Richard Taylor:: Liberal Democrat candidate Julian Huppert has turned up on my doorstep and I get to ask him about my vote.

So there are two things I’m concerned about with voting for you; I think you are one of the best MPs in Parliament, you’re certainly one of those I might end up voting for but it’s Europe and the sconomy really.

So on the Economy you’ve said, I think, you want to increase spending again relatively soon. You think we can afford to increase public spending again?

Julian Huppert: Yes. Once the books are balanced, when we’ve managed to deal with the deficit that’s when we should start increasing public spending.

It’s been a really tough time since the crash; we can park the argument who’s fault it was – it happened. You had to balance those books but I don’t want to continue to do that longer than we have to. We have to start investing again. Partly because future growth (let me park again whether growth is quite the right thing to measure) but the future depends on that so things like investment in science, investment in education, investment in infrastructure, they have to happen again.

Richard Taylor:: So what’s your envisaged timetable for getting to the point where we’ve got “balanced books”? Is it the end of the next Parliament?

Julian Huppert: No I think we can balance them a bit faster than that so a few years in. Which is actually I think a sensible timescale to do it in. We would do it by roughly, some further spending cuts but at a slower rate than we’ve had over the last five years where it has been necessarily painful and partly by closing more loopholes. There is a lot of work you can do to deal with tax-dodging. But also by some increased taxes on people who are wealthier who can afford to pay for it, and banks.

Richard Taylor:: Which way are you pulling Labour and Conservative on those; with a Labour government would you be suggesting they should be spending less?

Julian Huppert: To be honest I’m very unclear about what Labour are actually talking about spending so it is very very hard to know exactly. They don’t identify any of the things they actually mean.

Richard Taylor:: We have to judge them on what they’ve done in the past don’t we?

Julian Huppert: So I wouldn’t want to see massive spending and another boom, another bust, that cycle doesn’t work for us; it doesn’t work again. It has been painful to pay the books off as far as we’ve got so far, we can’t just stop – that way lies economic ruin. We also can’t go the Conservative way so I’m still amazed that the Tories are trying to balance the rest of the books without any tax rises because doing it all on spending cuts, all on welfare cuts, all on the backs of the working poor, is simply not the right way to go. I also disagree with them that when we’ve got the books in balance – they want to keep cutting, that’s an ideological attachment to a small state rather than a genuine effort to have a sensible economic plan.

Richard Taylor:: Do you grasp the scale of the problem where we’ve repeatedly had a massive deficit and we’ve still got a massive deficit. I think that’s something which came through in the leader’s debate that I got from Farage he appeared to understand there’s a massive problem here and we’re really lucky at the moment that the interest costs are not huge. So we’ve got a massive problem…

Julian Huppert: Keeping interest costs low has been incredibly helpful, we’ve saved a huge amount of money from that. It’s one reason that if we keep borrowing too much then it goes up – classic Keynes.

I think Farage’s solutions to some of this were rather fantastic.

Richard Taylor:: I’m only giving him credit for identifying the problem.

Julian Huppert: There absolutely is a problem and that’s why for me we need to increase investment in infrastructure, investment in research, something I’ve been calling for for years. Because actually if we get more money into R&D. We are a very very low spend R&D country it went down under the Tories in the 80s but it kind of stabilised under Labour but it’s way less than we need to be at. Investing in that pays back the money.

Richard Taylor:: Two different types of public spending.

Julian Huppert: Short term and longer term absolutely.

Richard Taylor:: I know you’ve got to carry on …

Julian Huppert: There are a few other doors

Richard Taylor:: On Europe then you say .. you’re very pro-Europe.

Julian Huppert: Yep.

Richard Taylor:: The arguments you come up with, things like criminal justice, being able to get people back from other countries and co-operating on fighting crime. They’re not the core of the issue – why do we need a European Parliament discussing laws, doing things like working time restrictions – aren’t those issues for you in Parliament.

Julian Huppert: I think we benefit by working with everyone else and we benefit economically as well. I think we benefit in tackling climate change but in-order to have standardised rules, there’s a huge benefit from having standardisation between us and the rest of Europe. If you talk to companies which make things and sell them around Europe for example it is hugely beneficial that the electrical standards they have to meet are the same here as they are in Belgium as they are in Germany as they are in Poland. It would be a complete pain if they were different. So the question is how do you set those sorts of things. Either you have some sort of democratic mechanism that involves all of the European Countries or you have it very undemocratic. I think one of the biggest problems with Europe is it is not democratic enough and actually the Parliament there..

Richard Taylor:: It’s very remote isn’t it.

Julian Huppert: Partly it’s very remove it’s also its the council and the commission that drive a lot of things so what we actually see very often is British Ministers pushing things through in Brussels through the council mechanism because they don’t want to do them here. So Europe gets a reputation for foisting things on us when actually it was us making Europe foist them on us. We’ve seen that sort of laundering happen time and time again. The data retention directive being a classic example.

Richard Taylor:: So if we’re debating the UK’s position in Europe how close are you to the Conservative point of view that we need a serious re-negotiation. Do we need Europe to do less; or do more of the things you talked about and less of the social intervention.

Julian Huppert: I think we should reform how Europe works. There are a lot of things which are very poor like the second seat thing so the LibDems have campaigned against that for ages – why move to Strasbourg periodically. So Europe could be much, much, much, much better. But then by the same token Westminster and Whitehall could be much much much better and I don’t think Cambridge should leave London. I think that would be a very very odd thing to do. Devolve the United Kingdom because we don’t like how Whitehall works.

So I think we net-benefit massively from Europe. I think we can improve it – that part of it is right. Cameron, his big problem is his party is completely dis-united over Europe and if you look at his positions its just been triangulating between one wing of his party and another wing of his party. I don’t think he really knows what he wants to achieve other than to stop his party breaking into civil war. And I think that’s a real problem.

Richard Taylor:: It makes it very difficult. If you vote Conservative you don’t know what you’re getting.

Julian Huppert: No. Here in Cambridge every poll suggests if you vote Conservative you know you’re not going to get a Conservative that’s for sure. So we’ll have to see what happens. I think one of the big problems is if we have a referendum at a random time which happens to suit David Cameron or Nigel Farage that causes huge economic problems for us because there would be mass uncertainty about what was going to happen. You’d see businesses quite understandably nervous – there’d be a year or two year period of saying what’s going to happen.

Richard Taylor:: Even a general election causes uncertainty.

Julian Huppert: Yes and I think we should have one; but yes I think uncertainty for a referendum would be really devastating. I still think the right time is if there’s a change. If there’s actually something changing that’s the time, such as a treaty re-negotiation as we’ve said for years and years and years. That’s when you have the in-out referendum. I think the way Cameron is tackling, dealing with UKIP, is the problem. UKIP’s rise (now they’ve come back down again) opened up that Conservative right for people pushing for a referendum in the same way as it has opened up the space for a lot of xenophobic commentary not all from UKIP people but it has opened up that space. We’ve seen the Tories run that way and we’ve seen Labour run that way – we’ve seen the awful immigration mugs. And I think that’s the biggest harm UKIP have done.

Richard Taylor:: Thanks for that. Those were my two points and you’ve answered them. As I expected you to actually.

Julian Huppert: Shall I ask you on camera or off camera how you’ll vote?

Richard Taylor:: Well you’ve always got good reasoning for what you do. I’ve never questioned you and you’ve not had a rational and justified reasoning for what you’ve done.

Julian Huppert: Well that means a lot actually because I’m happy with the idea that people can reasonably disagree in politics. That’s absolutely fine with me. What I will always do is try and have reasons and fight for things I care about, for Cambridge, and Cambridge’s value.

Richard Taylor:: The one I thought I might ask tonight is [at the Cambridge Cycling Campaign Hustings] is the one about not voting on the NHS risk assessment.

.@GilulaArc Explanation from @julianhuppert for missing NHS risk register vote http://t.co/kYJAijxSGX is https://t.co/1vdakd1V9y

— Richard Taylor (@RTaylorUK) May 23, 2014

Julian Huppert: Well this has been taken up as a beautiful line by Labour ..

Richard Taylor:: I thought I started it!

Julian Huppert: Oh was it you.. so part of the problem is these opposition day motions. Normally they’re only tabled at the last hour, on the day of the debate, too late to know what’s going to happen. And broadly speaking to summarise [they say] we’re in favour of motherhood and apple pie; the Government is awful, Labour’s policies one, two and three, are brilliant. You know some paraphrasing. This isn’t just a Labour thing. Tory ones from the last Parliament are exactly the same way. But they’re non-binding anyway.

Richard Taylor:: I don’t like that because..

Julian Huppert: I think Parliament should be much more binding.

Richard Taylor:: I don’t like the way you can dismiss it…

Julian Huppert: I think the other problem and this is where there is a real problem – because you have to vote on it as a block and often with a motion like that there’ll be – I agree with this bit, this bit and this bit, I don’t agree with this bit, this bit and this bit. There’s no way to express that.

Richard Taylor:: A lot of it is the Speaker isn’t it. The Speaker has got a lot of power to decide

Julian Huppert: Because they’re tabled at the last minute there isn’t a chance to table amendments and I think it would be nice if there were easier ways for people to say can we vote on this bit separately from the other bits otherwise what do you do. Here is A and B, we had a fairly silly example recently where there was a vote on income tax.

Richard Taylor:: We regularly have these votes where Labour votes to scrap it..

Julian Huppert: Labour votes to not have income tax. Now I don’t think that’s what they mean.

Richard Taylor:: We don’t know quite what they do mean.

Julian Huppert: Well the real worry is, if it passed that would be Parliament saying there shall be no income tax which would be a bit of a disaster. So there’s a lot of things like that.

Richard Taylor:: I did think of doing a Freedom of Information request perhaps to see if I could get the correspondence with .. because there must be a lot of debate that goes on – you must write to the speaker a lot if you want to get your amendment debated..

Julian Huppert: It’s generally done by talking to the Speaker

Richard Taylor:: So there’s not going to be a lot of documents behind it.

Julian Huppert: No. Part of the problem is the Speaker’s normal assumption is you’ll always allow the opposition to choose which votes they want. So we have problems like this time after time where for example on fracking there were a number of issues that those of us who opposed wanted to vote on. One was about a duty to maximise economic extraction of oil, one was about the trespass rule change, one was about a moratorium and there were a few others.

Richard Taylor:: They’ve come back in. The Labour proposals were a bit rubbish but they have been re-drafted.

Julian Huppert: Yes, yes but what happened was Labour had their amendment which the Government agreed so there was no vote so there was time for more votes so Labour decided to pick up a couple of minor things to vote on quite specifically, and this was all very clear, to stop us having votes on ours.

We had to fight very hard and if you were watching you’d have seen me talking to Caroline Lucas and talking to various other people the SNP and others to work out because we were told we would only be allowed one vote on any of the things that we wanted.

Richard Taylor:: That’s the kind of detail we never get.

Julian Huppert: It’s really gaulling. We had it with the Mayfair tax loophole recently where there was a clear understanding between the Government and Labour front-benches that if we make the three bits of debate beforehand last long enough we don’t have to reach this and that’s really annoying. So I’d like to find a way where there is more power for backbenchers to have votes on things.

Richard Taylor:: You should have that.

Julian Huppert: Just briefly to come back to that particular thing. Firstly I didn’t know what was happening. The next day afterwards we had a massive debate on cycling. It turned out to be the biggest debate there’s ever been in Westminster Hall our second debating chamber and a large number, I remember it as thousands, I may not be right, of people had come together in order to prepare for that and invited me to be there so it would have been quite rude not to plus I didn’t know in advance what was coming up and I have to say that given how it is with the rules of Freedom of Information and how it works for risk registers were written by the last government when Andy Burnham was secretary of state he refused always to publish them I really don’t like it

Richard Taylor:: It’s about an informed debate isn’t it. Whether you can see the actual document.

Julian Huppert: I’ve been arguing that we should do it. The big problem is with these things that risk registers should highlight the risks – that’s what they want to to –

Richard Taylor:: And it’s very easy for tabloids to pick stuff out of them

Julian Huppert: Exactly and I would be alarmed about any risk register on any major project which didn’t identify serious problems that might be unlikely but if the headline then is: “Even the Government says there is a risk of ..” because people don’t really understand what risk means in that sense. I’d love to have much more transparency over that but you have to cover that in more sensible policies about them

Richard Taylor:: If these things were routinely published,

Julian Huppert: People would get bored saying everything has risks

Richard Taylor:: The police don’t do it for the same reason; they don’t publish their .. they have a very financial based risk [register] because they don’t want people to see the risk of of the police force going bankrupt.

Julian Huppert: We need to change the understanding of what risks actually are. There are risk in everything you do. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do things because there are risks; there are risks of not doing them as well. There is a real issue about how it is written. What would be really bad is if we came up to a situation where there were sort of pretend risk registers which were produced in order to be made public and there was actually a real one because that would mean less controls.

Richard Taylor:: I’ll let you get on.

Julian Huppert: Very good to see you, see you tonight.

Richard Taylor:: It’s really valuable to have… I think I would lose if you weren’t re-elected. I would definitely lose something. I wouldn’t think that Zeichner or Chamali Fernando would be as communicative and wouldn’t be active.

Julian Huppert: Feel free to tell people that.

Richard Taylor:: I will do. [I did]

I’ve got that balanced with a slight disagreement on two of your policies but then you answered them well..

Julian Huppert: The other thing is if you’re looking for an MP who will agree with you on everything

Richard Taylor:: It never happens I know. Everybody has their own set of views and you’ve just got to see who’s the best person for the job

Julian Huppert: I’ll must go and find a few more doors…