Episode 7 BBC News: The Editors

This programme contains contains some strong language.

Welcome to Belfast. Can Northern Ireland ever get over its troubled

past smack can young people succeed in business? Why doesn't government

in America seem to work? And our disabled people still invisible as

ever? This is store Montt, where the

Northern Ireland assembly sits. -- this is Stormont. Once it was a

Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people. Now it is the

home of a distant Catholic power sharing. I cut my teeth as a young

reporter here in Belfast, starting in 1970 when the troubles were at

that height. It has taken decades to reach a level of peace and

cooperation between the two sides. Coming back, I have been wondering

whether Northern Ireland can ever really get over its violent past.

It is hard to believe how this place has changed. It is relaxed, it is

peaceful, it is thriving. Belfast gets more foreign investment than

anywhere else in the UK except London. Unless you were here at the

time, you would never dream it was once a battlefield. For 30 long

years, Northern Ireland was torn apart by The Troubles. I was a young

radio reporter here in the early 1970s, scared and shocked. Mostly

the soldiers are hunched up in positions in doorways.

Thousands tied, tens of thousands were injured. -- thousands died. But

some of these scars are still here, mostly in the poorer areas. This is

not Cold War Berlin, it is Belfast in 2013. I must say I am absolutely

amazed by this. I suppose like a lot of people I assumed it had all gone

away in Northern Ireland, or the sectarian differences had been

forgotten. Then you come along and see this. This is higher than the

Berlin Wall used to be. Somebody has told me there are nearly 100 walls

like this, peace walls, as they are called, in Belfast alone. In areas

like this, you are still defined by your religion. 90% of housing

estates, 95% of schools are still either Protestant or Catholic. Here

in Ardoyne, police have stopped traditional Protestant marchers from

going into the Catholic area. It is still a flash point but without much

violence. Winston Ervine, a Unionist campaigner shows me a round. This is

essentially the front line, the demarcation line if you like between

the Unionist community and the nationalist community in a part of

north Belfast. Unionists believe they have had to concede far too

much to the Republicans since the Good Friday Agreement. But Irvine

sounds very different from the angry Loyalist leaders are used to know.

There are deep-seated problems, unfinished business if you like,

from the peace and political process which needs urgent attention. Am I

right in saying you feel like you are being pushed out in your own

country? I think the peace process is running out of process. I think

parades, flags, symbols are how we deal with our troubled and bloody

past, is something which needs urgent attention. What we need to be

thinking about is how we ensure that our future does not become an

extension of our past. A few minutes away you are in opposing territory.

The nationalist Falls Road could sometimes seem very menacing to a

British reporter. I have come to a Republican arts Centre to talk to a

former IRA prisoner I used to know well. Danny Morrison invented the

phrase about the ballot box in one hand and on Armalite in the other,

but he also sound a lot milder these days. You have kind of one, haven't

you? That is what Protestant people think. That is the wrong perception.

I think people are deliberately winding up a section of the Unionist

community to think that, to destabilise the situation. All that

happened as we were trying to achieve a level playing field where

I as a Republican can work towards my aspirations in a native Ireland

and wanting to end the union with Britain -- a united Ireland. It will

take a long time to repair. People like myself who were involved in the

conflict have a duty and responsibility, I think, to reach

out to the other side and try and emphasise and understand what made

the other side kick. If we can see where we went wrong, we can perhaps

ensure that it is never repeated. It will not be easy. This is what is

left of the Maze prison, which once housed Paralympian trees --

paramilitaries. It is derelict now but the past haunts the president.

Hopes of reconciliation and building a peace centre here have suffered

from mutual suspicion and anger. Peter Thurlow from Queens University

Belfast has come to tell me of one way that Northern Ireland is

starting to escape its past. What we are observing in mixed middle-class

areas is a process of young people adopting an identity which is based

around Northern Irish nurse. Unlike their parents who may choose to be

written sure Irish, there is a growth in the concept of Northern

Irish nurse. This is a solution, a hybrid complex history and the way

to solve that is to adopt its of both. Culturally and politically you

could be different things, culturally Irish and politically

British and vice versa. This is one way where we do find a resolution

and people who are trying to live in a different way. This new Northern

Irishness is starting to show itself. For a while I lived in the

Euro warmed hotels in the world. It used to be full of journalists, now

it is full of businesspeople. You cannot escape the history. The

extraordinary thing to me is how it is losing its power.

At long last, the British economy does seem to be picking up, but

youth and employment is still hugely worrying. Big employers like the

government and large private sector companies are not hiring school

leavers and graduates like they used to. Our business editor Robert

Heston wonders if the only hope for the young is to set up in business

for themselves. There is a quiet revolution going on

in our schools, although not caused by the schools. It is all about how

our young people are thinking they will earn a living. The unemployment

rate among young people is significantly higher than for the

rest of the population. One in five of them, that is about a million 16

to 24-year-olds are classed as unemployed. I have come to a school

quite a lot like the one I went to in the 1970s. It is a comprehensive

in east London to ask its students how they see their futures and

whether any of them are thinking of setting up their own businesses?

Great to meet all of you. What do you think about the idea of setting

up your own business? My mum started up her own small business. She has

influenced me to try and start my own business and be a manager. Ever

since a young age I have always found business really fascinating

and wanted to own a business. Me personally, I would not go down that

route because making a business in this economy is really hard. This is

one of our studios where we are going to make some lovely Julie

Rae. Jessica Rose is among the one in ten under 29 who have either set

up a business or are in the process of doing so. Now just 25 years old,

she owns and runs what she thinks is Europe's largest jewellery making

school. I think there were two main obstacles for me, one of them was

confidence, feeling like I could it and I did not need all these

previous skills and experience to go out there and start my own. And the

second one was knowledge. When I first started I had no business

training whatsoever, note jewellery training whatsoever, but I woke up

one day and thought, I would really love to be a jewellery designer.

That is a tricky position to be in because a lot of wool would say, and

did say, you are mad. The madness paid off. She used her savings were

working as a nanny to learn jewellery making and now she has

half ?1 million turnover and is in profit. Luke has set up -- has

backed a number of businesses. Has there been a shift in attitudes

towards people who have set up businesses? In the early 1980s it

was seen as being eccentric to run your own company and get a start-up.

Now there has been a huge cultural shift and it is seen as a cool thing

to do. That is why so many educated and bright young people see it as a

first choice. The proportion of young people

taking the first steps to becoming entrepreneurs has doubled since the

crash and recession of 2008. Every kid who sets up a business is one

less unemployed person and potentially, one more employer of

others. But strikingly, when they think about doing it themselves, the

spur does not come from the classroom. I look up to my mum and

Didier dropper. I would like to work hard like my mum did and I would

like to give back to people who deserve it because they have not got

the opportunity. My parents came from the Caribbean and they came at

a young age. They were so poor that they had to look after their

siblings while my grandparents were working. So seeing them struggle and

knowing, even now, they are still kind of struggling, that is pushing

me to have higher goals and really motivate me a lot as well. All the

students I met here at Central Foundation, are planning to go to

university, but is a university education essential for setting up a

business? As it happens, one of the individuals they cited was a bit of

a hero. Jamal Edwards has set up his successful film operation on YouTube

and he did this straight after leaving school. So I am off to meet

Jamal Edwards to find out how he did it.

What are you doing filming me? ! 23-year-old Jamal Edwards' online

showcase for his movies, which has had 100 million views, is so

successful that even Google looked to him for an endorsement. You put

these films that you made on YouTube and then YouTube starts to share

some of the advertising revenue with you and that is when you are seeing

this is not just a hobby... It is more of a business. But I did not

start it thinking I wanted to make money from it, it was more of a

passion. Loads of people think I am going to do this to make money. It

should be something that is a passion and you are doing well at it

and then hopefully the money will come later. Money and success have

come. And some interesting people like being seen with him. Everything

I have done, I have learnt it. I learn it from my peers. Is their

stuff that schools could be doing to help young people recognise that

there is an opportunity to create businesses? I think schools could,

it is like learning better kept at home. The earlier you learn it.

There were kids weighing up the profits and margins. I thought, you

are young. That stuff needs to be put into education much earlier.

From the playground to Chile economic reality, where we might all

benefit if they few more wealth creators were nurtured by our

schools. Something went badly wrong in

Washington in October. President Obama could not get the national

budget passed a Republican opposition which was determined to

do all it could to stop his medical aid plans. Government services were

shut down. Wages went and paid. American prestige around the world

suffered accordingly. On four separate occasions in the past two

years, President Obama has teetered on this particular brink. This month

he went over the edge. It has prompted our North America editor

Mark Mardell to ask, what is the problem with American government?

What on earth is wrong with this town? All the classical architecture

in the world cannot disguise the fact that in this vital capital,

democracy has become a hysterical drama. The puzzle is, why the man

who lives here, too many the most powerful man in the world, is so

often thwarted. The simple answer, Congress. Sometimes it seems

President Obama cannot get anything done at all. His legislation on

guns, immigration and environment languishes in Congress and then

there is the recent Disney is. Some people would blame his personal

style. He is not very touchy-feely. But I think it is something much

deeper than that, something about the whole American system at the

moment. This is a country where sometimes it seems everyone talks

and nobody listens. The leader of a divided Government and a divided

America knows he is often at the mercy of a new breed of activists

from the conservative Tea Party who hate him and Hull his work -- and

all his works. Both sides are loath to blink in a battle for America. I

recognise there are some House members, Republican House members

where I got clobbered in the last election and they don't get

politically rewarded a lot for being seen as negotiating with me. That

makes it harder. Makes it harder for divided Government to come together.

A lot harder, because in 2010 not only did Republicans win control of

this place, the House of Representatives, the victors were a

new breed of radicals. In a Washington hotel social

conservatives gather for their annual values voter summit, while

the name the Tea Party is only a few years old, the resentful righteous

right have been a force for years, people who distrust the media and

the elite who believe their country is in mortgage pe -- in mortal

peril. We look back at the time of the founding of the country and see

what the founding fathers intended with the constitution. He intended

to create a Government of gridlock where each of the Var yougs

institutions -- various, would goord their rights and I think what you

are seeing is one of the Houses, the House, with a good number of people

who are more conservative, asserting their rights as American citizens

and they're listening to people back home. You don't have to be long in

this town before someone will tell you we used to be so different in

the old days. Then sure politicians would scream and shout, but they

could come somewhere like this hotel after work, have a drink, do a deal,

the sort of deals that make this town tick. What they don't tell sup

why they could be so chummy over the drinks. The Democrat quite likely

was from the south. You have district... Something else has made

man who enjoys playing with maps, man who enjoys playing with maps,

maps which show why some Republicans don't give a figure for the middle

ground. Outside his office the Potomac river and on the other side

Virginia. A example of what they call redistricting. What we would

call gerrymandering. You have a situation where Republicans control

the process after the sendups. The effect is that Democrats were able

to carry Virginia for the President in 2012 and able to carry Virginia's

Senate seat in 2012 but Republicans won eight out of the 11

congressional districts. We are at loggerheads as a country thanks to

voters who elected different people. But the Arctic ture of American --

architecture of American Government makes this more of a problem,

designed to keep the slave states on makes this more of a problem,

board, used for decades to impose white power on the south, it's

wrought specifically to stop stuff happening. Republicans are part of

the Government with real power. In most governments you don't get the

fancy offices and trappings of power until you have done the deals and

here you do. It's a commodity in short supply. When the country falls

into a mood of de... Robert Dallek is optimistic. We have been here

before but there is a new factor. It relates to the fact we have the

first African-American President in history. Nobody is going to say I am

a racist or against having a black as President but there is a

significant amount of that, the notion that white, small town

America, white America, is being pushed aside by African-Americans,

Hispanics, the influx that may change Texas, for example, which has

been a Republican state for the last 20 years. America is not just

changing, it's still becoming with two very different visions of what

it should be. When one party is determined to block the other, in a

place almost designed to seize up, expect rolling crisis. It's better

perhaps than civil war but not a great example to the

It's more than 40 years since the parliament in London passed the

first law giving equal opportunities to disabled people. Protecting them

from discrimination. The 2012 Paralympic Games celebrated the

extraordinary achievements of disabled athletes. It showed just

how much British society has changed. Even so, a year later are

people with disabilities still effectively invisible? It's a

question for our contributing editor this month, Alison Holt.

It's double gold for David Weir! Ellie Simmonds is not going to stop!

Remarkable feats, great athletes striving to be the best in both the

Olympics and the Paralympics. In the summer of 2012 here in the Olympic

Park in London it was an exciting time, a uniting time. The Olympics

and Paralympics celebrated what people could do. They weren't judged

on what they couldn't do. That left many of us feeling pretty good about

the society in which we live. Walking through the Olympic Park now

the athletes are long gone and buildings are transforming as part

of the legacy. But what about things you can't see? What's happened to

that greater understanding of disability? For instance, there's a

debate on social media at the moment which makes really uncomfortable

reading. It's the everyday comments which are made to people with

disabilities. Things like, is your daughter normal then? Disabled

people don't have to pay any bills, do they?

Even, people like you should be in a home, it's not fair that the rest of

us have to deal with your problems. Francesca is a cometic and actor,

she also is what she describes as wobbly. I think that we should have

more positive names for conditions, like instead of something really

horrible like a schizophrenic, why don't we just say overimaginative?

Sitting in the audience you are given a funny and heartfelt glimpse

into her world and you are challenged. My show is called What

the lock is normal? She believes the Paralympics may have given us all a

warm glow but since then welfare reform has made life much tougher

for disabled people. I think attitudes have been polarised and

disabled people now are either brilliant athletes or work-shy

scroungers. Every disabled person I have ever come across really, really

wants to work. I have never met anyone who doesn't. Those people who

cannot work because they're too ill or disabled spend their lives

wishing they could. The Government maintains its welfare reforms will

target help at those who most need it. Another concern for Francesca is

the media. Aside from the Paralympics, it's still largely

invisible in the media and we live in a world where media has so much

power in shaping attitudes. How do you change attitudes? Some believe

we have to rethink everything about the way in which disability is

portrayed. That's right down to the internationally recognised access

symbol. This is one idea, an active figure driving themselves forward.

Maybe we should have signs like these paintings by Rachel which are

active... You know, these are really active. At this gallery, a stone's

throw from the Olympic Park, disabled and non-disabled artists

have been reassessing disability. Tony Heaton put the exhibition

together. Disability isn't always about physical impairment, it's

about facial disfigment, impairments Tony's own sculpture was impossible

to miss during the Paralympics. But four decades after the first

disability legislation how far does he think we have got? Oh! Well, when

I get on a train and there's luggage in the space that says this is

designated by law for a wheelchair user or on a bus and there's a load

of people stood there and people who clearly don't have a blue badge

parking in spaces you have to make a judgment that people don't really

care. Only 17% of disabled people are born

with their disability. Four years ago Lance Corporal Tyler Christopher

lost both his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan. He gets a lot of

support from the Army. But there's a lot of adapting to do. I have to

plan things. If I was travelling somewhere and there's a risk of say

a lot of steps I wouldn't be sure about going to the place.

As you are going along if you think you are going to fall to the left

put your hand down. He is here to mentor other disabled soldiers in

the sport he has come to love, sledge hockey. For him there is a

simple lesson we should have learned from London 2012. Everyone can do

amazing things. It's not to judge this bloke who is missing legs, and

it's how you see them - you think he is struggle ng, in a day he could

probably beat you down the road. Not talking about me, personally, unless

it was downhill and I was in the wheelchair. He is being modest, he

is in the British sledge hockey team in training for hopefully Sochi. In

40 years of disability legislation there's been important change. But

there's still a long way to go. If anything, the Paralympics raised our

expectations and showed how everyone benefits if we all feel valued.

Since I first worked here in Northern Ireland nearly 50 years ago

now things have changed out of all recognition. And yet one thing has

stayed the same, history is still a real burden. Remember 1690, remember

1916, remember 1969? As Bill Clinton, a real friend of Northern

Ireland once said, they could do with a bit less history here and a

bit more future. That's it from Belfast. Until we meet again,

goodbye.