Lisa Burton : The recent riots were difficult to watch, but also not unexpected, considering certain media reporting and the political environment for the past few years, particularly since Brexit. Will Labour consider press reform going forward, and how will the government respond to reform UK MPs intent on stirring up further division?

Stella Creasey :My community was directly affected by the threat of violence. We didn’t have any violence, but we did take to the streets as a community, and stood round our local mosques. We stood together because people were so divided, and this didn’t happen in a vacuum. For some time now, I’ve been very worried about the rise of the far right and of far-right rhetoric, both online and offline. It’s been shaping a number of debates locally, and it was an incredibly scary time. I’m very proud to represent a very diverse community. I’m very proud of the fact that when that pressure came, people were very clear that it was not welcome here, but acutely conscious that we don’t want to get to the point where these things are happening in the first place.

It’s not that we should simply be proud that if put under pressure in the UK, people reject this type of politics. We shouldn’t get to the point where the pressure is coming in the first place. With that in mind, one of the conversations I’ve been having with people for some time, as Chair of the Labour Movement for Europe (LME) is that you are talking about what President Trump is doing. You’re talking about who he’s talking to in British politics. But have you seen what’s happening in Europe? Have you seen what’s happening with Orban, with Le Pen, with Meloni, and what’s happening in France?

I am very concerned that the left has been complacent about the idea that far right extremism, Islamophobia, racism, wouldn’t take seed in our political discourse. For too long, the left has that said these are extremes, just ignore them, don’t platform them. We have to confront them. But I don’t think this is about press reform, though there are other reasons why we need to talk about press reform.

The reason my community was put under pressure was because somebody circulated via WhatsApp a list of 60 immigration lawyers that were going to be targeted next. That is not the traditional print media, or even a forum that has some modicum of regulation.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t an issue about press reform that we need to address. I know people have very great concerns about GB news, for example, and its impartiality. I think there are questions about where you blur the line between opinion and fact, and that’s online and offline. It’s to recognize that the way in which the far right is organizing is not through traditional forums and media. So that debate, that discourse, is late to the mainstream media rather than generating the mainstream media. What do I mean by that? I mean it’s as much as in your local Facebook groups. It’s in the Telegram groups. It’s in the WhatsApp messages that calls for a necessary different response.

If we load this solely onto press reform, I fear we will be too late. We’ll be too late in calling for a defense of free speech that recognizes if 50% of the conversation is terrified, because there is violence, because there is intimidation, because there is this constant drumbeat that whatever the problem is, the answer is, immigration is the issue? Actually, we’re not getting to the source of it, and we’re not challenging where that’s coming into modern political discourse. And I say that as somebody who now spends more of her time in WhatsApp groups with local residents than actually on even Twitter/X, I mean, X feels, you know, 10 years ago now, for me now.

A separate issue is regarding the role of politicians and the questions of standards. And I think there are some very interesting questions about our roles and our responsibilities. In terms of leadership of that debate, I have called for a national conversation about accountability for all of us. We all have to be accountable for what we are doing, to challenge the rhetoric, to challenge those ideas. Hope not Hate have got some very interesting research on this that is also an accountability for all MPs of all elected professions. I am somebody who has already debated, discussed and disagreed with the Reform MPs in Parliament, but I will hold them to the same standards that I will hold politicians in all political parties for the consequences of their actions, as I expect myself to be held.

Clarissa Killwick :Thanks to Brexit, I, for a number of years, lost my vote, but I was able to vote again in the UK. In the past, Labour were not in favor of lifting the 15 year rule for overseas voters. So has there been a change of heart now, or are we at risk of losing this important right again?

Stella Creasey : The absolute honest truth is, I suspect, that the debate around electoral reform in this country will be more rooted in wondering about electoral registration and about voter ID than the 15-year rule. We saw quite a marked impact on certain groups in society about their ability to take part, and I know the Electoral Commission is looking at that.

I think we have to see what the Electoral Commission comes back with in terms of whether or not this is a practical solution. I understand and appreciate what you’re saying about you had a vote. It would be remiss of me not to say I want to see what the Electoral Commission says first.

Steve Wilson : Do you believe proportional representation would be a prerequisite for rejoining the Single Market, the Customs Union and/or the EU and what’s the position of the Labour Movement for Europe on that particular subject?

Stella Creasey : As to whether proportional representation will be a prerequisite with the EU in order to rejoin the single market, or would be part of the negotiating discussion, I’m not aware of any examples in which the electoral system being used has been part of the negotiations, e.g. in discussions that other countries taking part in the accession process are having.

As for the position of LME, we are an affiliate organization, so we don’t take a particular position on policies. I can tell you what my position as the national chair is and say, I have always campaigned for electoral reform, not because I think it makes a single person vote, but because I think it is the right thing to do. I prefer AV+ because I do think the constituency link is important in our politics, especially with devolution, and I’ve always voted for electoral reform policies within the political process.

I also don’t think you can single out just the voting system. I think you’ve got a broader question about how you win the argument. I don’t think you can make Brexit work. We’ve always been clear about that. We can, we do think that you can resolve quite a lot of the problems that it has created in the first instance, and that should be the priority. We are around the edges of the single market, and we are affected by the single market. So, I always think it’s a bit of a canard to say that we’ve completely left it in the same way that inevitably, the trading decisions made in Europe affect what we can do here, because we are interconnected. You know, you can fight many things in life, but you can’t really fight geography. It’s just a thing.

The British public are far ahead of the political debate. They’ve moved on in 2016 and 2019 and they are also very clear that this was a democratic decision. As a result, you would need some kind of democratic moment to change it substantially. That doesn’t mean that that might not happen. Nobody can rule out anything, if we’ve learned anything in the last couple of years of politics, that things go up and down in all sorts of ways you never expected, not least Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister.

But it does mean that we face a very hard choice. What do you focus on? I talk to the businesses who can’t import things into the UK anymore, who are sitting with lorry loads of food sat in Calais, the people who are missing out on school trips, the businesses thinking about where they invest. They haven’t got the seven or eight years of negotiation time and a referendum that we need. What we have to ruthlessly do as people who recognize the damage that Brexit has done is work out how we can save what is essentially already on fire.

I’m very passionate about the Pan European Mediterranean convention, so passionate it probably puts people to sleep, frankly. But that is something I think we could negotiate to be part of, again, relatively quickly. Talk to the people in the Ukraine – they are on a fast track. That’s still a 7-8 year process. British businesses, British workers, do not have that length of time before damage that Brexit has done is going to be so great, we’ll never be able to do anything about it.

But I also think we do have to respect and recognize that if you are the European Union, you know, I would say Brexit is like the terrible man your aunt married 20 years ago, and you put up with him at Christmas every single year, and finally she divorced him. You know, you’re not going to invite him round for Easter cake, anytime soon. We have to respect and recognize just how much we trashed our status, the goodwill, the general sense that the UK was somebody you want to work with through Brexit, and the idea that we could very quickly get the time and energy and effort that our European partners would require for any sort of rejoin effort, I just think it’s a bit disrespectful to them. It is so important to me that we try and save what we can save, because any future conversation will be harmed by what is lost.

One of the things I worry about is if we spend our time still prosecuting the debates of 2016 and 2019 –  that means we’re not talking about what is possible in 2024, so we’re not giving people hope that you can actually sort some of these problems out. You can sort out the madness at the border, you can sort outwhat happens with Erasmus, you can sort out youth mobility. I believe that, I wouldn’t be doing this role if I didn’t.

We have to be really clear about the timescales, because we owe it to our European counterparts to recognize we’ve got a lot of ground to make up with them. That’s what’s really good about what the Government is doing right now. They are going round and proving not just that they’re not Liz Truss – which I know sounds like quite a low threshold – but that they are actually people you want to work with, that they get the concept of mutual interest, that they understand we’re asking a lot for people to pay us attention again because, we have been that awful man your aunt married.

Helen Johnston : All the recent surveys say that Labour voters and members overwhelmingly believe Brexit was a mistake and would like to see it reversed. Will the leadership come under pressure at the Labour Party Conference this autumn from grassroots members?

Stella Creasey : If you’re a member of the LME, you’re just about to get an email about our conference rally – we’ve got some really big hitters coming to speak, including Nick Thomas-Symonds, the person doing the negotiations with Europe. We’ve also got the new chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Emily Thornberry, who’s going to play an absolutely key role, because of a challenge in Parliament, since the European Scrutiny Committee has been disbanded. Sunday evening at conference, we have got a big, serious rally, which we are organizing to make sure that discussion of Europe is part and parcel of what goes on in the Labour movement.

If you join the LME, you can help strengthen my ability to keep those debates going and keep the discussions happening at a grassroots level. But just to blow our trumpet a little bit, there are now more LME parliamentarians than there are Conservative parliamentarians in Parliament. We are affiliated – formerly affiliated. If you’re a Labour Party member, you’ll know how serious this is to over half the constituencies across the country. We’ve got 1000s of members now. So that shows there is the interest and appetite. Absolutely, conference is a key event. That’s why we’re doing this rally. We haven’t been able to be upfront because of the election. It completely kiboshed the conference motion process for us to do a conference motion.

There’s an opportunity, if you are going to be in Liverpool, to show how serious you think this is, and that that relationship is there. And I cannot tell you how different that is to say a year and a half ago. It sometimes felt a bit of a lonely endeavor to be the person saying, can we talk about this? And people across the political spectrum felt wrung out. They felt so frustrated, so emotionally drained by the discussion. I understand why people didn’t want to have it. I just think we do need to do that now, and that is happening

Ruth Woodhouse : Keir Starmer has repeatedly stated, there will be no return to the single market, Customs Union or freedom of movement. Do you not believe that in an ever-changing world and political landscape, it is a mistake to rule out anything? 

Stella Creasey: I say we should absolutely look at all options, including the timelines. My concern about things like the Customs Union and the Single Market is the timeline, because I think of small businesses in my constituency who just said the point about Brexit for them is paperwork, and can they hold on for another 18 months? Possibly. Could they hold on for five years? No, that’s what I’m really worried about.

So, it’s a question for me. I think it’s right to look at everything. That’s why, for example, I have challenged the Labour Party to look again at the idea of youth mobility, because whilst what I thought the European Commission came up with wouldn’t work for us, because it wasn’t actually youth mobility – what it was was just one country. It didn’t include apprenticeships, for example, which I think is really important in all of this. The idea that there could be a scheme, I think, is something we should be exploring, and we’ll continue to have that debate and discussion within the LME.

Anon : How do we persuade those that believe immigrants are the cause of all their problems, that the fault lies elsewhere? 

Stella Creasey :One of the things I feel really passionate about, if we say and do nothing else, as progressive people, we have to be clear that the problem is not immigrants. The problem is politicians. It is politicians failing to show that in a world that is so complicated and that changes so quickly.

We have lived through lots of very destabilizing events, and at every turn, there have been people on the left and right who have looked to find somebody to blame. The right is very effective at blaming, starting with immigrants. Then it moves on to trans people, to people who need welfare support, then women. The challenge with that blame culture, that politics can thrive in, is absolutely it might win you a vote at the ballot box, but it doesn’t win you the consent for the change that needs to happen. So yes, it is a frustration for me that we have come to a point where people blame immigration when they really should be blaming politicians for being so problem focused rather than solution focused.

I came into politics to change the world. I think change is possible, but I’ll be honest with you, I sat on the Council of Europe refugee and immigration committee and used to bang my head in frustration on the desk because the conversation was long on an analysis of why immigrants were causing problems, and short on how could we collaborate together to make sure it was possible to help people equally and not put a burden on anybody. That conversation is not just a challenge within Europe, and tackling the far right politics. It’s a problem across politics. It’s not okay for politicians to just to tell us who’s caused the problem – rather they must say what they’re going to do about it.

Update 13 Oct 2024 – video now available for viewing from our You Tube channel by clicking here.

Ruth Woodhouse : Last year Ed Davey said that people on the doorstep were not talking about Europe. Was this your experience when you were campaigning during the build up to the recent general election?

Yes, largely I would agree that it wasn’t really a key focus for constituents during the campaign. I don’t think people have stopped caring about it, but a combination of a general feeling that reversing the decision to leave the EU is not likely to be possible any time soon, and a tsunami of more pressing, or immediate concerns, put the issue of Europe much further to the back of the queue.

Constituents are struggling with the cost of living; with a complete lack of access to NHS dental care; with long delays getting appointments with GPs or long waits for operations; with overdevelopment and no commensurate increase in roads and infrastructure; with constant reductions in bus routes and bus frequency sometimes making it nearly impossible to get to work in our large, mostly rural constituency; with sewage polluting our rivers and coastline and influencing the tourist trade on which we rely heavily and many more issues that are very directly affecting them and their lives and finances. I would argue that the economic consequences of leaving the EU are also affecting everyone, but the cause and effect is less direct and much harder for people to see. 

It was raised with me by a few people who run businesses and are being stretched by the ridiculous amount of red tape involved in importing and exporting, or who have extra costs now because of the Brexit bureaucracy. 

Tracy Rolfe : Do you think that the UK will ultimately regain its EU membership? What is the roadmap and how long would it take?

As part of our manifesto pledges, the Lib Dems have set out a roadmap for fixing our broken relationship with Europe and, longer term, ultimately rejoining the EU, and we will do everything we can to push the Government towards this position. I like to hope that, if the Government is brave enough to have an honest conversation with the public about the economic consequences of leaving the EU, the public will eventually insist that rejoining must be a priority, and the political will to do so will follow. It’s very hard to anticipate how long this might take, but with the Lib Dems so much larger and stronger a voice in Westminster now, it’s perhaps a more achievable long-term goal than it was.

Our roadmap includes rebuilding the relationship; seeking to agree partnerships with EU agencies and programmes such as Erasmus Plus, scientific programmes and cooperation on defence, security and crime; negotiating veterinary and plant health agreements and mutual recognition agreements to deepen the trading relationship; and then seeking to rejoin the Single Market. 

Valerie Chaplin : Do you think any political party will be ready to be more vocal about Brexit at the next election, and can you see any party putting rejoin (whether the single market, customs union or EU) at the heart of their next manifesto?

At the moment, no, if I’m honest. There is a deep fear of returning to the incredibly divisive Brexit debate among the electorate and it would take a brave politician to stoke that fire. However, five years is a long time in politics, so who knows where we’ll be when the next election comes around. I think it would have to come from the public though and with every year that passes, the demographic changes, so we may see more pressure being put on politicians to be more vocal about it. 

I think the worst effects of Brexit were hidden by the pandemic which hit just after we left – so people haven’t associated many of the effects with Brexit itself. That might change as the pandemic fades into the past and people begin to see more clearly the effects of Brexit. 

Anon : Do you expect Nigel Farage and his far-right counterparts to cause as much disruption in London as they did in Brussels, and what can be done to curb their behaviour in the Commons (assuming they ever show up!)?

Having “worked” with Mr Farage and his counterparts during my time as an MEP, I can only assume that yes, he will do everything he can to cause disruption and division in Westminster. 

But it is important to remember that he is capitalising on, or manipulating, many extremely valid concerns that people have about the state of our economy and their own standard of living. The most effective way of taking the wind out of Mr Farage’s sails is to deliver real positive change for people during this term. The greater the problems people face, the more susceptible they are to efforts to make them blame “other” people for those problems. In reality, it is up to Government, not minority groups and vulnerable other people to fix the economic issues in Britain so that people are not struggling and therefore don’t need scapegoats. 

Farage will be hampered by Parliamentary rules which mean that, as a very small party in Parliament, he won’t get much speaking time in the House. I expect him to use the media as his platform, as he has always done so well. So, his ability to disrupt depends on how much airtime the media give him, as much as what he does in Parliament. 

Steve Wilson : Having done so well in the General Election, what’s next for the LibDems?

I think our primary focus over the next few years is to be an effective opposition to the Government. The Conservatives are currently mired in their own problems, not least their attempts to find a new leader and their problem with the rise of Reform – and whether they deal with that by further pandering to right-wing factions or by moderating their position. They are largely absent as a voice in Westminster at the moment – certainly a united one – while the Lib Dems are very much present and determined to hold the Government to account. 

There is a possibility that we could become the official opposition if the Conservatives continue to implode, but, as I said above, five years is a long time in politics… so watch this space! We have an extremely talented team with a lot of professional expertise in the ranks now, so I expect us to be a very strong voice in Parliament.

David Eldridge : The recent increase in minimum salary requirements has meant I’ve been banished from my country of birth unless I divorce my wife. Do you support the minimum salary requirement for British people to bring in their foreign spouses? If so, at what level should it be?

I am so sorry you are facing such an inhumane choice. I think the increased requirements are extremely damaging and unfair. They will have devastating consequences for many families like yours and will prevent many people – disproportionately those who are not in high-paying jobs – from being able to live with their loved ones. 

Our manifesto included a commitment to replacing the Conservatives’ arbitrary salary threshold with a more flexible merit-based system for work visas, working with employers to address specific needs as part of a long-term workforce strategy. We also committed to reversing the unfair increase to income thresholds for family visas, so that no more families are torn apart. 

We would like to see a comprehensive review of the immigration system, including considering the human rights implications of immigration policy, to ensure it is fair, humane, and fit for purpose, and doesn’t separate families or cause undue hardship.

Lisa Burton : Already, we are seeing an improvement in the tone and the frequency of Brexit being discussed in Parliament. Do you think this will lead to a more honest debate about the economic damage, which Labour is still shying away from?

I sincerely hope so. An honest discussion, and an honest and detailed presentation of the facts to the public, is long overdue. We can’t begin to find ways to try and mitigate the economic consequences of leaving the EU until we are prepared to fully identify, acknowledge, and name them. I will work as hard as I can over the coming years to ensure the Government changes its cautious narrative and is honest with the British public about the enormous damage leaving the EU has done our nation, not just economically, but also socially – for many people, and geo-politically.