23/04/2014 The Papers

Champions League between high in Munich and Real Madrid. All of that

and more, in Sportsday, after The Papers.

Hello and welcome to our look ahead to what the the papers will be

bringing us tomorrow. With me are Jenni Russell, columnist at The

Times, and Neil Midgley, media writer at the Daily Telegraph. The

Express is leading on the search for the killer of Madeleine McCann. It

claims that detectives are now ready to make arrests in the Algarve. The

Telegraph is reporting on Bank of England figures, saying welfare

reforms have riven up the number of self`employed, creating a new

generation of entrepreneurs. The headline on the front of the

Guardian is referring to the Metropolitan Police's hopes that

Muslim and in might inform on family members determined to head to the

war zone. The Metro leads on a court case involving a man who allegedly

ran a ?5 million fraud scheme. The Times says a new union for classroom

teachers is to be launched. The Sun has a picture of the Duchess of

Cornwall, following the news that her brother has died after a fall in

New York yesterday. That is also the lead on the front of the Daily Mail.

The paper says the Duchess is devastated. We are going to start

with the Telegraph. Benefits cuts lift self`employment, according to

Bank of England figures. It is a good news story, isn't it? Well, if

you read the Telegraph and you believed it, you would certainly

think so. It is as if Britain has become a nation of people who are

all starting new businesses. If so, wouldn't we all celebrate? They used

to be claiming so much welfare that they had to have it, but now they

are brilliant entrepreneurs, within nine months! Unfortunately, what the

story is all about is, the Bank of England is saying that an enormous

number of Britons are now self`employed, 4.5 million, and

increase of 600,000 sinks 2010, so, one third of the new jobs created

since 2010. `` since. If you go beyond this page, and I happen to

have been writing about this recently, then the figures show that

the self`employed are earning a great deal less than the employed,

and incomes have fallen on average when to percent since 2006. So, very

often, these are self`employed cleaners or construction workers or

journalists who have lost their jobs, who are in fact finding work a

lot more difficult to get. And self`employed is what you have to be

if you have got a casual income and nobody is going to give you a job.

It sounds great but it is not in reality. That is all true, but to my

mind, it is better for people to be supporting themselves, even in low

paid work, than it is for them to be on welfare. Both for them and for

the state. I think people do have to get used to a certain amount of

insecurity in their working life, that is just the world we live in.

We no longer live in a world where you have a job for life, and a

paternalistic employer and a fully funded pension scheme. There we

would completely disagree, because you as a Conservative think that,

and I as somebody more to the left think that the whole function of the

welfare state ought to be to provide something of a trampoline, something

to bounce you back into employment. It means that as happens in Sweden

and Scandinavia, if you lose your job, then you get well supported in

the temporary period between losing that job and finding another one.

Clearly, if these people before that had to benefits, they were very well

supported! There is nothing in this story which justifies this headline.

Apart from the view expressed by the Bank of England. That is what

justifies it. But actually, when you read what the Bank of England says,

it is not borne out by the headline. It is not saying that actually this

was cause and effect. Part of the rise in self`employment appeared to

be a continuation of a longer term trend... It is possible that some of

the increase had, about in reaction to benefit caps. Possible! Those are

the words of the Bank of England, though. And only 38,000 families

have been affected by the benefit caps, and the number of

self`employed has gone up by 600,000. Neil, you have got a

personal story, how has it been going for you, someone who is

self`employed and making their own way in the world? Well, I hate to

say, for me, it is absolutely fine at the moment. He is very talented.

That is why he is on the programme! I do have a personal story, but it

is quite unusual, because I am highly educated and I have a lot of

experience in an industry, journalism, when people

traditionally are self`employed. Freelancing is a thing. But if you

are a cleaner, having to set up your own business, put leaflets through

doors, then... Yes, I think it would be wrong to look at the stories of

people like me. We should not be saying that people in very low paid

jobs should be chuffed. Which was Jenni's point. It was, but even so,

they are better off in low`paid jobs, for my mind, than they are on

welfare. Staying with the Telegraph, Jenni, you have just said, you may

be on the left of the political spectrum, but you now have an

announcement to make to the 6.7 million viewers watching The

Papers, no more wind farms if Tories win the election, and your

announcement is? Well, this does tempt me to vote Tory, at least for

a minute or two. What a brilliant idea. I think wind farms are

blighting the countryside, and there is no evidence that they are any

good at providing us with alternative energy. But if you are a

self confirmed lefty, how come you are not green? I can be, but there

is very little evidence that wind farms produce much energy. I was one

of the first people to go and see a supposedly self`sufficient

community, and he said the one thing which was a complete waste of time

was wind turbines, which have only ever generated 15% of the energy

which it was said they would. And we never have any way of saving the

energy that they make. So, you still have to have the back`up supplies

from orthodox energy supplies. But this is not just for lefties like

Jenni, is it? It is shoring up your base, this is for those Tory voters

who might be worried about, I don't know, UKIP, for instance? Yes, this

is heartland Tory stuff and it comes at a time when the Tory led

government is pushing through HS2 as fast as it can, which is going to

lose at a lot of votes in the Tory shires to the north and north`west

of London, as they cut through the Buckinghamshire countryside. The

Tories do need to do something, I think, with that heartland vote, to

say, we are still on your side in the countryside. But perversely,

this announcement is made on the same day that the Tories have

announced that you cannot stop people fracking underneath your land

in the countryside by saying they are trespassing. Anybody who likes

is going to be able to tunnel under your field, and I would have thought

that would make people even more angry than the wind farm issue.

Front page of the Guardian, optimism in industry at a 41 year high. Yes,

a very odd story for the Guardian. You think the Guardian always talks

down the nation?! No, but it is obviously a good news story for

George Osborne. And this is going to be, the nub of the story is that not

since 1973 has there been a higher level of optimism among

manufacturers. So, it is plus 33, things are going to get better for

them in the years to come. Well, firstly, that is very good economic

news, and it is also good news for George Osborne, who has been saying

that he is going to create a balanced recovery, and the recovery

this time around is not going to be just built on debt and on the

housing boom. And there is still evidence that George Osborne has

been busy in the creating debt and a housing boom `` busily creating. But

the fact that manufacturing now seems to be on the up will take yet

another arrow out of Ed Miliband's quiver. Jenni, if the economy is

doing so well, and manufacturing, which is actually only 10% of the

economy, but the service sector figures are also pretty good as

well, if that is doing well, then people's actual real wages could go

up? Well, yes, they could. But the problem with the recovery is that

all the official statistics show that it is the people at the top who

are going to get most of the benefits from the recovery. In other

words, whatever the recovery will be, it will be very unequally

distributed, and that is shown by the Government own own projections.

I think this story is significant because it might actually say George

Osborne's political career, and if it carries on, could make an

enormous difference to whether or not the Tories win the next

election. So far, the boom has been based entirely on debt and housing,

and everyone has pointed out that if it continues, it is unsustainable,

because people are running down their savings in order to spend,

because real wages have not gone up. And the Government has been waiting

in a furious of not understanding about why companies will not invest,

because it has needed them to invest, otherwise the recovery is

going to run out of steam. These are the best figures since 1973, and we

know what happened the next year. Moving onto the Express. Camilla is

devastated, as brother dies in fall. He died in what looks like a really

freak accident in New York. Yes, this is the kind of thing which you

expect to happen on a ski slope and not a pavement. When I first read

it, I thought perhaps he fell off a balcony, but apparently he simply

slipped on a pavement and injured his head so badly that he was dead

within a very short space of time. What can you say about this? He led

a very colourful life, he was romantically linked with many famous

women. Including Caroline Kennedy. He had an amazing life, and a

fantastic conservationist as well, by all accounts. Anyway, let's go to

the Telegraph. Atheists urged to be tolerant? This is a story which is

running about whether Britain is a Christian country. It has an

established church. Nick Clegg says it is flaming the obvious that

Britain is built on Christian traditions. I think we are all

agreed that Britain is at its heart a Christian country. In its

constitution, Britain is a Christian country. The Queen is the head of

the established church. That is not what a lot of people say who do not

go to church. That is where the different shades of argument come

in. And now there is the argument about whether people of different

faiths are offended, the question is what the atheists should do.

Apparently, the atheists are being to gung ho in expressing their

views. Secularism is increasingly, as you point out, the order of the

day in the country at large. I am an atheist and I think it is a

statement of fact that Britain is a Christian country, not just because

of its traditions but because of its history. We have been arguing over

the Christian religion in this country for 2000 years. I live a

mile away from one of the oldest Saxon churches in England. It has

been there for more than 1000 years. It is through beautiful. The fact

is, this is a country where its literature and history and the

landscape is shaped around the quarrels of the Christian faith. But

do you as an atheist need to be more tolerant? I am very tolerant of the

Christian faith. I do not see what this argument is about. The quarrel

I have here is with this letter which says the Church of England as

an established church had fostered liberal values in Britain for

centuries will stop soon after Henry VIII founded the Church, Mary was

burning Protestants then Elizabeth was doing the same for Catholics. I

do not know much about our liberal values in that sense. We have

arrived at them now but that is not what we fostered. Thank you. You

will be back in an hour to look at the stories in tomorrow's additions.

There will be more on the fact that injuries and file and figures are

down for the UK. Now it is time for Sportsday.

`` injury and violence figures.