Speakers: David Blunkett, Ed Balls, Linda Colley, Tony Giddens, Sunder Katwala, Mary Riddell

Fabian Question Time – LPC 2007

23 September 2007

Speakers: Ed Balls MP, David Blunkett MP, Sunder Katwala (Fabian Society), Linda Colley

Chair: Mary Riddell (The Observer)

Kindly supported by VirginMedia. Media partner: The Observer

Questioner: Should the board of Northern Rock have taken their share dividends this week at the same time as asking the public to keep their money in the bank?

David Blunkett

I was also going to say if maybe Tony could whisper in my ear because then I could really argue against whatever it was they were saying. That was a Harold Wilson type moment when I just needed a moment to think of the answer. The New Labour modern economy answer is that if you didn't allow people to take some reward then they themselves wouldn't see it as worth being investors in Northern Rock. So you're always caught between, God help me, a rock…[laughter]. And therefore the truth is that in an ideal world you'd like everybody to say, 'it's been a very difficult time, we'll forgo,', but in the real world that we are now addressing, and New Labour has had to live with and face and shape, we know that isn't the case.

Mary Riddell

But there were clearly questions of competence, of people being on holiday and really of…

DB

That was the Bank of England, Mary.

MR

But there was a general pattern of…should they have taken their share dividends, Ed Balls?

Ed Balls

I think there is a genuine question as to whether they should have done, and the shareholders of Northern Rock who have all seen the value of their shares go down, and any potential takeover firm thinking of taking over Northern Rock will look at that decision and weigh that as one factor among many others in the balance, if it comes to that point.

Let's be clear what's happened in the case of Northern Rock: we have a global event, a big piece of instability financially around the world that started in America in the summer because of the coming to fruition of a really serious crisis in the mortgage market in America. That then impacts around the world, there are financial firms in Germany which could go out of business. Here in Britain we carry on with stability in our financial system, but one particular building society, Northern Rock, gets into difficulty because of the particular way they've been running their business and the fact that they're exposed, I have to say through no fault of their own…those international events in America they didn't know was going to happen. And a decision is made, and I think the right decision, that in order to protect the savings of depositors and to keep the financial system stable, the deposits of the people who have been saving in Northern Rock are protected, and that's what's occurred. Northern Rock itself, as we've read in the papers – and from the outside I don't know any more than anybody else in terms of what's been going on - clearly Northern Rock, because of the fall in the share price and because of the loss the depositors , has come under a lot of pressure as an institution and therefore there's been a lot of discussion about whether there would be a takeover. And if a takeover occurs, or if this institution carries on, then people will look at the way in which the lending decisions of Northern Rock, or actually more importantly the assets side of their balance sheet, has been constructed over the last year and they will ask whether the decision which have been made by Northern Rock before and through this crisis have been the right ones. If they're judged to have done well, then I guess the management stays on, and if they're judged to have made wrong decisions they won't stay on. I slightly think to take their share options now slightly prejudges that judgment. It's not for the government to sack these people but it is for investors to think, are we really sure this is the right way to do things.

MR

But beyond Northern Rock and beyond how the board behaves, the chancellor seemed to be suggesting in his speech this afternoon that other mistakes had been made. I wondered, this sort of triple regulatory system, has that proved up to the task?

EB

I think the triple regulatory system – having the Financial Services Authority, which is the most respected financial regulator in the world, set up by us in 1997, alongside a separate independent Bank of England, advising the chancellor who has to manage to public finances and the stability of the whole system, having that tripartite structure has meant that in this financial crisis we have had a degree of stability in our economy that has given protection for investors that we haven't seen in past crises. I mean if you compare this to 1992, in this crisis inflation is low, mortgage rates have stayed the same, there hasn't been a single depositor in Northern Rock who's lost their savings. In 1992 you had interest rates going above 10%, you had people directly losing their livelihoods and their jobs as a result of a recession which preceded it. I think if you look at this crisis and the way it's been handled, and compare it with how the Tories ran the Bearings Bank crisis, or Black Wednesday in 1992 or the secondary banking crisis in the early 70s under Edward Heath when inflation went above 20%, you look at our record and say, actually it's been pretty good. And the interesting thing a Times poll showed on Wednesday was that not only is public confidence risen in Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling running the economy versus the confidence in David Cameron and George Osborne, but even amongst Tory voters. Tory voters at the end of the last two weeks now say they now would prefer to have Brown and Darling. Our ratings have gone up among Tory voters as well as Labour voters so I don't think it's right to say that either the structures haven't worked or that we're going to pay a big electoral price for it at all.

MR

Linda Colley, what do you make of all this?

Linda Colley

I suppose this evening is going to be one of very overused metaphors. I have anticipated this question or something like it and knew that this was the rock on which I was clear to crash, because since I've been in America I'm not au fait with the British press on these matters for the past few days. I can't say anything specific but I can say that in America there's actually a certain amount of surprise that there is so much…I don't mean to downgrade it, but there is so much excitement about this issue given the extreme mess that the United States and aspects of its economy is in at the moment. But of course the US economy is so powerful that if it sneezes other people catch colds. That's what's happening.

Tony Giddens

I'm not as brave as David or Linda because anyone dare talk about rock and a hard place, but if I can answer the question I would say no, I don't think they should have done.

And I think there is something a bit wrong with the moral culture of leadership and business in this country because there is too much of a disjuncture between the interests of those who are running businesses and the interests of those who work in those businesses.

Whatever you say about continental countries, there's a very big difference between how for example how German business people think and how British ones do, where there's much more sense of responsibility, much more sense of all being in the same thing together. Why shouldn't we say we're all in the same thing together? Why should there be one group of people who has different interests essentially from those of their workforce?

I think there is an issue to be addressed there and of course in terms of the specific circumstances of Northern Rock, you aren't dealing with something that is specifically just about a particular firm, you are talking about the whole structure of global markets and fundamental problems in the American economy with a loan system which we can't completely control. So I have more sympathy with the Bank of England, or the governor of the Bank of England, than most newspapers have done.

But I still think I feel very uneasy about the makeup of the management of our companies and I would like to see more being it together, more moral responsibility, more of a shared outcome, more of a sense of shared fate between those who run our industries and those who work in them. [Applause]

Sunder Katwala

I think that's right. You've seen a crisis of confidence in the particular institution, you've got the institution apologizing to its customers because they're standing out in the street. I think it's a bank that's clearly in trouble, that it probably does need a takeover, it's not appropriate in those circumstances for people to do that. And I think it would show a sense of moral courage if people recognized that – sometimes you have a right to do something and you don't need to go through with it. I'm not saying it's an issue for government but the people concerned could take that view. Clearly the shares are less than they were. The idea that we've introduced a lot of moral hazard here I think is questionable because you protect the depositors, you haven't protected the shareholders, I think that's right.

I think with hindsight there probably are lessons about the system because the very thing that was supposed to engender confidence, with the lender of last resort, was the thing that kicked off the panic. So why did that happen, why did the public react like that, because actually it was probably safer than people thought but the trust wasn't there. I think with hindsight Mervyn King, if he knew now what he would have known – of course he doesn't operate with that knowledge – probably would have acted differently. So I think you've got to look again, if a system has worked well for 10 years and has obviously taken a major impact that it's obviously come through and ask what do we learn from that.

Question

Is it true that this sort of thing is going to continue. It's going to happen in America, it's going to happen here. The interest rates coming down. There is a pattern, every 15 years this happens, and it's been predicted every time before.

Question

A point about moral duty, that point was well made in that we're all in it together and we should all sink or swim together and I think the fact the directors took some money this week was a weakness on their part and the whole agenda now is about equality and trying to recognize that and therefore that's what we should be doing and the directors should be taking responsibility, not just taking their money.

MR

I think we should move onto our second questioner who is Martin Cordwell

Question

Should the next general election be sooner rather than later?

EB

Well, it's a matter for the Prime Minister to decide. It's a very interesting conference we are at at the moment. It feels most like 1996 in a way. You have a party which is united, we've got a new Prime Minister, we have a Conservative party which looks to be in a rather weakened state and the main question in British politics what is the Labour/Conservative choice? The big difference with 1996 is because we were five years into a parliament we knew we would have an election before the following conference, whereas this year we don't know if the election will be this year, next year, it could be anytime in the next three years. And we do know that the big choice in British politics is the choice between Labour and Conservative with quite different visions and quite different and new things which haven't been tested as the Prime Minister thought. Add to that the fact that the whole first six months of this year the Conservative leader, the Lib Dem leader and commentator and opinion polls all said it would be essential for Gordon Brown to have an early general election in order to get a mandate, that was the challenge which was laid down. And my guess is that the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives laid down that challenge when they thought he wouldn't do well as Prime Minister, when they thought they would be ahead in the opinion polls and what's happened over the course of the last three or four months is we have both seen on a number of different issues the Prime Minster handling it well, but we've also seen a complete turnaround in the opinion polls and underneath the headline opinion polls a much stronger position for us as a party on issues of competence, leadership and values than the Conservative party.

So coming to this conference the question becomes are we going to bow to the pressure of earlier in the year and go for a mandate election. But I think we have to be quite careful coming to this conference because as far as the public is concerned the most important question of this conference isn't the timing of the election. It may be an obsession in parts of the press, it may be for us as candidates a bit of an obsession because if it's four weeks away it's not long, and we're also upping our canvassing work and thinking about whether we've got marginal seats and campaigns ready and whether the candidates in place. So it's not surprising that we as people involved in the political process are obsessed by the timing of the election. But I think as far as the public is concerned, what they want to know is what will the election choice mean for the future of our country, what is the choice on education and how do we differ from the Conservatives, what is our vision on education contrasted to David Cameron, what is the choice on health, on fighting crime, what is our view of social justice in our society. Now either we've got answers to all of those questions…I think that the dividing lines between the political parties are becoming very clear indeed and will become so over the course of this week and next week. But while the obsession might be about the timing of the general election, I think we're right to say that we will use this week to set out our perspectives for the future. We want to set out what will be the contents of our manifesto…If we can make that the debate for the next week rather than simply the election timing I think the public will think we are doing our jobs better.

MR

But it's making it very hard for you to do that because this [teasing] along and along by the Prime Minister again in his interview this morning, sort of not saying yes and not saying no. And as a result of that the whole democratic process has become rather slowed down because everybody's so election focused. So when is this going to end, this speculation which could easily be knocked on the head with a few words from Gordon Brown. What's your best guess? Will it be sooner rather than later?

EB

If we're honest about this, the Conservative Party are in turmoil. Next week at their conference the main discussion is going to be in the bars of the fringe meetings who will be the successor to David Cameron if the Conservatives lose, and will it be David Davis or Liam Fox or Michael Gove or whoever else is lining up. The politics of what's going on is David Cameron in my view looks increasingly like a transitional figure, a further Conservative transitional leader who failed to face up to the big test of Conservative leadership which is to do what we did in the early 90s which was to debate with our party about how we take our historic values and apply them to modern times. And he didn't do that and he had two years when he should have done that. But he didn't and the contradictions in what he wants to say and what his party demand of him.

At our conference, even if Douglas Alexander hadn't said yesterday the party's got to be ready whenever it comes, even if we'd said nothing at all it would still leave the big question which would be the timing of a general election, because we're quite a long way ahead in the polls, we've got a new prime minister and we're establishing a new vision and a new programme, building upon our successes. At a certain point the right thing to do will be to then take that to the public in a general election. So therefore we're bound to have an obsession with the timing.

What we need to do is take people's interest in the election and use that to set out the political choice and where we stand on world class education for all, rather than just for people who go to grammar schools, and a health service which is personalized and universal to all rather than just for some. It's right we try and get it back onto policy and policy onto vision, but I certainly don't think at the moment at Labour Party Conference today the right thing to do is call an election. I certainly don't think that today with our position in the polls as we're in and the Conservatives and the turmoil they're in and with the importance of getting that vision set out, the right thing to do is not either, and I don't think either makes sense.

AG

If I was them I'd make sure Gordon's got a big supply of Rennies in his bathroom cabinet. I think this is actually a pretty agonizing decision because Gordon Brown's done a marvelous job so far I think of reestablishing an independent position from Labour, he's managed to break away from the previous regime, he's established a commanding lead in the polls – the private polls apparently show that he's even further ahead if you ask if there's going to be an election quickly – the Tories are in disarray, you've got the European question which could be difficult down the line. So the situation's in a way very propitious for having a quick election.

But if I was Gordon I suppose I wouldn't do it because he does need to establish himself, he does need to set out what his programme is. I think it will be quite worrying that if there actually was an election quite quickly worrying that if there actually was an election quite quickly then people might not turn out in high numbers, that therefore it could be quite a close thing, it could be quite close to a hung parliament, despite what polls say at the moment. So my inclination would be to wait and to still try and have an election in the spring. But you can see why it's such a difficult decision because you've got to take the whole of your life…we all know from these examples from previous circumstances in British politics where people have made the wrong decision.

EB

If we knew the right decision we'd make it. [laughter]

AG

I think it's a gamble either way obviously.

DB

Ed can't say because the minute Ed said that would be it. I was reminded of when I was a teenager, the first satirical programme that came on television had Harold Macmillan singing, 'I didn't say yes and I didn't say no, I didn't say stop and I didn't say go,' and I don't think Gordon has the luxury that we have of being able to second guess.

All I know is that if every rightwing newspaper want you to do something and tell you how wonderful it would be, you have to think twice about it. On the other hand it would be quite difficult for the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph to suddenly change their mind about Gordon over the next four weeks - but that wouldn't stop them from doing so.

My own view is that if it's a hundred days…they've been phenomenal, we've had the biblical water, fire, pestilence, cataclysm. He has and would have and should have the confidence to see the winter and a good chunk of next year, if not longer, out in terms of the new team in government, delivering, getting their profile up. I'm about to commit myself so I shall eat my words many times over if I'm wrong, but I think he will leave it.

LC

I would prefer the PM to take more time. I think this is a politician of great substance. In the past they used to refer to politicians having bottom, which was no reference at all to their anatomy but to the fact that these were players of substance, that they had ideas, they had policies, they had thought these were grown up, substantial figures.

And I would like the PM to have longer time really to establish that because there's lots of policies and ideas I would like to see progress on.

That said, there are of course two obvious caveats which have already been indicated. One is that all politicians, all leaders, are absolutely at the mercy of events – the economy can go haywire, there could be say a US invasion of Iran, it could create all kinds of waves, things could go very nasty.

The other caveat is if the media get so excited about this issue and keep on getting excited about this issue, then there's a danger that that may edge out, blitz out discussion of I think the serious issues that I would like to see dealt with in the short term.

SK

I think later. It's always had a whiff of a phoney war to me. You wake up and read the papers this morning and you don't know because we don't know. But when Gordon Brown pulls off one of these strategic master strokes – Bank of England independence, defections of Tory MPs, income tax rates – most of us never hear a word of it until it happens. Except Ed, of course.

I think this is now a bit of a problem, it has got in the way, and we should want to calm it down. Because I think we want to win the next election not on a bounce but on an agenda, because if Labour wins a fourth general election we get to define the new centre ground of British politics. We get to say to the Conservative Party, this time if you really paid attention you might find out something about the country you'd like to govern and you've got to decide whether you want to be in touch with it or not. You might even have to pay attention to what the Fabian Society is up to!

Because the idea that you've been right all along and you've just got a contaminated brand is not true – you've tried that, you've tried going back to the right, you'll have to wake up, do what Conservatives always do which is when the country changes. And that is to say: fine, that's great, we're in favour of the changes that have happened but let's have no more change now – and can we have another turn in power please.

If the Labour Party sets the election agenda we can make sure that happens. Under Tony Blair the accusation, it was unfair I think, but the accusation was always we won despite being Labour. But we've got to say we're going to win this election because we are Labour and we've got to win it on the Labour agenda about opportunity, tackling inequality, spreading life chances and I think this whole election date thing is getting in the way and I think we should calm it down. [Applause]

EB

This is very interesting because if you think back to last year's conference and the way in which people were talking about this year, people said first of all there is no way that Labour could come through a transition and still be unified, and a year on it's the Conservatives who are the divided party of British politics, not Labour.

Secondly they said that you couldn't simply have a change of Prime Minister and make it feel like a change of government, and a year on you're all saying it's too early for Gordon Brown, he's not had a chance to set out his vision yet and his policies for the future. It's fascinating because he's actually been at the centre of the government for a decade and it shows that our challenge of delivering continuity and change has actually been pulled off to such an extent that it's Labour that is the change party now, not the Conservatives. So we're the change party, they're the divided party. So that's two really great strengths for us.

I think Sunder is exactly right that part of the strength in the opinion polls in the last two or three months has been about competence and completely blowing the Conservatives away on competence. But we also want a mandate based upon a vision and that was why I was saying that we do need this conference to be not only about the political choice on timing, but also what are the substantive dividing lines which will define the future of Britain for the next 10 years. And we must have space to do that.

Finally, David may well be right, it may be the balance of probabilities is against an early election ….. or then it may be wrong. [Laughter] The thing I would say to Labour party members throughout the country is that the risk-averse thing is to be prepared.

Question

Does the panel think that increasing the number of faith schools will improve social inclusion?

LC

My answer, and I have no political power at all, is no [applause]. I would like frankly all education, certainly state provided education, to be secular. [applause] I think, and this analogy has been made many times but I think it's still worth making, you can see some of the results of faith-based education in Northern Ireland to this day. The educational era should be a time when children from different backgrounds, different faith systems, different types of parents should be brought together. And if we don't like public schools, if we don't like the decisions of fee-paying schools, it seems rather strange to push a system of faith-based schools. [applause]

SK

I sympathise with Linda's position but it cannot be done. The reason is that in this country, in this democracy, you would not be able to take away the Catholic, the Jewish and the Church of England schools that are very well embedded because the people who care enough about those things care enough to organize, to switch political parties, to vote in general elections on that issue above all. So the government who tried to do that would not survive. Gladstone lost an election on a similar issue and I'm sure Gordon Brown would not want to. If that is the case, then there is no equitable reason why you can say, but not for Hindus and not for Muslims.

So we are going to have to say we are concerned about this, we want shared citizenship, we want people to grow up together, we are going to have to strengthen the links between all schools, we are going to have to strengthen the national curriculum – that must apply to all schools, secular or faith-based, and we are going to get stronger on that. But we cannot remove them and we will have to extend it. I think there's a bigger question in this society which is we now have a dialogue of the deaf between the people of faith and secularists and I just think we've got to have a more sensible dialogue and people like Richard Dawkins I think are not promoting such a dialogue, because it is a society of many faiths and of no faiths and I think we've got to do something about that, recognizing that faith has a role but recognizing that it has limits. We can't do that with your current system, the whole position of the Church of England needs to be looked at, never mind just the education system.

MR

But surely any increase would be done not just on the basis of fairness and catch up, but on the basis that they're a jolly good thing to start with which is a rather different thing. David Blunkett, as a former education secretary, should we increase faith schools?

DB

I had to take the decision and the truth is if were starting from scratch and had no faith-based schools I would be an advocate of retaining an entirely secular, not faith-based, system. But before the school boards were created in 1872 many of the schools that existed were faith-based. The state had to accept and acknowledge that and we have to acknowledge it today, otherwise we're opening a Russian front. Linda, with great passion, said let's get rid of them all. Actually you wouldn't get rid of them all because you'd hold an election and get hammered and you wouldn't get rid of anything which is the way we used to perform in 1983, which is we'd like to do things and we'd like to tell you which it is we're going to do and then you'll refuse to elect us and then we won't do them…

My simple answer is this: it is not right to simply push faith-based schools instead of the choice of a community school or a non-faith-based foundation school, but it seems to me that where there is a demand for a particular school based on the faith within the national curriculum and liberal education, it makes more sense to have them in than out. That was the reason I extended the option to Islamic schools. There are lots of Islamic schools across the country. In West Yorkshire there are a large number, many of whom require their children 15 to 20 miles to schools that don't embrace the national liberal curriculum, that don't have adequate facilities, that are not properly monitored and inspected and do not [cooperate] with other schools. So you haven't got a choice between whether they exist or they don't exist; the choice is, do they exist inside the system, with all the monitoring and proper assessment. The second choice is do you make sure that within the system schools aren't pressurized into the zaniest and crazy stuff like the earth is flat and the creationists and I think there's still a job to be done in taking them on because otherwise you have the kind of thing which people are most afraid of which is what's happening in the southern states of the United States.

MR

But surely there's also the question, not just of the Islamic schools and so on, but of the new academies where, for example, children are given preferential treatment on admission if they belong to a certain faith.

DB

They shouldn't do. The admissions code is a major step forward and, if implemented properly, should prevent that.

AG

I think there's some really disturbing issues around this. If you look at recent research from the LSE, it shows the proportion of kids in faith schools who qualify for free school meals - the measure of inequality - is lower than it is in other schools and therefore this is a sort of a cover route for selection. Someone has even called it grammar schools by another name, or selection by another name. I think that's an issue that's got to be carefully watched. Second, Lord Puttnam, who invented the notion of social capital, has just done some interesting new research in the US that shows very worrying segmentation of communities, what happens when communities become segmented is actually everybody tends to lose an interest in public good, in supporting other people and so forth. You have to be really careful that faith schools don't support this process. Now I completely agree with those who say that you cannot abolish faith-based schools and therefore all faiths should qualify, as Sunder says, for such schools, but we have to be really careful to try and integrate those schools into the wider curriculum, integrate them into the wider educational system and absolutely integrate them into the wider community, and I think there are some very difficult consequences which could ensue.

MR

Ed Balls, social cohesion and the Northern Ireland example, do we just go down the same route?

Ed Balls

No, and I think that the circumstances of Northern Ireland are different. First of all, my department, our government, has no policy to increase the number of faith schools. It's not our policy to increase the number of faith schools in our country. It is true that there are some religions and communities that would like to have a faith school. Take the Muslim religion for example, there are currently about 116 schools of which six are maintained schools, the rest are private schools, and there's a question as to whether some of those private schools may move into the state maintained. As David says, I think there would be substantial advantages in private schools which exist today coming into the maintained system, being fully Ofsted inspected and following the National Curriculum. But I think there's currently no Hindu schools in Britain at all and there is the possibility of there being one Hindu school. And if the local community wants it, and if they pass all of our tests, then I'm not going to stand in the way of it but it's not my policy to increase the number of faith schools. If we spend our whole time debating whether we should have another faith school or not – some people want that to be the case – then I think David, Anthony and Sunder are right – then I think we take our eye off the ball. There are 1.7 million children in 6500 faith schools, which are a third of all the secondary schools in England. Some of them have been in existence before the state guaranteed an education. I am not going to abolish them. The question is not whether we should have one more faith school or not – whether we have 6500 faith schools or 6501. Interestingly quite a lot of the evidence shows that some of the schools which have thought hardest about how to promote community cohesion are faith schools. We have introduced a new requirement on all schools to promote cohesive communities Many of the examples of how to do that are actually drawn from the faith communities.

On fair admissions, we have a tough admissions code now. I've given a new power to dioceses to make sure that individual schools in the diocese are keeping to the admissions code. But it's completely right to say that faith schools, actually unlike academies, tend to take pupils that are less representative of their catchment area than the average, they are less likely to take children on free school meals compared to their catchment area or the average of the country, unlike academies which are more likely to take free school meals and pupils.

We are not going to abolish 200 years of history. But many faith schools were set up specifically to give a decent education to the poor. It doesn't make sense for faith schools on average to be less likely to take free school meals pupils because, while I understand the importance of those schools being able to offer education to children of their faith, they shouldn't be discriminating in favour of the better off of their faith against the less well off of their faith which is what's happening in a number of their schools. And what the admissions code does and the new power for dioceses does is give us the change with faith schools together to address that issue. So rather than having a debate about 6501, I think we'd have a much more constructive time if we focused on whether our existing faith schools in their thousands are delivering fair admissions and promoting community cohesion. And the reason why I launched the Faith in the System document a week and a half ago with all the churches is because I want them working with me to tackle those faith schools who aren't delivering fair admissions and promoting community cohesion, just as I've got responsibility for the other two thirds of schools to do exactly the same, and I would rather work with them rather than against them. But what I'm not going to do is allow education policy simply to be a debate about whether you allow one Muslim school to set up and allow the other 6500 – 99% of which are Catholic or Church of England – off the hook.

MR

I'd like to go back to the questioner. I'm presuming that you don't think that increasing the number of faith schools is the recipe for community cohesion.

Questioner

I think the answers were quite interesting, because my question wasn't should we increase them, my question was, do they contribute, do they improve social cohesion. And very few of the speakers answered that. Ed Balls did to some extent and the first speaker did also. So I wasn't asking whether we should have more, I wanted their opinion as to whether they do actually improve social cohesion or not.

Questioner

I understand the political points about faith schools but there's an important point which is that, particularly in faith schools, gay and lesbian pupils get much more bad experience of homophobic bullying, particularly in faith schools where often the existence of it is completely ignored. I know the government's done quite a bit on homophobic bullying but I'd like to ask Ed particularly, in encouraging faith schools how do you think gay and lesbian children in those schools will do?

EB

On Friday we published for the first time ever our guidance to schools on how to crack down on both cyber bullying and homophobic bullying. For homophobic bullying we've drawn up, in close consultation with Stonewall, schools round the country and also the churches. As far as I'm concerned, any child whose life is blighted by bullying is wrong and that is wrong whether it's your sexuality, your religion, your colour or whether you're different in any way. And that includes homophobic bullying too. And every school in our country has got a responsibility to stamp out homophobic bullying and all kinds of bullying and as far as I'm concerned that is faith and non-faith schools alike.

MR

But do you take the questioner's point that faith schools are more prone to homophobic bullying?

EB

To be honest I don't know the answer to that but I think probably the issue of homophobic bullying, like other kinds of bullying, is a problem in schools across our country and I need all schools to help us deal with that issue and it's important that that includes faith schools and it includes Catholic schools. And I understand that the Catholic religion has particular views about marriage, about sex outside marriage, about homosexuality too, and those are views they want to be able to discuss in RE. But as far as I'm concerned homophobic bullying is wrong and every faith school, and every Catholic school, has got a responsibility to take a tough stand on it and stamp it out because, whatever your religion, you've got the right to go to school and not be bullied.

Hannah Jameson

How can we make sure Britishness is not just about who we were but who we want to be?

LC

How long have you got? The debate on Britishness is huge, it's going to be ongoing. I think one of the ways we can make sure it's about who we're going to be, not just who we were, is really to take the United Kingdom seriously. Let me give you a topical example. Why are party conference always held in English seaside towns? If you put that question people say, well it's the accommodation factor. Well, as far as I know there's accommodation in Glasgow, in Bangor, in Belfast, in Newcastle. It just seems to me that this would be one way whereby we could make a British conversation, a United Kingdom conversation, by moving the political debate, by moving the party conferences to different parts of the UK. What we've also got I think to do, and I'm very pleased that Gordon Brown is moving on this and really takes this seriously, is get the concept of citizenship advanced in these islands. One of the glues of these islands used to be the monarchy – we were all subjects. And subject hood was quite an effective glue as long as the monarchy retained charismatic power. But whatever you think of the monarchy that time has gone and we've got something of a vacuum here. I think Britain's fallen behind in that respect and we do need to do more work on citizenship, whether you think that means a new Bill of Rights, or, as I probably do, a new written constitution, that's a matter for debate. But citizenship has got to become much more of a buzz word, much more part of the political vocabulary we take for granted and it's got to be something that we live.

MR

Ed Balls, can I ask you to pick up on some of the constitutional points of that. The Bill of Rights, or the Bill of Duties as it's now called I think, the possibility of a written constitution, are we going to see these things, when and what are they going to do to give us a better sense of who we want to be?

EB

I think there's a number of different issues which that constitutional debate is trying to address, one of which is whether people feel because of the ways in which decisions are being made that they can see that decisions are being made in the right way, in an open way which they can trust. Part of the issue about constitution making and codifying how we make decisions, whether it's, to give an example, in the case of the independent Bank of England or on issues like how we choose to go to war, people seeing in legislation the way in which we make these decisions and seeing that we require ourselves to make them for the right reasons in a long term way that helps to build trust so that we can then make difficult decisions and people can understand them. There's a second set of issues in constitutional reform which is whether people feel that we have got the right protections for individual liberties and individual rights relative to the needs of the wider community, whether we're striking the right balance of rights and responsibilities and that is where the issue of the Bill of Rights and its relationship with the European Convention, and how we choose to integrate that into our law, arises. And there is a third set of issues which is, as Linda said, about citizenship and our sense of identity. I think that is partly about Scotland and Wales but it's actually, from my point of view, as much about Morley and West Yorkshire, which is where we have a BNP councilor, we have a lot of people voting BNP, we have a lot of immigration into our area, economically we have the diversity of Leeds and Dewsbury just down the road, and that in order that we can isolate the racism and fascism of the BNP, the right to start is first of all for us as a society to have a sense of who we are, what we stand for, what kind of place we want to be, and use that in order to expose the fact that racism and intolerance has never been part of what it is to be British and won't be part of the kind of society we want to live in for the future.

I think the debate about what it is to be British, what we stand for, what are our values and how we then put them into practice on a daily basis through our laws, through our bill of rights, that is the best way to expose racism and groups like the BNP who actually stand outside the values set that makes us as a country what we are. Jack Straw has taken forward the constitutional reform proposals, the bill of rights proposals; we are running our commission on citizenship. The constitutional reform agenda is trying to achieve a number of different things but an important part of that I think is the sense of identity which Linda asked for which enables us to face up to some big issues facing our country, one of which is seeing off the kind of racism and discrimination which people encounter daily in my constituency.

MR

Are you in favour, yes or no, of a written constitution?

EB

The European constitution, which was rejected by the French and the Dutch two or three years ago, started in 2000 with people saying, don't you think we should just write down what we've already agreed which is what they tried to do and it turned out to be rather difficult.

MR: Shall I take that as a no then?

EB: No, there are risks in this but personally I think that codifying in a way which we can understand and see the way in which we as a society make decisions, the balance of power, the rights and responsibilities of different institutions, that is a healthy thing for modern democracies to do. I don't underestimate how difficult that is, and part of the consultation is for people to understand the nature of the decision to move towards a bill of rights or written constitution, to work out whether this is a process we really want to go through because it would take years and be hard, but I personally think that in the area where we've tried to do it and done it well it's actually been to our benefit as a government.

MR

So beyond a bill of rights and duties a written constitution would be difficult but would be a goal worth aspiring to and trying for.

EB

We already have a number of different ways in which different parts of our constitution are written down. The question is, are you simply trying to bring them into one place and codify or are you trying to do more than that. I don't know that I know the full implications of trying to go that extra step, but my instinct is to think if you want the public to trust governments to take difficult decisions in the face of changing events, the right way to do that is to have the clarity of objective and division of responsibilities that everybody understands. So that certainly takes you in the direction of a written constitution, yes.

MR

And that would go for Europe too, presumably?

EB

The problem with the written constitution two or three years ago was it rather gave the impression that it was doing something rather different. We can have a discussion in the sense of Britishness, I don't think a discussion in terms of Europeanness is really at the constitution making stage and I'm not sure whether it will ever be.

MR

David, you were given a lot of work in office on Britishness and so on. Are we taking enough account of where we ought to go and who we want to be?

DB

First of all I'm agnostic about a written constitution and bill of rights. All I know is that without a change in the equality of practice in the community and in people's lives it will be a complete irrelevance to the Yemini, Pakistani, Sikh and white working class community that I have the privilege of representing. It wouldn't make one iota difference to their lives or to the perspective or sense of belonging, unless something changed in their own lives and experience. The reason we introduced citizenship into schools was precisely to give people a feel both of not only our history in Britain but also the history, the contribution that is made by people who've come over the years. I've read quite a bit of Linda's stuff because two years ago, with Nick Pearce who was then at the ippr, I was doing a pamphlet on some of these issues. What struck me was being reminded that Daniel Defoe once described us as a mongrel nation and that was all those centuries ago. And we remain so in the nicest possible way, in the sense that we have absorbed, we are part of, the history of inward migration over centuries and we benefit from it. I'm not entirely sure where my name comes from but the least attractive was a great blanket which was the Huguenots coming from persecution in France.

My biggest worry is that citizenship is not being taught properly in schools, it's not being brought alive. Some schools – 15% according to the inspectorate – aren't teaching it at all, many of them just see it as an adjunct to the HSE and they haven't really got the message which is very depressing. Secondly I think people coming into the country learn our language, they can share and be participative in our democracy and start making a difference as I have seen in my own constituency where the upsurge of requirement and demand from the Asian community for a school that delivered more than being patronized changed the whole nature and culture of the school and its achievement and expectations. And the third thing would not be to see this purely in terms of incomers. The most alienated group in my constituency are not the Yemini or the Pakistani or the Sikhs, but actually the white working class young men who are alienated completely from our society. They don't feel they belong, they don't feel they're valued and therefore we've got to get the sense of belonging and identity right across the sphere. It's about people who've come in recently, yes, it's about second and third generation feeling that we're not excluding them by priding our own background and history, but it's also trying to include those who feel that society has nothing for them. And just finally, I received a racist letter from an elderly lady who declared that she was 75, so I sent her a quite nice, gentle Blunkett reply to which I received an even worse tirade of racism. And her main point was, when you were growing up in the 1950s none of these people existed around us, have you got no memory. And I wrote back and said, 'yes I do remember when I was growing up in Sheffield in the 1950s when we brought in very large numbers of [Yemini] workers, on their own, without their families, into the steel works. They didn't learn English, they sent remittances back, they didn't actually become part of the living community, and we're coping with that legacy now in terms of those aged, isolated men. And we've got to avoid it ever happening again which does mean a sensible, rational debate which doesn't go down to the absurdities of headlines that I've been reading again over the last few weeks which say that in 2003 I couldn't see any definable limit to immigration. Of course I couldn't, because we're a market economy and I didn't say that any level of immigration would go and any level of immigration's acceptable, I simply knew that setting a target for immigration and setting a limit on people coming into the country is a meaningless concept in an international environment where we'll adjust what we do according to what we can actually manage in terms of social cohesion and our economy to absorb. And because we're a thriving economy, and because we want people to work legally rather than in the black economy, we want to welcome people properly, we want work permits that actually work and we want to make sure that we handle people's asylum claims sensitively. And over the last seven years since 2000 when the big upsurge came we've handled this with a degree of liberalism and with common sense that other countries have not managed which is why we didn't have the upsurge that Le Pen managed five years ago, or in Austria or Denmark, where the social democrats were absolutely swept out. That's why I think we should be proud of what the Labour government's done. We've got a lot to learn and a long way to go.

LC

The old saying, men, and also women, do not live by bread alone, they need ideas as well. That is why I would like to see in every school, and I think people who are coming from disadvantaged backgrounds and new to these islands need this particularly, I would like to see a document on every school wall about what Britishness means, or what British constitution is. I think this would help enormously. I work in the United States, I know how valuable, it's a kind of secular version of the Ten Commandments, and it really does matter and help whatever your background.

DB

Is it helping people in Louisiana at the moment? Is it protecting people there?

SK

I think David's right about Daniel Defoe, it's a mongrel nation and always has been and that's incredibly important because it can then be about the future because it's a civic identity, you can define it politically. My parents came here from India and Ireland so it's not a coincidence that they came to this country because that's about the legacy of empire and it's also about the NHS because they came here to work for the NHS. And what I take from that is that actually the history defines us, it's good and it's bad and you can't help either fairytale about it, but it's made us the country who we are. And I think we spent 20 or 30 years worrying that if we talk about that history it will divide a diverse society when actually it's the only thing that explains a diverse society, which we can be very proud of despite how we got here. But it's got to be something that is held together by something. Linda's absolutely right that this has to be about citizenship and I think it's worth doing a constitution, not so some lawyers in Oxford can write down, but so people can be involved in it. If it's about values you'll never get it anywhere, we'll all disagree about it. If it's about citizenship we'll have to disagree and then decide because that's what you do politically. I think there's a real problem though: in England people really do not know their own history. We have this brilliant revolution in popular history but we need to go much further with it. We have this very mythical view of how the history is all the same and there was no diversity and so on. The right now [holds true] to England because we've made it too complicated but actually the left has to get hold of the English question and England's going to be pretty complicated and diverse. Ok, part of it's about morris dancers but that's not the bit I'm part of. Part of it is people have those values but we've got to get hold of England as one of the identities but I think we've got to define the citizenship. What Ed said is very important because they haven't decided yet and they know they should do it and unless the pressure is there it would slip away if we don't do it.

MR

I just want to move this onto Britishness and onto one foreign policy topic.

Questioner

Has intervention in Iraq made it impossible to support reformers in Iran without looking like we're interfering?

SK

Iran could be the last great crisis of the Bush administration. I think we need to learn some lessons as to how this happened and I think a military strike would be very bad news, except it would be very good news for Iranian hardliners and bad news for the people in Iran who want support. So I think the only way to go about this is to go to the people in Iran who are working for human rights and democracy and say this is fantastically complicated, we know you're in trouble domestically, what is it that outsiders could do that would make things much worse and are there things, not necessarily by governments, or people who you would like to see prevail who could do with support. I think it's a humbler version of democratic solidarity that we need but we've got to go out and find out about the internal situation first. I think the European approach is going to be very important here. The Americans don't talk to the Iranians, we do, it's important that we pursue the diplomatic.

DB

[Iraq] doesn't stop us supporting reform in Iran but I think what's happened in Iraq and the length of time it's taken to reestablish the security and stability that Rumsfeld and Cheney dismembered will actually be a precursor to less intervention, less internationalism in the years to come. I think we'll have a wave of withdrawal and whilst we may all disagree about the rightness of going in militarily, the Labour party has a history of internationalism and people being prepared to care about what happens to others across the world. I fear that the experience of Iraq will withdraw the British people and I think this will be true also across the world.

I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 about Czechoslovakia about what happened in the run up to the Second World War and just to be reminded of the speeches that were made of what was actually said by Chamberlain, about the way in which people reacted to that in this country frightened me because if we ever went back to that insularity, to that 'small nation a long way away about which we know very little why should we care,' I hope we never go back to that.

MR

But equally there's great alarm in this country about the revived neoconservative influence and mood that's around in America. Linda, how do you read that from your side of the Atlantic?

LC

I take David's point but I have to say that the Second World War has become too much the iconic war on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a very important war, it was important that it was fought but it isn't the typical war. History shows many things but one of the things it indisputably shows is how difficult it is to invade people for their own good. I wouldn't want to push and exclude the possibility of interventionism if at some point it seems appropriate. But I do think that the influence of that Chamberlain moment has become too easily cited by those who want to make military inroads, and that's certainly true of the American neocons who are always citing that particular example. I repeat: invading people for their own good, however good your motives are, is always fraught with profound risk and we have to remember that.

DB

But we should have intervened in Rwanda. I think a lot of what happened afterwards was a regret that we didn't and we could have saved three million lives. I am unapologetic in believing that we have responsibility across the world and not just in our own country.

MR

Of course, genocide and Darfur…those sort of cases are perhaps a case apart. Nuclear build up where there's a certain amount of hypocrisy to say the least in the West…

Questioner

I'm particularly interested in how the debate is moving now to focus on Iran and I do wonder what sort of responsibility we have as trade unionists and supporters of the Labour party for rebuilding civil society in Iraq. It seems that whole sections of the progressive movement is now looking away, they're using the debate about war to sidestep the debate about this. What are the panel's view on what responsibility do we have now to civil society in Iraq, and I'm thinking of those fragile, home grown democratic institutions?

Questioner

With our commitment to human rights, we're encouraging trade with China who have a hideous human rights record, and the situation in Zimbabwe at the moment, what responsibility do we have to promote human rights and intervention in situations where maybe we can help. I think we should do our best to contribute to what we can do.

MR

Are we looking away from the rebuilding of Iraq and more generally the interventions we should be looking at?

SK

I know a number of the trade unions who were strongly against the war have done a great deal to support trade unions in Iraq. We've got to support people trying to have free democratic trade unions in Iraq and we shouldn't look away. There is an organization, Labour Friends of Iraq, which people may know, doing a lot of work on this. Journalists should support journalists, teachers should support teachers. The question about Zimbabwe, I think what the Archbishop of York has said is exactly right, that we should say to Zimbabwean democrats, look we know that Mugabe will play the colonial card, so how do get over that, what do you want us to do? The right question to ask when you want to help people isn't to steam in and hopefully they'll have flowers in the streets for us, it's to say, what do you want us to do for you? And if they say, actually keep your mouth shut you can't help, that's advice we need, and if they say we want this sort of pressure or sanctions, let's take that. Civil society links, democracy from below, is a very important idea for the left.

MR

David Blunkett, the idea's been built up that if there had been better planning then all this mess wouldn't have come to pass. The reconstruction has been a disaster, are we turning away from it now?

DB

I agree entirely with what's just been said. I think we have a greater obligation to both civil society and political institutions to help and we should do so as we have to in Afghanistan, and as we did in Kosovo where I think we were right to intervene, we were right to stick with them and help them. It isn't as has just been said a responsibility purely on government. It is up to non-governmental organizations including trade unions to get involved as well.

LC

Of course we're going to have a continuing obligation to Iraq. We dismantled the state, however pernicious it was, we have a continuing responsibility and that can be done at all sorts of levels. One of the most moving things is the work that the British Museum is trying to do to restore Iraq's ancient artifacts which have been dispersed and substantially lost. So we can all contribute something. What I would like to see for the future, and it's going to be very hard to get, is to get more UN African troops and Muslim troops to go into Africa and the Muslim regions of the world when things get difficult. I think given the imperialist past, not least of this nation, it's very difficult even with the best of intentions for troops which are perceived mainly as white and Christian and as coming from the West to move into non-Western, non-Christian, non-white regions without them being perceived as being on an imperial mission – even if they aren't that's how they're very easily going to be perceived, and given history that's hardly surprising.

ENDS