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Sunday shows: Thornberry, Nandy, Starmer, Phillips set out leadership pitches

Ridge on Sunday

Shadow Foreign Secretary and Labour leadership candidate Emily Thornberry confirmed that she was still pursuing legal action against Caroline Flint for comments on Ridge on Sunday before Christmas, and said she felt US President Donald Trump was “reckless” for ordering the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

  • On the Iranian crisis: “I remember saying to Boris Johnson, I am really worried that the President is going to rip up the Iranian nuclear deal and he said to me:  ‘You should spend a bit less time reading the newspapers.'”
  • On the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani: “The President is reckless and hasn’t thought through what he’s doing.”
  • On dealing with Donald Trump: “My experience of bullies is that you stand up to them.”
  • On support for military intervention: “If we are at risk of imminent attack then of course we will always defend ourselves.”
  • On whether Jeremy Corbyn was a good leader: “I think Jeremy had many, many talents and I think the reason he was popular in the Labour Party was because he spoke from the heart.”
  • On Corbyn’s claim that Labour ‘won the argument’: “He clearly didn’t win the argument in the country – we didn’t win the general election. The most important achievement for any Labour leader is to win elections. We were established by working people to look after them in government and if we can’t win elections then we are failing as a party and the leadership is failing, too.”
  • On why Labour lost the election: “We weren’t sufficiently clear about what our priorities were.”
  • On Labour’s 2019 manifesto: “If anybody looks at the manifesto they can’t say they don’t like this or they don’t like that – but I think there was too much in it. It just wasn’t convincing.”
  • On Caroline Flint’s claim that Thornberry had said her constituents weren’t as stupid as another MP’s: “It’s in the hands of my lawyers. I’ve issued a letter before action. You can’t just make up rubbish about me and not expect me to take legal action. People can slag me off, and they do, but so long as they do it on the basis of truth, I’ll take it on the chin. But if they start making things up, I have to take legal action. I deeply regret that we’re going to need to do this, but if we have to do it we have to do it.”
  • On the recent Labour leadership poll by YouGov: “I remember looking back at the other two leadership elections and Andy Burnham was absolutely going to win the last one, and David Miliband was absolutely going to win the one before. I mean, it hasn’t even started yet.”
  • On whether the next leader should be a woman: “Let’s make sure that we get the best candidate, obviously that’s got to be the most important thing and obviously that’s for the members to decide. I think that the best candidate happens to be a woman.”

Lisa Nandy spoke in favour of the radicalism of Labour’s 2019 manifesto, and said she felt Labour’s biggest issue with voters was trust. The Wigan MP also indicated she wasn’t concerned about coming last in YouGov’s recent Labour leadership poll, and said securing the nomination of MPs to get on the ballot paper was “looking very positive”.

  • On whether Corbyn was a good leader: “He did something profoundly important for us and I want to say this because it really matters to me and I think we’re in danger of learning the wrong lessons from what has just happened. If you cast your mind back to 2015… people were looking for deeper and much more fundamental change. We are a party that has to have the courage of our convictions and wear our values on our sleeve.”
  • On why Labour lost the 2019 election: “Trust. Trust was the issue. Not the radicalism, not the deep and fundamental change we were promising, but trust.”
  • On whether the manifesto was too radical: “I’m not sure [the public] thought it was too radical. Certainly when we were talking to people about renationalising the railways, people felt it was a no-brainer. They couldn’t believe that we hadn’t been talking about it before.”
  • On Labour’s policies: “When we said that we would offer free broadband, I remember somebody in Leigh saying, “I just want a functioning bus network.””
  • On why the party is losing voters in towns: “There is a disconnect between the hierarchy of the Labour Party and the country and people in towns like mine. 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 and Victoria Street commissioning opinion polls and focus groups and then we go out and tell people that we’re going to fix it.”
  • On the party’s focus on public transport: “There was a moment when Jeremy Corbyn stood up at Prime Minister’s Questions a few years ago and talked about buses and I remember this roar of noise coming from the commentariat in London telling us that it was ridiculous that the want-to-be Prime Minister was standing at the despatch box talking about buses. I got on a train and went home and people were saying “Thank God someone’s talking about our buses.””
  • On the YouGov Labour leadership poll: “It’s a name recognition poll. What it doesn’t do is tell you how many people don’t know and haven’t made up their minds.”
  • On securing the nominations of MPs: “It’s looking very positive but I wouldn’t in any sense be complacent about that. I think we should be OK but I don’t want to be complacent.”

The Andrew Marr Show

Labour leadership candidate and Brexit spokesperson Keir Starmer set out his pitch for the internal contest.

  • On supporting rejoining the EU: “We are going to leave the EU in the next few weeks. It’s important for all of us, including myself, to recognise that the argument about Leave and Remain goes with it.”
  • On why Labour lost the election: “The issues [on the doorstep] were: the leadership, rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly was coming up everywhere; the Brexit position and whether we were persuading people and more importantly whether we were knocking down the Tories’ claim that they would get Brexit done; antisemitism came up as a question of values and competence, and there was a general feeling that the manifesto was overloaded.”
  • On Labour’s Brexit position: “We didn’t persuade on our policy. We should’ve taken a stronger position one way or the other.”
  • On the current Iranian crisis: “We cannot blindly follow the Americans into what could well turn out to be a war in the Middle East.”
  • On support for military action: “I would pass legislation that said military action could be taken if: first, the lawful case for it was made, secondly, there was a viable objective and thirdly, you’ve got the consent of the Commons.”
  • On support for renationalisation: “In some cases the nationalisation argument makes itself. In the case of rail, you don’t have to travel for very long to be persuaded of that argument. What I’m really concerned about is this: the manifesto we need to be discussing now is not the 2019 manifesto, it’s the 2024 manifesto.”
  • On abolishing private schools: “I would like to see private schools as an irrelevance because the state sector is so good.”
  • On sticking with the Corbynite agenda: “What Jeremy Corbyn brought to Labour Party in 2015 is the stance of saying we should be anti-austerity and pro-public services. That is right – we don’t want to throw that away.”

Labour leadership contender Jess Phillips talked about loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn and rejoining the EU.

  • On the YouGov poll: “If we keep having this conversation about which part of the party people come from, I don’t think we’ll be learning the lessons that people of the country have been telling us. I think I can win the backing of people from all different areas of the party.”
  • On the lessons from the election: “The fundamental thing is that the country didn’t trust us to govern.”
  • On trusting the NEC to run a fair leadership election: “I absolutely do trust them. The reality is that at the moment, there is a huge amount of buzz around this contest. In the public glare, with lots of people joining the Labour Party, for the NEC to say “we’re not interested in you”, that would look so incredibly bad for the Labour Party, in a time when it needs to stop looking just inside itself and look outwards.”
  • On loyalty to Corbyn and the leadership: “Is it loyal to stand in front of the country and say something you don’t think is true? The loyalty question is a perfectly reasonable one… This shouldn’t be a test of how we feel about each other in the Labour Party.”
  • On supporting military intervention: “I marched against the Iraq War and in fact left the Labour Party over it. I would absolutely take action where there was a moral case and British lives were at risk.”
  • On Labour’s policy of free broadband: “What I thought was what I think a lot of other people thought, which was that I wasn’t sure how we were going to deliver that. Offering people free broadband was just not believable.”
  • On the pledge to compensate WASPI women: “In the election, a lot of WASPI women didn’t believe that we were going to be able to deliver that.”
  • On whether Labour under her leadership would back rejoining the EU: “We have to wait and see… You’d have to look at what was going on at the time… 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 win.”

Pienaar’s Politics

Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan and a Labour leadership candidate, talked about which policies she would drop.

  • On what she would “rub out” of Labour’s last manifesto: “First of all, I wouldn’t have been offering free broadband… People said to us, it’s all very well promising free broadband but could you just sort out the buses? And that was the more pressing issue in their lives. It’s not about whether you’re radical or not, it’s about whether you’re relevant.”
  • On Labour’s public ownership policies: “Nationalisation was a popular policy, I think, in relation to the railways… We have to explain to people why renationalisation is important. Renationalisation isn’t an end in itself.”
  • On energy policy: “I think there’s something much more radical you can do around energy actually… Labour councils have been setting up their own energy companies… That is much more radical and much more relevant than renationalising the energy companies. I don’t want to spend lots of money taking the energy companies back into public hands and giving huge bonuses to those private companies.”
  • On whether she’d keep the policies on trade unions laws: “Yes. The trade union laws are a real restriction on the rights of working people to stand up for themselves.”
Tags: Lisa Nandy / Emily Thornberry / Keir Starmer / Jess Phillips / Sunday shows / Sunday shows round-up / Labour leadership election 2020 /
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