20/03/2017 Newsnight

It's official, the FBI is not just investigating

Russian interference in the US election, but...

That includes investigating the nature of any links between

individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian

government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign

and Russia's efforts. Yes,

it's the strangest An absorbing but bizarre

intelligence drama centred on the election of the president,

who was live tweeting We'll ask this Republican

Congressman whether everyone is playing politics

with national security. The Labour leadership

gathers to douse down REPORTER: Is there a plot to take

over the Labour Party? We'll ask the Shadow Foreign

Secretary, Emily Thornberry, what's All the politicians seem obsessed

with Brexit. Actually the biggest problems we face now are not Brexit.

Former Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King,

is back to warn we've all taken our eye off the ball.

And Marie Lyon believes the pregnancy test she took 40 years

ago caused her daughter's disability, and many, many others.

We'll hear about her campaign for justice.

They'll have to make a movie about it at some point.

The accusations being levelled at Donald Trump,

Public officials in the US have been caught up in a highly politicised

process of inquiry into FBI and NSA investigations.

For Democrats, the issue is the possibility that the Trump

campaign colluded with the Russian state in its attempts to hurt

For the Republicans, the issue is the illegal leaks that

have brought certain of these matters to public attention.

The House Intelligence Committee held hearings on these

matters today, James Comey, the director of the FBI,

and Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Council.

And yes, Britain did get an honourable mention

Here's Newsnight's own intelligence expert, Mark Urban.

It was bound to be dramatic - two spy chiefs cross-examined

publicly for the first time on an emerging investigation

into the Kremlin's role in the US election.

The FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission,

is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere

That includes investigating the nature of any links

between individuals associated with the Trump campaign

and the Russian government and whether there was any

coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts.

Time and again, committee members asked what Russian President Putin

It wasn't simply that the Russians had a negative preference

against Secretary Clinton, they also had a positive

preference for Donald Trump, isn't that correct?

And on Putin's aim to weaken the West, there was this

Would they have a preference for a candidate who encourage Brexit

Many times, the witnesses were asked about President Trump's

statements on Twitter, including the allegation that

Trump Tower was bugged by President Obama.

With respect to the President's tweets about alleged wiretapping

during the prior administration, I have no information that

As for the idea, lent credence by the White House,

that Britain's GCHQ had performed the interception of

Trump's Communications, the director of America's

I have seen nothing on the NSA site that we engaged

in any such activity, nor that anyone asked us to engage

And if you were to ask the British to spy on America,

there would be a violation of US law, would it not?

In broad terms, the Five Eyes agreement includes an agreement not

That is the foundation of the agreement.

Beyond that, each country has constraints within their own

domestic law that say they cannot use other Five Eyes partners

or any other intelligence service in order to circumvent

the constraints of their domestic law.

So anything that the United States intelligence community is not

able to do themselves, they are not able to ask a foreign

intelligence partner to do that on their behalf against Americans.

But while the hearing produced some light,

it also produced much heat, partisan, tactical

questioning, with Republicans emphasising not Russian

actions, but the seriousness of leaking about them.

Doesn't that leak hurt our national security?

Can you think of any reason why somebody would want to

And Democrats asked questions which stood no chance of

Being answered because of the ongoing investigation just to put

Do you think Mr Flint's failure to disclose the communication and

contact he had with the Russian ambassador and that topic of

conversation, along with the blatant lie to Vice President Pence, meet

the standard for an investigation by the FBI?

As for collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, the White

House today brushed aside the whole idea.

If you continue to search for something that everybody has been

briefed hasn't seen or found, I think it's fine to look into it.

But at the end of the day, they're going to come to the same

conclusion that everybody else has had.

So you can continue to look for something,

but you're continuing to look for something that doesn't exist.

What we've learned today is that Trump

and his people will be under scrutiny for months to come about

their alleged ties with Russia, and the FBI's judgments could prove

Well, a little earlier, I spoke to Republican

congressman Will Hurd, who is a member of the House

Intelligence Committee and was also a former undercover agent

I asked him how credible it was that intelligence agencies -

ordered by President Obama - had wiretapped candidate Trump.

Admiral Rogers confirmed that they would never have requested a foreign

intelligence agency to do something like that as well. I think a lot of

President Trump supporters would say those people would say that, they're

not going to say yeah, we were told to and we did it. In a way, Trump

supporters are not going to accept the evidence, are they? Well, I

don't know if I agree with that premise. I think one thing that the

American people should be happy with is that the separation and checks

and balances in our government is working. The fact that you have

folks from the majority party in the House and Senate disagreeing with

the executive branch is a sign that the process is working. I haven't

seen any indication from folks, rank and file Americans being concerned

with this. I think what they are concerned with is they want to see

this investigation and the Russian involvement in our elections be done

in a bipartisan, thoughtful and deliberate manner. Do you heart of

heart think that's what the intelligence committee were today,

they were bipartisan? The Republicans seem more concerned with

the leaks. Obviously the Democrats were concerned with potential

collusion between the Trump team and the Russians. It seemed to be

falling down party lines to a large degree. Well, I think we've got to

start with the fact that the scope of our investigation has been made

public. That is manying that generally doesn't happen. We're

looking at four areas: We're looking at what technical means did the

Russians use in order to try to manipulate our elections. Are think

any Americans associated with Russian intelligence that colluded

with the Russians? We're looking at what was the government response to

these actions and whether those could be improved in the future. And

the fourth area is the leaks. I think both sides, Republicans and

Democrats, made it clear that even though somebody may be focussing on

one particular area, that's not an indication that the other areas

don't matter. What you've just spelled out seems like the really

substantive issue facing your committee. Along comes the president

with his allegation that's Obama ordered his Trump Tower to be wire

tapped. Is that just a silly distraction? What is going on there?

What accounts for why that big thing will be thrown into your

proceedings? Well, you'll have to ask the president that question.

Because I don't have any perspective. I always rely on

guidance and advice my father has given me. My dad is 85 years old.

He's told all my friends, right before they got married, it never

hurts to say you're sorry. I think that's the case here. Just one last

one, do you think the president, if he believes the things he says and

the things he tweets, as someone who's been working in intelligence

yourself, not that long ago, do you believe he understands how it really

functions and really works? Well, I think there can be a whole lot more

precision used in language with everybody involved in this scenario.

We can't think of press reporting as if it's intelligence. Some of my

Democratic colleagues tried to use some information gleaned from the

press as if it's proper evidence that's going to stand up in the

court of law. I think we need to be precise in the use of terms like

"wire tapping". We need to be precise in how this information is

gleaned. Ultimately, when it comes to intelligence and law enforcement,

much of this should not be done in the public eye until after its

concluded. I think the American people, and honestly the world, have

an appetite to know what's going on right now, but when it comes to law

enforcement investigations and intelligence investigations these

things take time. When we talk about them, all of our language needs to

be a lot more precise. Congressman, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me on. There's the impending Article 50

process, the Scotland issue, there's been election talk in recent

days, which has been has been resolutely

smacked down by Number 10. But Labour, at this busy time,

is in the midst of some You don't have to be hugely trusting

of opinion polls to think that when the Conservatives have a 19%

lead in them, as they did in a poll today, something

is going badly for the Opposition. There was an explosive meeting

of the Parliamentary Nick Watt was outside,

listening through the door. Tell us about the meeting first.

Well, it was clearly a dreadful atmosphere, as you say, at tonight's

meeting. All the bigwigs were there, Peter Mandelson came out and he said

it reminded him of the dark days of the 1980s. Then Neil Kinnock said

no, it was far worse than that. It was clear there was shouting and at

one point, Jeremy Corbyn was referred to as "our so-called

leader". Now, give us the cause, let's go two steps. What's got all

this going? This blew up after a report in the Observer yesterday

which had a tape of a private meeting addressed by John Landsman,

the veteran left-winger who set up the Momentum group. He outlined

plans to tighten his grip over the Labour movement. He said that if Len

McCluskey, the General Secretary of unite, then unite will affiliate to

Momentum. This is what he said in the tape.

Tom Watson, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, condemned that on the

Today Programme. This is what he said as he turned up at a meeting

today, this morning of the Shadow Cabinet. I've responding to

newspaper reports at the weekend that showed there was a secret plan

to take over from the Labour Party. One of the things on the tape was an

allegation from the head of Momentum that Unite were going to channel

their funds into being part of that process. I think that's very

important. I would like Len McCluskey to publicly distance

himself from that allegation. After that meeting, it was a Shadow

Cabinet away day, reports appeared that Tom Watson had been isolated at

that meeting and had been widely reprimanded and John Crier, the

chair of the PLP and who attends meetings of the Shadow Cabinet said

he did not recognise that account of the meeting and he also said to the

PLP this evening, he hadn't really paid much attention to this tape. He

had made a point of listening to it and some members of the PLP heard

him talking about an attempt to create a party within a party.

Lucky with all this going on, that it looks like we're not having an

election on May 4th, or whatever the date was meant to be. A definitive

statement from Number Ten - there is not going to be an early election.

That's what Theresa May said way back in the summer when she launched

her bid for thor to leadership contest. One group who are

absolutely delighted by that, that's Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters,

because they know 19 points behind in the opinion polls, if there was

an election on May 4, bit tricky for them. Tricky for him. Thank you very

much. With me now is the Shadow Foreign

Secretary. Festival, can we corroborate that

Tom Watson was slapped down for going on the radio this morning and

ecstasy his concerns? He said this was a battle for the future

existence of the Labour Party -- for expressing his concerns. I am going

to be very boring. I abide by the rules, and that is that Shadow

Cabinet meetings are private and they are held in an atmosphere of

trust, and I never say anything about what happens in them. What do

you think of Tom Watson going on the radio this morning and said it was a

battle for the existence of the Labour Party? It is important that

internal discussions and fights within the Labour Party are done

privately. We do not need to discuss them in the media. It seems to me

that these are things we can discuss internally. The Labour Party is

about a great deal more than that. Although you say there aren't going

to be elections, actually, there are. There are going to be local

authority elections, and I think of the elderly woman I met in Warwick

who was so worried about the cuts to social care that she was not going

to be got up in the morning any more, she was going to be got up at

lunchtime. And who was going to help her have breakfast if the cuts to

social care went ahead? The cuts to local authorities and policing,

these are the things we should be focusing on. So many people have

said Labour is letting those people down because it is not serving the

role it should of holding the government to account. I am not

clear on what is going wrong. Is it that Tom Watson went public with his

criticisms? Is it the leader? Is it the MPs? What is it in your view

that explains why Labour is 19 points behind the Tories in the

poll? After the Shadow Cabinet awayday, there was a statement put

out saying that we are a broad church and we have always had

different groupings within the Labour Party and as long as it is

done within the rules, no one is going to criticise. That has got to

be right. That is the settlement on today's argument. Now you have to

deal with the fact that poll after poll has you 20 points behind the

Conservatives. That is why we have to focus on the policies. If you ask

the public about our policies, we are very popular. It is linking

those policies with us. I would like to talk about Donald Trump and about

what has been happening with the allegations against Britain and the

British Secret Service. Instead, I am talking about this. But you can't

blame us for that. I'm not. What I am saying is that Labour ought to be

debating our best policy offer for the public. You can't get to the

policy until you have sorted out the internal dynamics. And yet when it

comes to policy discussions, there is so little disagreement. That is

because you have had so little to say on policy. When we have

discussions on policy, it is actually relatively easy for us to

come together, because we have a dreadful government and we know we

have to be an alternative to it. We want to be

able to put out a policy offer. Then we descend into personality politics

and fighting amongst ourselves, and we have to be more disciplined. We

have to focus on what the Labour Party is about. After the Budget, it

was not the Labour Party that spotted the great flaw that pulled

the Chancellor's Budget and made it unravel. It was backbench Tory MPs.

Your leader didn't mention it in his follow-up speech, even though it had

been trailed three days before. There is something else going on

here, and it is not getting better. A year ago, John McDonnell

suggested, give us a year and it is going to get much better. It is not.

It is getting worse. What is going to get you out of this? I don't

think it's getting worse. The Labour Party is a collective endeavour and

we all have a duty to do our job as well as we can and to work

collectively as one organisation. That is what we should be doing more

than anything else. We should keep our focus on what is happening with

the housing crisis. What are we going to do about the fact that we

are having the number of police officers cut from our streets? These

are the things we should be looking at and setting forward an

alternative. When the party has sorted out the issues, people will

probably give more time to that. Do you want Len McCluskey to win the

election for general secretary of Unite next week? I am a member of

Unite and I will vote for him. So yes, I would think he would be a

good leader. Then can I assume that you have no worries about Unite and

Momentum getting together and perhaps working more in unison and

exerting more power over the Labour Party? Whether Unite affiliate to

Momentum or the other way round am a it is not a matter for the leader of

Unite, it is a decision that Unite had to make collectively. That is

useful. Another issue that is relevant is whether the rules of the

Labour Party should be changed to make it possible for a leader to be

collected with just support from 5% of the MPs. At the moment, it is

15%. It doesn't seem like an enormous hurdle, but John McDonnell

has suggested that it should come down to five. Do you think that

would be a better way of electing the leader? Well, there have been a

number of suggestions. Tom wants it to be a third again. These

discussions will happen internally. To be honest, those discussions will

not get that lady who is being held in bed until lunchtime because the

social services are not coming to get her up out of bed. That is what

we should focus on in public, and that is the important stuff of

politics. Politics is about power and changing people's lives. When

Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, there was a suggestion that the

Scottish Labour Party would have a resurgence and that he would better

connect with the values of Scotland. Since he was elected leader, the

Conservatives have overtaken Labour in Scotland and indeed, Labour is

seen as being in some difficulty of that. Should those people who

thought that by backing Corbyn, a kind of untapped socialist murmur

around the country would be harnessed and would be brought to

light, should they be disappointed that this has simply not worked? It

has not gone to plan at all. I think that politics in Scotland ought to

focus on the party which has been in power for ten years. The schools are

failing. The health service is failing, and they have just

introduced a huge cuts which they need not have done. They have powers

devolved, and yet they are not using them. But there are continuing to

bring up constitutional crisis after constitutional crisis to cover the

fact that they are not doing their job properly in Scotland. It is up

to Labour in Scotland, and I spoke to Kezia Dugdale tonight. This is

what she will be pointing out during the elections. We need her to have

the space to say that and not spend our time fighting amongst ourselves

and discussing people's personalities. Emily Thornberry,

thanks very much. Not a general election, it's not

a boy, or a girl, it's Article 50. 279 days after the June 23rd

referendum, nine months and a few extra days,

the Brexit process begins. All the arguments, the chatter,

the thinking about this option Clear your diaries -

here's how the timetable now looks. On the day itself, Theresa May

will send a letter to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council,

and will address the Commons. Within 48 hours, the council

will publish Then everything is put

on pause till late April, when other EU leaders are expected

to meet to agree The talks themselves

should then begin sometime in May after the final

round of the French

presidential election. through the German general

election in September, to a vote in the UK and European

parliaments Then Brexit becomes a reality,

two years from now. Victoria Dean was a diplomat

for 20 years, including being the Foreign Office's deputy

director on Europe and also spokesperson for the UK's permanent

representation to the EU. She now heads the Brexit unit

at Portland Communications. We thought we would get you to help

us understand some of the Kokrak every -- choreography of this. The

other 27 will have a meeting in late April, it seems. That is exactly

what they will do. They will need to coordinate their position in

response to the UK invoking article 50. We expect that they will get

together at the end of April, rumour had it the 27th. I think that is

tricky timing. But they have to agree a line. What if they can't?

Does that store things? It does, and it could take more than one meeting.

But they have been preparing for months. They have had plenty of time

to start to get their ducks in a row, and they then give a mandate to

the commission who will lead discussions. So the commission lead

the negotiations. Can we divide and rule of it here? Can we bung a few

favours to one lot and say, be on our side on this or that?

I certainly think that is what the UK has been trying to do and will

probably continue to have a go at, but there is a strong case for

European Union member states to come together and have some unity on

this. To some extent, it is the job of the lead negotiator to keep the

member states together as much as he can on this. They know they will be

more successful if they are united. We keep talking about the

negotiations of a Dale. Physically, give me the picture of what we mean.

Said David Davis or are we talking people lower down the food chain?

Where will they be? What language will they be talking? Are we talking

thousands of pages of things passing backwards and forwards? None of that

is set in stone, but we expect it will be Barnier on one side and

David Davis. David Davis will not be there every day, though. Of course

not. Barnier has already set out who his team is and has divided them

into different sectors. He has played specialists and financial

services specialists, so we know about his negotiating team already.

I expect there will be lots that happens outside the room and outside

the formal negotiations. And it is going to be in English? It will have

to be in English. I don't know how Barnier will feel about that. So

they have a few things to work out about the citizens of different

countries and the Brexit bill. We have to sort out the bill. If we get

stuck on that, seriously, does nothing happened for the whole two

years while we say no? That is a strong possibility, and plenty of

people will co-you that that is what will happen, that negotiations will

run into the sand over the issue of the bill and the 60 billion euros.

We might never even get into the real meat of the negotiations

themselves. I think there is a way around that. As Newsnight reported

last week, you can park in a separate process between number

crunchers what happens on the 60 billion. That is a concession on

both sides already, that there is a bill to be paid and that the number

can be discussed elsewhere. So perhaps that is a price worth paying

to allow you to get into the meat of the negotiations. You're right that

the other issue that the Prime Minister will want to tackle early

is the status of EU nationals in the UK and in return, UK nationals in

the EU. And in one word, if we agree on a status for EU nationals but

don't agree on anything else, the status will stay as agreed

presumably, or does that fall away when you have no agreement on

anything else? All we know is that it is not agreed until it is all

agreed. Victoria, thank you very much.

Lord King, Mervyn King, who was Governor of the Bank

of England, through the good years and the bad years in

He's at the midst of many of the traumas of the time

and wrote his account of what had gone wrong in a book published last

But it's been a long year and a lot has happened since.

So the new paperback version of the book has a preface updating

He is, for example, more comfortable with Brexit

First, does he have any worries about Theresa May triggering Article

Well, it's bound to be a complex process.

My biggest concern is not about the challenge of Brexit as such,

but about whether we're going to make the decisions early enough

that would enable us to make the practical planning

we should have a simple, clean Brexit and minimise the scale

There's a danger that we won't make progress in negotiations,

at least within the two-year horizon.

But what follows from that is not that we say OK

and give in to everything the other side demands.

We say "These are the things that are under our control",

and a clean Brexit is under our control.

There will be things that we will want to discuss,

but we have to minimise the area of negotiation.

And I think the Government also has to point out

the potential opportunities that Brexit gives.

We could restructure the way we give subsidies to agriculture.

We could, for example, in Northern Ireland,

which is a problem that deserves more attention

than it is getting at present, try and have a conversation

with the government south of the border -

I know they were very nervous about the Brexit outcome,

I was there just before the referendum - and say to them

"Can we find a way of shifting the tax and tariff border

from the land frontier to the sea frontier,

while not disturbing the political arrangements?"

I think it's in everyone's interest to have an imaginative discussion

You mean have a customs border between Northern Ireland

And there's no reason why the rate of corporation tax

in Northern Ireland has to be the same as in the rest of the UK

A lot has been said about the potential for a UK-US

Would such a deal benefit the UK's trade balance

My feeling is that both sides are thinking "We'll sign all these

deals and we'll suddenly be exporting more and bringing our

country into better balance", but both of us have the same problem

and I'm not sure which one of us would benefit.

We in the UK need to do something about our trade deficit.

My biggest worry about economic policy in the next few years is that

all the politicians seem obsessed with Brexit and actually,

the biggest problems we face now are not Brexit.

It's about how we can reduce the trade deficit,

how we're going to save enough as a nation to pay for our pensions,

because the pension scheme has deteriorated over the last 25 years,

how we're going to save enough to pay for care

for the elderly when we all become so old that we need that support.

These are the big economic challenges, and if politicians

ignore those and focus only on Brexit for the next two

or three years, then those big questions will not receive

And you think they might be giving too little weight to those

Well, it's clear that their mind is now completely on Brexit,

I just want to talk briefly about Scotland, which

you mention in your book and you say would have been viable as a nation

at the time of the last referendum and Project Fear

was perhaps overdone at the time of the last referendum.

The revenue that Scotland would derive from oil is much lower.

Do you still think Scotland would be viable as a nation?

Scotland could certainly be an independent country.

There are plenty of small countries the same size as Scotland.

Scotland has both the people and the capital city,

The question is, does it want to be, given the consequences?

I myself don't think there are any major problems in terms of currency.

That was the thing that Project Fear focused on last time.

But there is an issue about public finances.

If the oil price remains low and if they lose the money

which is transferred from the rest of the UK to Scotland,

they would have to make that up in their own budget.

But that is a consequence of deciding to be

It would be a challenge to borrow on the international market

in Scotland decided to run a large budget deficit.

But that's one of the consequences of saying

"If we want to be independent, we have to accept the consequences".

Donald Trump, one of the things he has said he wants to do

the big post-crisis regulatory change in the US.

He thinks it's getting in the way and he wants a more

Is that the right approach, and are you worried

about the fragility of the global banking system still,

which is two years on since you wrote the first edition

I think there is an argument which can be made to support part

of the move that President Trump wants to make, which is that we have

made the regulatory system incredibly complex.

People who work in banks have to go to their compliance officer

What regulators have done is to produce literally thousands

of pages of regulations and say "You must obey each of these".

And they've done it in order to prevent a repetition

But of course, the next financial crisis that comes along

won't look quite like the one that happened before.

Are you scared of any banks having a run on them

But elsewhere in the world, there are concerns

In Europe, the banking system is still fragile.

We've seen concerns about the financial sector in China.

and the thing that everyone needs to be concerned about is,

in the banking sector in one part of the world,

it can quite easily lead to problems with the banking system elsewhere

So our banks are in good shape, but if there were a serious problem

there would be a blowback to our banking system as well.

And for those of you that want to see the full, unedited,

version of that interview, it's up on our YouTube channel now.

Primodos was a drug made by the German company Schering back

in the '60s and '70s, sometimes used as a way

But using powerful synthetic hormones, it may have caused birth

defects in the children of pregnant women.

It was withdrawn from use in the '70s, but the question

of whether the drug was behind a number of birth defects

This week, campaigners are meeting the Department of Health

to discuss the progress, or lack thereof, of an expert

There's a Sky News documentary on the drug tomorrow.

But the story has a twist: in 2015, campaigner Marie Lyon found

internal company documents in the Berlin State Archive

suggesting that our own Chief Medical Officer had warned

Schering in 1975 that Primodos did indeed cause such abnormalities,

and he had then destroyed the evidence so that it

Very good evening to you. Hello. You took Primodos. I did, yes. You think

it affected your daughter. What affect did it have? When Sarah was

born, she had her arm missing from just below the elbow. There was a

tiny pad, five tiny fingers where the arm should have been. It was as

if the growth had just stopped quite abruptly much those fingers and that

tiny pad were actually amputate whenned she was 13 months old. --

amputated when she was 13 months old so she could be fitted with an

artificial arm. She has the artificial arm and working. She is,

yes. She came out of relatively well compared to some. She certainly did.

We have a lot of our members with multiple abnormalities, not just

one. You've got transposition of valves, heart disease, brain

disease, you know spina bifida. What is the actual evidence that the

including was involved in this? We had quite a lot of evidence. There's

the that titical graph that shows that -- statistics graph that shows

it was on track with the abnormalities. We found that there

were testing results in the files and they showed abnormalities in

animal studies. Also, the drug itself was manufactured as an

abortive agent. A drug that's 40 times the strength of oral

contraceptive is a huge thing to give to a woman early in pregnancy.

It is. If you think back to those times, now you just say, what were

they thinking. They weren't. When you took the drug, what was - it was

a pill presumably? Two tablets, yes. Do you even remember taking it? Of

course, I do. It's something because it was my first child. So my initial

thoughts were it would be a urine test. The urine test was very widely

available at that time. When I was given the two tablets, it was sort

of on the understanding that this is new, this is quick. You'll be able

to know you're pregnant within days. So I didn't question because my

doctor gave them to me. Consequently - You didn't know that it was a

powerful hormone? I had no idea. We weren't even told. It was a test, it

wasn't a therapy like Thalidomide. The only purpose for this was money.

Bayer, which now owns the company which produced the drug, reject all

claims that there was a link. There was a court case. There was. The

link wasn't held up in that case, that was in the 80s. We didn't get

to that stage. We had a handful of scientists willing to give evidence.

Schering had the same number of scientists, including I may add Dr

William Inman the commissioner on the safety of medicine. So he was

someone who should have been looking after the health of the women in the

UK, but he actually chose to give evidence on behalf of Scherings

against the association. We had to withdraw and that really is the

bottom line. We withdrew because we were outnumbered and outgunned. But

the judge at the time insisted that the case should not be closed. And

it's not closed for you. No it absolutely isn't. There are too many

people whose lives have been affected for #40 plus years. They've

lived half a life. That's how you've got to look at it. It's about time

that answers were actually given and it's about time that Bayer actually

were big enough to actually release all the documentation. I will stress

that Bayer of course deny it. I understand that. Thank you very

much. You're very welcome. Thank you.

Dame Vera Lynn, the forces sweetheart whose songs kept the home

fires burning during World War Two, celebrated her hundredth today.

Unfortunately the Spitfire flyby in her honour had to be cancelled

because of bad weather, but the rain didn't

frighten the residents of Priory House in Leamington Spa,

We leave you tonight with Dame Vera - and the memories of Esme,

# We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when ... She

represents family and home really, to me. Because she wasn't

particularly young, was she, when she was singing. Everybody could

relate to her. # Keep smiling through, just like

you always do # Till that blue skies lift the dark

clouds far away... We only had radios, we didn't have television.

When she sang, it really did lift us. It really did. I thought she was

marvellous. -- marvellous. We all had to make our own entertainment.

And to sing together was people and choirs, was a lovely way for the

community to get together. You couldn't always have expensive dos,

but you could have a sing along. # Don't know where, don't know when

# But we'll meet again some sunny day

# We'll meet again # Don't know where, don't know when

# But I know we'll meet again some sunny day.

Hello. There warnings of snow and ice for Scotland and Northern

Ireland overnight and into the rush hour. Definite winter chill in the

air. Many central and Eastern parts of England