22/06/2011 The One Show

Hello and welcome to The One Show with Alex Jones and Matt Baker.

Tonight we have a politician who is not afraid to get his hands dirty.

Earlier this month he did a series of police raids, taking on the bad

guys. Here he is, holding the door open. He is going in! The police

are obviously very happy to have him there. The suspect not so

You can stay here as long as you want! It is Boris Johnson. That was

something called Operation Target, which we will talk about in a while,

but you have just come from a meeting with the Olympics Committee,

haven't you? Did you bring up the fact that you didn't get any

tickets? I did. I was one of many who found the computer said no the

other day and I was extremely hacked off, as you can imagine, but

I will have another go on Friday. Today, people who have been lucky

have found out which allocations they have got. Do you think the

system has been handled as well as it could have been? You speak to

the Olympics guys, this is something they have been bracing

for because they always knew the public would be disappointed. There

would never be enough tickets to satisfy demand. What I would say to

people, particularly in London, her larder so -- who are disappointed,

hundreds of thousands of people will be able to get into the live

sites, watch the thing and maybe we can even get some of the athletes

in so they can feel they have taken part. First of all, we are going

back to crime-busting. For years, the police have struggled to track

criminals with information travelling slower between forces

than the suspects themselves. answer is a new central database,

launched tomorrow. The problem is you could be on it, even if you

have done nothing wrong. Caught on camera, again and again and again.

A gang targeting cash points at Tesco stores across nine different

police force areas. The nine months, the criminals found it easy to stay

one step ahead of the law. That is because individual police forces

have not had a joined-up intelligence system. If they wanted

to get information from each other, not only could that request take

days, but vital information could also be missed. When the gang

struck, by the time the lead investigators found out, it was

often too late. Crucial opportunities to gather evidence

had been missed. There were some tyre tracks left outside a cash

machine on a particular night, which from a time perspective we

didn't know about and the cleaner mopped the tyre tracks a way which

means that evidence has gone forever.

With the help of in-house security from Tesco, the gang were

eventually caught, but only after they had helped themselves to more

than �1 million in cash. Was it embarrassing? It was very

frustrating, particularly when Tesco were saying they had had five

offences and really knew about three of them. For now police

forces will be able to communicate more efficiently. It is a legacy of

the so one murders. Ian Huntley had been able to get a job working in a

school because police officers didn't have any way to share

information about previous allegations of the threat he posed

to girls. After his conviction, a government inquiry recommended

setting up a national police information database. Now, seven

years later, the system is about to go live. It is going well. We are

95% there. This gives you routinely electronic accessible information

for every police force across the country, and that cuts down the

chance of people not accessing it, and increases the chance of picking

up names. If you are arrested and you find yourself in a cell like

this, you might expect of end up on a police database, but what about

the rest of us? Some estimate that others could find themselves on the

police database. Some people who have never even been in custody,

that is because if an allegation has been made about you or your

name has come up in a police interview, that is classed as

intelligence and is likely to be on the database. Is this another step

towards an out of control surveillance society? Police say

the numbers will eventually come down but up to 6 million innocent

people could find themselves on the database. When you are putting such

a vast amount of information, information about 6 million people

who may be innocent, it only clouds the issue and opens up the database

to date a loss and violates the civil liberties of many people.

Police will say there is no new information here, they are just

joining databases that have already existed. There is no problem with

sharing information, but when it comes to holding information about

people who are victims of crimes, Whether or not this man is

convicted of a crime, from tomorrow his details will end up on the

database, and 12,000 specially trained people will have access to

it. But senior officers insist the information will not be misused,

and this will be an important aid to policing. Is it fair to have a

database that has loads of innocent people on it? Intelligence is just

intelligence and we know that, we are trained to understand that. It

is the lifeblood of policing. If the only information we could use

is the stuff resulting directly from convictions, we would have a

very poor picture on which to base our deployments. We need to use

intelligence, and we needed to join it up as well. A quarter of the

population will be on this list and many of those will be innocent. How

do you feel about it? This is one of those really difficult ones

because you don't want people's civil liberties infringed, but when

you look at the cases they are now solving with DNA, particularly the

murders in so am, you have got to think it is a sensible way forward.

Many people will be interested in how you are cracking down on

burglaries. That guy we tracked down early in the morning, he was

admittedly amazed to see me at the end of his bed, and you can expect

that it was not surprising he was a little bit flummoxed but he wasn't

as angry as all that. But come up operation... Operation Target

sounds direct, what are you doing? We are dealing with a rise in

burglary and robbery, and this has been caused by a small number of

people who are basically traded in stolen iPhones and that kind of

thing. We target them and we can bring down those crimes as well.

Crime in general is down by about 10% across the board in the last

three years, and Operation is about arresting a particular number of

known people who are aggravating the problem of robbery. We had

taken loads of guns, ammunition, and it is hitting the hardened

customers. It is definitely a positive step, but you say you are

cutting crime but your opponents say you are cutting down on the

police force so how can you do both? We are not cutting down on

the police force. By the end of next year in 2012, we will have

about 1000 more warranted offices in London than there were when I

took over in 2008. You have got to get police out there, and we will

be doing that. I never tire of telling Meyer Bloomberg of New York,

London is now one of the safest big cities in the world. No murder rate

in London is down to the lowest it has been for about 30 years so the

police are doing a fantastic job. We can't avoid this subject - you

have just lost your cultural strategy manager for shoplifting!

How embarrassing?! He had been promoted to my cultural strategy

manager, it is perfectly true. I don't know what it plays, I read

what I read in the pages of the Evening Standard where he gave an

interview that seemed to suggest that was the case. Have you checked

the office since he has gone? paper clips? We run a very tight

ship. We have cut down in waste so dramatically there is very little

to steal. On to Glastonbury, U2 are playing this weekend but the crowds

will not just before screaming fans. Protesters plan to demonstrate

against U2 von not paying their fair share of taxes. A avoiding tax

is not just for rock stars. Paying as little as possible is big

business for those who can afford it. A new type of activist is

emerging. They are not protesting against countries or dictators,

their target are some of the richest companies and individuals

in the UK, and the charge is tax avoidance. Their target now, U2.

This man is accused of depriving the Irish government of the huge

sums of money by moving some of his business to Holland. Richard Brooks

is a tax inspector turned journalist. Talk me through tax

avoidance, what does it mean? Reducing your tax bill by illegal

means. The favourite method is to move your money offshore. You can

exploit the international system, you can exploit the tax havens

around the world so you do not even need loopholes in the system.

are not breaking any laws? No, but they are costing the rest of us

tens of billions of pounds. A even the people who collect the taxes

have dealt with an offshore company. In 2001, the Inland Revenue sold

off and then leased back a big chunk of its own property. Who did

they sell it to? A company based in the offshore tax haven of Bermuda.

They had to admit that it cost the taxpayers millions of pounds. A bit

ever known goal? Do you reckon? But surely, with money increasingly

tight these days, the government is now doing everything it can to

crack down on those avoiding tax - right? Wrong, according to some

people. They are saying the government is actually making

things worse. Graham Black is the President of the union for senior

tax inspectors. Since Revenue and Customs came into being, it has

fallen from 99,000 staff to around 64,000. At a time when everybody is

feeling the pinch, why should HMRC and your members be any different?

It is a false economy. If you invest in HMRC, you get more money

to the Exchequer. It is as if we are giving the government a winning

lottery ticket and they will not spend �1 to get the major prize.

may not be a household name, but this man is the Treasury minister

whose job it is to stop tax avoidance. The individuals who will

be laid off are some of the people at the very top of HMRC. They will

bring in the most money - isn't it lunacy to get rid of them? We don't

believe that will happen. We believe the people who can get the

money in will be capped. There are areas where, because of new

technology, we can make savings. Over the next few years we will see

the number of tax inspectors are increasing, and more money going

into the training. Are you asking me to believe that the cuts you

have made will not affect the amount of revenue you take in?

the end of the spending room -- review period, we expect to get �7

billion more than we would have without the investment. Some people

estimate it is costing us as much as �25 billion a year. That could

fund the running of every state secondary school in the UK. It

could build 50 state-of-the-art hospitals, or it could pay for 4

million lollipop ladies. We don't need 4 million lollipop ladies. But

We do get the point. Well, we got in touch with U2, and unfortunately

they weren't available to comment on Friday's planned protests.

People will want to know where politicians stand on this. Do you

take steps to pay as little tax as you can legally? If I would, I

could, but no, I cough up whatever the tax man asks and so should Bono

- pro Bono publico! Pronounce his name correctly!

LAUGHTER I was interested in the report

there. That's a lot of money they're going to bring in by those

measures, and quite right too. Governments across Europe need all

the money they can get but you have said you think we should let Greece

go bankrupt, so a year from now, do you think we'll see another

financial meltdown? I think Greece is getting itself into a very

difficult position where people are accepting more and more cuts to

their standard of living, people losing their jobs, benefit going

and all the rest of it and all, really, so that they can stay in

the euro, and you've got to ask yourself at least the question -

would they perhaps be better off going for a new drachma, devaluing,

redenominating their debts, putting their hands up and saying, we have

to try something else, because if you look at the experience of Latin

American countries who had been pegged to the dollar for too long -

you think of what happened to the UK after we came out of the ERM in

the early '90ss, actually, devaluation, being able to cut

interest rates prayer docksically - everybody said we wouldn't be able

to cut interest rate, but we did - it might be the best thing for

Greece. A lot of people disagree. A lot of people say did convulsion

would be too great. The knock-on effect on the banking system would

be too disastrous. British banks would be badly affected. You have

to keep the whole show on the road, kick the can down the road. I

understand that argument. But what I worry about is that if a

constantly waiting and waiting for the Greeks to default, constantly

the victims of this potential crisis - we'll never really have

confidence again. We'll not have confidence again any time soon.

Now, for families who desperately want a child, surrogacy can be the

next best thing to a natural birth. It's hard to imagine the emotions

involved for the couple seeing their baby grow inside another

woman, and, of course, for the surrogate, who has to hand over the

newborn child. But more than a hundred families do it every year,

and Lady Pauline Prescott went to meet one of them.

This is the top of the baby's head. This is a routine scan, but also an

unusual one. Tania is the biological mother of the unborn

child, but she isn't the one being scanned. Nikki, the lady on the

bench, is a surrogate. She's carrying Tania and Douglas's baby

boy conceived by IVF. It has been a fascinating day, one that started

early in the morning at Douglas and Tania's home in Glasgow. How lovely

to meet you. Tea? How did you turn to surrogacy? What sort of made you

think this could be an option? were pregnant with our third child

in 2009. We've got two lovely boys, and we were so delighted to hear

that we were having a daughter this time. Tragically, during the labour,

we lost her. Helloa survived for just a few precious minutes. I

managed to hold her for about 20 minutes until she died. They didn't

tell me about how ill our other child was because she almost didn't

make it home either. The grief has been so bad for all the family,

Douglas, myself... The two boys were absolutely devastated. They

were looking forward to their wee sister coming home for six months.

How do you explain to your children that she died? You can't leave your

family with that gaping hole. We don't feel complete. Their

solution was surrogacy through a charity called COTS. Tania can't

carry children anymore, but following successful IVF treatment,

their details were sent to surrogates. We weren't sure whether

we would be chosen because we did have children, but Nikki did choose

us specifically because we did have children and had lost our wee girl,

and I think she just - she felt - she could really feel the pain we

were going through. Now we're going along to meet the surrogate, Nikki,

and when I was a young girl, I too had to hand a baby over. I had my

child adopted, so I do know the feelings. I'd be very interested to

find out how she's coping with that. Nikki is married with four children,

and her decision to become a surrogate is backed by her family.

She's not motivated by money. In Britain, surrogates only receive

what's called "reasonable expenses". Why did you become a surrogate?

When I had my eldest, I saw a programme on surrogacy, and I just

knew it was something I could do, and to me, it's just something I

can give back. Why did you choose to have baby for Tania and Douglas?

When I read Tania and Douglas's profile, their wee boy wanted to

get in an aeroplane and go to heaven and bring their child the

medicine so he could make Herbert and bring her home. That just

rubbed at my heart. Do you have any doubtss that you will be able to

hand the baby over? Absolutely none. It's not my baby. It's Tauntaun's

wee boy. I can't wait to hand him over. What could be more great a

gift than giving somebody a child? Before the baby's born, Tania faces

a really bittersweet moment. this is lovely. Yeah. This is

Lola's nursery. It's never been redecorated. It's a very emotive

room for me. Yes. We're just going through the stage at the moment of

turning this into a room for a little boy. How do you feel about

making the change? It's a tough one. It is a tough one, yes. It is a

very tough one, but it's a change for a very positive reason. Yes.

How do you feel about another woman having your baby? There's some

feelings of jealousy. Yeah. Once you have carried baby and know what

that is like, to have somebody else do that for you... Yes. You're

missing something. That's right. Yes, I can feel that. But I think

there is somebody out there that's willing to help us complete our

family is absolutely incredible. This is a poignant tale of loss and

renewed hope. Tania and Douglas will be in the maternity suite when

the baby is born. He'll be handed straight to Tania, not to Nikki.

It's mind-blowing, really, you know? It's - there's no attachment.

He's a cute wee boy, and I can't wait for him to go home to his mum

and dad, but that's it. It's amazing. Absolutely incredible. And

he's all yours. He certainly is! Wow. That was filmed a few months

ago, and tomorrow, mum, dad and baby are going to be joining us

here in the studio, so we're really looking forward to that.

Speaking of families, you Johnsons are a bit like the Kennedys really

- your dad, yourself... Charlie Kennedy. Three of you were in

politics. Any plans, do you think, for your children to follow suit

and go into politics? I... Are they showing any... I don't - I don't

think it's - I think it would be very unwise of me to speculate.

Fair enough. It seems like you've got a lot of similarities between

you and your dad, but what about your mum? We don't hear much about

her. My mother! Uh, you want to talk about my mother. She's a

brilliant artist. I'm nothing like her, but I love painting, and I try

to - do you know you can buy a box of French cheese in the supermarket.

Yeah. They have these beautiful little boxes. I like covering them

with white paint, then painting on them. Sounds great. Bring one in

next time. Like in primary school. As a politician, you know you

shouldn't count your chickens, but if you have them in your back

The chickens here on our farm live a life similar to their ancestors.

We pretty much leave them to their own devices to roost and forage

wherever they want. The life span of a chicken could be up to 20

years, but unfortunately, not all are this lucky. Commercial egg-

laying hens live in a very unnatural environment. After only

one year, egg productivity begins to fall, and they're slaughtered.

But despite their ragged appearance, every year over 60,000 of us get

all clucky over them and give them a second chance. However, rehoming

a chicken in your garden is not always straight forward. The One

Show viewer Josie has adopted hens before and has recently taken in

more of them to add to her flock. So what made you think of getting

these chickens? We moved into the house four years ago, and we had

this big garden space, and the kids love them. Yeah, they're just

lovely creatures to have around. Are you having any problems? Yeah.

The new girls - they have been in a large flock of about a thousand

chickens before. From the looks of them, it looks as though there has

been some serious feather pecking going on. Are they still doing

that? They are. There is a bit of a worry that that might cause a

nightmare problem, really. Domesticated over 5,000 years ago,

all breeds of chickens descend from the red jungle foul of Asia. --

fowl of Asia. Here, they inhabit the complex

world of the forest floor, and that's what we need to recreate in

order to reawaken the natural instincts of her chickens. To help

me, I have Christine Nicole from the University of Bristol. She

studies chickens, and her area of work looks at how the chicken and

egg industries can improve their welfare. Well, you've got two very

different groups here, haven't you? Some look huge and big and sleek,

and these, I guess, are the newer arrivals. Yeah, the new ones, as

you can see. They do form this pecking order. One chicken is boss

of the next one, and the next one is boss of the one after. Right.

But sometimes chickens get a bit confused, and these ones will be

because they've only just met. ball areas - they're looking a

bit... Yes, here we have something we need to solve as a problem I

think. Although it looks like that might be part of this aggression

we're talking about, that's a mistake to think of. It's not

aggressive at all. It's related to their natural foraging and feeding

behaviour. Chickens are very, very curious animals. In the jungle

where they came from, they would spend most of the day pecking

around and looking for food, and they've still got that instinct. In

a commercial system, it's not really giving them that level of

excitement of different things to peck at. So they get bored? They

not so much as get bored, but they try to find the most interesting

thing to peck at. One possible solution to her problem is to

provide more interesting objects in the chickens' foraging environment.

I have a real mixture of things in here. Time for Christine's box of

tricks. The first thing I'm going to suggest is we perhaps hide some

treats in here for them... Right. And this would work well as a

short-term distraction. Oh, yeah! They love pulling things apart, so

a bale of hay continues to change, so it keeps them interested for

much longer. Here, girls. Have a go with that.

So in no time at all the pecking order will be sorted, their

feathers regrown, and the girls will have discovered their inner

chicken. It's all getting very exciting here,

as you can see. We have a tennis table in The One Show. At the last

Olympics you famously said this: saw to the Chinese and I say to the

world, ping-pong is coming home. APPLAUSE

Yes, it's coming all the way here to The One Show studio. We thought

we'd have a quick game - Boris Johnson versus our very own Matt

Baker. Since Matt isn't very good, I am going to try to put you off by

asking you some questions as you and Boris is on fire. Here we go.

You just launched a literacy project with Peter Andre. Can you

name one of his songs, and can you sing it? Peter Andre is a brilliant

singer. I would say Mysterious Girl. He's just got me!

You have plan to build 30-storey towers to block the view from David

Cameron's house. Was this deliberate? Pass. I can't remember

- no, I can't comment on planning. OK. Who do you fear most at the

next election, Ken Livingstone or Lembit Opik? I think apathy.

you remember any Welsh? (He speaks Welsh)

Your green policy is based on the four green Rs. You failed to

remember them in a recent interview. Can you remember them tonight?

reuse, recycle, reduce... Good. regurgitate. Brilliant.

champion smashed it. Good luck with getting the Olympic tickets on