Tory Rascal

I was lucky enough to be able to interview Tom Harris recently. I really don’t think he needs much introduction from me. His blog achieved the number one spot in Total Politics’ polls for the Labour, MP, Scottish and Left-of-Centre categories earlier this year, making him one of the most popular and influential politicians to make the foray into new media. To add to the accolades, this month’s GQ magazine lists him – perhaps cheekily – as one of five Labour MPs who could take over from Gordon Brown.

He’s also an absolute gent, and generously put up with my questioning for an hour. I hope you enjoy reading the interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it.

The interview covered three key areas – politics, faith and new media.  Today’s segment is on politics.

What is your first political memory?

It’s very embarrassing! It was asking my local MP, David Lambie, who was campaigning for re-election in 1974, for his autograph. He represented North Ayrshire. My parents were both very staunch Labour supporters, and he was visiting houses and campaigning. My friends and I thought, “ooh, this must be a famous person” – because he was an MP – and we asked for his autograph, which he very generously gave us. I don’t have it now, sadly. David’s still around, though, and I meet him occasionally. He’s still an activist, though, and still goes to Conference.

Why did you join the Labour Party?

Because I was a Christian and was involved in an evangelical church. I’ve often said in the past, you have no idea what the phrase ‘misspent youth’ actually means until you’ve spent most of your youth as an evangelical Christian. There were two things that arose from that: first was, it did give me a genuine concern for people. This was in the early 80s, and unemployment where I was was just awful, because the two main employers were the Linwood car factory and the steelworks at Kilbirnie. Half of the people where I grew up were employed at one or the other, and when they both closed down it was just indescribably awful – for my family, as well as every other family. That sort of inspired me, so when I became a Christian I wanted to talk about those sort of issues with other people in the church.

Just as importantly as that was that for the first time in my life I found myself socialising with people who were from a different class. That sounds very class-conscious, but I had never really socialised with anyone who owned their own house, or had been to university, or in one case was even a university lecturer. I found myself fascinated by these people and really impressed by them, and having arguments with them about politics. That’s really what motivated me to join the Labour Party. Most of the people I revered in those days from my church were Tories, and when I joined Labour they weren’t very chuffed!

I didn’t inherit my politics. Both of my parents were staunchly Labour voters, but it wasn’t the case that I joined just because I was indoctrinated; in fact, I voted SDP in 1983 because I was so disenchanted with the Labour Party under Michael Foot. My mother took that very personally; at one point she threatened to throw me out of the house because I wasn’t voting Labour. She hated Margaret Thatcher that much. It was after the election, when Neil Kinnock became leader, that I joined the party.

So have you always been, in one way or another, on the modernising wing of the party?

Absolutely. I never went through the phase of being remotely left-wing; right from the beginning I was very anti-Militant, and I was instrumental in expelling eight of them from Cathcart Labour Party back in 1989. I was always a strong supporter of Kinnock’s, right from the beginning, and also of John Smith – but particularly under Tony Blair.

About a year ago, you lost your ministerial post. On your blog you really took it in your stride – no protest about it, no anguish or bad feelings…

I lied. I thought it was important to come across as more philosophical than I actually felt, but I was absolutely gutted. Heartbroken. I really was. I loved that job, and I thought I was doing it well, and I felt very bitter about losing it. But I thought it was important at the time to be philosophical about it. It would have looked very ungracious if I’d actually said what I felt.

You posted at the time that you’d had no indication of why you were moved to one side, other than that the Prime Minister said he needed to bring new people in. Have you had any indication since as to why you were moved out of the ministerial job?

Not from the Prime Minister, although I did have a discussion with him about it. People have their own theories about why this sort of thing happens, and I think I have a fairly good idea. It’s not something I’d want to talk about at the moment, though.

Talking of Gordon Brown; we hear a lot of media reports asking about whether he’s thrown Nokia phones or pushed printers of desks, so many reports of his being brooding, misanthropic, or whatever else. What’s he actually like to work with or near?

I don’t actually know. Being an undersecretary of state, I didn’t actually work that closely with the Prime Minister. I did attend a COBRA meeting one Sunday night, after the flooding in 2007, and I have to say that he was brilliant. He walked into the room and took complete charge. There were plenty of very high-ranking police officers and secretaries of state, civil servants, Army officers… and he walked in and knew exactly what he wanted to ask, exactly what he wanted to happen, and everyone got their orders and went to their tasks within about half an hour. There aren’t that many other meetings that I’ve had with him, though.

Do you think people obsess over his personality unnecessarily?

I think the right-wing blogosphere does. It has a view that Gordon’s personality is unhelpful to the Labour cause, and they want to exaggerate those issues for understandable electoral reasons.

You’ve been very open about Labour’s bashing in the polls.

I could ignore the polls, but in a political blog by a Labour MP it would be absurd for me to pretend that they don’t exist, so I feel I have to comment on them. I just don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence; I think it’s a political joke for any party to be reasonably consistently far behind in the polls and to claim that there is any silver lining in that. The public don’t believe that, and I’m not going to make a fool of myself or be accused of insulting people’s intelligence by saying, “yeah, we’re 15 points behind in the polls, BUT…” There is no “but”. If we’re 15 points behind, then that’s a bad thing.

Can anything be done to pull it back?

I hope so.

Turning to your constituency. What makes Glasgow South different from other Glasgow seats?

Well, what’s interesting is that it was one of the last Conservative seats in Glasgow to fall to Labour. It fell in ’79, when Teddy Taylor lost. The reason it fell was because as well as having some of the most deprived areas in the city it also has some of the richest. Newlands, for example, is a beautiful part of the city, with some houses that I could never afford in a million years. Just a couple of miles away from there you have one of the most deprived areas in the constituency. So you have an incredible mix that you just don’t get in most constituencies. There’s a solid rump of Conservative votes still there. I was campaigning a few weeks ago, and there were still people who are big fans of Teddy Taylor!

Teddy Taylor’s defeat was a big shock for Thatcher, wasn’t it?

She never forgave him. He came back into Parliament a few months later, but never got into ministerial office, which is a shame. I had a lot of time for Teddy; I was one of the few MPs who, when I gave my maiden speech, could give tribute not only to my immediate predecessor, John Maxton, but to his immediate predecessor, Teddy, who was still in the Chamber.

What do you enjoy most about being the MP for Glasgow South?

I’m very proud of the fact that it’s my adopted home. I wasn’t brought up in Glasgow – I come from Ayrshire – but I am lucky to have lived in that area for the past 23 years. I’ve lived there longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in the country, so even before I became an MP I always felt part of the constituency. Now, I’ve nothing against someone who’s not from an area becoming its MP – there’s some advantage to that, in some cases – but I was just always very glad to have the privilege of being MP for the area I lived in. I started living there when I first became a reporter for the East Kilbride News, and the people I met then in the local party I still know today.

What’s the biggest challenge you face as the MP there?

I would say unemployment at the moment. I spent a day at one of the local job centres a few weeks ago, trying to get to grips with what the staff are trying to get to grips with due to the downturn. The unemployment level has increased markedly over the last few years, and I would say that even before the downturn it didn’t figure quite as highly electorally.

The biggest problem throughout my tenure has been with asylum. Immigration is seen as a major issue for my constituents; I have one of the largest Asian electorates in Scotland, and I deal with immigration cases on a day by day basis. With Glasgow being the only local authority in Scotland that volunteered to take part in the Home Office’s asylum seeker dispersal scheme, it means I’ve been dealing with asylum very closely for a long time.

I take an approach that a lot of my critics find very heavy-handed and unsympathetic to asylum seekers. I don’t think it is; but it’s caused me some political difficulties over the years. I take the view that if you’re an asylum seeker and you come to this country, you strike a bargain with the Government. It’s a two-sided deal, whereby the Government agrees to provide you with safe haven until your asylum case is decided, and on your side you agree that you will respect the decision in return for being given that safe haven for that period of time. What I’ve found is that in the majority of cases, people come and apply for asylum with absolutely no intention of returning home if the decision goes against them, and I find that attitude absolutely unacceptable.

I understand why people think that’s a hard approach, but I think the alternative is to have utter chaos in immigration. If people think that, rather than going through the rather tortuous and expensive immigration process, all they have to do is seek asylum and remain regardless of their circumstances back home, then the whole system breaks down.

Do you think that sort of honesty will help to defeat the BNP?

Yes I do. But when you say honesty, that’s actually the Government’s policy on asylum. I think sometimes we need more politicians to make the case. When Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time, someone in the audience said there’s no such thing as a bogus asylum seeker. She was wrong; there’s a majority of people claiming asylum who are not entitled to asylum under the strict rules we have, and those rules are that you are entitled to asylum if it can be established that you would face persecution for your religion, your sexuality, or political views, at home. If your only reason for claiming asylum is that you want a better life economically for you and your family, although that’s perfectly understandable it’s not a reason for asylum. If you can’t meet the criteria, then you are not a genuine asylum seeker, and you should not be given refugee status.

Some people say that if you say what the BNP says, you are, somehow, supporting them. Is that sort of timidity going to cause a nasty surprise at the general election?

No. I don’t for one minute think they’re going to make an electoral breakthrough. That doesn’t mean we should be complacent, of course, and I do think those issues have to be addressed. I speak to people all the time who are concerned about immigration, and they’re not racists or extremists. Many of them are Labour voters, many are Conservatives, and they all have the right to talk about an issue that concerns them.

Every MP that I’ve met has a number of stories about mad constituents. Could you share any?

Oh God, there are so many! There are some who I will give time to because they’re harmless and sweet people. If I’ve not had a busy surgery, I don’t mind if they want to come and shout at me about something completely bonkers. There was one bloke who approached me to claim that National Savings staff were orchestrating ERNIE, the Premium Bonds computer, so that it would produce numbers beneficial to them. I told him that I wasn’t going to pursue the issue, and he was totally astonished! I lost his vote, but never heard from him again.

One other guy came to see me, and although he wasn’t a real nutter I came close to throwing him out of my surgery. He was objecting to a mobile phone mast being put up close to his house. I asked him if he had a mobile phone himself, and he said yes. “Well,” I said, “you can see my problem, can’t you?” He replied “yes, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have masts at all, but we should put them up in Castlemilk” – which is one of the poorer areas of the constituency. I told him that was a bit offensive, and he started to huff and puff, so I just said I didn’t have any more time for him. As he was pushed out of the door he was threatening to report me to the Parliamentary Ombudsman – people think that’s actually something that can call MPs to heel – and that he was going to go to the press. I never heard any more about it. He wasn’t a nutter, but he was obviously a very unpleasant individual.

When you first come to Parliament do you get any preparation for dealing with those sort of people?

Nope, not a thing. My predecessor, John Maxton, and I worked together on surgeries when he was in the House, so I did have some experience. That helped.

Who are your political heroes and villains?

The villain would be Ralph Nader. Or Arthur Scargill. I have to be quite careful because there are some more up-to-date ones who are still around and who I wouldn’t want to annoy too badly. We’ll never see the likes of Scargill again, thank goodness. I’m tempted to say Thatcher as well, but it’s such a cliché.

Heroes: Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock – with some caveats. Sheffield, mainly! Also, on the night I spoke against Gordon at the PLP meeting, Neil summed up the loyalists’ case in a very long-winded way, talking about the important of loyalty, and I was dying to ask him if he thought loyalty was important when he was voting against the Callaghan government dozens of times in the run-up to the ’79 election. Overall, though, his contribution to the party was immense, even though he didn’t win an election.

Denis Healey is another hero of mine. He’s almost part of the architecture. And Hugh Gaitskell; I need to read more on him, but I think his contribution could have been even greater. And Barbara Castle, who could have saved Labour in 1979 had Jim Callaghan not stopped her implementing In Place of Strife a decade earlier.

What’s your favourite political quote?

It would probably be Kennedy at his inauguration speech – “ask not about what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country,” which I still think is something that every politician should believe in very strongly.

Wednesday: Tom on Christianity and Iraq.

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