of the West Bank for a very long time and the reaction - the reaction that this huge military machine brings about to acts of terrorism is without a shadow of a doubt wholly disproportionate and exactly what the terrorists want and require. And there is a very serious responsibility here. Firstly, I think it is now becoming obvious that the Israeli military machine is very largely out of control and secondly, it is very high time that the West and in particular America should exercise the undoubted power that it has over Israel in terms of army [CLAPPING], in order to force - force a just solution on the Middle East. And until we do that, until we do that, we are whistling in the wind with anti-terrorist measures. That is the fundamentalism and that is what needs to be solved. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE Thank you. Another question please.
PORTER
John Porter. Would any of the panels' names have featured on a national register of gifted children at the age of 11?
CLARKE Thank you. This is the idea of making sure that gifted children don't slip through the net and achieve everything that they might by having a long list somewhere around the age of 11. Julian Fellowes, would you have been there at the age of 11?
FELLOWES Oh I'm sure I would have been top of it. I do remember I passed my 11+ and got into Holland Park Comprehensive, I was offered a place at Holland Park Comprehensive, and my father was passionately keen on getting out of paying my school fees, I remember that, so that nearly was a change. But I mean I support this because I actually did spend at one time in my rather variable school career, I was in what has come to be called a mixed ability class for a year and it was a very, very unsatisfactory arrangement for the pupils in it because there was no way to teach this wide variety of children at any kind of pace that suited them all. And so there were chunks who were bored and chunks who were puzzled and I really believe that we have to accept that there are gifted children. And this country needs to take advantage of those gifted children and we need to find them. And so on - for that reason alone I'm in favour.
CLARKE Bob Marshall Andrews.
MARSHALL ANDREWS Well I certainly think at the age of 11 I had special needs but [LAUGHTER] but they weren't of the gifted and talented variety, as far as I can - as far as I can remember. But also I was of mixed ability, that is to say I was reasonable at some things, almost quite good at others and absolutely rotten in respect of others. I fortunately went to a school which recognised that and I think that education is now increasingly recognising these disparate gifts that children have. I welcome - I welcome this emphasis on talented and gifted children but also I welcome an emphasis on other forms of special needs and on other forms of ability. I have to say that the whole position is distorted by the continued overhang of selection in our system. [CLAPPING] But it makes it - I was a governor of a very fine comprehensive for eight years and we believed - we believed fundamentally in excellence. The way that we were going to take on the private sector was in order to create excellence within the school. I believe in that fundamentally and we are getting there. But one of the ways in which comprehensive schools can compete is by recognising the genius that exists in many children to do many things. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE Polly Toynbee.
TOYNBEE Well I was profoundly and deeply ungifted and I have to admit that I failed my 11+ and actually I still find it quite difficult to say that, it still kind of hurts somewhere really deep down and I think that's the true me, I'm really thick and I've just got away with it and conned you all and somehow managed to squeeze by and keep all the balls in the air but I know fundamentally that I was judged on that day and I was found stupid. And I was very lucky, I was middle class for a start which meant that I was likely to get a leg up in life, unlike lots of children who were dammed forever by that exam, quite unfairly and quite wrongly. [CLAPPING] By an extraordinary chance I did go to Holland Park Comprehensive, it was one of the first ones and a very fine school it was too. I'm quite worried about this programme for gifted children because the figures show that if you take a very clever very poor child at the age of 22 months and you compare them with a very dim but well off child at 22 months, there they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, by the time they're six years old they will have crossed over and their trajectories will go in opposite directions. So if you are picking out very gifted children in secondary school stage the chances are that you're picking out children from the best backgrounds. That would be the biggest predictor, as opposed to that original talent which is why Sure Start and the under 5's are so important and [CLAPPING] ...
CLARKE Nigel Lawson.
LAWSON I certainly wouldn't have been - wouldn't have been picked out as a gifted child or [indistinct word] gifted children at the age of 11 because this was during the war in my - and I had a terrible experience during the war because my parents - first of all I started off before the war in London, then they were afraid that was going to be bombed so I went to my grandparents on the South Coast, went to school there. And then they were afraid there was an invasion so I was brought back to London, then there was the blitz, I was in London during the blitz, then I was taken to Hertfordshire. I went to seven different schools and - including a period when I wasn't in any school at all, which is why I've been such an under achiever. I never had a chance. Anyway I disagree profoundly with Bob Marshall Andrew about selective schools. I think there is no doubt that the grammar schools did a fantastic job of giving real opportunities to gifted children from poor homes, which is much harder [CLAPPING]... But we can't turn the clock back but I would hope that now at least other state schools, not grammar schools because we don't have them anymore, would - would - would - in the old sense - would be able ...
CLARKE There are still 162 left aren't there, or something like that.
LAWSON ... would be able to identify - would be able to identify gifted children and give them the education they deserve and need and can benefit from without the need for - headmasters, head teachers can do that - without any need for a special register.
FELLOWES What I - I hate the idea of the 11+ actually and I hate the idea of binning all these children as they were binned really effectively at the age of 11. I would not have abolished the grammar schools, I would have abolished the secondary moderns and put everyone into the grammar schools. But what I've never been able to understand is why we can't have the streaming system of some public schools where you are not in one stream for everything, which means you're in the dopes stream or whatever, but every single subject you are in a different level of class, so if you're very good at history you're high in history. Because as we all know a lot of children including me find their way half way through their education years and at that point, if you have that system, you just move up, you get better at this, you go up. And I've never been able to grasp why this isn't a realistic option for state schooling?
CLARKE I think we get the impression from the audience that may be what happens here already.
FELLOWES Very good, very glad to hear it
CLARKE And if you've got views on that and on grammar schools, anything you want, Any Answers is there for you 08700 100 444. Another question please.
BAILEY
Ken Bailey. Is it entirely theatrical to arrest a friend of Tony Blair?
CLARKE Thank you. Some of - some Labour party figures were said to have believed that the police were acting theatrically in arresting Lord Levy and interviewing him. Polly Toynbee what do you think?
TOYNBEE Well I don't know about theatrical I think that it suggests that the police are up to trick and games or playing politics, which I very much doubt and I think there were technical reasons why they probably had to do that to get access to papers, computers and that kind of thing. However, I do think it's important to put all this in perspective because I think it would be quite hard to put - to look at any government, either the government or indeed opposition leaders, who didn't manage in their honours list to produce a very extraordinary synergy between those who'd given large sums of money to their particular party and those who got honours and that's been true all the way through. So okay maybe now it's being brought to a stop and a very good thing too. But also what should be brought to a stop is private funding of parties, we need state funding of political parties to absolutely take this away. We need - there are very good ways of doing it and the Power Commission suggested that each of us, when we vote, should tick a little box to say which party we would like the state to donate £3 to, so that we get to choose where the money goes, it doesn't happen by some other allocation, the voters themselves get to choose. There are lots of ways of doing it. I know it's not perfect and a lot of people don't like it but it's better than having it funded by - under the table by millionaires, I really think that sort of corruption has to come to an end. And when of course we have an all elected House of Lords there won't be anything to offer them anyway. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE I think it's right to say and this may become rather a boring theme of mine that no corruption has actually been proved in any of these cases yet - am I right?
TOYNBEE
Indeed but there is just - historically all the way through ...
CLARKE Alright, just checking - oh we're going back to Lloyd George, okay well that's fair enough. Lord Lawson.
LAWSON I think the House of Lords, as a matter of fact the interesting opinion surveys show that in recent years the standing among the public of the unelected House of Lords has been rising in the publics' estimation, where the standing of the House of Commons, the elected House of Commons - and I regret this as a former member of the House of Commons - the standing of the House of Commons has been declining. So I am not enthusiastic about Polly Toynbee's idea of an elected House of Lords and I have no axe to grind because whatever changes there are will not be retrospective, so I shan't be affected. But I think that it is - I think that it is claptrap, if I may use the politest expression I can think of at the moment. The - but the corruption or the whiff of corruption about the money and honours now is worse than I can ever recall.
CLARKE Well that is a point - isn't it - because an awful lot of people on the Labour side say look actually it's been going on for ages, it was just as bad under the Tories ...
LAWSON I think what is true - what is true is that it has always been the case that businessmen, it's largely businessmen, who have given large sums of money to a party have been prominent among those businessmen who are appointed to the House of Lords. But there are two new things here. First of all in previous occasions it is difficult for me - I have to be very careful of the words I express but there has always been another hurdle. The businessmen chosen, it was not simply that they had given money to the party, they had to be considered suitable members of the upper house. That hurdle seems to have been lowered considerably. The other - the other - the other - the other - it is a shame, a great shame - the other new dimension - the other new dimension is there appears to have been a connection between donations and specific favours, that is new, I mean - not meaning new since Lloyd George but new in recent times, in post-war times. I just quote one example.
CLARKE Carefully please.
LAWSON Because I'm going to be careful. But I think that many people feel that the exemption brought in by the government very early on to say that tobacco advertising, cigarette advertising, on Formula One cars was not wholly unconnected with the large donation that Bernie Eccleston gave to the Labour Party. And I think that is a pattern which was set at the beginning and there is some fears that that might have continued and that is something which I think is unacceptable.
CLARKE Bob Marshall Andrews.
MARSHALL ANDREWS Well it's impossible not to observe that Nigel Lawson's remarks about the fall in the esteem of the House of Commons and the rise in the esteem of the House of Lords appeared to be coincident with him leaving one and going - and going to the other. [CLAPPING] We - as to theatricality - one of the many problems about New Labour is that they do tend to invest in others the faults that they have in themselves. Police officers of this calibre do not engage in spin, they are in the business of investing something very serious. And what is very serious - let us leave for a moment the question of peerages - is that the Labour Party in 2,000 - my party in 2005, in the first part of 2005 borrowed £14 million worth of money. They did not declare it to the Electoral Commission, they did not declare it to the Labour Party Conference in September of that year and the defence that it fell just outside the accounting period is micrometer thin. If you serve up accounts to a party and do not inform them that their £14 million poorer than the accounts actually showed them then there's something very wrong. And the Prime Minister knew that when he addressed the Labour Party Conference in September. Why was there this secrecy about these loans? Now that is what sparked everything off and that is what we must - we must, for the sake of the party and for the sake of politics itself, we must reach a resolution of this because of course one possible inference you could draw is that by the time that the next accounts were given those loans may mysteriously have changed in their nature. And why do you not declare donations? Because of course under the act now you have to do so if it is for electoral purposes. Now this is overhanging the Labour Party, my party, and it must be resolved. And as to the fact that the Tories may have done it, I don't care what the Tories do. I joined the Labour Party. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE Okay.
MARSHALL ANDREWS I joined the Labour Party specifically for this reason - that I believed that we were - not above it - but we certainly turned our faces against it. And just at the time when criticism is coming from within the party I think legitimately for this and for other reasons you may have seen that new disciplinary proceedings have been put into effect for Labour backbench members of parliament, absolutely typical of the Prime Minister that when he's in trouble he reaches for a sort of political ASBO, and which - you may sense the cold smell of fear coming from over here as I speak. But we must resolve it for the question of politics, it is serious and it needs to be looked at very seriously. There you are and that's probably got me a peerage free. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE And Julian Fellowes.
FELLOWES I'm rather intrigued that Polly thinks these people want their peerages so they can dedicate themselves to a hardworking life in the House of Lords, I think most of them want their peerages so they can be called Lord and Lady and get a table without any trouble at the Ritz and I think that was always the case. Nor do I really I'm afraid support Nigel on the recent plunge of standards, I mean not just because the law was framed I think after Maundy Gregory scandal under Lloyd George but I mean one can go further back than that - James I used to give peerages to young men he wanted to go to bed with. So there have always been rather odd reasons for raising people to the peerage. And [LAUGHTER] on the whole, yes life peerages for that reason would only go to the young wouldn't they. But no I suppose what I do feel about this is there is some kind of line we seem to have gone over. We've all lived through the lavender list and all sorts of rather peculiar people showing up with coronets on and on the whole good luck to them say I. But there is something - I think it was Mr Noon who reported the fact that he originally wanted to make a donation to the Labour Party and then he was asked by Lord Levy to cancel this and turn it into a loan. Now this I find is not very fragrant really, there seems to be some kind of foul play that's gone over the acceptable line of normal skulduggery. As for the theat...
CLARKE And that of course is what is being investigated. Thank you. Have you nearly done?
FELLOWES But the theatricality of it, I think just briefly in defence of the police, I think there are reasons for arresting someone as opposed to just dropping round to their flat and having a chat because it confers rights over their papers and this that and the other. I don't think it necessarily was theatrical, I think they are just trying to get to the bottom of it.
CLARKE Thank you.
LAWSON May I say very briefly?
CLARKE Yes.
LAWSON I'm wholly opposed to the idea of - very good Julian, very good - but I'm wholly opposed to the idea of forcing the taxpayer compulsorily to finance political parties. [CLAPPING] Political parties have got to deserve the support of the public, they've got to earn the support of the public and let the public support them financially voluntarily. And the idea that you end corruption if you have state funding is nonsense. In Germany they have state funding and look at Chancellor Khol's slush fund in Germany - a far worse degree of corruption than anything we've had in recent times in this country.
TOYNBEE I think there's often a misunderstanding, I mean democracy has to be paid for by someone, we live in an era where people don't join political parties anymore, this is true right across the Western world. We live in a time when people despise politicians and politics, don't want to join parties and yet how else are we to run democracy - you need parties, parties are good things. I mean I think we could organise them much better if we had proportional representation, we'd have a better [CLAPPING] we'd all have a better chance of finding a party we most wanted to vote for and a chance to vote for it - we'd have what's called choice, which would be a very good thing. But as it is somebody's got to pay. Well if people won't join and pay subscriptions individually I don't want millionaires funding our democracy, in the end it does have to be we the voters who have to pay for this process if we want democracy to survive.
CLARKE Alright thank you very much. Another question please.
MANTON
Dominic Manton. Would you hug a hoodie?
CLARKE Thank you. This is one of David Cameron's latest thoughts that a lot more love shown to young men wearing hoods would be a lot more attractive prospect than slapping ASBOS on them and banning them from shopping centres, which I think has also happened. Polly Toynbee.
TOYNBEE Well I'm very glad he's said it because it's very nice for once to hear Conservatives not saying everybody young is revolting and turning back to some golden era when somehow everybody young was wonderful, I think it must be in their own young day on the whole, perhaps Cameron being a bit younger himself is less likely to do that. What's sad though is that it wasn't attached to any particular policy, he didn't say how disgraceful it is that we're now locking up more children than we've ever locked up before in prison, he didn't say how disgraceful that despite the fact that crime has fallen sharply in the last 10 years, not just in this country but pretty much across the Western world, why is it that our prison population has just about doubled. He didn't say why are we more punitive than any other country in Europe, sending more people to prison for longer with less effective - the more of them we send the worse they come out, the less education and the less help, the less rehabilitation they get. He didn't produce any concrete policies at all. I mean maybe when his manifesto comes out it will also be full of the milk of human kindness and some sense as to what actually prevents crime. What we all want is the same thing, wherever we stand in politics we want less crime and you get less crime by stopping the people who commit them committing more crimes, that's the best way.
CLARKE We'll ask Julian Fellowes, Julian Fellowes you're billed as being a keen supporter of Iain Duncan Smith and demanding that he go away from caring conservatism and back towards a rather more right wing view, this may be another misinterpretation.
FELLOWES I don't remember saying any of it, I think I must have been drunk. But anyway in this particular instance I don't think Cameron was saying anything terribly complicated, he was just asking us to avoid the automatic knee jerk reactions and to look at the person rather than the type and that seems to me to be always a pretty good idea when dealing with anyone in society, not to automatically have a set of prejudices in place that all you have to do is implement. These are - a lot of people wearing hoods are just kids who are trying to get through their lives and I think he was just asking for a slightly more forgiving response to them. I mean I'm rather interested by Polly Toynbee's thing - all these figures are very confusing. We are supposed to have this very high prison population, which we do indeed have, but actually in opposite - I think it's France - the reason we have more people in prison is because we have a far higher ratio of imprisonable crimes, we are actually sending fewer people to prison than France for crimes that carry a prison sentence. I'm not necessarily defending prison on this but all of these statistics are so easy to fiddle and fix. We are all unsettled by crime, Polly tells us confidently that it's plunging, I don't know that that's everyone's experience. But I don't think that Cameron was trying to be soft on crime, I think he was just asking for an open mind.
CLARKE Yes, no answer, pro Cameron or anti?
FELLOWES Oh pro.
CLARKE Good, thank you. Nigel Lawson.
LAWSON Polly Toynbee's actually completely wrong to say that David Cameron in that speech didn't put forward any positive policy proposals, he did. He put forward one which I can remember and one which I can't.
TOYNBEE I love it - I love it when you've had the briefing from central office.
LAWSON The one that I recall - no I can recall it. The one that I recall, which he said was that he wanted voluntary organisations to be supported to do far more in dealing with a very serious problem of antisocial behaviour and to have for the state to take more of a back seat. And he also put forward an initiative of his own which I'm sure he's dedicated to but I can't remember what it was. He was there - he was there - it may not have been marvellous, it may not have been marvellous at all but it was certainly there, so for Polly Toynbee to say there wasn't any positive proposal is completely wrong. As for hugging hoddies well I'm too old for that sort of thing. [CLAPPING]
CLARKE And Bob Marshall Andrews.
MARSHALL ANDREWS Yes, I quite like to see the faces of people that I hug, it's one of comparatively few prerequisites for that [LAUGHTER], so I think probably wouldn't. It was an interesting intervention by David Cameron, it certainly got straight up the nose of the Daily Telegraph who started with a leader with the words How much more can we take? So full marks for that anyway. But I think that he was saying no more, wasn't he, than the old Christian aphorism - you hate the sin but love the sinner. It's one of the most difficult things in the world to do but it is one of the great hallmarks of humanity and civilisation that we try, that we try to do it. Of course that does mean to say [CLAPPING] it does mean to say that whilst loving the sinner you're going to have to lock them up sometimes and sometimes for quite a long time for the protection of society, for some modest form of deterrent, it doesn't work very well but also so that society can have a feeling that justice is done. All of those things seem to me to be elementary. But I think what he was saying - I hope he was saying this - that in doing that, in punishing people, we should always do it more in sorrow than in anger, we should always do it with contemplation and sanity and rationality and we should not be motivated by the hysteria of a tabloid press [CLAPPING]. Politicians should not be driven by these things and I'm very sorry to say that in the recent past it has appeared that my party has, to a very large extent, done precisely that.
CLARKE Thank you. Thank you for that and thank you to all of you for your answers. Any Questions next week is going to be at the Conkers Discovery Centre in Moira in Leicestershire with Lord Morris, formerly General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers; Matthew d'Ancona, editor of the Spectator; Margo James, vice chair of the Conservative Party with responsibility for women and Darren Johnson, assembly member for London for the Green Party. But for now from all of us here in Carshalton goodbye. [CLAPPING] |
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