29/09/2012 Dateline London

documents. Paolo Gabriele admits he some of the letters to an Italian

Britain's political conference season sees Labour's leader

desperate to convince his party he can become prime minister but why

has he been unable to convince the voters? How has Ireland managed to

deal with austerity while Greece protest and Spain falls into more

trouble? And despite the enormity of the issues at stake, is is

becoming a forgettable American presidential election? My guests

today are Greg Katz of Associated Press, Annalisa Piras of Italy's

Expresso and Brian O'Connell, an Irish writer. Judging by the

opinion polls, not many British people dressed Nick Clegg allotted

but as the Labour Party begins this conference season, the big question

is, Ed Miliband is an intelligent Labour leader but does he have the

right set to become Prime Minister? If he has, would now be a good time

to show it? It is early days. You have got to remember that two years

before the last election, Gordon Brown was thought much more prime-

ministerial than David Cameron. An awful lot can change between now

and then. I think this Labour Party meets in better heart than you can

possibly have imagined. Two years ago, this was a party on its knees.

29 % in the polls. People said it will take to walk free elections to

get back again. Now they are 10 or 12 points ahead. It is pretty

astonishing. They have been voted the most confident -- competent on

all kinds of things. But these are difficult days. Labour is going to

have to produce tough answers for tough times. But you can't produce

a budget now when every single forecast of where we would be now

would have been wildly wrong two years ago. How much of it is,

despite the fact politicians always say it is all about policies, it is

largely about personalities. People form an opinion of somebody, they

see them on television, and they figure, that David Cameron is a

nice fellow. Ed Miliband has not done that. Does he have to do that?

Is the analysis right that it is actually about this party? He is

only a bit behind David Cameron. He was miles behind to start with. He

has got a lot of recognition still to make. He has put on quite a lot

of authority. But in the end, the choice will be David Cameron or Ed

Miliband. How IT will David Cameron crash further in the next two-and-

a-half years and how much can David -- Ed Miliband mover? It is to size

of a coin. -- two sides of a coin. In general, over the last four

years, they have thrown up leaders because we are not happy with the

economy. In some ways, Ed Miliband, it is there for the taking. He is

not a head on economic Competency. All the polls show they trust the

Labour Party to look after the NHS, education and so on, but not on the

economy, and that is the crucial thing. He has close the gap. If the

good thing for Ed Miliband, who we are working in a fixed parliaments

now and everybody knows when the next election is going to be. We

are halfway through that now. But it is not enough to say, we have

got a double-digit lead as a party, not Ed Miliband's personal polling,

just because the other lot are really bad. If you say we need more

growth and less cutting, how are you going to do that? They need to

explain that in detail. The problem is, you want to keep your powder

dry until closer to the next election, but because we know when

the next election is an things are still tending at the moment, it is

very difficult not to start coming up with credible alternatives now.

I don't think anybody, we are not going to see a huge amount of that

at this party conference, but I think he does need to move away

from their theoretical stuff. He got slammed for pre- distribution

and all this kind of stuff. I think there is a danger that people think,

he does not really know what we are run out on this particular council

estate. Does he have the time to do it? Does he have to introduce

himself personally to the electorate? I think that is a big

part of it. That is absolutely spot-on. Unfortunately, when things

start getting worse in the economy and every indicator says that is

the direction we are going, people will look at a strong leader. I am

afraid, so far, from what I hear about what people make of Ed

Miliband, I was actually thinking about his brother, a lot of people

think Labour made a big mistake. When you look at leadership

qualities, David Miliband had more. He was more charismatic, he had

more leadership qualities that is so difficult to describe. I fear

that what people see at the moment is a very nice personal -- person

in Ed Miliband, he is competent, he knows his policies, but he's not

the Great Leader we need in a moment of crisis. You could say, he

must have a streak of ruthlessness somewhere, he took on his brother

and defeated him against all the odds. But he's more of a shadow

rather than a virtue, I think a lot of people will suspect he has been

ruthless with his brother back he does not have what it takes to

convince the outside world. In other words, he was very good at

finding a consensus inside, but when it comes to convincing the

wider public, he is not finding it easy. Do that is another

interesting question. We do seem to have a political class in all

parties. That can be quite a difficult sell for the public.

watch him all the time from my guess on a gigantic screen and icy

Ed Miliband time and again and I can't think -- can't help but think

he is not rejecting much, he is not connecting much, he is not forceful.

What he says is fine but he suffers from a little brother syndrome not

just in relation to his big brother but also in the shadow of Tony

Blair and Gordon Brown. He has not defined cool years. I think that is

crucial. -- defined who he is. I don't sense the connection with the

voters. David Cameron may have to find too much coolly is. Before the

election, it was all wolf in sheep's clothing. Since the moment

he came in, he has been axing everything, outsourcing everything,

more Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher, and moving on behalf of

the rich. He has to find himself in a way that is dangerous for him. --

defined himself. Does anybody understand what the big society is

yet? Redistribution is a terrible word but if they can find a way to

express its, they could do well. Should we make sure that employers

pay fair wages so the taxpayer does not have to do that? They should be

a better way to say that. problem is that party, this is now

have less debate and they are more about the leader. Tony Blair was a

past master at this. I think it is going to be difficult for Ed

Miliband because of the fact that nobody really cares, outside that

conference hall, about the union block vote. It is going to be all

about the leader. If he does not have that personality, it is not

going to be great. The All people see his three clicks on the news,

we watch the whole thing. street protests increase this week,

more details revealed on the problems of Spanish banks, plus the

news that Italy's best-known comedy genius, Silvio Berlusconi, might

make a comeback. As the European macro -- as the eurozone struggles,

Ireland shows that they can deal with austerity of relatively calmly.

They are getting on with it. more cynical would say most young

people have already left the country or are planning on leaving.

The unemployment rate in Ireland is around 14 %. Youth unemployment is

comedy about 30 %. But you have got to add on to that all the people

who were leaving. It is not as bad as it was during the worst time off

immigration but it is pretty bad and so they are being taken out of

the equation. What you are left with is still a mess. The

similarity with Spain is that Ireland's sovereign debt and its

banking crisis are welded together. Until that can be separated, it is

very difficult to get on with it. Spain is a proportionately much

bigger problem and it now has the European stability mechanism.

Ireland is hoping it will get some help on funding its bank debt

separately from its sovereign debt but it seems to be pushed further

down the back -- pipeline. Is there are cultural stoicism in Ireland

about this? One of the big books that people are buying in Dublin is

about the famine and you open it and you weep. Is there something

about that? Does it mean Ireland is more resilient? I don't think they

are more resilient. There is a lot of anger in Ireland. But I think,

maybe, it happened to us slightly earlier than it did to Spain and

because we were riding high on this Celtic Tiger and because the

minister for finance at the time guarantee the Irish Banks and

stepped in, we all knew what was coming far earlier. We have

probably been dealing with it for a lot longer. The problem is, we are

getting to the point where, if Ireland can't get back into the

bond market, you have got this spectre of a settlement bail-out.

We have worked our way through the programme and the cliche is we are

the poster boys of austerity. We are doing everything right. But it

is still tough and we are getting tougher. A lot of people are very

worried about the Budget. Given that it is hardly a democratic

situation. It is very often misunderstood abroad because there

is a high level of popular consensus and the majority of

people think we were better off under Silvio Berlusconi. You have

got to be careful. There is quite a widespread optimism for what is

being done but there is a lot of uncertainty on what is going to

happen at the next election because there is a popular kind of anger

which is mounting and it is resulting in expressions of

populism on the internet. There is this new party coming out of

nowhere that is forecast to have something like 20 % of the vote.

Yes, but they are looking for a kind of very low-level protest vote.

But the thing is, we should be careful, because what is happening

in Europe, in my view, and in the view of a certain senior analyst

that I have heard speaking recently, is that they are missing the point,

because we are looking at it country-by-country, and we are

losing the big picture. The systemic picture is that we're

going from one crisis to another, because we are not looking at the

structural problem. The structural problem is that Europe needs to

rebalance its economies from north to south. We need to look at

Germany and say, we are all in this together, either we sort it out, or

we're going to go from bad to worse. And also, you do not hear this

addressed in British politics. You hear David Cameron saying, we're

going to opt out of a whole load of things, just to keep his

backbenchers happy. But because the eurozone is hugely important to

British trade and everything, it should be up there more, but you do

not really hear it so much. You do hear people speaking now about

alliances with the French leader. David Cameron gave him the cold

shoulder anyway before the election. There is a sense that there is a

bigger story to tell, which is looking at how history will look

back at this period - they will say, Europe went mad, the austerity was

insane. They will take the view and say, they learnt nothing from the

1930s, they fell apart. It is a great deal of pressure to put on

Angela Merkel and Germany, but as you say, in the end, the Germans

decided not to take responsibility. But this should be the debate in

every single country in Europe, we should talk about, where are we

going? Sadly, Britain has counted itself out, we will gets lessons to

other people, but we will not take them ourselves. -- we will give

lessons. But history will also look back at this period and say, there

was no leadership, nothing, a complete vacuum. 12 people getting

together and reaching a consensus. But that's fundamental to the

project, isn't it? What you were suggesting is that there should be

an agreement on a way forward, and that nation states should act

collectively, but they are acting as nation states. Why is that? The

leaders are thinking about their voters, and saying, the voters

would never understand this, if we spoke about the long-term, 10 years

hence, they are thinking about the protests next week. They are

underestimating the intelligence of the European citizens. If Angela

Merkel could speak to the German citizens and say, look, guys, your

future is linked to the rest of Europe, so you have got to accept

solidarity, because if you do not, we will be worse off. Germany

itself is about to go into recession, according to reports.

She needed to say to her people, this is not just about lazy Greeks

or lazy Italians, disgraceful things which have been said, this

is about, we cannot export, our exports are shrinking because of

what has happened to the rest of Europe. The structural reforms are

not happening fast enough. The European Central Bank has to

oversee banking union, but it is happening so slowly. Spain is

almost certainly going to be requesting a bail-out. Yes, and it

is a problem of leader's thinking strategically, not tactically. It

is a problem of the media saying, the debate is this, not this. It is

the awareness of what is the real issue in Europe, instead of running

after how many billions are needed for Spain, how many for Greece.

is unlucky that this has happened when Europe has the weakest

leadership, I think, for many years. This American presidential election

has fallen into the pattern we have come to expect in a nation which is

divided politically more or less down the middle. It is a 50-50

contest, more or less. Why is Mitt Romney struggling to get anywhere?

Are Americans are engaged in this election? I just came back, I was

in the States for the conventions, and there is not that much

excitement. There is anger and fury on both sides, tremendous hatred

and demonisation of the other side. But there is not the great

excitement that there often is, and I have been trying to understand

why. It just seems to me that it comes down to people saying the

other side is terrible, the other side is going to cut off all our

rights, do this, do that, but it does not seem to have caught

people's imagination. People are very unhappy with Obama. People

find Mitt Romney a cardboard figure, easy to throw stones at. There is

just not much debate. I think it will change this week, with the

start of the presidential debates. His part of it actually some kind

of commonsense from the American people, which is, these issues are

really difficult, and there is a problem in Washington whoever gets

elected? In other words, Americans will just get on with it and do the

best for their families? Yes, I'm afraid that is the case. I'm afraid

Obama came in on this tremendous wave of hope, or at least that was

his slogan, and he has managed well, he has been scandal free, the

economy has grown a bit, but he has not caught lighting in a bottle and

turned people. So, there is this sense that it does not matter that

much. It is sad because usually I find these elections really

exciting. Is the divide deeper than ever before? It is more nasty. The

Republicans needed a candidate who was going to appeal to the centre,

at least 5% in the centre, and I thought Mitt Romney was well

positioned to do that, but he has not had a good plan to find these

people. Saying that 47% of people are welfare scroungers does not

leave a lot of people in the middle! Well, it does leave that

5%! It does leave the swing voters, but it was probably not the wisest

thing to say. But what do you make of it? I have spent a lot of time

in American campaigns, and usually, they really fire the imagination,

with big thoughts, big ideas, something to think about what an

amazing country this is for producing ideas... It is probably

because it is about the economy, and nobody has any answers. Also,

if you look at the line-up of the candidates on the Republican side,

in the primaries, it was pretty thin. So, Mitt Romney is a

cardboard figure, that may be here's the best of a bad lot. I was

surprised. I think what has been interesting about the economic

debate, particularly from a European perspective, is that we

have seen Obama, insofar as he has been allowed to, injecting more

stimulus, and it worked better than here. Americans are grumbling about

low growth, we're talking about no growth, negative growth. We have

seen that actually, if Obama had had a freer hand, it probably would

have been even better. He has not been able to be Roosevelt, because

he has been restrained by the insane American constitution.

debate is also about the deterioration of the level of the

public debate, which is one consequence of Technology, which

should worry us, because we all belong to a moment in time in which

the new media revolution has lowered the level of debate so much,

and it has become so fractured and so reduced to sound bites or

fragments of conversation. If you think that today, we face an

historic moment, which is extraordinary, because America has

lost its primacy in international trade, it is not any more the power

that it was, we have got another part of the world which is rising

at a phenomenal speed, this should be one subject of conversation.

What are our leaders doing about these historic terms? And who is

talking about that? I want to give you a chance to rebut this slur on

the American constitution. What is so insane about the constitution?

Well, because you have is huge emphasis on the presidential

election, everything is geared to that, and then you elect a

president who does not have enough power, he cannot actually do what

he said he would do! I would agree that the foreign policy of Obama in

many ways it represents the foreign policy of George W Bush. There is a

lot more continuity than I expected. I would have expected after four

years to say, this is how he has put his imprint on foreign affairs,

and I do not see that. But in terms of the stimulus that you mentioned,

if you think back to the weeks before his inauguration, he said,

this is what I'm going to do, I am going to pursue this policy, and he

has done it in a limited way, with his hands tied. I think he has been

consistent, I think he has been maligned. I think he has done

pretty well in the circumstances. But if you think of how much

stronger his health care plans would have been, and his stimulus,

both of which he got elected on - you get elected, and at the same

time the constitution allows people to elect someone to stop him. So,

either presidential elections should be much more low-key, just

one part of the constitution, instead of investing this whole

sense of nationhood in an event which does not lead to that