03/03/2016 Newsnight

As the Chancellor mulls major reforms to the pension system,

Radical changes to pensions tax relief could hit millions of higher

earners. But would the Chancellor do something so drastic -

and potentially unpopular - just before the EU referendum?

If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee,

the prospect for a safe and prosperous future

The Republican Establishment fights back.

But will Mitt Romney's attack actually help Donald Trump?

David Cameron's former adviser has been watching the race.

Also tonight - could an ancient Chinese board game help build

A piece of software developed in London could just herald

the biggest step forward in artificial intelligence

Death and taxes might be civilisation's only certainties,

Some of us already draw one, some of us pay into one,

some of us don't, but all of us expect to receive one one day.

But what can the modern British worker expect their pension to look

like and when can we expect to get it?

How much should Government be doing to ensure that the most help goes

to those with greatest need and should the age at which we get

one depend not just on how old we are, but also on the kind

As the Chancellor prepares to address at least some of these

questions in his looming budget, Newsnight's Chris Cook has taken

The world of work is always changing, but one question

is a constant - how do you get people to pay

Tax policy is a critical lever and we may be the cusp

I think major changes are more likely than not.

There's been a lot of pension reform already and tax relief is,

Workplace pensions are all about deferring income,

delaying the moment when you receive a portion of your pay,

until the time when you can actually enjoy it.

Pensions get the benefit of tax relief.

That means the state waives income tax on money that people put aside

Now, there are critical discussions going on about the future

At the moment, any income you put into your pension

Any gains your pension pot makes are also not taxed.

You're not taxed on money while it's in there.

It's only at the end, when you start drawing an income

This arrangement is known as exempt-exempt-tax or EET.

Your pension is tax exempt when you put money in,

exempt as it's invested and it's only taxed as it's withdrawn.

Paying tax at the end of the process means your tax payments

reflect your actual income in retirement.

In any given year, the Chancellor foregoes tens of billions of pounds

of tax because when people put their money into a pension,

he doesn't get the tax on that wage, he says -

don't worry, I won't tax you now, I'll tax you when you

The question is, could you lose that money in the current year and get

more people to do more saving, better than we do now,

and, unequivocally, the answer to that is, yes.

A radical idea currently being considered by the Treasury

would completely change how we tax pensions.

Rather than waiting until the end, until you're drawing an income

to claim tax off you, the taxman would instead tax money

as you're putting it into your pension scheme.

So this changes things to tax-exempt-exempt or TEE.

You'd pay into your pension scheme after you've been taxed,

meaning that the tax burden falls on current earnings

and then your pension would be totally tax-free,

At the moment, the Government offers a few eases, notably a tax-free lump

sum to bribe you to save in a pension.

Any new system would needed a top-up bribe, too.

But the Chancellor would certainly benefit now.

This would raise tax revenues in the short-term,

but cut them in the future, and that might not be wise.

You've got the fact that this is a policy that brings forward tax

revenues from future years, from a time when there'll be

an older population, putting more pressure on the public

finances, through state pensions, through the health service

The fear would be that that might make future governments a bit more

desperate and maybe a little more likely to renege on the promise that

withdrawals from these pension ISAs would remain tax-free.

So what about a less radical reform, say of tax relief?

At the moment, if someone in the 40% tax bracket want to put ?1

in their pension, they only need to pay in 60p.

The Treasury puts in the remaining 40p.

But people in the 20% bracket have to put in 80p because the taxman

The reality is we're giving more money today to the better off,

who are already putting more money into pensions, and that's not

the best use of money when we have a savings crisis.

So my preference would be to level things up, up for lower

rate taxpayers at 20%, down for higher rate taxpayers.

The pensions industry likes this idea.

It would be a less disruptive change.

This model might also save about ?6 billion a year

for the Treasury, but it looks a lot more like a straight tax hike

on higher earners, it would also cause an administrative headache,

and the Chancellor may not want to upend the pension system,

David Grossman is our Political Editor and he's

Was dreaming or was there a promise that a Conservative Government

wouldn't go near tax relief? We can quote from a central office briefing

note from April last year, which says we believe the pensions tax

relief system will be fair and affordable and we will not propose

any further changes to that. Is during the next Parliament. So in

the process, the Chancellor could be accused of going back on commitment

made before the election and annoying large numbers of people who

have voted for the Conservatives, because not only were they told

there aren't any plans to do that, they were told the only way to stop

Labour doing us wit to vote Conservative. Why is he suggesting

he might be doing it? The ansz is ten, maybe 15, maybe ?20 billion of

extra income he could get in the process. Income as one of our

interviewees suggested, a future Chancellor could be left feeling the

pinch of. Exactly. What he is doing is perhaps taking the money, that

future Chancellor might earn, or tax, pensioners with, but that

Chancellor may not have been born yet. And it is not just voter, there

will be Conservative MPs who are a little troubled by this. Why and how

long a shadow the referendum cast over this whole process? Well,

partly kith MPs are annoyed about going back, annoying their core

voter, some activists in the constituency ises, there is this

referendum of course, the wisdom is, that if you are going to do

something unpopular or something you are voters might not like get it

down early, that is when your mandate and majority are freshest

and the voters have time to forgive you. We are going into a referendum

in 120 days' time, a bit less than that, The, one of the core groups

that are wavering in the middle of this are some of the affluent people

whose hearts may tell them they would like to vote to leave the EU

but their heads maybe susceptible to arguments that the Chancellor is

making about their best economic interests. If they don't trust the

Chancellor, if they feel the Chancellor hasn't got their best

interests at heart they maybe harder to win over in all this. So the

stakes are high. Let us Mark Garnier, a Conservative MP

who sits on the Treasury Select Committee, and Josephine Cumbo,

the pensions correspondent for the Financial Times,

whose reporting has led the coverage You are splashing tomorrow with a

warning to the Chancellor from one of his own Pensions Ministers he

perhaps needs to calm down, if not slow down. Think what we are seeing

now is the tensions and concerns and fears are really starting to

surface, that what the Chancellor is going to announce in the budget,

while saving the Treasury billions of pounds could cause deep damage to

the retirement system. In July last year, he announced the consultation

on the future of saving incentives for retirement and at the time he

said it was going to be an open consultation, but the only option he

really mentioned at the time was the pension ISA, during the consul

location there has been a core Corus of industry representatives and MPs

queueing up to say that this is a wrong idea, it could lead to severe

complications for the industry, you will have two systems running at the

same time, you will have an old pension system and a new pension

system. There are concerns that a futures Chancellor might say well, I

am going to start taxing the income that George Osborne promised was

going to be tax free, so that could really hit pensions saving and

confidence in pension savings at a time when the UK is starting to

enrol people in pensions through automatic enel rollment. There is

two possibilities on the table really. There is the ISA and you

explained and the flat rate of tax which was very well explained in the

film. I sense from your journalism you are too wise to place bettings,

which would you say he is closest to? He is attracted to the pension

Isa. He likes to make bold decision, let us think back to 2014, when he

stood up at the despatch box and said no-one will have to buy an

annuity. That came out the blue, there must be a big temptation for

him to do that again, in spite of the range of opponents he has had to

doing anything drastic. Something has to give doesn't it? The notion

that the lowest earners get the least help to save for their few

while the highest get the most help. If it wasn't true it would be

unthinkable. O Think you are right. The numbers speak for themselves. If

you look at the 10% of people who earn more than ?50,000, they

represent 47% of pension contributions and if you look at the

1% who earn more than ?150,000, they represent 14%. So clearly, it is

skewed in favour of the richer people, who have more disposable

income. So it could be partly to do with the incentive and the fact if

you have ?150,000 you have a lot more disposable voluntary income

than if you are on ?12 nap,000. I think what we have done so far is

like House of Lords reform. We have done a bit but haven't finished the

whole journey. There is talk about this pension Isa where it will be

taxed on the way in and there is a possibility there may be a

contribution by the Government. If the contribution is 50-50, for each

pound put in everybody, including the high rate taxpayer's will be

better off. I think one of the problems facing the pension

industry, and facing pensions in general is that the Holy Grail of

this is getting people to put as much money as they can in to their

pension pot as early as they can. I think that really clever thinking on

this would be able to work out a system where by people can look at

their entire lifetime savings schemes, and perhaps we could come

up with a system where by the pension system can be allied with

mortgage guarantees, so people could start looking at this sort of,

together rather than a separate entities. You are proposing a third

way, you don't like the idea of equalising the playing field so

however much you earn the amount of help you get remains the same It

will cause a lot of the problems, if you are going to create the problems

you need to have something really important that is going to come

along with it. If we go to the flat rate of, the flat rate of discount,

then you end up with this problem of the hybrid, you have half in one

type of pension and another in another type of pension, you have

the administration, it will be very difficult for pay role managers so

that will be difficult. Then you have the contribution of the vt go,

so that could be expensive. Anything is going to be difficult. I was

thinking more of fairness. Yes, I think one of the inthises which I

would be keen on, if he is going to make change, I think you have to

give people a lot of warning, what, I am getting people who are writing

to me and stopping me in the street, saying is he going to do something?

Should be I be worried about my tax free lump sum? If you are saving for

your pension you have spent your life focussing on the one point when

you retire. At the closer you get to that the less options you have

available in order to mitigate any changes, so the key thing I, I

think, would be if he is going to make changes he has to give really a

decade's warning before they come into play. Very briefly, what do you

say when you are stopped in the street, to the voters who say you

promised they wouldn't go near this issue and they are. They are looking

at it. It is right to have a look at it. At the end of the day the tax

credit given to pensions in this country is worth billions they get

back 13 billion on taxes, paid on pensions coming out. It is not as

simple as it sounds but that is the problem they have got. But I come

back to this remaining point point, which is if eare going to change

something people like me and my colleagues will be advising the

Chancellor we have to give people plenty of warning. A decade is not

unreasonable I think. I don't think that would happen. He would be

looking for savings to balance the books by 2020. People are diving in

and maxing owl their pension contributions on concerns that high

rate relieve is going. He would have to do something in the budget to

clamp-down on that. Many thanks indeed.

Start any observation about the performance or prospects

of Donald Trump at the moment and you run a very real risk

of being comprehensively disproved before you've

But, it's probably fair to say, that much of his appeal lies

in his supporters' deep dislike of mainstream politicians.

So the fact that very senior mainstream politicians

from within his own Party are now queueing up to condemn him,

in the strongest of terms, could be construed as evidence

If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee,

the prospect for a safe and prosperous future

If Donald Trump's plans were ever implemented,

the country would sink into prolonged recession.

Doesn't he know what he's talking about?

Look, his bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men

He inherited his business, he didn't create it.

Mr Romney was joined in his condemnation of Mr Trump

by another former Republican presidential hopeful,

John McCain, who said he "shared the concerns about Donald Trump"

and criticised Mr Trump's "uninformed and indeed dangerous

Mr Trump had a few choice words for Mr Romney in return.

Look, I'll just address it quickly, because it's irrelevant.

Steve Hilton, David Cameron's former strategy director,

now based in San Francisco, joins us to make sense

That's quite a big ask, Steve Hilton, can you make sense of it for

us? I'll have a go. Good to be with you. I think what's going on here is

actually pretty profound. We live in a world run by bankers and

bureaucrats and accountants, people like Mitt Romney. Those people,

regardless of who has been in power, for the last few decades have been

pushing an agenda, an ideological agenda, that it favours big

businesses over small. That champions globalisation and open

immigration, whatever the cost of that. It's been pretty inhuman and

callous about the impact of that approach to government on the real

lives of working people. Basically, I think people are sick of it. They

are sick and tired that. They are sick and tired of being told to suck

it up and deal with it because it's the world we live in. That is what

is driving support for Trump. On the left for Bernie Sanders. Someone

like Mitt Romney, who pretty much epitomises that approach to

government, which is being comprehensively rejected. Is about

the worse person you could ask for to make the argument against Trump.

Judd Trump trump has dealt with John McCain by questioning his heroic

status. Neither Romney or McCain have learnt the lesson, they feel

the way to get him is conventional weapons. He doesn't recognise

conventional warfare in political terms? I think that's right.

Actually, we need to dissting swish somewhat between the froth of the

campaign, Trump is very good at that, getting attention for

statements which every now and again go beyond the boundaries of what

people might consider to be acceptable. People di discounted,

dissupporters discount it, because they identify with the substantive

argument that underlice that. The other point is his character and

temperament. Mitt Romney made the argument that his character and

temperament disqualifies him from being President. Again, it's

precisely his character that people are responding to. The idea that he

is not some smooth-talking politician. He is actually a strong

guy who is going to get in there and shake things up. That is exactly

what people If you were want. Looking after one of his opponents,

what would you advise them to do next? Well, I don't know. I'm not

that involved, so I don't think of it necessarily in those terms. I

think one thing that is clear is that, as the race is going on, there

is more time, for example, in the Presidential debates, another one

here in the States, for focus on the actual policy agendas of these

various candidates and to look at the substance of what they're saying

it. Seems to me there is more concentration on that. That will

only increase once you get into the general election setting. I think

someone like John Kasich, who is around right now in terms of the

state of the race, he is the governor of of Ohio. A distant

fourth in the race right now. He is still sticking to a positive agenda,

setting out how he would solve these same problems. His analysis is

pretty much consistent with the same arguments Trump is making he is

putting something which is a little more tangible. That could over the

next few weeks, prove to be quite a good way of approaching it. Tangible

versus toxic, if you like. I was reading a piece, # 0 years old, from

the New York Times, they explained that Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism

wasn't here, exaggerated but to carry favour with the sentiments

that American voters are feeling. History suggest that is over

optimistic. Do you think Donald Trump is as nasty as he seems with

his descriptions of Mexicans, Muslims, building of walls and hi

bans of people of the wrong religion? I don't think so. It's

something about him. The truth about Donald Trump is that he is a pretty

non--ideological, pragmatic, problem-solving businessman who says

the first thing that comes into his head much I don't think he makes

these statements because there an underlying, bigoted or ideologically

driven point of view about people from other countries or races. I

just don't think that's how he is. He is very much someone who speaks

off the hoof. There is another important point, it might be easy in

people in the UK to follow the race from afar to conclude from some of

the things that Trump is saying he is pretty much another crazy

right-wing American politician. In fact, it's the opposite. One of the

reasons that the Republican establishment is really worried

about Trump and rounding on him, is not that he's too right-wing, it is

not that he's right-wing enough. They think his positions on abortion

and immigration are not right-wing enough. The other candidates in the

race the establishment would like people to get behind, Marco Rubio

and Ted Cruz, are to the right of Trump on abortion and immigration

and some other issues. You are quite right to suggest that we are

following it from afar. Of course, the vote we're following more

closely is the looming vote on EU membership, the referendum on that.

Your former boss has laid out his stall fairly effectively. Are you

impressed by it? Look, one thing I think is important for such an

important debate is for me not to get involved from afar. I don't want

to wade into that from a long distance away. Let's pretent tend

you are next door. I don't want to get involved. Better to leave the

debate to you over there. You haven't made a secret in the past

about your scepticism of the European project, I presume that

hasn't changed? Neither has David Cameron. He himself has said there

is no way he sees the EU as being perfect or an organisation or an

approach to governance that absolutely ideal. So I think, being

a critic of the EU doesn't necessarily put you in one camp or

the other. I fully appreciate you don't want to endorse David

Cameron's position or condemn it, but in many ways that speaks volumes

itself, doesn't it? I think it's not right to get involved from a long

way A former director away. Of strategy at Number Ten Downing

Street doesn't feel it would be right to get involved about the

biggest issue that the residents of the Number Ten Downing Street is

going to tackle in his career, come on? I don't think it's reasonable to

get involved from a long way away. It's a vivid and highly energised

debate right now. I just don't think it would be right, beamed into your

studio for me to make an intervention. Do you think we might

leave, leaving aside the battle. Do you think the result might go the

way of the Brexit campaign? You have months of campaigning and, as we

have seen here in the US, anything can happen. Indeed. Steve Hilton,

many thanks indeed. You may remember the excitement

in 1997 when Deep Blue, a computer, defeated

the chess grandmaster, That moment was considered a great

leap forward for artificial intelligence - a sign that computers

could now better mankind at even Now, almost 20 years later,

technology developed in London is about rewrite the rulebook again

as it takes on the World Champion at the ancient Chinese

board game of Go. If it wins, some experts believe

this will be the greatest breakthrough yet in the quest

for robots to mimic minds. Former Downing Street tech adviser,

Rohan Silva, is one of them and he's Until recently, computers have

been relatively simple. Even the most powerful machines can

only carry out the specific tasks This limits the scope

of what they can do, After all, the real world

is messy and unpredictable and computers aren't good

at dealing with that. But what if machines

could think like humans? What if software could learn

new things by itself? That's been a goal of scientists

working on artificial intelligence since the very dawn

of the information age. But it's proved

a near impossible task. A piece of software,

developed in London, the biggest step forward

in artificial intelligence It was developed playing simple

computer games and now it's about to take on the best

player in the world, A game of such complexity

and intuition, no machine has ever AlphaGo's creator is the British

start-up, Google Deepmind. So the game of Go has just two

rules, but out of those rules There are more possible board

configurations in the game of Go than there are atoms

in the universe. So really, it takes a whole

lifetime to master. We're ready for the next step

for us, which is the ultimate challenge - to take on one

of the world's top Go players. So we've decided to challenge

Lee Sedol in a $1 million Lee Sedol is the greatest Go

player of the last decade. Probably one of the greatest Go

players of all time. I describe him as the Roger Federer

of Go and, you know, the press and the excitement

there is just huge from the general population, because they really love

technology and they love Go. Human professional players,

at the top of the game, they're extremely creative

and they'll do unexpected things So we're pretty confident,

our internal tests are saying we should do pretty well,

but Lee Sedol has been interviewed by the Korean press and he's very

confident of winning, so it's going to be a very

interesting match-up. Of course, this isn't the first time

computers have beaten humans But what really marks out AlphaGo

from the machines that mastered noughts and crosses in the 1950s,

and eventually chess, in the 1990s, is not

just its ability to play a much It's the way it plays

the game - by learning. AlphaGo actually learns how to play

in quite a human-like manner. So the way we start off training

AlphaGo is by showing it 100,000 games that strong amateurs have

played, that we've downloaded We first initially get AlphaGo

to mimic the human player, so we give it a position,

and we train it to predict the move But of course, ultimately,

we would like AlphaGo to be stronger than human amateurs, and compete

with the top professionals. So the way we do that is,

after we take that first version, that's learned to mimic human play,

we then allow it to play itself 30 million times, on our servers,

and using reinforcement learning, the system learns to improve

itself incrementally through avoiding its errors,

and increasing and improving its win rate against older

versions of itself. After all these games,

then you end up with a new version that can beat the old version,

the original version, The computer Deep Blue has tonight

triumphed over the world chess It's the first time a machine has

defeated a reigning World Champion Kasparov, after the move

C4, has resigned. This is in many ways a more

interesting piece of software than Deep Blue, which was the piece

of code that did beat Garry Kasparov Why are people excited

at the moment? I think that's because these machine

learning techniques have made a little bit of a breakthrough,

at the sort of lowest level of functionality that's

really important for AI, So being able to take raw data,

large quantities of raw data, such as images or sounds,

and to be able to do the basic processing and recognise

what's there. Key to understanding why AlphaGo

could be a much bigger breakthrough than Deep Blue is to see just how

differently the two machines work. Deep Blue was programmed

to recognise the value of each piece It then used raw computing power

to search every possibility, It's a bit like trying every

password combination until the safe unlocks, but ask Deep Blue to do

anything other than play chess, like even play a much simpler game,

and it just won't know Like a human, it can't measure

all the possibilities in Go. Instead, AlphaGo teaches itself

to play the game by watching thousands of others,

playing matches against itself, When historians come to write

about the 21st Century, I believe this match will be seen

as a pivotal moment in our Because as Deepmind software shows,

we may be entering an age of thinking machines and general

artificial intelligence, capable of carryling out a huge

number of tasks currently Whether or not Deepmind wins

the game, it's likely that intelligent machines

are going to have a profound impact AI can make great contributions

to things liked medical imaging diagnosis, to self-driving cars,

to image recognition processing, so that computers can understand

what they see. Going beyond this, real general AI

means that these systems can do all of these things together,

and maybe can guide robots to make the right decisions,

so that they can behave with humans The whole point about general AI

is to not put bounds on any specific thing they can do, but to provide

a general technology whereby computers can make smart decisions,

can understand what they're doing. That's the really open challenge

for AI, is to try to make AI more and more general, and more and more

robust to situations that it The next step for Deepmind's

technology is applying it to real world situations,

not just games. The idea is that, you know,

these algorithms that we're working on are general purpose and can be

translated into these new domains, so we'd love to use these types

of algorithms for things like health care and science, and improve

the speed of breakthroughs in those areas by helping human

experts achieve more. The match against the world's best

Go player is a key milestone It could represent the dawn

of machines that think like humans and open up the possibility

of advanced artificial intelligence, This may all sound like science

fiction, but now it might really be The beautiful game is at its ugliest

when attention turns to the personal morality and apparent sexual

incontinence of some players. The conviction this week of former

Sunderland and England winger, Adam Johnson, for engaging in sexual

activity with a 15-year-old girl, has brought many attendant issues

into particularly sharp focus, with swathes of social media

contributors blaming Johnson's victim for his crimes

and the players' union calling today for footballers to receive more

education about "personal COMMENTATOR: Now for Adam Johnson.

Shooting in. Like so many young Premiership

footballers, Adam Johnson A multi-million-pound contract

and a great playing career But it was a sexual encounter

with a girl he knew to be under age In one series of messages,

the victim clearly tells In the next, he makes it clear

exactly why he wants to see her. He finishes by telling her to keep

deleting their exchanges. Now those who supported Johnson

are coming to terms with his crimes. I was aware of his plea

for all charges to be not guilty. Just before the trial started,

to hear that he had pleaded guilty was a massive shock to everybody,

everybody at the football club, which the football took

swift and direct action As Johnson awaits sentencing,

it leaves football asking more Can the game do anything

to stop its allure being used With me here, Mihir Bose,

a sports journalist who has written Joining me from Sheffield

is Richard Caborn, who was Sports Minister under

the last labour Government. O something in the budget to

clamp-down on that. Many thanks indeed.

Obviously, Adam Johnson particular crime is not one thankfully we see

replicated across football, but it was committed against a backdrop of

a sort of moral vacuum. We use the word veteran perhaps rudely in the

introduction, as you look back over the years you have been covering

football. Is that new development or has there always been a sense of

impunity about the top players? There have been bad footballers who

have done bad things, what we have is a dysfunctional system. Football

has become business. Club has become business. At the same time it

portrays itself as a community thing, it has a moral sense, and

what this case shows is where is the club's moral sense? Because what

Johnson did, what the club knew, we don't know for a fact what the club

exactly knew, what did it do, to, if you like educate Johnson, it is not

just the players union thing, the clubs have a responsibility and the

club claims to be a community club, the club of Sunderland, this was a

young 15-year-old, who was, who worships Sunderland, worships

Johnson which is how the whole thing started, where is the duty of care

to the season ticket holder o the fan? This is where the moral vacuum

has come. The clubs have spent too much time becoming businesses, and

forgetting how they originated and also what they say their main

appeal, that we are not just a business, we are more nan a

business. How, education is one thing, how do you discipline or

punish a man, earning 60,000 Bourne a week whose presence on the pitch

will have a direct affect on the profitability of the club or company

he works for? But in any proper situation, he would have been

suspended. Not played. They originally suspend him, brought him

back, the question is not whether he should have been dismissed but the

club new a serious charge is made, then they howl not have played him.

They should have suspended him but the club was then facing a

relegation battle, he is a very important player and the question

the club hasn't answered is why did they remove that suspension? Is it

because they needed to stay in the Premier League and all the money it

brings or is there some other reason? Sunderland are themselves in

the dock, but if you could step away from that particular case and tell

me what you as a man who didn't have a background in professional support

was struck by between the relationship between football and

morality. I agree to some extent with that. It is wider than that. It

is about the responsibility of the world of football, to put its house

in order. And some of us have been asking for that, that, I have worked

with a group of people who for the last ten years have been saying why

don't we have an independent service set up that can advice, give

counselling, education, to, we are taking young people now, into, young

people into this profession, the profession of football at nine years

of age, and that is really where it ought to start. We put forward the

players' programme where there ought to be this education programme, we

ought to have a proper counselling service, the other part in this

profession is how these players are dealt with. They are not dealt with

as people, they are dealt with as commodities by the agents, so the

whole structure is actually artificial, yes, ?60,000 a week they

were paying to Johnson, but that, I think when you look at the round,

when you are taking young people into what is a very artificial

world, without any counselling, without any support, I think the

profession of football ought to be looking at it. There are demands and

for the PFA to say it is about education, I have been asking the

PFA and the League Managers' Association, and the Premier League,

and the FA to set up an independent service for the last ten year, and

they have not done that. Briefly why not? , why do you think they

haven't? I don't know. I think that is a question that football itself

has to ask. It is no good, the PFA saying they want education, we have

put on the table to them, a programme, what we call the players

programme to start at nine years of age and help these young people to

be able to manage much more responsibly the profession of

football. It is a wake up call they ought to take to heart.

In a sentence, how optimistic are you that football will learn any

lessons from this? I don't think football will learn lesson, we have

have a lot of sound bites and football will say it is not our

responsibility. We are present aggregate game. The Premier League

is a wonderful product. And that will be the end of the story. Watch

this space. Many thanks. As the sighs of panicking parents

subside for another year, we thought we would mark World Book Day not

with costumes, cobbled together at the last minute, guilty. But with a

celebration of what is really important about books. What is on

the outside. Here are some of our favourite covers.

Good night.