Shadowing Practice: Leaders' Debate - David Cameron interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, 26th March 2015 - Learn English Speaking with Video

David Cameron, do you know how many food banks there were in this country when you came to power?

I don't have the exact figures,

but I know that usage of food banks has gone up

and there are many amazing volunteers who own those food banks and provide an important service.

There were 66 when you came to power, there are now 421.

900,000 people took food parcels last year, free food parcels.

You talked about broken Britain and fixing it.

You haven't.

It's more broken now than it was.

Well, I don't accept that,

because if you look at what's happened with our economy,

there are 1.89 million more people in work than when I became Prime Minister.

We've got 900,000 fewer people on out-of-work benefit.

Is an increase in food banks a mark of success?

Look, obviously, there has been an increase in food bank use.

That's partly because of the difficulties we faced as a country.

It's also, Jeremy, because we changed the rules the previous government didn't allow job centres to advertise the existence of food banks.

They thought it would be bad PR.

I thought that was a wrong decision.

I thought it was a poor decision.

So we allowed them to point people towards food banks if they needed them.

But look, the big picture is here is we want to get more people back to work.

We've turned the economy around and it's jobs that are the best route out of poverty.

Is it acceptable in a rich country like ours that there are that number of people depending on free food aid?

Obviously, I want fewer people to be using food banks,

and I want more people to have the security of a job,

but we have created 1,000 jobs for every day this government's been in office.

Now, that's a statistic, but behind that statistic are people who are able to provide for their families,

who are earning a wage,

who are able to build a better life...

How many of those jobs are zero-hours contracts?

About one in 50 jobs are zero-hours contracts.

Yeah.

So this is an important point...

Would you live on a zero-hours contract?

No, what, for many, some people choose a zero-hours contract,

for instance students, because they want the flexibility.

But what we did is,

hold on a second, we outlawed,

first government to do this,

the idea of exclusive zero-hours contracts where you can only work for one business.

So we passed a law saying that shouldn't happen.

But it is a myth,

as some people want to say,

the jobs that have been created are all low-paid jobs, that's not true.

No one's saying that.

Well, I'm not saying that.

But the hint you're trying to give is that, you know.

You're saying there are 700,000 people on zero-hours contracts.

Could you live on one?

No, look, as I said, some people...

Could you live on one?

I want to create a country where more people have the opportunity of the full-time work that they want.

Could you live on a zero-hours contract?

Look, that's not the question.

The question is...

Well, it's the question I'm asking.

Yeah, but the point is,

some people choose a zero-hours contract.

If you're a student, for instance,

and you want to do some part-time work,

a zero-hours contract can work for you.

That's why we haven't outlawed them altogether.

What we've outlawed is exclusive zero-hours contracts.

And no, I couldn't live on one of those,

and that's why we outlawed them.

But the person, for example,

a colleague of mine this morning spoke to a man in the North East, Patrick.

He walks four hours to and from work.

When he gets there, he doesn't know whether he's on for one hour or two hours,

or if he's lucky, longer,

and then he has to walk home again.

He gets £6.75 an hour.

He works between 8 and 12 hours a week on average.

Now, is that any way to live?

No, I want more people to have part-time...

Not to have part-time work,

to have full-time work, and that is what's happening in our economy.

Look, it has been difficult.

We've had a very difficult few years following the longest and deepest recession virtually in our country's history.

Now, we're coming out of that.

We created 1.89 million new jobs.

That's 1,000 a day.

The majority of those have been full-time jobs, not part-time jobs.

Most of them have been in relatively well-paid occupations.

Only one in 50 jobs is a zero-hours contract,

and some people choose those contracts.

But if you ask me,

do I want more people to have the dignity and security of work and a regular wage?

Yes.

Do I want a higher minimum wage?

Yes.

And we've seen the minimum wage increase now,

above inflation, for the first time in many years and I want to see that minimum wage go through £7,

on to £8.

And crucially, Jeremy, in terms of what the government can do,

we have cut taxes, so we've taken the 3 million lowest paid people in our country out of income tax altogether.

So you can earn now £10,600 before you start paying income tax at all.

I think that is vitally important,

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and that's been the priority for the government.

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Sure, but to be clear about this,

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you couldn't live on a zero-hours contract.

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This is one of the things people really find problematic about you.

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I'm going to be personal,

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if I may, for a second.

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You can.

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It is that you would choose,

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for example, to appoint a man who oversaw tax avoidance as a minister in your government,

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another rich person, that you would choose to appoint,

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to appoint to the heart of government a rich newspaper editor whose newspaper hacked people's phones,

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that you choose to defend a rich television presenter who thumps a colleague.

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Now, what do you have in common with all these very rich people?

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Let's take these in turn, because...

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Let's take this in turn,

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because I think that is...

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I think it's completely unjustified.

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Let's take Stephen Green, who was head of HSBC.

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He had been appointed by my predecessor,

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Gordon Brown, to run his business advisory council.

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I appointed him as a Trade Minister in a move that was welcomed across the political spectrum,

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across British industry, as someone who had run a bank responsibly.

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Now, I don't know whether there was wrongdoing subsequently at HSBC,

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we'll have to see, but nobody criticised that appointment at the time.

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Did you ask him about it?

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I didn't ask him about that specific question,

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but we went through all the normal processes and procedures that you would with appointing a minister proper checks,

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including checks by the Inland Revenue,

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into someone's tax affairs, and so it was properly dealt with.

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If you want to raise the issue of Jeremy Clarkson,

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I said very clearly I didn't know what had happened,

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and so I wasn't going to comment extensively.

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I just simply answered a question I was asked,

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explaining he was a friend of mine,

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he's a talent, and I hope it could be resolved.

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But I'm absolutely clear, look,

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treating the people you work with badly is not acceptable.

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The BBC have made their decision,

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and that's absolutely right for them.

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I think the aspersion you're trying to cast,

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I think, is completely ridiculous.

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What I have done for the last five years is lead a government that has got the economy growing,

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has got people back to work,

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has got the taxes of the poorest people in our country.

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I'm not saying we've achieved everything we've set out to do,

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but the country is immeasurably stronger.

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Let's come to the question of the economy, then.

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Apart from broken Britain, one of your slogans last time was that the country was overwhelmed in debt.

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Overwhelmed was the word you used.

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How much money have you borrowed?

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Well, we have cut the budget deficit in half as a share of GDP.

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How much money have you borrowed?

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The key thing is the amount of money you borrow every year, the deficit...

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Do you know what it is?

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..that is down in half.

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I know that we have borrowed a lot of money because the deficit adds to your debt every year.

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Do you know what the figure is?

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Well, you're going to tell me, Jeremy.

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I am.

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It's a mere £500 billion.

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Well, that is a lot less than the previous government was borrowing was borrowing.

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No, it's more than the previous government borrowed.

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Look, the annual overdraft, the deficit,

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has come down by one half as a share of GDP and debt,

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the total stock, the debt as a share of our national income is now falling.

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Now we haven't finished the job.

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We have been working to a plan

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and the British people have been working incredibly hard to that plan of turning the economy around,

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getting the deficit down, having public services that we can afford and creating jobs and livelihoods for all our people.

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That is what we have been doing.

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Now, if you're saying we haven't gone fast enough to cut the deficit,

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I would agree we need to complete the job.

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But all my political opponents have been saying we should borrow more,

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we should spend more, we should tax more.

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That's the alternative that you face with Ed Miliband and his approach.

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My point is merely the chasm between what was said and what was actually done.

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Let's take another one, let's take immigration.

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You promised at the last election that you would reduce immigration to the level it was at in the early 1990s,

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tens of thousands a year.

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Do you know how many people you actually let in?

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No, immigration has not been cut to the tens of thousands.

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No, it hasn't.

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You failed.

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What we did is we cut immigration from outside the European Union,

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that is down by 13%.

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We closed down about 800 bogus education colleges,

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which were really visa factories.

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But inside the European Union,

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immigration has increased,

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I'm afraid not least because we've actually created more jobs in Britain than the rest of the European Union put together.

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The European Union's economy has been so stagnant that people have come here to work.

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So what we need to do now is keep the economy working but fix the broken welfare system.

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And I'm going to just make this point, if you'll let me.

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There are some key changes I'm going to make,

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which is that if you come from Europe to Britain,

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you cannot claim unemployment benefit.

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If you don't have a job in six months,

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you'll have to return to the country you came from.

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You'll have to work here for four years,

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paying into the system before you get tax credits or benefits out of the system.

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And while you're here, you can't send child benefit home to the family if they're living in another country.

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Now, those changes taken together,

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key welfare changes, will reduce immigration quite markedly from inside the EU.

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It's not what you said last time.

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You said, quote, No ifs,

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no buts, we make a promise to the British people

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that we will reduce immigration to the level it was at in the early 1990s.

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You've not done it.

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I believe that is still the right ambition.

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We achieved a cut from outside the EU, but inside the EU...

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It was a no ifs,

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no buts promise, not an ambition.

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Inside the EU, we haven't achieved it,

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but we need to make these welfare changes in order to do it.

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But you accept you haven't met the promise there.

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We've not met the commitment that I made.

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I fully accept that.

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Right.

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There's a whole credibility problem here, isn't there?

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Because one of the other things you said,

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and you repeated it again this week,

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yesterday, I think, you said,

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we're not going to raise VAT.

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You said exactly the same thing before the last election.

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We have no plans to raise VAT.

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You said it to my face twice at the time of the last election.

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And then the moment you got into government, you did raise VAT.

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Well, there is a crucial difference on this occasion.

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We are the government.

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We've been able to look very carefully at the books.

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We know what is necessary in the next Parliament,

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and our plans do not involve tax increases on VAT or national insurance or income tax.

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It's very clear about that.

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We know what needs to be done.

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And let me explain, because I think people watching at home want to know,

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what is the scale of what needs to be done?

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We need to save for the next two years one out of every £100 that the government spends.

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Now, I think it is the right approach to try and find £1 of waste in £100 of government spending

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rather than to put up everybody's taxes,

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which is what my political opponents want to do.

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So you've got a choice.

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Bear down on waste and get public spending under control or put up taxes with my opponents.

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That's the choice.

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But again, you said one thing and you did another.

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Well, we said that the most important task for the government was to get the economy growing,

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was to get jobs growing and was to get the deficit down.

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And I would say on any analysis,

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and we've had to take,

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we had an appalling inheritance.

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We inherited a situation where Britain's budget deficit was forecast to be bigger than Greece's.

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Now, we had to take difficult decisions.

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I will defend all of those decisions.

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Difficult ones, ones that were hard to take,

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but the right thing for the country.

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And the result, there's a connection between the difficult decisions we had to take

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and the fact that we now have the fastest-growing economy of any major Western economy.

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We've created 2 million private sector jobs.

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We've got 750,000 more businesses.

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The British economy is working.

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Now we need to make sure that people can...

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What I want is an economy that doesn't just look good on the page.

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I want people to feel that they can get a job,

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they can have a livelihood,

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they can buy a home,

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they can get a good school place for their children,

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they can enjoy a retirement.

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Those are the things.

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But that's what this plan, Jeremy, is all about.

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In the spirit of transparency,

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can you tell us where this £12 billion in welfare cuts is going to come from?

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Well, let me explain.

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We've said that there's a £30 billion adjustment that needs to be made,

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and the other political parties have voted for this too.

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And we've said that breaks down into £13 billion that needs to be saved in government departments,

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£12 billion in welfare, and £5 billion from cracking down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance.

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Now, when it comes to the welfare,

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we've identified, for instance, freezing in-work benefits like unemployment benefit for two years to raise some of that money.

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But the 12 billion, right, the 12 billion...

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10 billion of which you've yet to explain.

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That compares with 20 billion that was saved in the last parliament,

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in this current parliament, by this government on welfare.

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So this is well within the range of what we can do

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if we continue with the sort of plans that we put in place.

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Do you know where these cuts will fall?

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Well, we know that it is possible to make the savings in welfare, like we made.

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We made 20 billion of welfare savings.

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I don't want to be rude,

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but do you know, and you're not telling us,

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or do you not know?

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We know there will be difficult decisions and we'll have to go through every part of the welfare budget,

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but we believe just as we've saved £20 billion in welfare in this Parliament,

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we will be able to find a further £10 billion of welfare savings in the next Parliament.

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Let me give you some more examples.

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We're going to cut the welfare cap we put in place,

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saying no family should get more than £26,000 a year in welfare.

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We're going to reduce that to £23,000.

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That's not within the missing 10 million.

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We think that's the right thing to do.

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We're going to say, when it comes to young people,

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that young people, when they leave school,

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they should be either earning or learning,

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they should be doing an apprenticeship,

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looking at higher education, they shouldn't be able to go straight on to unemployment benefit and housing benefit.

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All of these things...

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Changing welfare, Jeremy, isn't just about saving money.

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No. It's about trying to help people's lives.

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It's about trying to...

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Well, I've just given you...

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Talk about transparency, and you don't tell us what you're going to do.

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Let me ask you a very simple question about something else,

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about foreign policy, because we're going to be out of time shortly.

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What do you think has been your biggest foreign policy disaster?

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Well, other people, I'm sure,

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will highlight difficult things that we've had to deal with.

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Well, what did you find the greatest reverse?

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Well, I would argue that some good things we've done are cutting the European budget,

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first government to achieve that,

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getting out of the Euro bailout scheme so British taxpayers aren't giving money to Greece.

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Those, I would say, are successes.

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I think we've got a very challenging situation today in Libya.

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I think it was right to get rid of...

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Do you regret going to Libya and promising the people...

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You promised.

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You used the word promise.

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The people of Britain and France will stand by you as you build your country and your democracy.

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Those were your words.

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Do you regret saying that?

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You haven't even got an embassy in Libya.

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I don't regret saying that.

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I mean, first of all,

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I think it was right,

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with France and America, to stop Colonel Gaddafi when he was going to butcher his own people in Benghazi.

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If we had not stepped in,

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if I hadn't ordered those aeroplanes into the sky,

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we would have seen a massive catastrophe in Benghazi of people butchered.

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It was the right thing to do.

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Now, I don't accept that we left the Libyan people after that.

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We put in aid, we put in military training,

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we put in political assistance.

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It just hasn't been possible to date to get the different parties in Libra...

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Christians have been beheaded on the beach.

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Well, it hasn't been possible to get the different Libyan parts of government together,

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to get the warlords to put down their weapons,

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but we're still trying, even now,

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with people out there, trying to bring that about.

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But it has been, I accept, a very difficult situation.

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Can I ask you one quick question about Europe?

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What would it take for you to vote no in a referendum on our continued participation in the European Union?

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Well, if I didn't think it was in Britain's interest to stay in the European Union,

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I wouldn't argue for our membership.

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I mean, I think the situation today is

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that what we need is a reform of the European Union and then a referendum where the British people,

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not me, but the British people,

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watching at home, they have the choice in an in-out referendum by the end of 2017.

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By implication then, surely our current membership is intolerable?

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No, what I think is we need to improve on our current membership.

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This organisation works to an extent for us.

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We get the trade, we get important cooperation,

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but Europe isn't working properly.

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That's why we need the renegotiation.

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That's why I think those who say just have a referendum straight away,

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I think we'll be giving the British people a false choice.

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I want to give a proper choice,

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stay in a reformed organisation or leave,

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but it will be the British people's choice.

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I will make this point,

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Jeremy, there's only one way to get a referendum,

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and that is to make sure I'm Prime Minister after the next election,

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because none of my principal opponents will promise a referendum.

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You've said you're not going to stand for a third term.

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That means that a vote for Cameron is a vote,

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if you're successful, for Cameron as leader of his party and Prime Minister,

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perhaps, for two, three, four years,

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after which it's Boris Johnson or George Osborne or Theresa May or Sajid Javid or Uncle Tom Cobley.

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Now, if you vote Conservative,

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I've said I will serve every day of a full second term.

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What I was doing in that interview was just giving an honest answer to an honest question,

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because I think people need to know that sort of thing.

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Are you one of those leaders who,

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like sort of Chairman Mao,

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who thinks you can go on and on and on and on?

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Or actually, do you think,

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look, I'm really passionate about what I'm doing.

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I think we're turning this country around.

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I'm passionate about having another term, completing this vital work.

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But after that, ten years,

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two terms, I think politicians do have a date by which they need to say,

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well, I think it's time for someone else to take over.

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I'm not some person who thinks that you just...

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You're indispensable.

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We're not indispensable.

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It's important to remember that.

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David Cameron, thank you.

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Now, coming next, questions to Mr Cameron from our studio audience.

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Shadowing Practice: Leaders' Debate - David Cameron interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, 26th March 2015 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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