14/12/2015 Newsnight

Make or break on migration: EU nations are saying no

to the Prime Minister's plan to cut the numbers coming to Britain.

How does he get out of that one? This evening an ICM poll puts

It's immigration that the public wants to see movement on. Tonight an

ICM poll puts support for Britain leaving the EU

neck and neck with staying in, and it suggests the Government

must get substantial Where are they now? We talk

to the family in the first of our series on those who've

endured the most perilous of journeys this year. We don't

understand the darchingers of the sea. We just put our foot and there

on the boat. And the lady with the iron shoulder

pads. Steve Smith looks ahead

to tomorrow's sale of some Do you have your eye on anything? I

do have my eye, in fact I've put in a bid. I'm certainly not going to

tell you what it is. Would I be right thinking it's this kind of

shape, maybe with a handle on the top. You swine. You swine.

We're in the countdown to the crunch.

Thursday is the day when David Cameron gets

the attention of EU leaders sitting down in one room together.

A few hours only, some of that over dinner.

But a chance to present his case for a different relationship

Now most of it is not going to be difficult.

Some of it verges on the banal - a clear commitment to boost

competitiveness and productivity, for example.

I doubt anyone will argue with that as an objective.

But we have to keep coming back to one item causing a headache -

the four-year rule: Mr Cameron's idea for getting immigration down

is to stop migrants getting in-work benefits for their first

The answer from much the EU has been "no".

Archive: They carry no arms, but hack saws and destroy no enemies but

the artificial barriers. A 50s protest aimed at getting rid of

European borders. Today these frolics have given way to something

more like fury. David Cameron has had to renegotiate Britain's

relationship with the EU. Behind the scenes, the Prime Minister's

officials talk about the four EU negotiation demands as four baskets.

You may even be able to repeat these off by heart now - an opt out from

ever closer union with the rest of the EU. That the EU is a

multicurrency union and a group national veto for parliaments. It's

the fourth basket that's most empty, immigration. The Prime Minister has

acknowledged that other European countries don't support the

four-year ban on tax credits. He's openly asking for something else

inside. What to put in the fourth and final basket? There are two

ideas doing the rounds. The first is the idea an emergency brake and that

does what it says on the tin. If levels of immigration to Britain

from Europe got to unsustainably high levels, then a brake would be

pulled and it would stop. The other idea more aggressively pursued by

Downing Street is the idea of a residency test. This would see the

four-year ban on tax credits that's proved so hard to get, flipped on

its head. Instead both EU migrants and British citizens would have to

prove they've been in the country for more than four years before they

got their tax credits. There are problems with both these ideas.

The problem with the emergency brake is that the commission would decide

what constitutes a surge of immigration and the brake could be

pulled. So the UK Government isn't super happy with that. The residency

test idea, the problem is that Brits returning home from elsewhere in the

EU would also have to wait for four years before they could get

benefits. Brits who hadn't been anywhere would get a leg up from the

benefits system. The last idea is that Brits from the ages of 18 to 22

years old would also have to wait four years just like EU migrants.

Ways around these problems are being explored inside Government.

18-year-olds who stand to lose out, at the moment, could inherit their

parents national insurance numbers and to avoid hitting people who live

abroad, like armed service personnel, it could be that you'd

only need to show you had lived in the UK for four out of every ten

years. This afternoon, at an event in Westminster, Tory MPs de-- Tory

MPs debated what reforms David Cameron must bring back from Europe.

I don't mind in-work benefits for people who are working. It's out of

work benefits that concern people. Undoubtedly immigration as such is

the biggest issue on the doorstep. I don't equate the in-work benefits

with immigration. I don't think that stops immigrants coming in, if they

know that they're going to get in-work benefits. I don't think

that's the draw. The fact that we have one of the fastest growing

economies in the West, there are plenty of jobs around, that's

drawing immigrants in, not the benefits. But for others the tax

credit demand doesn't go far enough The renegotiation will not provide

the fundamental change that the Prime Minister promised. It's not

going to bring powers back. It's certainly not going to take back

control. This evening an ICM poll, conducted by the vote leave

campaign, suggests support for leaving Europe is rising, asking

people if they will vote to stay or leave should freedom of movement

rules stay the same, 40% said they would vote to stay, but 45% said

rules stay the same, 40% said they they'll vote to leave. 40 years

after signing up, we're now negotiating a different deal,

controlling immigration, not trade, has become the biggest issue. David

Cameron's job is to get as much into that fourth basket as other EU

leaders will let him. We were commenting on that Thatcher

sweater. More on her clothes later. In a moment, we'll hear two views

from within the Tory Party but first, let's get a perspective

from one of the countries he has to Sven Miksa is the chair of that

country's foreign affairs We believe equal treatment of EU

citizens irrespective of which passport

they carry, is a very important, I would say,

fundamental and to pull Just as free movement of people

and free movement of labour. So I think that while we are

interested in the UK staying a member of the European Union,

this is an extremely If you had to choose

Britain out of the EU or, Reneging on this

important principle, would you renege on the principle

or would you see Britain It is only fair that taxpayers,

people who work and pay taxes would also be eligible

to all the benefits. If the UK benefit system is overly

generous, then the UK Government should very seriously

consider reforming it. But I think workers,

irrespective of whether they have been born in the UK

or carry other EU member states passports, should be eligible

to similar benefits. Now, it's clear

the PM has a problem. Let's imagine we are sitting

round a table advising him. There would be different

pieces of advice coming from within his own party,

and we've a range of two Tory MPs Here in the studio, eurosceptic

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is on the European Scrutiny Committee,

and from Westminster, the more pro-European MP

Neil Carmichael, who is the chair Good evening to you both. Imagine

the Prime Minister was sitting here, he's got this problem, what would

your advice be on this migration issue? I would certainly talk about

the residency test as a key part of this. I'd acknowledge we need to

control immigration. But actually, it's about Britain taking control

itself of its own borders by making the necessary changes through

modifying our welfare payment system, as Allan Johnson was

referring to yesterday, very sensibly and looking at the

residency test in a serious way. When you say residency test, do you

mean, look, no-one who's been living here, whether a British passport or

Estonian passport gets tax credits until they've been here four years?

That doesn't cross this principle that Estonians and British passport

holders get different treatment? It does mean that essentially. I think

that brings us to the point, there are quite a lot of Britons who live

outside Britain and in the European Union. They would have to qualify

for a residency test in those terms. We would have to negotiate a way

around dealing with, for example, members of the armed forces and

others. The key point is to make sure that we are focussed on what we

want to acheer, which is a sense -- achieve, which is a sensible

reduction of those coming in simply to benefit from welfare payments.

What about the idea of converting the plan for the four-year plan into

a residency test so that some Brits wouldn't actually get the benefits,

do you think that works? I think it's superficially attractive. The

problem is that it takes away fundamental rights from people who

might have lived here and worked here for 30 years, go abroad for a

couple of years because of a posting with their company, you might go off

to the BBC's correspondent in Washington and now you're not

entitled to benefits having paid if for decades. There isn't a

fundamental equality between a British citizen and a foreign

citizen. They're a different nature. You're accepting that citizens

across Europe should be equal? No, I'm not. I'm saying they're

different. We've dealt with that proposal. We're sitting round the

table, David Cameron is there, what is your advice? My proposal to him

would be to go further and to say that the free movement of people

does not work in the British interest, that the European Union is

incapable of dealing with a migration crisis across Europe. We

took in 183,000 economic migrants from the European Union last year.

And that is too many. Therefore we should have the same controls on

Europe as on the rest of the world. I see no reason why it's easier to

come here from Bulgaria than from India. There should be equality

across the world of immigration to the United Kingdom. We're in the

meeting with the PM, what do you say to that one? I think the problem

with Jacob's proposals is that they affect the activity of business. Of

course, business really does need to make sure that labour can move from

one place to another. We need expertise. The best way of dealing

with that movement is recognising that we ourselves have

responsibilities to make sure our skills and education systems provide

the labour that we need. That's the remit that I have as chairman of the

education Select Committee. It's relevant to this debate because it's

critical that we have the kind of labour that we need. I think the

other big problem with Jacob's proposal is that it effectively does

mean that people who are not here, but who've left Britain and are

living in the European Union would actually be badly affected too. Can

I not give another problem with the proposal, which is that the

Europeans would tell us to get lost. Oh, would they? Would they? The

European Union is suffering from a collapse in confidence in the euro

and has had to bail out lots of countries. It's suffering from

absolute crisis of migration across the European Union and has managed

to relocate 184 out of 160,000 people. Then the UK says we're going

to leave, we give them ?12 billion a year. We're crucially important to

the EU, we just don't want to be signed up to everything. We're not

in the euro. We shouldn't be in free movement. We can get labourerers

from all over the world. They don't need to be from Europe. Do you think

the rest of Europe would go along with that plan if we called their

bluff on it? I do think we have to bear in mind there are another 27

nation states involved in this. We do have some issues not least, what

are we going to do if we left the European Union? And Jacob's looked

at the Norwegian solution, almost - I've never looked at the Norwegian

solution. He's talking about the 10 billion or so that we pay. The

Norwegians pay the equivalent for not being in the European Union at

all. That's something we have got to think about. If we wanted to trade

with the European Union we would effectively have to pay but have

little or no influence of the way the European Union worked. 20

seconds each on a third idea, which is David Cameron says OK, I can't

get the agreement with the Europeans on the migration issue, I'll give in

on that one. How bad would that be? He went into the negotiation asking

for nothing, if he got less than nothing, the negotiation will be a

complete waste of time. Do you think he can come back and say I'm getting

three out of four, my other things will probably be given, I can't get

this one, but it's enough. He has got three out of four and that's

very secure. He needs to make sure that we do actually get some sort of

arrangement about immigration and that is about making changes

domestically and encouraging European partners to accept that we

need to change. Thank you both very much.

Aside from featuring in the UK's EU renegotiation,

migration has been THE issue of 2015.

Every country in Europe has been affected by it.

Whatever opinion we might have of the appropriate response,

we have all undoubtedly been affected by some of the pictures

of migrants making their hazardous journeys to this continent,

Well, this week, as we head to Christmas, we are going to visit

some of the characters who feature in three famous photos of the year.

Katie Razzall meets the faces of the migrant crisis.

I mean, that face, so much agony and emotion in that face.

So many migrants have made the treacherous journey by sea from

Turkey to Greece. As individuals, most pass almost unnoticed, but one

came to symbolise the agony of many. His family survived the journey,

just, as people in boats around them drowned.

We begin to cry. The water is into the boat and up this moment we feel

it is dangerous of death. Death of the sea. But God with us, we begin

to cry and pray to God to save us and save our kids.

Until now, we cannot sleep, and also the kids cannot sleep alone. They

say Timmy, mummy I am frightened and I want to sleep with you. This fear

is very terrible and it is hard. They now live in Germany. One family

to a room, waiting to find out if their asylum claims succeeds. A

million refugees have moved to the country this year. When the picture

went round the world, because others on their dinky Assyrian, it was

assumed they were. They are Iraqis, teacher and a mechanic who had lived

a comfortable life in Baghdad. What happened, why did you have to leave

Iraq? Nobody helped me. I am crying all

night. Please, anyone help me, they want to kill... When I remember,

this moment is destroying me and destroying my life. For that, I sell

everything to save my children. For that, I am here. To save my kids and

to save my life. After the trials of the last months, the children love

going to school. Germany is recruiting thousands more teachers

to provide intense language classes for migrants. It is very difficult,

it is a grudge. We want to complete education for their kids and they

must learn German and it is a new culture, new people, I knew

everything. I took the family to their first

Christmas market, the German tradition. But attitudes to refugees

apparently hardening here, I wanted to know if they had felt any

backlash? We are happy now, we are safe from

the sea and from the fear. But everything is new for us. Hopes of a

new life are tinged with fear that their claim will be refused and they

will be sent back to Iraq. And always in the background, the memory

of their journey and that photo. We will have two more stories of

migrant experiences this year, during the week.

The Paris climate change talks - COP21 to give them their technical

name - came to a conclusion over the weekend.

A big moment obviously, that there was an agreement.

Remember, being a UN forum, agreement means everybody

Think of the range of quarrelsome countries there, from the US

The very big nations to Pacific islands that you didn't even

So, yes, it was an achievement, but did Paris meet the Flash Gordon

Countries agreed on the objective of keeping temperatures rising by no

more than 1.5 or two degrees, but their combined promises

on actions to reduce emissions will probably not

This is not even a case of constructive ambiguity,

which is often necessary to get people together.

This was a constructive contradiction.

So having had a chance to sleep on it, what view should those

who worry about climate change take - glass half full,

of the Labour government's Climate Change Act, and the writer

and environmental campaigner George Monbiot.

Good evening. We asked you to bring something to show and tell which

give you grounds for optimism and something to show and tell which

perhaps less optimism. What did you want to show others?

a chart. And the chart shows that share price of Peabody. There it is.

This is showing the steady decline of the share price of Peabody. Also,

just today it dropped a further 10% in its share price. The reason I

chose this, Paris was all about the message it sends out to the rest of

the world, that we are serious about tackling climate change and coal is

going to go. Doesn't it show commodity collapse? It is

significant because it reduces their lobbying power and reduces their

hold over politicians. The politics of Parishad change from Copenhagen

and we should have hope because politics is changing. How will it

look in a couple of years? There are a load of reasons why it might be

falling. I am delighted. I want to see the coal companies go down.

Whether they will stay down and it will come up again. George, what are

you going to show others? This is a more systemic view, when it comes.

This comes from the Paris .org website. It is the black line which

is what we have been doing. Carbon emissions from 1990, going up. They

have been growing. Then the green line, which is what happens if

everybody who brought their promise to Paris, fulfils it and doing it.

Then they carry on going up. Then the red line is what would be

required if we were to get down to 22 degrees. It is falling off a

cliff. If we were 1.5 degrees, which is what they said they wanted, go

halfway along the green line and you will see a white line intercepting

it. That is the cliff edge with which it would have to fall on a

vertical drop. It has done nothing, basically? That is a legitimate

chart to put up. It is challenging. It is not impossible to decarbonise

the economy. It is easier because of the technologies we will rely on

coming down in price. If we had taken the attitude of it is too

difficult is so let's not have made any progress. That would have been a

downward spiral. We have all these countries coming together to say,

this is what we can do and we will put effort into it. We will come

back to it year after year. Those are the words crucial to you? Yes,

the coming back which is built into the legal text. I would love to

believe this. I so want it to be true. But the problem is it is so

unambitious, what has been agreed. There is so much hype about it,

somebody saying it is a great global deal and they are all applauding

themselves and slapping each other on the back. The problem is, if we

go round telling ourselves, we have sorted it out, it could undermine

the ambition. No difficult decisions were taken, it was promises of

difficult decisions? 31 pages of text. The worst-case scenario is we

got a page with no text in it. 30 articles of legal text. 2018, we

will seek the first review. The first review, but what about the

percentage cut by then? A single international piece of paper will

not solve climate change, but this is a massive step forward because it

signals everyone is on the same page and taking it seriously for the

first time and that is worth celebrating. Is there a way

international progress is achieved, and that is you get together and

agree nothing but it looks like you have agreed. Nixon goes to China and

they have agreed there is one China, Taiwan is part of China but they

cannot agree if it is Taiwan or China which is the proper China. But

having something to agree on, then you move on with the momentum? That

was the appropriate approach in 1995 at the first UN climate summit. We

are now in a state of emergency. We have a climate crisis which has

begun. 1 degrees of global warming already. Things are going to custard

left, right and centre because of climate change. We need drastic

action. It has got past the time of creating the right framework where

we cannot actually do very much, but creates a momentum towards maybe

doing something in the future. We have DC drastic action taking place

now. We do, but let's not percent Raqqa pretend it will happen right

now. It took generations to get rid of slavery. We have technology cost

cuts coming down and the demise of the fossil fuel happening. We don't

have the time. Remember the words of JFK, we do this not because it is

easy, but it is difficult. There are things were using to get the graph

down and that is what I'm looking forward to, human ingenuity and

politics aligned, we will get there. I hope you are right, I wish I could

believe it. Thank you very much. It was about 18 months ago,

that an obscure French economist suddenly exploded into

global consciousness. Thomas Piketty had written a lengthy

book called Capital. It sold millions, arguing that

people who have wealth are getting ever wealthier, their capital

accumulating yet more capital more quickly than that

of ordinary mortals. It struck a nerve and in certain

circles, conversation about inequality became

a dinner party staple. Well, since then the spotlight

on Professor Piketty has faded a little, but he is on the panel

of advisors to John McDonnell As he was speaking at UCL in London

today, I took the chance to meet up and asked whether his argument

still stood after criticisms made First of all I would really

like to thank the Financial Times for all the free

publicity they have given They seem to be very confused

because they started to criticise the book very strongly and then

gave me the Best Business Book That being said, it's pretty clear

if you look at any billionaire rankings in the world

including those published by the Financial Times,

that people at the top of the list have been doing

better than the middle class and the bottom, including

in this country, In a way, if your case was right

that capital keeps you rich and allows you to kind

of govern the world, it's interesting that

there's so much change It's interesting, Forbes

have studied their own In 1984, less than half

of people were self-made. So people are coming

from nowhere into Which is basically

a contradiction of the book? In the 19th century,

if you made a fortune in a business during the French revolution,

the parents were rich, so you always have

mobility at the top. A more objective way

to look at this is, it's OK to have rich people,

people in the middle and people at the bottom, as long as all these

groups with the mobility between them are rising,

more or less at the same speed. The problem is, this

isn't what you see But the average wealth at the very

top, taking into account the fact some people have come down,

some people have gone up, the average wealth at the top has

been rising three to four times faster than the size

of the world economy. I thought your case was that this

rich lot, they managed to entrench their position

because they've But the mobility

is really important. If there's mobility

about who is in that top league, then your case is much less

interesting than the book suggested, Let's take the case

of the early billionaires, They have mobility,

but then their position can be more entrenched in the sense

of their ability to Why is it there is no

progressive taxation I think part of the explanation,

is the influence of Mark Zuckerberg gives 99%

of his shares to a foundation. If you want to call it

philanthropy giving, I think it's important that

you don't keep control. He might be controlling

it to give away. I control which charities

I give my money to, I don't have a foundation,

but I would like to think I make the decision rather

than just giving it to someone. We have to be serious

about what is public interest In many countries in order to call

this giving to a public interest and charities,

then you must lose any control If you are chairman of the board,

if your wife is on the board, if your family is

on the board, is this Bill Gates, not

philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, trying to

cure polio, malaria? I think it would be much more

convincing if he gave away power. I think we are being very naive

about the ideas that we don't need taxation, we just need to wait

for billionaires to give some Philanthropy is fine,

it's very useful. If it came instead of

taxation, if you have people who don't pay tax,

like Facebook, it's basically pays no tax, then you say, it's not

a problem because I will set up my own system, my

own education system and you will see it

will work very well. I think this is

the end of democracy. I need to ask you about

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, because you are on the Council

of economic advisers to John Have you met him, have you actually

sat as a council and spoken to him? Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn

and John McDonnell? If I had voting rights in Britain,

yes, certainly I would vote The history of the Labour Party

in Britain, of course has been marked by the huge failure

of Tony Blair, in particular with the Iraq war,

which has been a disaster. Tony Blair to care a lot more

about social policy, trying to be something

with the rest of Europe. It would have been much more

clever than go to war. What advice do you give him

on income tax and wealth You would put a wealth tax

here obviously, that is central What sort of income tax

rates would you like? It's not to create some

brand-new tax, it is to start from the existing tax and make

it more progressive. I see what is important

is to reduce the tax rate for the lower property owners

and this has to be financed by an increase in higher

property values. A lot of people think

that would be sensible to change the council tax

because it is capped. That's not the end

of your view so is it? Come on, you want

a much higher income I think making real,

progressive tax net wealth and moderate net wealth starting

from the existing tax would be This is something for

which you don't need the UN or the European Union

to agree with this. I'm told the full 25-minute version

of that interview will be up on you cube.

-- YouTube. She was the Iron Lady,

but under those shoulder pads of steel, Mrs Thatcher

was a woman who took Her frocks have been at the centre

of an unseemly tug of war of late, with reports that the V was too

snooty to put them on show - And it's claimed that

Lady Thatcher's own family has been divided over what should become

of her effects. But some 150 of her outfits

and accessories are going on sale Our man scratching his head

and inadvertently buying a handbag For Mrs Thatcher, like Oscar Wilde

before her, nothing stole Going under the hammer,

several of Mrs Thatcher's clutches and pocketbooks,

plus all this... # Bobbles, bangles, hear

how they jing-a-ling #. Right from the beginning

she understood the power of an amazing suit and also

of really bright colour. What we've got here is a number

of examples of those things. She really did provide a template

for the modern political You look at some of the suits

and you can imagine Hillary Clinton, dare I say it, or Nicola Sturgeon

working a similar look. The Lady's old ministerial

red box is perhaps conservatively estimated

at up to ?5,000. Her bits of luggage contain

multitudes, for some. She would have a copy

of the 1944 Employment Act, for example, which she would

take out at regular She would have books

by Milton Freedman and Adam Smith and people like that

which she'd quote from. After the Brighton bomb,

she always kept a torch in her handbag, because

she remembered how all the lights had gone out

at that terrible moment. If it ever happened again,

she wanted to be able to see These are little things

that one doesn't automatically equate with a normal

woman and her handbag. I think here you really see

Thatcher's sense of theatre She wore this when she

was meeting Gorbachev. She's really dressing for the stage,

wearing a Russian-style hat and Russian echoes

there on the collar Funny enough, one of the things

she always made me think about was the dichotomy that

Queen Elizabeth I would play with, herself as a woman

and use her feminine wiles, on the other

hand, she would refer to herself as a Prince and in a way,

what Margaret Thatcher was doing sartorially was what she was doing

politically, to have her cake To use her powers as a woman,

but also to co-opt the powers More shoulder pads

than the Super Bowl. And it's all very

historic, in its way. But who'd want a piece

of this in the house? I do have my eye, in fact,

I've put in a bid. I'm certainly not going to tell

you what it is, otherwise other people might bid for it and think

it's an attractive thing Would I be right in thinking it's

this kind of shape We might bid it up by a few

bob, but you're OK. Steve Smith. There I wonder how much

a pair of Tony Blair's shoes would get.

Tomorrow is not only the big Thatcher sale at Christies,

look out for British astronaut, Tim Peake, who'll be taking off