11/11/2015 Newsnight

Tonight, a year from the US elections, we are live in New

Hampshire - the first primary state to cast its ballot for president,

to ask if the anti-politics movement could change the vote.

We've got momentum because people want to see our country be great

What would you do on the first day in the White House?

We'd do many things, so many things you wouldn't believe it.

The Bank of England governor declares good things are happening

The financial services employs many people across the UK, it is our

largest export industry, about 8% of GDP, it is incredibly important that

we get this right, we think we've made a lot of progress.

We'll hear if it's time to get over the crash, and learn

And science has found a new secret route to happiness.

You just have to give up looking at Facebook.

Exactly a year from today, this country will have

The race for the White House is a long, protracted

and often baffling affair for those watching it outside America.

But this time around, there's a sense

those in this country feel just as confused by what they're seeing.

The Republican Party, which controls both Houses of Congress,

is in the midst of an identity crisis which is tearing it apart.

What's emerging from the rubble is an anti-politics voice - the likes

of which we are already familiar with in Europe and at home.

But could this anger at the establishment ultimately decide

It's a question we'll be asking politicians in just a moment.

But first, we caught up with some of the candidates in this key electoral

Veterans' Day in America is a colourful affair.

The soldiers and their families, the living embodiment of America's

history, the legacy of her battles lost and won.

And here, in New Hampshire, a key target state

for presidential candidates, many have come to pay homage, not

just to fallen friends, but to a rising star,

a would-be commander-in-chief who looks like this.

Donald Trump, businessman, or should that be showbusinessman,

who I first met a few years back, wants to be president.

I asked him how he explains the momentum.

We're doing so well in all the polls and we're leading

as you saw last night - we were number one in the polls.

We had seven polls today on the debate, as to who won,

We have a great momentum going, because people want to see

our country be great again, it is as simple as that.

What would you do on your first day in the White House?

So many things you would not believe me.

"The Donald", exposed to the US public through reality TV.

I think everything we do is better than Hillary.

Viewing figures remain his favourite metric.

I can tell you also the ratings were much greater.

Is it all about ratings, or politics?

And for over 100 days here, he's led the polls as the Republican

Donald Trump lives in a world of winners and losers

and he understands what it means for America to be second place

and that means he will bring his A game to the office.

People are rallying around what he is standing for and what he is

standing for are those good, solid values that I think we've lost.

Ask about Trump's political qualifications

This is the anti-politics politician,

and the Republicans are lapping it up.

Donald Trump has both emerged into and defined something you might

No one expects him to back up his claims with proof.

Evidence, data, that is for wimps, unless you are talking about TV

No, Donald Trump defines himself as the man who understands

the American dream, and just as importantly, the American fear.

If there's something you don't agree with, well, you're wrong,

that's the world according to Donald Trump.

I think he's a vehicle for anger for a lot of people.

There's a sense in which some people want a strongman, someone to come

There is a way in which this is a kind of post-modern

period for many Republican voters, where there are not objective truths

I think Trump is the avatar of anti-reason.

Trump says he wants to deport illegal Mexican immigrants

and build a wall across the border to stop them coming back.

They bring in drugs, they bring in crime.

An accusation that has sealed his popularity on the right

of the party, and left Hispanics in America reeling.

Alfredo opened up this diner in Chicago's south side four years ago.

"If he came into my restaurant", he tells me, "I would show him

how hard we work and remind him of his own Latino employees that

Now every year more than 800,000 Hispanics turn 18, in other words

one every 30 seconds reaches the voting age in this country, the

When Bush won the presidency, he did so on 40% of the Latino vote,

but that growth in the population means that any future Republican

It makes you wonder why some of them aren't trying

When all of you guys pile on, that is actually going to help me.

Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon, and creationist, believes you

fight illegal immigration with armed drones on the Mexican border.

He's another candidate with no executive experience and is fending

off one of the strangest accusations of any electoral cycle.

Claims he invented a violent past in which he threatened his own

mother with a hammer, to give himself an interesting back story.

The Republican party is going through a very odd period right now.

The question is whether the fever will break or the virus will end.

I hope it does, but I'm not certain that it does.

But you're quite right, usually the Republican party is a very orderly

party and it is about the next in line and they nominate people with

governing experience, people who are safe and who can be counted on.

Ohio Governor and presidential candidate.

He is seen as solid, part of the establishment, and he's struggling

I think that people look at the problems and they look at the

dysfunction and they think, "Maybe we better have a whole new

"Maybe this football team doesn't work any more".

"Maybe we should pick some people out of the stands and see

But I think at the end, that's not the way we operate.

Come on, folks, we all know you can't pick them up and ship

Kasich and Trump clashed at last night's TV debate over

Republican commentators declared Kasich the loser.

But those close to the centre, like the Cuban-American Marco Rubio,

may ultimately have the last laugh in this race.

Because for all the feel this has of a beauty contest, what it really

First in the changing demographics of the country as a whole,

and secondly, just as importantly, in what they call delegate maths.

It is the Republican party delegates who ultimately choose

their candidate when they meet for the convention next summer.

And this party tends to have a bias towards centrism,

Once the sound bite and the fury of the noisy ones dies down,

But don't underestimate the anger of America right now or

the disarray of the party these candidates want to lead.

What to make of this race and the questions this is throwing up? I'm

joined by Frank Guinta and David Boutin. David, listening to the

analogy that Kasich was using, he said it is like we have football

players that don't work and we are trying to bring in new players to

see if anyone scores goals. Does that sum up the Republican party?

That is a good analogy. It is not in soccer, you call it a striker, we

are trying to find a quarterback for our team in this country and that is

the conversation that is going on at the family table. When you look at

these extreme candidates, the insurgents by Donald Trump, Ben

Carson, do you think they are speaking to an America that will

stay with them for the next 12 months? Honestly, they are speaking

to a sliver of the Republican Party that is with some justification very

angry with Washington. But I believe at the end of the day, when we vote

here in New Hampshire, we will see someone other than Donald Trump or

Ben Carson, who will win the New Hampshire primary. You have not made

up your mind. You watched the debate last night, presumably, who did you

like? I did watch the debate, and like everyone here in New Hampshire,

I like to see the candidates upfront, in the living rooms of my

friends and colleagues throughout New Hampshire. I'm looking for

someone who is a leader and has a vision and who can win the general

election. I have not figured out that person yet. We have a great

group of candidates who are speaking to the anger and frustration of

Washington, DC, and you get a lot of energy and excitement as a result of

that, but today in November, three months from the New Hampshire

primary and there is a lot left to play in this game. It is to be

determined. I will say, as we continue, the campaigning, and the

debates, in terms of who I will support. I was with Donald Trump

this morning, his book speaks of the real anger that many people in the

room were feeling at the moment, whether that is about wages or

immigration or about a past time of America that felt better. Where is

the anger coming from? The anger is that we have high unemployment, we

have under employment, the lowest Labour participation rate in modern

history, and economically people are not doing as well as they were

before 2008, and there's a level of frustration at our president, at

least among people in our party and also independent voters. This

antiestablishment wave, do you think this is what... I assume Jeb Bush

will be part of this and also Kasich, maybe Marco Rubio, they can

reject those voices, and say, we don't like anyone who has worked in

government or politics before? This all began in 2007, that is when it

started to bubble, and it came to the top around 2008 and the

beginning of the year after that, when we had to bail out the banks

and the auto industry. The president put up the programme for homeowners

who were experiencing bankruptcy, and people back home simply said

they had had enough of government interfering with their lives and

with the marketplace, and that has continued in the last few years. We

had Obama K, which has had an impact on our economy and employers and

they have not hired more people because they are frayed of going

over that threshold -- Obama Care. You are talking about this as if the

publican party did not control the Senate and Congress, there must be

an anger with the party itself, is on deck was not -- the Republican

Party. It is twofold, the majority of the time under Obama, has been

with a majority of Democrats, the Republicans only took over the house

recently. As a result of that, we are not over what the President's

proposals are cover but there is frustration within the party that we

cannot get things done. As a result, the voters are looking at candidates

other than the traditional US Senator candidates. I will be very

unfair, who would you put money on right now? It will determine who

will win the New Hampshire primary, and I think it is too early to tell.

Although I have a candidate that I'm supporting, it is too early, and

there's a lot which will happen in the next few months. Frank Guinta,

David Boutin, thanks very much. We will be catching up with a

Democratic strategist as Wheeler at the Hillary Clinton campaign in a

York. -- as we look at the Hillary Clinton campaign in New York.

It's the best of our industries, it's the worst of our industries -

It's the best, because we are world leaders in international banking,

and it earns a remarkable amount for the country.

Well, you don't need me to remind you of why.

And today the Bank of England held an open forum to

take soundings on how to better ensure we get more wisdom and less

Most striking was the bank governor's declaration that

the industry is increasingly "part of the solution rather than

the problem", notwithstanding some bad apples, hinting it's time

We'll discuss that shortly, but some first thoughts from Duncan Weldon.

Today, the great and the good of the financial sector gathered at

London's Guild Hall to discuss the city.

Before 2008, financial services were the UK's

golden goose, but then that golden goose fell the nest and Britain had

Seven years on, policy towards bankers is changing direction.

A survey carried out by the Bank of England found that only one in three

members of the public think that what happens in financial markets

It is to try and allay those sort of fears that the Bank of England

is today hosting what it calls its open forum.

It is public meetings in London, Birmingham and Edinburgh.

It is even encouraging people to take to social media

In fact, earlier today, BOE Open Forum briefly trended on Twitter.

Although to be fair, it did not get as much attention

But the people inside the hall were more interested

We want to profile today not only the progress made

in reforming markets but to spur this continual process of review.

This isn't just about fixing the fault lines of the last crisis.

It's also about seizing new opportunities from

And it's about building truly global markets in the UK and elsewhere.

With cross-border governance and co-operation structures

Britain has two financial systems, including the city in Canary Wharf.

The international firms have driven much of the sector's growth. The

combined balance sheet is, the value of their liabilities, have soared

over the last few decades. In the 1960s, the banking system balance

sheet was slightly smaller than the UK economic output. By 2010, it was

almost six times as big, doubling in size in just 15 years. Today, Mark

Carney said that by 2050, it could have grown to 15 times GDP, but is

this something to celebrate or something to fret about? One person

not fretting was on his way to dinner when we spoke to him and

doesn't always dressed like this. Over 1 million people are employed

in financial services, not just in London but across the country, and

the associated support services that go with core financial employment.

It is undoubtedly a great asset, we are very good at it in this country

and it contributes about 8% of GDP, about the same as the creative

industries as a whole. Recent IMF research suggested that in general a

bigger and more developed financial sector is good for growth. But, and

this is important, they also found it is possible to have too much of a

good thing. That beyond a certain point, a large financial system,

rather than adding to economic growth, added to economic

volatility. In Japan, the US and Ireland, they found that tipping

point had been passed, and while they did not specifically look at

the UK, given how large our financial system is, you could guess

which side of the line we would be on. It is not so much the size of

the system that is a worry but what it does. If it is just financing, it

is a problem that is too big. In the last 30 years we have had gross

value added compared to the rest of the economy... If the financial

sector was nurturing capital development of the economy, if it is

too big or too small... When you have a useless financial sector just

focused on itself, that is a problem. The forum today asked the

questions but did not get to the answers. Is the financial sector

fixed? Did we overdo it with the post-recession clamp-down? Are we

just being too quick to forget the lessons of the recent past? Some

good questions. Of course, there are two

financial service industries. The one designed to serve us,

and the global one that sees We need both domestic

and international finance to work. With me are fund manager

Nicola Horlick and economist John Kay, author of

Other People's Money, about the John was at the open forum this

morning. As I understand it, the book effectively says the banks are

solving each other's problems in complicated ways rather than dealing

with ordinary... Yes, we had figures about bank assets and liabilities

having grown to six times GDP, but what is behind that is the assets of

banks are mostly the liabilities of other banks, and... From each other?

Overwhelmingly trading with each other. The complexity was created by

bankers? Some of it is created by bankers, let's not say to milk the

rest of us but to bemuse the rest of us. Quite a lot comes from the

complexity of the regulatory system. We need to see regulation as being

as much a part of the problem as of the solution. That has generated a

lot of this activity and the complexity of it. That is the basic

critique, in a nutshell. I think back to the 70s and the early 80s,

and how dire the economy was. What would we have done if we had not had

financial services? It is very important to our economy, as

everyone keeps saying 1 million people are employed in financial

services in the UK, or relatively highly paid. The money they spend

promotes lots of other businesses in our country. -- all relatively

highly paid. Estimates vary, but it is between 8-10% of GDP produced by

the sector. You are talking about the international industry and what

it sells to the world, the tens of billions of pounds of exports,

correct? Well, some of it is domestic banking but that is the

boring bit. The useful bits for the economy in a balance of payments

sense? Yes. We were lucky, we spoke English and that is why London was

chosen as the financial centre of the world. They sit in the middle of

the time zones. So we have lots of global heads of banks who sit

here... Do you think any distinction should be drawn, John, between the

failures of the British banking system to serve industry in

Middlesbrough or an average saver, and the international banks which we

are hosting? German banks selling services to Singapore... The

distinction you are making is quite important. Most of the 1 million

people Mark Carney was talking about are doing rather mundane clerical

jobs in branch banks, call centres, insurance offices. A number of

people work in what we might call the city, that is perhaps 150,000.

The remuneration there of course is dramatic. The exports they generate

is tens of billions. I don't think we know what the exports they

generate are, just as we don't know what the contribution to GDP is.

When you start burrowing down on the statistics, I am afraid you discover

it is a bit of a mess. The truth is that the ordinary ways of measuring

economic output don't work very well when you apply them to financial

services. Is one of the reasons the public are frankly a bit sceptical

when they hear people saying, is it time to draw closure on the crash,

is it still feels as though the culprits got away with it. Not

enough people went to jail. Hmm. It is difficult to know whether people

should have gone to jail. You have to demonstrate they actually

committed a crime. I'm not sure they were crimes as such. What happened

was, there was a excess liquidity in the system. All sorts of very bad

decisions were made. Whether that is a criminal offence, I'm not sure.

Decisions they benefited from and then ultimately did not serve the

shareholders or tax-payers... That is a slightly different argument.

One thing I find a little odd is the shareholders did not play a bigger

role. There were lots of warning signs and not many shareholders

stood up and said, what are you doing, the people running the banks?

That mystifies me, because the fund managers who control large holdings

in these banks should have been saying something. There were plenty

of warning signs. It mystifies me very much when I asked asset

managers, why didn't you do something about RBS, which went bust

in 2008, the answer I kept getting was, it was more important for us to

be more underweight in the Royal Bank of Scotland than it was to

answer back... So the shareholders were saying, rather than do

something about a bank about to go bust, we just get out quicker than

the next guy? Until we change that kind of structure, we are not going

to change much about shareholders and banks. Duncan showed a graft

that showed how big the British banking sector has become. -- a

graft. -- a graph. Lastly bigger than GDP. Should it worry us? --

lastly bigger than GDP. If the banks want to settle here, we should let

them. Overall it is good news for us that the banking sector is as big as

it is. And by the way, when we say, banking sector, there are lots of

things within banks that are not strictly banking. I have worked for

three banks but I am not a banker, I am a fund manager. Lots of things

that sit within banks are not strictly banking, it can be managing

assets. In terms of whether we should be concerned, the problem is

watching over them and regulating them is a very difficult task. It is

very hard for the regulators to keep track when you have lots of super

clever people doing whizzy things with computers. Does it worry you,

John? It worries me a lot. A couple of points in what Nicola said. One,

she pointed out that she has worked for several banks and she is not a

banker. Most people who for banks are not bankers. We have created

huge financial conglomerates which have clashes of culture and conflict

of interest, not capable of being managed by anyone, far less

regulated by anyone. So instead of saying we need better regulators,

which is a hopeless task, we should create a structure in the industry

which people can manage, which serves customers better and which is

actually possible to regulate I hope in a fairly minimalist way. Thank

you both very much. A pretty important social experiment

has been carried out in Denmark, with what looks

like a very clear result. 1,000 regular users of Facebook

were divided into two samples - one lot told to stop using Facebook

for a week, the others told to carry on using it

as normal, reading about their Both groups were interviewed

about happiness and well-being at Yes, on multiple dimensions,

the half who had stopped using Fewer of them felt depressed,

sad, angry, lonely or worried. More of them were happy,

enthusiastic and decisive. Let's talk to Meik Wiking, CEO of

the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark, and Charlotte Reed, author

of May The Thoughts Be With You. Meik, how strong were these

results? How robust were they when you did this test? How accurate do

you think the test was? Quite accurate for the short-term effect.

We don't know what the long-term effect would be. What we found was,

especially within life satisfaction, we saw an increase of 0.5 an hour

scale, which doesn't mean a lot to people who don't look at these

numbers every day. -- 0.5 an hour scale. If we compared the 10% in

Denmark with the richest 10%, the difference between those two groups

is one point. And the difference in life satisfaction was halfway

point, quite strong in just one week of experiment. The difference

between the poorest 10% in the richest 10% in Denmark is not as big

as in some other countries. That is true. Let's go into the theory. You

ask them all what they posted on Facebook and a large number said

that what they put on Facebook is the good news in their lives, the

upbeat stuff. This is crucial to your theory about why sometimes

Facebook makes us less happy. Right. We have known for some time through

other studies, data across the world, that people care about

relative terms. They care about how much money they are making compared

to the neighbour, to Mark in the marketing department. We wanted to

test the fact that people are really good at making these social

comparisons and that social media such as Facebook enable is asked to

make even more social comparisons. So the fact that people mainly post

all of the great news that happens in their lives, the amazing job they

got in the city as you mentioned in the previous story, the wedding

pictures, the trip to Bali, we are constantly bombarded with great news

from our peers and our networks. We think that the background makes us

evaluate our lives less. Charlotte, your experience bears out the fact

that Facebook can impact on your mood. Tell us your story. You were

depressed, basically. I had depression in 2008, when I got over

this horrific state, I decided to post a positive thought that I'd

written myself, and put it on Facebook every morning, to try and

inspire other people, and those thoughts were to help myself

initially, but they helped other people, and I did that because I

wanted my friends to get on board. I wanted them to help me get better.

Your positive thoughts, they are like thought for the day, you are

not saying, I'm packing the Paris. No. It is more motivational. You

found being positive good uplift you a little bit? It really helped me.

This was a small part of getting over depression, but it really

helped my friends, as well, and they would get on board and look forward

to my thought each morning. What you think of the result coming out of

Denmark which says we basically look at Facebook and we get in -- envious

of other people? It depends what you are posting, if you are posting

inspiring content which is adding value to people, rather than making

them feel insignificant compared to your life, that is not what Facebook

should be about. You have a responsibility to not just project

this image of a perfect personal but actually tell the truth and be

realistic and honest. You have down days, as well. Meik, there are

adverts, magazine covers with pretty people, pornography, where you can

be a consumer of those things, and be made to feel less satisfied with

yourself? You are perfectly right. Social comparisons, conspicuous

consumption, this is an old phenomenal, but the new thing is

that social media is a fantastic broadcasting system for that kind of

behaviour. Charlotte's story is interesting, and there is evidence

to support what she experienced. We find that people that keep journals,

which is what she has done, they also find their life satisfaction to

increase over time, that you simply train your brain to focus on the

positive elements in your everyday life. In a word, if there's one

thing we could do to consumer Facebook in a way which was

constructive and did not make us angry and jealous, what would be

your one sentence tip? I would ask people to present a more nuanced and

coherent picture of their lives, the good side, but also the bad side.

Thanks for joining us. In the history of all the Nobel

Prizes ever handed out, eight have been awarded to people

who originally come from India. And one of those went to Amartya

Sen, 82 years old, he's one of the His Nobel was for economics -

he's noted for insights But he's also a philosopher,

a writer, Sometimes, frankly, his work has

been technical and rather tough going, but he's just published

a book of very readable essays on some of the themes

that preoccupy him. I met Professor Sen to talk

about poverty and about the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who

starts an official visit tomorrow. Why the title,

The Country Of First Boys? The Country Of First Boys,

there are two points there, But also the preference for the

first boys, like the monitor-type And the teacher says, "Oh,

you're the first boy". So it is so focus

on the success story. Then they come out of India,

they run Microsoft, They run all kinds of things

across the world. On the other hand,

those who are left behind, boys or Some of them don't manage

to get into school either. That inequality, as well

as the gender inequality, that I The Indian Prime Minister is

on an official visit to the UK We've had a lot of discussions with

previous leaders about how much How much of a welcome should we

extend to Prime Minister Modi? I think you should offer

a very good welcome to a prime The question is,

what are the things to discuss? Have they been better than what I

expected? They have been somewhat

worse than expected. Looking back over

the last 20-25 years in India, and Indian history, it has loosened up

quite a bit economically, correct? And are you really

dissatisfied with that drift? I know you have been

very ambivalent. I've been dissatisfied with

the slowness of the drift. The oddity of what happened is that

when Indian planning began it had a peculiar model of state interference

which was entirely wrong. It wanted to do those things

which it could not do well. Like controlling industrials or even

running industrials And it has neglected those things

which the state could do well if they had put the effort into it,

namely education and health care. So neglected to do the good things,

did all the bad things, You've thought more about what

it is and what comprises it. The UK Government had

a target to get child poverty more Many people have felt we are

not going to hit that target. Poverty was defined

in a very obvious way, your income was below 60% of the median income

for the equivalent family. The British government has said it

thinks that is too simplistic a notion of poverty,

just looking at income. It wants to take more measures

into account. It wants to look at whether their

parents have work, maybe bring in What do you think about how a

state should target child poverty? You see sometimes very good

arguments could aid bad policy. And this is one of those cases,

I think. You have to recognise that

the real achievement of Britain, of course, is the period after the war,

when the welfare state came in. Gordon Brown lost his job as

a likely Prime Minister on grounds that, among other criticisms, the

big one made is that 70% was the That was 225% when the National

Health Service was introduced. When Harold Macmillan told

the British that they had never had A great deal more than anywhere

Gordon Brown had reached. Why is it that the debt was not

a problem? Because it was steadily

falling down. Not

because they were doing austerity. But because they were

having economic growth And also providing a level

of health service which the British I think that Britain is very hard to

see in anything which is going And tomorrow morning, British Indian

relations will be to the fore The Times has led on a story that

George Osborne is issuing an ultimatum over Trident. The Guardian

leads with a funding catastrophe warning from universities over

exiting the European Union. There is a selective photograph from the

daily Telegraph of Jeremy Corbyn. John Kerry warns the climate deal

will not be legally binding, that is in the Financial Times.

That's just about it for tonight, Kirsty is here tomorrow.

But we didn't want to go without making our contribution to

a debate provoked by Conservative MP Oliver Colville,

who used the hallowed ground of the House of Commons, no less,

to propose replacing the lion as a national symbol with