11/02/2016 Newsnight

The Health Secretary tells us he had no choice but to impose a contract

What is the alternative? The alternative here is that in the face

of a union that militarily refuses to negotiate how we can improve care

for patients that week ends, I just go away.

The doctors threaten a brain drain - and say he's alienated

Predicted by EInstein a century go, Scientists finally detect

gravitational waves - that change the sound

Tonight we speak to one of the scientists who worked

And we're in Colombia, where a 21st century plague

So, this is Zika almost at its worst. You can see the restraint on

this patient's arms, his name is Edwin, and the oxygen pipe is

feeding oxygen into his lungs because he can't breathe on his own.

It was arguably not the day for the Health Secretary to announce

a review into junior doctors' morale.

Junior doctors, by and large, are quite good at spelling

And if morale is low, they know who they blame.

This morning Jeremy Hunt took the unprecedented and radical step

of imposing a new contract on thousands of medics

across England after negotiations between the Government

He had, he insisted, included many concessions that had

been chief stumbling blocks between the sides.

But the Shadow Health Secretary called the move a sign of failure,

the British Medical Association said he'd risked alienating a whole

generation of doctors, some of whom would now vote

And some hospital chiefs who signed a letter of agreement with the

contract later stated they hadn't agreed with the imposition.

So is there a real risk of a brain drain in the NHS now?

And what happens to patients when trust breaks down

between the Health Secretary and his NHS staff?

The dispute over the new junior doctors contract for England

Tonight these junior doctors met on Whitehall to respond to the fact

that a new contract is being imposed on them.

After years of rumbling along and two strikes,

the Government has taken the advice of its lead

negotiator to end talks with the doctors' union.

He has asked me to end the uncertainty for the service

by proceeding with the introduction of

a new contract that he and his colleagues consider both safer

for patients and fair and reasonable for

What exactly is this dispute between the Government

It has been running for a few years but it has

come to a head in the last year because the Tories were elected last

May on a pledge to introduce what they call a seven-day NHS.

In short, hospitals should offer more

services at the weekend, and to do that, they say they need

to change the contracts for the 50,000 or so

junior doctors so that it is cheaper to employ them during the weekend.

This is the current period when junior doctors get normal

It runs from 7am until 7pm on weekdays.

Under the new proposals, normal evenings would end

later, at 9pm, and working on a Saturday would also not attract

overtime, so doctors will get a boost to their basic pay

to mitigate the loss of that

Saturday a normal day is a particular frustration to doctors.

What would it have taken for the BMA to be happy on Saturday pay?

I think it would have taken a recognition that junior doctors

already work Saturdays for patients and will continue to do

so, and to acknowledge that the Government's

position that Saturday is the same as any other day of the week is not

Society is not set up so that schools are open on Saturdays.

Everybody knows that Saturdays are a bit different

and the people who work for patients on a Saturday should have a little

bit of recompense in order to compensate them for working

The tough question is, how do you de-escalate

For the Department of Health, they have

a problem which is if they return

to the negotiating table it will cost them political capital.

For the BMA, they would have to persuade

their members to accept something they have argued about for a long

time with a Health Secretary that lots of doctors feel has

Doctors on the picket line seethe about Mr Hunt's claim that death

There is evidence of that, but there is not good evidence

that staffing is the critical

is a cost-effective way to save lives, but a seven-day NHS

This was the last junior doctors walk out.

This was the last junior doctor walk-out.

But they do have public sympathy for their action.

Two thirds of the public blame Jeremy Hunt for the dispute.

We need to think about the implications of this and to take

the temperature of our members on what they feel about this

imposition of a contract that is frankly unfair.

We will be taking into account when we do that what is happening

in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland,

where I have to say the governments there are not

They are continuing to deliver the seven-day

services that they have there in agreement with the medical

staff and agreement with all clinical staff,

and moving forward in a way that the Government in London has

For further strikes to work, they need to

do enough political damage to the Health Secretary to force

So doctors must gauge if they can take public

opinion with them through such a campaign, and whether it would be

worth the likely inconvenience to patients.

No wonder some are talking about seeking work elsewhere.

This imposition has never been done before in the history of the NHS. So

does Jeremy Hunt know what he's doing? I asked him earlier.

It is really disappointing that it has come to this.

We have wanted to discuss these changes for the best

part of four years, but last night Sir David Dalton,

the chief executive of Salford Royal, which is one

of our safest and best hospitals, who has been leading

the negotiations for the Government, said that he did not think

he negotiated settlement was possible

and he urged me to do whatever I thought necessary

That all the time and all the money and all the costly

negotiations have come to nothing because you have just imposed

The negotiations had come to nothing.

He is someone who wrote to me with that judgment.

He said there is no realise the chance

of a deal particularly on the issue of Saturday pay.

This is vital because we have not just a manifesto

commitment but an absolute determination that if our NHS

is going to offer the highest quality

care, patients should be confident that they are going to get the same

high-quality care every day of the week.

You are looking for a seven-day NHS, but it is going to be

cost neutral so you are stretching the five-day NHS to seven.

How is that possibly going to resolve

Next year we are putting in an extra ?3.8 billion in real terms

It is about meeting the clinical standards

that say that every day of the week you should be seen by a senior

decision-maker within 14 hours of being admitted.

If you are vulnerable you should be seen twice

The problem is, bluntly, that when you have got 98% of highly

trained, highly educated, dedicated junior doctors who reject

this, they have read it,

and say you are wrong, that is your problem.

What was so sad was that the BMA junior doctors, instead of sitting

Refused to enter into discussions and balloted for strike,

and they balloted for strike saying that pay was going to be cut,

which it isn't, saying that hours were going

to be lengthened, in fact we are doing the opposite

in bringing down the maximum number of hours that

That is not quite true, because there is going to be

damage, if you like, by removing penalties if doctors

work excess hours.

That safety net is going to be removed.

When they tell you that they are worried about exhaustion

and the knock-on effects to patient safety, why is that not ringing

The problem is what we had before was not a penalty,

it was extra pay for the doctors being

That created a perverse incentive, particularly because doctors' basic

And so one of the things we are doing today

is we are bringing down the weekend premium

rates but increasing basic pay by 13.5%.

You keep on telling me I am wrong and if that is the case,

and this is what we are hearing from junior doctors,

well educated, highly trained, who have read and rejected

what you are proposing, what is the message you are giving

I fully understand in the heat of an industrial relations dispute

that people are not necessarily going to

take everything at face value from the politician who has been

If you do not want to take the Health Secretary's word

for it, listen to independent people.

Today's senior NHS leaders, including the head of NHS England,

Simon Stephens, have said that the new offer on the table

to what was on the table in September.

It is very easy to see through that list.

These are senior respected independent people who say

that the new contract on the table is fair and reasonable and we have

We initially said that Saturday should be treated

We have changed that position and said

that if you work one in four weekends or more you can get a 30%

That is a very significant concession.

The BME have not been prepared to make any

Which is why I have had to make the difficult decision to give

The BMA have said this risks alienating a whole generation

The best outcome, you are going to get more strikes in July or August.

The worst outcome, you are going to get people voting

We have heard from doctors who say, I do not know about my future

in the NHS and I do not know about my future in this country.

In difficult situation like this there is no risk-free route,

but what I have done today is given certainty for the future.

There would be huge risks to the service

if this uncertainty had continued to paralyse the service.

Is there a plan in place if there is a mass

I don't believe it will come to that because I think doctors

will look at what was proposed and they will see this,

when you impose a contract, which is the last thing anyone

wants, you can impose anything you like, you have moved

beyond the process of negotiation, I actually

chose to impose a position which moves a long way

to address the concerns of the BMA and many other

We have had eight studies in the last five years saying that

mortality rates are higher at weekends.

Six of those top about staffing rates as being one of

You have been accused of being rash and misleading for using a figure

of 11,000 more deaths at the weekend when is no evidence

as to how those were created or whether your solutions

There was one study that had the 11,000 figure.

We've had seven other studies in the last five years.

I don't know any doctors who are saying there is not an issue

about the weekend effect and the vast majority would say

I cannot as Health Secretary sit here and say that is not something

How do you as Health Secretary work with NHS staff who do not trust you?

You need them onside to get the public to

believe in the service, and they do not at the moment.

That is unfortunate, because we are in the

middle of a very difficult industrial relations dispute

and in any industrial relations dispute,

if you ask the protagonists

you will not get a particularly complimentary

language, but what is the alternative?

The alternative is that in the face of a union that militantly

refuses to negotiate how we can improve care for patients

at weekends that I just pack my bags and go away.

I cannot do that as Health Secretary.

I have to be there for patients and I think in the end

that is the right thing for doctors as well.

The sound ripples detected in the fabric of space time have

something more akin to a huge and excitable scream

from the scientists that discovered them.

Of that ilk, all credit must go to EInstein who first predicted

Today, in an anouncement that electrified the world,

astronomers finally detected the waves - and conceeded

The skies - one said - will never be the same again.

It's him again, making waves in the world of physics.

This is the equation behind Albert Einstein's

theory of general relativity, conceived 100 years ago.

A pillar of modern physics, it told us

everything from the motion of the planets to the presence

But it also proposed the existence of something else.

Our universe is a gobsmacking sight, but one of its most intriguing

It's awash with them, but we've never

We have detected gravitational waves.

The news today that we finally found them is quite literally

Almost certainly Nobel Prizes will be given out for what some

are already calling the discovery of the century.

The idea is that as any object moves through the fabric

of the universe, it gives off waves of gravitational energy,

much like the ripples that emanate across the surface of the water

Everything on the move including you and me emits them,

but, in universal terms, we are pretty puny, so our waves

When it comes to cosmic giants, though, like

exploding stars, these generate tsunamis of gravitational energy,

so a good opportunity for scientists to

As gravitational waves move through the universe,

they eventually reach the Earth, and when

they do, they gently warp anything and everything they pass through,

stretching and squeezing atoms, but by a tiny, tiny amount.

And it's this minute disturbance that

scientists have detected emanating from this explosive event that took

Two black holes moving ever closer together.

Eventually they smashed into one another, merging.

The collision generated a surge of gravitational ripples that

reached Earth just in time for the switching

on of an experiment designed to find them.

So, why should anyone care about a few ghostly oscillations?

on of an experiment designed to find them.

So, why should anyone care about a few ghostly oscillations?

Aside from providing another feather in Einstein's cap,

who has been proved right once again, it heralds

Until now, even our most advanced telescopes could share only

Now we can detect gravitational waves, we will be able to learn more

about the events that generated them, looking

deeper into space and further back in time than ever before.

It really does give us a brand-new perspective of the universe.

Professor Sheila Rowan, Director of the Institute

for Gravitational Research in Glasgow, is one of the researchers

I cannot imagine what your day has been like.

He knew about this a hundred years ago.

People have written books about the history of the field because it is

so interesting. Einstein made this prediction 100 years ago but for

decades it remained a mathematical curiosity. People were not sure that

this prediction of gravitational waves had any real physical meaning,

that it was an effect we could detect and it took until the 1960s

before people thought that this was maybe something that was real that

we could try to sense, and they have taken the following decades in

between to get to the point where we are now. The sound of space has

changed. Through that sound, do we get the history of the Big Bang? Do

you buy that? Not yet, but that is a call for us in future. What we have

started to be able to do is listen to the gravitational history of our

universe and hear sounds from our local universe, from black holes,

spiralling, and so far we can listen to those within a certain volume of

our local universe. We would like to make our detectors even more

sensitive to sense further out into the universe. The further out we go

the further back in time we can sense and eventually if we can make

our detectors sensitive enough we would like to reach back to

gravitational signals potentially coming from the Big Bang.

Extraordinary. Does this tie in with Einstein's theory of relativity?

Does it prove it? Today's result is a fantastic confirmation of

Einstein's theory of general relativity. Everything we detected

today fits with general relativity and in some ways that is a fabulous

confirmation. We know that general relativity, a fabulously, does not

tell us everything, the. The of all the forces that govern our universe.

In some ways it is a fabulous confirmation of general relativity

but still there are boundaries to push. Does it disturb things that

scientists had thought were set in stone? Has it created more problems

for you? I do not think it has created more problems for us. It has

given us a new tool that we did not have before to study the dark side

of our universe, because pretty much everything we know so far we have

got by going out and turning our telescopes are up and sensing the

light we can see. It has all been done with light and visually. Light

and its different spectrums, x-rays and gamma raise, all part of the

spectrum of light. What does this do to our understanding of gravity? It

has always been mysterious. It gives us a new tool to try to understand

where our limits of Einstein's theory stop because for the first

time we have objects that have the strongest gravity that we can think

of, like polls are black because not even light can escape them, and two

merging is gravity in its strongest form and we have just darted to be

able to see what is happening in those limits of the strongest

gravity we can think of. We got our first ignored today, our first hint.

To study those systems it will push our understanding of general

relativity to the limits and test what we know. Thank you.

The Zika virus, carried by the Aedes Egypti mosquito,

is suspecting of being the cause of 400 birth deformities in Brazil.

Now the disease has moved north to Colombia where it has also been

The science behind Zika is not proven but the fear is real enough.

Imagine losing control over the muscles in your body.

Tropical Colombia is at the centre of a 21st-century

And the suspected cause is the Zika virus.

You can see restraints on the patient's arms.

The oxygen pipe is feeding oxygen into his lungs because he can't

The connection between the creeping paralysis and Zika

But here at the front line, it's taken for

Fabian is 22, a young man in the prime of his life.

Then he got pins and needles, lost feeling

in his legs, and then he couldn't breathe.

I ask, did you use mosquito repellent?

That is his wife, and she's pregnant.

He's recovering, but he can still barely

This is the alley where his family live.

There is fear here, but the message isn't

People should wear long-sleeved shirts, trousers and use repellent.

It doesn't take long to find where the mosquitoes might come

It is Zika's suspected effect on unborn

babies which is causing her as much anxiety as the fate of her husband.

Before 2000, there are no reports of Zika causing birth defects.

Along with other scientists he's noted that Zika

used to be a mild virus and now it isn't.

It looks as if the virus has changed in some way.

We have to see exactly what happened.

I'm afraid that there is a change in the genome of the virus.

Zika plus, a mutation in this genome.

And a problem in the environment that is specific

to South America and Central America.

We will have the answer soon I think.

The health systems in our countries have to deal with the complications

that we did not have, and we are not really ready to deal

All that the authorities can do is fumigate,

and hunt down the Zika larvae which flourish in still water.

So this is absolutely what you don't need

How can you convince people who live in a tropical area to cover up?

The hospital here is under massive pressure, not least from patients

like this one from Venezuela, who the doctors believe have got

Zika, and now the beginnings of paralysis.

Instead, she ended up here in Colombia.

So far, the Western world has been watching the spread of Zika almost

Soon the southern United States and even parts of southern

Europe may be dealing with its grim reality.

Russia has submitted a proposal for a ceasefire in Syria,

Russia's foreign minister gave few details but it's understood

to envisage a truce starting on the first of March.

The US has demanded an immediate end to hostilities, as it suspects

Russia wants to give Syrian government troops three weeks

Earlier I talked to General John Allen, a former commander of US

forces in Afghanistan and President Obama's special envoy

He's flown in from the States to take part in the Intelligence

I began by asking him why there are still no Western fighting

We are there to provide air support, precision air support to both deal

with Daesh as a target, but also to support the manoeuvre

of the Iraqis, and the Syrian opposition element.

We have trainers on the ground at multiple training sites

throughout the region who are training Iraqi security

We have advisers on the ground who are with some of

these manoeuvre forces and helping them to gain the advantage locally.

We have special operators on the ground to work closely

with their counterparts so that in the event we can target a key

Isil location, a compound, a leader, an infrastructure,

So there are boots on the ground, there are Western forces

on the ground, and that's the kind of support we want to provide

to the indigenous population so that they

are the authors of the defeat of Daesh.

So just to clarify, because when people talk about boots

on the ground, they mean, as you know,

Western boots doing a military, as in a fighting, job.

I think we should be very clear that as the operational environment

evolves, we should be prepared to make the kinds of decisions that

There could be the day when as Daesh continues to feel the pressure,

the continued global pressure that we

are bringing to bear on it, that we could see a real

vulnerability, and we should have the capability of moving very

quickly with indigenous forces, with the right kinds of Western

forces if necessary, to exploit that for ability.

The question isn't whether we apply large numbers of forces.

The question is whether they stay on the ground for long

Do you think the West missed a chance

in not going into Syria a lot earlier?

It isn't a hypothetical question in the sense that they had

I think more could have been done earlier, frankly,

with some of the Syrian opposition elements.

We would be in a different place today.

But again, the question begs how much

and how long and who would have contributed, and we didn't do it,

so we are where we are today, and that

is a real challenge, it is a humanitarian catastrophe

of unparalleled extent in the aftermath

of World War II, and we are going to have to deal with that for a long

You could argue in that absence, Assad got stronger, Russia came in,

how much do you think Russia has changed this whole game

when you look at what is happening in Aleppo now?

We had had some hope that, with the Russian incursion,

there could be a partnership in dealing with Isil.

There could be some reduction in the violence that the regime has

And there could be a coherent conversation about a political

We had hopes in all of those areas, and none of them have come to pass.

In fact, the violence is greater than it has been before.

There have been valiant attempts to create a political conversation

about transition, but the Russians and their allies in the region

are about the destruction, if you will,

of the terrorists before we can have this coherent political

Where do the differences lie between you and

President Obama in terms of strategy on Syria, an Isis?

I'm not going to answer that question.

There have been, and I offer my advice to our leadership,

and they are free to take that advice as they choose.

I think that there have been areas where I have

offered advice that has been embraced, and those areas I think

are areas where we are now finding that we are making some progress.

But it's not just me, it team effort, and that team has

been together now for some period of time

dealing with this crisis and trying to give the president our very best

The focus is also including Libya now.

Is it right to step on the Isis in Libya?

I think we should attack Isis wherever we find it.

And in the context of how Isis has globalised,

we find that there have been a number of organisations,

one in Libya, one in the Sinai, one in West

Africa, Boko Haram, which people are familiar with.

And in other locations where they have been

franchised by Isil to fly the black flag.

We're going to need to deal with these over time.

We have to prioritise our efforts, because we

don't have the capacity, we being the Western community

of nations, we don't have the capacity to deal

But I do believe as your question implies

The presence of Isis has made it much

more difficult potentially to find a political solution in Libya,

but the presence of Isis in Libya has a destabilising effect

to Egypt, and potentially across the Mediterranean

So we have to watch this very closely, and we should be,

and we have been, attacking Isis forces

And how significant is the British involvement?

I'm always very careful to point out it is not

about the numbers of aeroplanes or numbers of bombs or special

It is the presence of Britain in the crisis

General John Allen speaking to me earlier.

Its slogan when it first launched was "It is -

The paper that wore its editorial independence with pride,

the Independent, could be moving off the press to become online only.

The final decision has not yet been made but the paper,

which has existed for 30 years, is in the process of selling

the iPaper to the owner of the Scotsman in a ?25 million deal.

Today the Independent's editor, Amol Rajan, sent staff at the paper

an e-mail acknowledging a lot of questions and uncertainty.

Steven Glover was one of the founder members of the paper

What is your gut feeling about this? Are we nearing the end of the

Independent? It won't be the end of it, because it will have a life

online, and that will be the future of the many newspapers. If it is

true, I think it will be the first of many newspapers which stop their

print editions and have another existent online. That e-mail went

out today suggesting that the editor doesn't quite know what is going on.

It is very difficult when you are talking about staff. I guess the

bigger question is, does a paper need to exist paper for many more?

It is a good question. Anybody under 35 who reads the Independent

probably read it online, so whether the print edition continues is not

really an important question. For people who like reading newspapers,

as I do, it does matter. And there is a longer question as to whether

online newspapers will be able to support the same number of

journalists that went newspapers traditionally have. Will they have

the same resources? Will they be able to do the same sort of

journalism. We have some pictures I think of the early days of you and

colleagues starting this off. Did you have an impression in your head

of its life span? Did you think that it would still be going today? Many

people thought we would be out of business in about six months. That

was the common Fleet Street view. We were more optimistic, but if you had

asked me whether I would be around in ten or 20 or 30 or 100 years, I

wouldn't have been able to give you an answer. What decides, there are

some hope as you can't imagine not exist in paper form, and there are

some that seem to be able to make that transition. What is it, what

decides whether a paper stays in paper form? What decides it is in

the end the bottom line. The Independent is now selling so few

copies that it doesn't really make sense to go on printing it everyday.

But that has to be the editorial content, then, essentially? You

could say it is what attracts in advertisers, but is it that

advertisers will only come into a high end money focused paper like

the FT, awkward content do it? The FT, I wouldn't be at all is a prized

if the FT itself stops printing copies in the foreseeable future.

You think it will? Think it is likely. The ones that may follow

quickly are the FT and the guardian, within the next few years. How many

papers will be on the shelves in five years? Most of them, but not

all. In 10-15 years, not very many, I'm afraid. Do you recognise the

same paper today as the one that you launched? Do you read it? I do look

at it. It has been an very depleted resources compared to what it had

when we launched it, but it is still a feisty little paper, it still has

high standards, and it has been very well edited. Its reach on social

media, on Twitter, on the sites, is probably a totally different

audience, but it is very visible online, isn't it? It is, and the

Independent is something like the eighth most read newspaper in the

world, and I think they will put more resources into the online

version. UI divided between saying closing is

not quite staying closing, do you think from the emotional

perspective, your baby has gone now? It has grown-up certainly

transformed into something we couldn't have conceived of 30 years

ago, but I think it will still be there. In some way, the dream lives

on. Stephen Glover, thank you very much, thanks for coming in. Let's

take you through tomorrow's front pages. The Independent has the

theory of relativity proved, going back to those gravitational waves.

The Daily Telegraph has the same picture, and their top story is the

deal that could split the Tories, they said 130 grassroots members

want Cameron he risks the future of the party if he ignores their views.

The Guardian has the doctors vowing to fight on. The Times, Turkey

threatens Europe with millions of migrants, saying tensions mount as

the President of Turkey warns that we are not idiots. They are

expecting another 600,000 people to flee over the border. The Daily Mail

has the flight of the strike doctors, junior doctors threatening

a mass exodus to Australia, and the FT has a day of turmoil as negative

rates strike fear into global markets.

We leave you at Propsman, the propeller specialist

Props to them, forgive us, for apparently inventing what looks

like an authentic 21st century sport.

Good evening. It has been turning pretty cold and frosty across many

parts of the country, particularly the central and northern areas.

Further south, rather more cloud, so not as cold as it was on Thursday

morning. Some bright spells through the day, but also one or two

showers, wintry over higher ground. Some of the snow fit Easter Scotland

right down to lower levels. Brightness across the borders, just