12/03/2014 The Papers

in the Queen Mother Champion Chase. And another British Paralympic medal

at the Winter Olympics in Sochi as well.

Hello. Welcome to our lookahead at what the papers will be bringing us

tomorrow. With me Jenny Wilson, columnist for the Times, and Neil

Midgley, media writer the Daily Telegraph. We are going to start

with the main picture story in the Independent. It is of the news

conference today for the missing flight, MH370. The main story is

that tens of thousands of people are being unlawfully detained in care

homes according to a House of Lords inquiry. That's also the main story

on the front of the Daily Mail. One in ten adults will pay two thirds of

all income tax according to analysis done by the FT. It says there is a

growing debate about whether next week's budget should do more to help

top rate taxpayers. The Telegraph's leaders that statins have no side

effects according to research done by Imperial College. Billions of

funding will be needed for NHS reforms according to the outgoing

boss of the service with an interview with the Guardian. The

Express says there are ten days of sun on the way. We like that

FrontPage! We hope it's true. A lot of express stories about the weather

turn out to be mistaken. Was there supposed to be a big freeze this

winter? At least three times a week! That plane crash, MH370, still

missing, five days after it disappeared. Nobody seems to have a

clue what happened to it. A huge press conference, where it is clear

it is not just potential debris that's at sea, it is the search for

this plane at sea as well? The word farcical is in inverted commas in

the headline, that is exactly how it teams to be going. It seems there

were images taken by the Chinese satellite on Sunday showing daydream

in the sea, almost precisely on the flight path. -- debris. Since then,

they have been searching hundreds of miles to the west of air. The real

tragedy is that there were hundreds of families waiting in Beijing, who

know nothing about the fate of their loved ones. They are now being fed

all of this inconsistent information. It must be not only

heartbreaking for them, but really trying as well. Very frustrating.

There is probably a lot of politics involved as well. The satellite

image was apparently taken on Sunday. It was only released today.

The Chinese, it is daily Chinese nationals on the plane, the Chinese

authorities need to be seen to be doing something? If the Chinese knew

they had pictures of debris on Sunday, why have they spent so long

not telling anybody about us? It's a mystery to all of us to realise that

aeroplanes don't automatically send out signals telling everybody where

they are. We can get tracks every 100 metres by mobile phone signals.

It wasn't until this crash happened that I discovered that the

transponder sends out those signals. But if it is turned off or

if the aeroplane crashes, or if somebody, a hijacker, decides that

it should not operate any longer, there is no automatic signal being

sent by the plane. Apparently it is perfectly technically possible that

you could make an aeroplane turned out a signal every few milliseconds

on a low band of the radio, but it has never been a matter of course. I

would have thought that now everybody would want that to happen.

It seems impossible you could lose something so large in a contemporary

age. The last-minute occasion suggested everything was fine. All

of a sudden's flat. Does make you wonder, after 9/11, you would have

thought all of these things, God forbid there was a hijacking in this

case, you would have thought that all of the aviation authorities all

around the world would have got together and thought, what can we

do? That was another fascinating theory that I've read. We don't have

any idea what happened to this plane, but I read a book by a pilot

that said, what happens if you turn off the transponder is that the

plane then becomes invisible to the civil aviation authorities because

it is no longer sending a signal. It is only military radar which is

picking up objects which are reflecting back to them, which can

then read what a plane is doing. One of the series is if a hijacker had

come into the cockpit and turned the transponder off, only the military

would be able to detect it. Post 9/11, why would we expect that to be

an acceptable fate for any aeroplane? If they were able to

detect it, the military, why aren't they telling us? I know this is

incredibly serious, but there are many journalists that are absolutely

rubbing their hands with glee about the fact, as the story continues, it

is riveting all of us, it is on the front pages and nobody can make any

sense of it. It's like an episode of Lost. Nobody can make sense of it,

and because there is a shortage of concrete information, that vacuum is

filled with all kinds of theories. Let's move on to The Financial

Times. Boom in higher rate tax fuels relief calls. The suggestion may be

that there may be pressure on Mr Osborne to cut the top rate of tax?

I'm sure that the boom will lead to calls from readers of The Financial

Times, just as many readers of the Times, which also run this story

this morning, will have a vested interest. But I don't know that the

majority of the population is going to be joining this call. I think

what it indicators there is a lot of political pressure on George Osborne

from the Conservative Party, saying, let's make sure our people are being

rewarded here. At a time of austerity, it doesn't make sense to

be saying to the people that are only one in ten voters, earning

enough to pay higher rate tax, it does not make sense to be saying,

these people above all must be getting relief, it really doesn't.

The FT has a fascinating statistic. It says that, had the threshold kept

pace with wage growth over the last few years, somebody earning ?75,000

would only be paying 20p basic rate tax at this point. So it should have

gone up? That is assuming we still have money to spare. We know that we

haven't got money to spare. Over a couple of decades, it shows you the

change in the political landscape. There was a time, dim and distant,

we can all remember, when tax cuts won elections. John Major got

re-elected in 1992 because of his tax policy, more than anything. The

Tories in this government seemed to be fighting shy of saying, not just

that we need an enterprise economy, but that includes a lower tax base

and giving people's money back to them, as Margaret Thatcher did in

the 80s. It would be very difficult to sell at a time of austerity. It

would not be difficult to sell a cut in the basic rate, it might for the

top rate. To be fair, they are trying to raise the lower rate of

income tax. But that is really a Lib Dem initiative? Speak to Tories and

they'll tell you furiously at not, it's just the Lib Dems trying to

take credit for it. Tories being on the side of lower taxes used to be a

motive. When you have to cut the deficit, I can see why there are

internal oddments going on. But we are in strange Financial Times? Ed

Miliband has done a fantastic job about making it about what he calls

the cost of living crisis. That is the political dialectic at the

moment. The Tories, if they had any sense, in my opinion, would try to

move away from twiddling with electricity bills and talk about

bringing prosperity to the masses. That is how Margaret Thatcher won

elections. I think we might take it from all of the lobbying going on to

these papers and behind-the-scenes that there may be some change next

week, that actually the threshold may go up a little bit. With some

any people briefing that senior nurses, and we all love nurses, are

being caught in this tax regime. It indicates Osborne is being pushed

and perhaps he's going to jump a little. Prisoners of care homes,

front page of the Daily Mail? Interesting story. A devastating

report, revealing tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable people are

being locked up against their will? There is something called the mental

capacity act, enacted by the Labour government in 2005, which the Daily

Mail politely says was botched. Apparently, according to this House

of Lords report coming out tomorrow, tens of thousands of

people are being held against their will. Tens of thousands is an awful

lot. The prison population is, what? Around 100,000? Something like that.

70,000, just under. If there are tens of thousands of people in care

homes, being held against their will... The idea is that this law

was passed so that people could be protected, people that were not

capable of managing their own affairs could be detained against

their will if they were demented or otherwise incapacitated. According

to the report, it's been used too much. It might be against their

will, but it could be good for them? Of their will is not rational, it

could be. It's getting the balance right between those that you have to

keep in homes and those you allow out into communities? That's the

problem with the issue of mental health. How much autonomy do you

give people that may not be capable of making decisions in their

interests. I think it is a reflection of the mess that mental

health policy has been in for 25 years, since it was decided to close

so many homes that looked after the mentally ill and put them back into

the committee. Lots of people I know that have friends or relations, or

who themselves have been mentally ill, as soon as you enter the system

you find that care is very short, in very short supply. You find yourself

being committed, when you know, and you feel, you should not be there.

Or you are pleading desperately for some kind of respite care,

short-term assistance, and it's not available. Basically, we just don't

know what to do with people that temporarily conduct after

themselves. -- temporarily conduct after themselves. Difficult area,

another difficult area. Statins apparently have no side effects

according to Imperial College, despite many, many years of being

told that they do. All sorts of side effects, muscle problems, renal

disorder. But apparently, Imperial College have surveyed 29 pieces of

academic research and they say there's no greater risk of

side-effects from statins than if you a placebo, which seems hard to

credit but is obviously, if it's true, or if it is held to be true by

the health service, then that will have important consequences because

statins are set to be prescribed much more widely to people over the

age of 50, almost as a matter of routine. New NHS guidelines, which

were out just when I was last on this programme, are going to

recommend that the majority of men over 50 and women over 60 should

take statins in the future. From your experience and members of your

own family, is that there are side effects? Absolutely appalling

side-effects. The second half of this piece has all the evidence that

says actually, statins do have severe side effects. There are

doctors saying that the trouble is in clinical trials lots of people

and a report side-effects. It says here, last week a survey revealed

that the majority of GPs would not take statins themselves or recommend

them to a relative. The argument is they are the people who are seeing

the patients coming in day by day, saying, I am feeling terrible on

these. They find that symptoms disappear when they come off them. I

know many people who were put onto statins and found that things like

muscle fatigue and weakness was so severe that they could hardly walk

or get out of their chairs. We will have to end it there. You are back

in an hours time. Stay with us on BBC News because at 11pm we will

have the latest that missing Malaysia Airlines plane, as the

Chinese government releases satellite images of floating objects

in the South China Sea. Are these clues to what happened? Time for

Sportsday. Hello, I'm Olly Foster. Here's

what's coming up on Sportsday. Messi puts City to the sword as another

English side are knocked out of the Champions League. At Cheltenham, the

favourite, Sire de Grugy, wins