31/01/2012 Newsnight

Yesterday the new boss of Royal Bank of Scotland fell on his sword

and refused his bonus, tonight his predecessor, the man who broke the

bank, had his Knighthood removed. Services to banking indeed. But in

truth, is Fred Goodwin any worse than many another beneficiary of

Britain's quaint honours' system. Are both he and Stephen Hester

victims of a new mood in the land, where the rich are loathed, and the

mob reaches for pitch forks. Russia says President Assad must be

allowed to try to assert his authority in Syria, because without

him, there will be civil war, could they be right?

Syria has always had a very diverse society, where religious and ethnic

minorities have felt comparatively safe, now many members of those

minorities are worried about what will happen to them if the regime

falls. Thousands of skills learned in

schools will no longer be counted as GCSEs, why this bias against

learning something useful. How can Facebook be worth tens of,

perhaps $100 billion. What exactly is for sale?

So farewell then Sir Fred Goodwin, it is not as if there will be many

people mourning the fact that the man who wrecked a bank and did so

much to bankrupt the country, has been striped of his Knighthood. The

hardly heard of honours forfeiture committee, came to an a decision

and shifted him into a much more exclusive group of people, Robert

Mugabe, Nicolae Ceausescu and Mussolini, to name but three, who

have had their knighthoods removed. Is being popular the same as being

right? He's probably always been plain old

Fred to his family, now he's plain old Fred to everyone else again too.

Those three little letters, and long been a cause of anger for the

public, and the politicians. We have a special case here of the

Royal Bank of Scotland symbolising everything that went wrong in the

British economy over the last decade. It is appropriate that Fred

Goodwin loses his Knighthood. The focus of the current Government is

to make sure we get back all the tax-payers' money that was put into

the RBS to save it. A statement The decision to give Fred Goodwin

his Knighthood in the first place was a source of some embarrassment

for Labour, the party even tried to spin the reasons they had given it

to him. I think that Sir Fred was nominated for a Knighthood, because

of his services for the Prince's Trust, I understand that it was not

in recognition of his services to banking.

That was not true. Fred Goodwin was knighted in June 2004 in the

Queen's birthday Honours List, for services to banking. No-one now, of

course, will own up to coming up with the idea, but it was

reportedly on the advice of Gordon Brown himself. And came just months

after Sir Fred led RBS to record annual profits of �6.2 billion.

Most people will welcome the fact that Sir Fred Goodwin lost his

Knighthood, isn't it embarrassing for you, as your side gave it to

him? It is right Fred Goodwin lost his Knighthood, but it is only the

start of what needs to happen in boardrooms, we need to change the

bonus culture and have responsibility across the board.

That is what the public want, and it is what Government, working with

the private sector, needs to deliver. Fred Goodwin sank RBS in

2007, with his disastrous takeover of the bank ABM, he played a

disastrous price where assets were worth less, less than a year later

they were begging for a bailout. The complete collapse of the entire

banking system could have occurred. Fred is a man of incredible

arrogance, who totally believes in his own power, merit and ambition.

He's somebody that put the fear of God into everybody around him,

somebody that would never be stopped in any ambition that he

pursued, and that, of course, was part of his success when he was

successful, and his total and utter collapse when he failed at the end

of his career. Is there something rather unsavoury in this rush to

de-gong Mr Goodwin on the left, he was a welcome visitor once. The

politicians only too happy to bask in the wealth and taxes they

thought he was bringing. The ABM Amro deal was waved through by all

the authorities. The Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, wrote to Mr

Goodwin, signing the letter, "your's for Scotland", saying he

would do anything to help the deal through. I don't turn my back on

friends, and Fred is a friend. The Financial Services Authority did

not object to the Amro deal being done. The then Prime Minister,

Gordon Brown, supported the deal. The Bank of England did not object

to the Amro deal going through. And the Treasury, that's Her Majesty's

Government did not object to the deal going through. Are they all

going to lose their honours and their positions of power? I just do

not see that this precedent is a good one to have made. Some

suggestion, then, this Knighthood is a proxy for the �700,000 pension

that Fred Goodwin refused to relinquish. His eventual decision

to hand back half of it did nothing to as sage public anger. Now, --

assuage public anger. Now there is one title he would like to be

striped of, but would probably have to his grave.

With us now to discuss this are the journalist Toby Young, and Will

Hutton. Toby Young, what does this decision tell us? It tells us that

the Government are willing to sacrifice someone like this in

order to secure short-term political gain. It looks as though

the tentacles of Number Ten have extended into the Forfeiture

Committee. Let there's just no question that he's being

scapegoated. Why him and why not the chairman, as the report stated,

the chairman of the Financial Services Authority who nodded

through the AMro deal, why him and not the chairman of RBS, both of

whom have Knighthoods. It is freighted with hypocrisy? I don't

think so, it has come late. He was endorsed by every single politician

in this country? Honours matter, and I think it is enormously

symbolic. I think that people at the top of banking and business

generally care about being honoured. And actually, it sends an

extraordinary signal. Four years after the event? It would have been

better, obviously, for it to have happened earlier, but to happen now

and not at all. How long will honours continue to matter if they

are politic sized to this extent? - - politicised to this extent?

Sometimes honours are given for political reasons, the honours

system has always been partly politicised. But this is overt. The

forfeiture committee is supposed to consider only those who have, to

strip people of their honours, if they have been convicted of a

criminal offence, or censureed by a regulatory or professional body.

Neither of those things have happened in this case. It is

blatantly political. It has cost the country �45 billion? We are

living through a once in 80 year event. The scale of which is only

becoming obvious to everybody. It is going to take years more more

balance sheets to return to normal in banks, and debt levels to return

to normal. Years of austerity. This bank would have been bust without

�45.5 billion of tax-payers' money going into it. It is in profound

trouble. What you are doing with this, and what happened with

Stephen Hester's bonus and not accepting T it is a landmark moment.

Within 48 hours the country, civil society, the business community,

and actually the Forfeiture Committee, are all signalling that

the parallel universe in which banking has lived, over the last

three years, since 2008, has to come to answered. You can argue it

should happen earlier, but thank God it has happened. He wasn't the

only chief executive of a bank to make a reckless decision, and to be

in some way responsible for the credit crunch. The reason we

gambled and were as reckless as they were, is because they needed

to be in order to compete. The reason they were able to do that,

the reason they were in this framework in which gambling and

recklessness was acceptable is the failure of financial regulation.

course you can't have capitalism without risk. As a matter of fact,

HSBC got through this without Government assistance, although all

the banks needed, in the end, part of that enormous cheque that was

written, that is true. But the epicentre of this was Edinburgh.

The epicentre of what was happening in Edinburgh was the Royal Bank of

Scotland. That is why Scottish politicians like Gordon Brown and

Alex Salmond, were so keen to advance the case of RBS, and to

honour the guy who ran it. When the whole thing went pear-shaped, and

it has brought the British economy down, you go for the epicentre.

There were other people at the crime, I admit that. Doesn't it

stink of hypocrisy, for Ed Milliband, the leader of the Labour

Party, to be celebrating the fact that this guy is publicly

humiliated, when it was the lack of public regulation that led to these

mistakes being made, which the last Government were responsible for?

Gordon Brown and the Labour Government, and the light-touch

regulation, and by the way, at the time, there weren't very many

critics on the right about that. also reflects a change in the

public mood, that is the other interesting thing. When you think

back to previous times, when you think of the era of the movie Wall

Street, for example, when there was a -- an awe at the way capitalism

operated at that sort of level, now there is loathing? That is true,

people think, rightly, that reward should be related to contribution.

Actually, you know, David Cameron has said it, Ed Milliband has said

it, and Nick Clegg has said it. used to think that? That was not

said in the years since 2008. It is now said. This is part of the story.

What is curious about it is, you would have expected the public mood

to change in response to the credit crunch. The current financial

crisis, while partly blowback from the credit crunch, is also caused

by the financial profligacy of various states, particularly states

within the eurozone. If anything, you would have thought that the

eurozone crisis would have brought about a shift to the right rather

than the left. It was the banking crisis, which politically seemed to

mean that various centre left Governments were kicked out to be

replaceed by centre right Governments. Now we have another

crisis with the opposite effect. There is a desire to inspire moral

capitalism, and it is welcomed. President Assad of Syria has to go

for the sake of the people of his country. That's the burden of the

resolution that western and Arab states are trying to get agreed by

the UN Security Council. Mr Assad's friends in Moscow, though, are

expected to try to knock the thing on the head when it comes to a vote,

perhaps the day after tomorrow. Mark Urban has been watching

proceedings at the United Nations in New York, which are still going

on right now. So where are we at the UN? They are

talking away, debating this Moroccan sponsored resolution, they

have done this on behalf of the Arab League. It is a cut and paste

of something the Arab League agreed nine days ago. As you mentioned in

the introduction, the key provisions of which are regime

change. Asking President Assad to step aside for his deputy, and

talking about a transfer to a different system. This is the first

serious attempt to grip this in the UN Security Council, when the

threat of veto before was enough to stop it. Many think the same could

happen again now. The Russians are batting away for Assad, aren't

they? The key thing here, I think, is both Russia and China have a

sense of deja vu about this. The resolution in 1973, that came

through last March, to enable the Libyan intervention started in a

similar way, with the Arab League as the point men. They say it then

turned into, despite all the evenhanded language, humanitarian

language, a vehicle for western military intervention to top a lead

they are didn't like. They say it is all very similar. Speaking

before they came on air, Hillary Clinton tackled that head-on.

know that some members here may be concerned that the Security Council

could be headed towards another Libya. That is a false analogy.

Syria is a unique situation that requires its own approach, tailored

to the specific circumstances occurring there. That is exactly

what the Arab League has proposed. A path for a political transition

that would preserve Syria's unity and institutions. Of course Russia

doesn't want Syrian intervention but intervention, but they are

worried that this resolution would leave no-one in charge, and the

opposition forces would get involved in a serious struggle. The

debate will go on for days, potentially, it is not through the

resolution will go through. -- it is not clear if the

resolution will go through. If the regime fall it is will

trigger civil war is the concern. But increasingly it looks like it

will happen. Syria has some of the smallest minute religious

minorities in the world. Some claim their future would be perilous.

We have this report. In the language Jesus spoke, in the

country where St Paul saw the light, Syrian Christians celebrate their

faith as they have for nearly two millennia.

The tightness of the aremaic liturgy, veils are a sudden sense

of danger. Among the worshippers, refugees from neighbouring Iraq.

Much of its ancient Christian minority has fled under Islamic

intolerance. Now, beyond the walls of this

monastery, a haven of calm on the road to Damascus, Syria too is

dissolving into civil strive. Syria's always had a very diverse

society, where religious and ethnic minorities have felt comparatively

safe. Now, many members of those minorities are worried about what

will happen to them if the regime falls.

In these uncertain times, in a country where Christians make up

nearly 10% of the population, the Archbishop of Damascus knows better

than to become a Government whose days may be numbered. But nor will

he back a revolution, morally encouraged by the west, whose

consequences could be perilous. hearing from the western countries

that they are pushing on revolution, and I'm hearing that some parties

are helping arm the group. This is not helping the stability, it is

not resolving any problems. In towns gripped by revolution, the

Islamic of a firmation of faith, "God is most great", is it, as

protestors say, just a traditional rallying call in a country which is

at least three quarters Sunni Muslims. The expression of

willingness to die for a cause, or is it, as the regime maintains, a

sign that Syria's secular system could be destroyed by religious

sectarianism. These are Government supporters,

chanting for Syrians to remain united. They are mainly Alawites,

members of a Shi'ite sect, that includes more than one in ten

Syrians. Downtrodden for centuries, Alawites have been more favoured

since the Assad family, also Alawites, came to power 40-odd

years ago. Most families probably have at least one member employed

by the security forces. In this district of the increasingly

segregated city of Homs, Syria's most fought over city, they

bitterly oppose the revolution that is raging just a few blocks away.

TRANSLATION: Our's is one of thousands of families who has had

to flee their homes. I used to live in a different area, now we all

have to move because of the armed gangs.

Government supporters often cite this anti-Alawite threat from a

popular rebel cleric, to try to prove the opposition's sectarianism.

"we won't hurt those Alawites who are neutral", he says, but adds, in

a line certainly not typical of the opposition, still talking about

Alawites, "those who fight against us, I swear by God almighty, we

will turn them into mincemeat, and feed them to the dogs."

You Fears of score d -- fears of score-settling are inevitably high

in places like this, in the hills above dam mass cushion where

Alawites were encouraged to settle, by Bashar al-Assad's father,

perhaps to control the less reliable Sunnis living below.

Almost all of the regime's trusted servants are Alawites. Among them

this man, the owner of an advertising agency, decharged with

designing a new logo for the leading party. He believes top-down

political reform is still possible and it is the best way to avoid the

sectarianism, which the regime says, are being stirred up by armed gangs.

TRANSLATION: I'm afraid of instability, of the armed gangs

that cause destruction, of the invasion of negative ideas into

society. I'm not afraid of sectarian attacks. I'm gambling on

the common sense of the Syrian people. They have a completely

different outlook to others in the region. All the sects here value

human life. They reject the violence you see in other places.

Our main enemy now is fear itself. We have to support the existing

system, because it is the foundation of our society. And

reforms that Government is proposing, will help us build a new

democracy. But some say it is the President

who is spreading the fear. I'm going it meet one of the Alawites,

who are active in the opposition, despite, what they say, are

Government scare tactics. TRANSLATION: In areas where I'm

from, people live in terror now, because of the propaganda about

hidden explosives and armed gangs. People believe those stories, the

people are being killed because they are Alawite, it is all lies.

But the regime knows how to play this game. The Alawites were a poor

sect, so many joined the army or police long ago. When the

President's father came to power, he convinced the Alawites that the

regime was protecting them. Now even people who don't like the

Government are afraid of the revolution, because they are frayed

of the Muslim Brotherhood, that they will force men to go to the

mosque, force women to wear hijab, and not let children go to school.

This young Christian opposition activist, also rejects the regime's

propaganda. She says the revolution isn't dividing people, it is

uniting them. We say we are from this area and they know we are

Christian, you can see how surprised and happy they are we are

with them and support them, that we are part of this revolution. That's

like we go in some houses that we will be the first Christian people

to enter this house, and they really welcome us in a very amazing

way. That gives the joy. So when the Government says these are

terrorists who are trying to stop and end the stability of Syria,

what do you think? This Government they are the one who is make this

division between people. When you go out and you shout you feel you

are free. In those moments, even if they are seconds, you feel you are

free. Nobody will go back home. Even if a lot of people get killed.

After decades of stability in Syria, wedged between war torn Lebanon and

Iraq. Who wouldn't be at least a little afraid of the future now.

The more the regime plays on those fears, and the longer the violence

goes on, the greater the risk that those warnings of civil war will

eventually become self-fulfiling provecy.

You think you or your children got a GCSE or two, they didn't,

necessarily, many vocational courses, subgts like nail

technology or fish husbandry, will no longer be counted. The education

department claims that every child with a good or disadvantaged

background leaves school with a good GCSE pass in English and maths.

These students are getting experience outside the formal

classroom. The qualifications they build up here will be equivalent to

up to four GCSEs. It helps the school in the league

tables. As far as these 14-year- olds are concerned, it will help

them to earn a living. With brick laying you can go get an

apprenticeship, or you can go do other things like you can do it at

college, or whatever. You get a good skill out of it. You are also

getting the four GCSEs, which is kind of important. They are not

happy that in future this course, whether at certificate or the

higher diploma level, will count as just one GCSE. I think it is a load

of rubbish, really. With the GCSEs you are doing more work, you are

getting a better qualification for it, if you are doing one you are

doing class work, not practical, like this. Building your wall,

taking an engine to pieces, that is the bit that buys them into their

education. That makes them enjoy coming to school. It buys them into

their English and maths. The principle of vocational

training is not in doubt. But the value of some of the courses is.

Horse care and nail technology are all well and good if you want to

qualify as a Barbie doll, but should they give a school a leg up

in the league stables. At the moment there are 3,175

equivalent courses. In future, just 125 of them will count towards

GCSEs. Among those erased by the Government, a nail technology skill,

worth two GCSEs, practical office skills, another two, and fish

husbandry, again, worth two GCSEs. The vocational courses of offered

at Feltham are seen as vital in an area of en trenched unemployment.

Students studying childcare spend at least day a week out on direct

work experience. The school will continue to prioritise the

practical element, but that means less time for academic GCSEs, and a

hit in the league tables. vocational courses to get the

practical issues take a lot of time. We may be judged as failing in that

we have some section, about 20% of our population, will not look like

they are taking a full range of eight GCSEs.

While these Feltham pupils tended to their vocational courses, the

Education Secretary defended the changes. Mr Gove, again, lambasted

some critics of academy schools, which he insisted are raising

standards. We have had a reprice of the all the enemies of promise, who

fought against what Andrew Adonais and Tony Blair were trying to do

reconstituting themselves. It is a great pity the Labour Party hasn't

spoken against this campaign. Gof told MPs he was not undermining

vocational training. If you say to a student, that we the state are

going to value this qualification as an equivalent, the colleges to

which they apply subsequently and the employers say no, that child

will understandably feel betrayed and let down. Praised and pillaried,

as Mr Gove's favourite teacher, Catherine Sing h, is setting up a

new school, favoured on his principle that every child can

receive good GCSE passes. They need a qualification even to be a

hairdresser. Which children are they we say are not academic, it is

often children who come from states, poorer and more disadvantaged, we

expect less of them, we are not doing favours. Michael Gove says

the most useful courses, like this one, will count towards league

table. In a time of rising youth unemployment, the UK figure stands

at more than a million out of work. The Government is being accused of

making things worse. What should our children be taught, Stephen

Twigg and Graham Stuart are both huer. There are hundreds of

thousands of these courses being followed in schools. Is the

Government really saying children doing them are wasting their time?

They are saying there is a huge increase over the years, driven by

the league stable, and schools have gained a system, in some cases,

putting children...There hundreds of thousands of children

out there, and parents supporting them in doing that. Are you saying

they are wasting their time? What Alison Wolf who did a review of the

Vocational Qualifications for the Government, saying many of the

courses don't lead anywhere, and there needs to be a review. A lot

are wasting their time? Alison skaf Wolf, the expert said a lot of

cases didn't lead to education or a job and needed to be reviewed. They

were given too much value in the league stables. Your hands are

pretty dirty on all of this, in effect, you have encouraged

children to waste their time at school? It was right to have the

review, but I'm worried it will be the baby out with the bath water.

Some of the GCSEs have buy in from employers and universities. You

recognise You recognise some are not? Recreated the diplomas, the

equivalent of four or five GCSEs. Employers have said the engineering

dip plom ma is a great qualification.

That needs to change. That is not me saying that, that is some of the

top engineering employers saying that.

Why has there been such a conspicuous failure to engage with

this question of what children, who are not going to follow the GCSE,

A-level, university route, do with their time at school? One of the

problems is the measures we have in schools, and there is one

overwhelming one, that is five good GCSEs. Today my select committee

and are were challenging the secretary, the last Government and

this Government putting too much on that one measure, it drives

performance in schools. It means the poorest performing bottom 20%

in good schools, don't score there. It is important to have courses

where they can achieve and go along. Why have the metrics been set

wrongly? Successive Governments have failed to find a more balanced

scorecard. Why? We privilege certain forms of learnings, there

is a notion of the academic. This idea there is academic here and

vocational there is nonsense. English and mathematics are

academic subjects but hugely practical as well. There has been a

big debate over the years. This announcement today does the mistake,

to privilege certain sorts of learning over others That is why I

have said it is baby out with the bath water. You are imprecise where

the baby is? It is important to looks a Alison Wolf did, the report

is a rigorous piece of work, some changes make sense, not all of them.

You think it is right to chuck some out, why ones might be and which

not want? The bonus system we developed had four or five GCSEs,

instructed with lawyers and universities. It is not safe to

reduce them from four GCSEs to one. The figure of 15, how many would

you say? -- 125, how many would you say? I wouldn't say. It doesn't

mean they are invalid. 500, a 1,000? I wouldn't put a figure on

it, you have to look at all of them, some have the equivalent of four

GCSEs and they should maybe only have two. You don't know about it

all? I don't know because I have to look at each individual

qualification. I do know there are vigorous qualifications downgraded

today that should not be, that is wrong. What the Government is doing

is rushing into a decision on this. When they should be consulting far

more wide low, building a cross- party consensus, getting support

from employers. They have a cross- party consensus, you agree with

them? I don't agree with what they are doing with the dip plom mas.

is a technical skill for the Labour Party to point in two directions at

the same time. On the issue of the dip plom ma, I was on the committee

when Ed Balls was pushing it through in a hurry. It was the most

complicated than any body had seen, we asked him to slow down and get

it right. We have failed to get the right structure in place for

Vocational Qualifications, it is tremenduously important. The last

Government made a mess of it. There are only a few bits of the

qualification that are good, like the engineering. It is going to get

worse, many more children at school until the age of 18, for whom some

vocational qualification is the way to go. Why -- Why didn't you think

it through when you looked at the school leaving age? The diplomas

were not perfect, but some of them including engineering, they were

good rigorous qualifications looked at in schools. We should look at

some positives. We have the university technical colleges from

the age of 14, we have allson Wolf saying more children at 14 should

go into FE colleges. We need action on that. This is an inishal stab at

reducing the number -- initial stab at reducing numbers. We can add to

the number but make sure we never again put children on courses that

don't lead anywhere, and does mean they are wasting their time.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door

they used to say. The inventor of social network on the Internet,

they may pay you up to $100 billion. Facebook offers itself for sale

tomorrow, it claims to have 800 million users, not bad considering

it didn't exist until a year ago. We will discuss the business model

in a short time. First we look at how it can become to be worth so

much so fast. If you are on Facebook, this is how

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to tell your story from now on. The new

timeline laying out your history for your friends. Zuckerberg's own

Facebook life begins in 2004, when he starts Facebook in his bedroom.

Now he's going to float on the stock market, after years of

refusing to sell up to all sorts of suitors. The hardest one was when

Yahoo offered $1 billion. That was the first big offer, I knew nothing

about business or what a company might be worth.

Until now, it has been hard to know exactly what Facebook is worth. But

private stakes in the firm, were trading recently at a qalation of

�80 billion. There is talk of -- Wall Street is very excited. One

man who got overexcited in the last dotcom bubble is trying to stay

calm? There is pandemonium in the United States over the deal. It is

shre overdone, this is a very mature company. Everyone is excited

to see the numbers, but the hype is completely absurd, relative loo

what the likely event will be. Facebook's whole business is a bet

on us. The 800 million users flowing down its mighty river.

Someone once said you are not paying to be here, you are not the

customer, you are the products. Our likes and dislikes are a vital

currency for Facebook, advertisers could target us with personalised

messages. Are we worth as much as investors seem to think.

What's happening here? We are starting to build a new campaign

for job sites. We will build some perzone nas, looking for people

looking for a new job, effectively. At this digital marketing agency,

they are finding clients being attracted to the targeting that

Facebook can offer. If one wanted to target me, it would be a 43-

year-old, living in Kilburn, liking beer. They could target me

precisely and show me whatever ad they would like. It is interwoven

with the platform itself. Something like sponsored stories, advertising

off the back of a recommendation, I think they will get great results

if they keep this. Facebook's timeline will intercept with a

larger and more powerful one, Google, the company owns the

lucrative search advertising market, with Google Plus, it would like to

boss social advertising too. Can Facebook ever be as big a beast.

This is going to be large and successful business. That said, I'm

not convinced it will be as great a business as some people think. This

is still a social media business there have been lots of social

media businesses on-line and elsewhere. It turns out they are

just not that spectacular at advertising medium. Google found it

miraculous product where you go to the search engine and say I'm

looking for a particular product, you get an ad for it, it is a

perfect advertising vehicle. If I'm a betting man, and I am, I would

bet on Google, fantastic business that works well. Facebook is a good

eachway bet at the moment. Not a certainty. The early signs are

encouraging. What do go wrong in terms of -- what could go wrong in

terms of Facebook? It is whether advertisers could get a good turn

on a scale big enough to support the evaluation. That is the big

risk. Whatever price a company gets for

its shares, Mark Zuckerberg's next step along his time again, will

confirm him as the world's richest 27-year-old, then comes the hard

bit, keeping Facebook users happy, while targeting with ever more

advertising. Can it possibly be worth up to $100 billion. The Brent

Hoberman, and Aleks Krotoski are here.

What is for sale here is effectively us, anyone who has ever

put anything on Facebook, isn't it? It is absolutely, 850 million users,

it is the lock in Facebook will have on the users. If I have

invested the time to pull my friends in there, it is hard to

switch over. What Facebook can do is influence my behaviour.

Does that appeal to you? I find it quite frightening. What Facebook

and things like Google do, is they help us make sense of the vast

information on-line. Google says a model if everybody says this is

good manufactures then it is relevant and value for me. What

Facebook does, slightly different, and is seemingly more value is it

says, if all of my friends think that this is valuable, then it is

valuable and relevant to me. That is what it is that they trade on.

Which is why they want more and more of our information.

It turns, does it not, Facebook's customer, from a user of an

apparent service into Koon sumeer - - consumer and target for

advertiser. Yes, and also an Evangelist, if you like a product

and you become an Evangelist, and the message is sent to your friends,

it is incredibly powerful marketing. The data you give and the ability

for those to target that data is the holely grail of advertising.

provides an intentionality that advertisers haven't had. First of

all, you have the content is in exactly the right place for the

right eyeballs to see T because of the all of the things we put on-

line, whether it is photographs of our kids, or whatever, put in front

of the Taj Mahal. We are saying to the technology, this is what we are

interested in, this is the kind of thing we want. What we're going to

do, this is what we're going to buy. That is phenomenally valuable. That

truly is the innovation. A lot of people will see this as rather

sinister? Oh yes. People do it willingly? I don't think that they

necessarily go through the fine print of 35 pages of terms and

conditions and say they will accept. Most people are haep happy to say

it is a free service, it is changing the way I'm communicating

with friends. I don't mind giving out the information. There was one

a survey, how much would you have to offer to teenagers to give way

their on-line information about their lives, the answer was �10.

What does that tell us about teenagers today. What it does is it

turns us from users into victims n a way. Or evangelist is the

positive way of looking at it. is more that we become commodities,

this is the realisation of a process that has been on going for

a time. This is the most effective and streamlined way the advertising

model. Let's look at the way investors will look at it. There is

Facebooks out there, shortly, there is Google out there, is there room

for the two of them? As I said before, they approached the same

problem in two different ways. What is interesting is how they are

trying to interact. There is this kind of dance they are doing

together. Google has its social networking service, Google Plus,

trying to do what Facebook has done, it is trying to fill the holes and

put a plaster on some of the problems that people have. Users

have with Facebook. This idea when you put something out there 2 goes

to all your friends, despite them being friends, work mates or family.

Google is trying to do this social searching. But it isth also

provides n some ways, an enpsyche immediateic approach --

encyclopaedic approach. Google is more like you are looking for

something and it provides a way. is good Facebook has come up here

and given a challenge to Google. Facebook says its content is not

searchable on their sites. I don't think the use will be the amount of

time people are putting into Facebook. Would you invest in it?

did get caught in last minute dot comb -- lastminute.com, I lost many

money there. They have product geniuss knowing what their

customers want and love. They may well be able to grow into the

valuation. If it is $100 million do they merit it today, neither did

Google when it went public, and people did well who invested in

that. Assuming you had the money, would you invest in it? What would

I do with that kind of money. There is the unique selling point, it is

the lock-in, that Brent reference before. This idea that it has this

way of attracting people and keeping people in because your

friends are there. The other thing is I don't think they have started

yet on how well they can monitor it. The public will make them do that a

lot more. Thank you very much, the daily --

Daily Express has unearthed an American medal report. Otherwise

they are all going with Fred Goodwin, the Mail, the FT, Andy's

on the front page of the Telegraph. That's it for tonight. We will be

That's it for tonight. We will be Payback time weather wise, after a

mild winter. Much colder this week, colder through the next few days.

By day and night. Cold and frosty start to the day. Lots of sunshine

out there, blight, crisping and sunny, very cold, particularly in

the south. A risk easterly wind developing. Significant wind shield

here. Lots and lots of sunshine. If you get well wrapped up in the

sunshine it will feel lovely. In the breeze cold. Any flurries

across Devon and Cornwall will fade away. Increasing amounts of

sunshine as we end the day. For Wales a beautiful day. Beautiful

but cold. Further north across the country, the winds are lighter, of

some benefit, cloud dripping on the east coast in Northern Ireland. For

Scotland too, sunny across many parts, but a bit more cloud

developing. I think I could just see the odd flurry of snow, but

basically dry. Not much changing on Thursday, the risk of one or two

wint free showers on the east coast of Scotland and England. London

could catch a snow shower too. Generally most places are try,