22/05/2017 Newsnight

Is there any chance at all you're going to look at it again?

Testing the meaning of the words strong and stable,

the Prime Minister has made a staggering U-turn on social care,

and has compounded the embarrassment by pretending she's done

I've clarified what we will be putting in the green paper,

So Jeremy Corbyn is now rewriting your manifesto?

We'll ask what it tells us about Theresa May's

style of leadership, and what it tells us

I have come around lately to quite a radical idea.

I think compulsory voting could actually be the answer.

And is anyone think Facebook are any good at acting as a sensor of public

discourse? So, why then, does

Facebook allows this... Certain arguments go

round in circles in this country - the one about a third runway

at Heathrow, for example. And the one about how

we pay for social care. And today, in what can only be said

to be a jaw-dropping move, the Conservatives have,

mid-election campaign, reverted to a social care

policy they had junked. There will be a lifetime cap

on care costs after all. We may be close to a resolution

of the care issue, as both Conservative and Labour parties

want that cap. The fuss over the Tories' plans

of the last few days seem to have nudged the country

into a new deal on care. But the other important thing

about today is what it has done to the Conservative campaign,

built on the supposedly decisive The words "strong and stable"

have come back to hit And perhaps bizarrely,

the party has attempted to suggest, contrary to the evidence,

that there has been no Can you think of anything like this

in name election campaign? I can't think of a precedent, a U-turn on a

manifesto or a clarification, to use the official parlance. I can only

remember general election is going back to 1979. Let's go back to the

great Oxford psephologist, who tweeted today about the 20 elections

he has covered, you can't think of a U-turn on this scale or indeed one

at all. What went wrong? Ministers are saying the Prime Minister was

brave and right to face up to the social care crisis and people with

means should pay. But they experienced blowback on the doorstep

with one Tory candidate telling Newsnight it looked like a plate of

sick. Two problems were identified. Firstly, it wasn't fair. If you have

cancer, the state will pay for your care. If you have dementia and need

to be cared for at home, you will be liable. The second thing they said

was that it offends the idea, the Conservative idea, that you should

be able to leave a legacy for your children. That wasn't there because

it says on the original plans that if you have to pay then you only

have a guarantee of ?100,000 left in your estate. Finally they identified

Nick Timothy on the Prime Minister's chief of staff, as the culprit. One

minister said to me that's the problem with Nick Timothy is that

he's a socialist. It has been a strange day for the party and for

her. How is it playing tonight? I spoke to one minister who said, if

we win the election big then it will be forgotten as a mid-wobble. But

there has been quite a lot of criticism of the Prime Minister's

refusal throughout the day to acknowledge that she has changed

tack and there are echoes of Gordon Brown cancelling the election that

never was in 2007, and he said that had nothing to do with the opinion

polls. We journalists were told precisely the opposite. It has been

quite a big day. We have looked at Theresa May's wobbly Monday.

We were promised strong, stable, and consistent leadership. But what's

this? A U-turn on one of the central planks in the Conservative general

election manifesto. At a tetchy press conference this morning,

Theresa May announced there would be an absolute limit on care costs. The

Prime Minister dismissed talk of a U-turn because she is upholding a

guarantee that elderly people who rely on social care will have

?100,000 left in their estate. We have not change the principles of

the policy we set out in our manifesto. Those policies... Those

policies remain exactly the same. Ministers are in no doubt that this

is a U-turn, and a big one at that. They say they are experiencing

blowback on the doorstep from natural Tory supporters who say the

policy was unfair and offended the Tory principle that you should be

able to pass on a legacy to your children. Ministers also have in

their sights the Prime Minister's joint Chief of staff, Nick Timothy,

who drew up the manifesto in great secrecy. One veteran of numerous

Labour manifesto believes Theresa May has damaged her own brand. What

she's managed to do today, extraordinarily, is turn her own

leadership advantage against Jeremy Corbyn into a corrupted brand. She

wants to be strong and stable, the Prime Minister that Stevie and

determined and has resolved, but the toing and froing and U-turns and

irascibility in press conferences, corrupts the brand of leadership she

wants to make her biggest asset. And this isn't the first time our strong

and stable Prime Minister has embarked on a U-turn. Others include

calling an early general election after definitively ruling one out.

Ditching plans in the budget to increase national insurance

contributions for the self-employed. Watering down proposals for workers

to be given places on company boards. And abandoning plans to

oblige companies to declare the proportion of overseas workers.

Ministers say the U-turn was prompted in part by an apparent dip

in Tory support in weekend opinion polls. But one polling expert thinks

the picture is more complex. I think it's really, really easy to see this

as a seismic shift in the result of how people are feeling, but actually

if you get outside Westminster bubble, people are talking about

lots of different issues. Some were talking about the dementia tax, as

they call it. Lots were talking about fox hunting. Lots were talking

about the Labour policies feeling they were quite attractive and

hearing more from Labour about the specifics on what they will do

instead of the Conservatives. But there is no doubt the U-turn of 2017

will have a lasting impact on how Theresa May is perceived. A former

Conservative speech writer who coined the phrase dementia tax

believes the U-turn has shown the Prime Minister has rather not Tory

views. It doesn't feel very Tory. It perhaps hasn't been thought through

as much as it might have been. I think there's probably a danger in

government when the press are generally behind you, that you are

not perhaps as cautious as you might be. I think perhaps number ten

overlooked the kind of reaction they might get from voters. Lord would

believes the U-turn has ended up undermining the UK in Brussels.

Brexit negotiators in the European Union will smile quietly to

themselves because the she has made such a big plate of her steely

determination. That has been the big message, not to be messed with, but

she has performed a U-turn on a flagship manifesto pledge. That will

influence people in the next year and a half. It seems like a classic

mid-campaign wobble. Whether it casts a long shadow will depend on

whether the Prime Minister secures a decisive election result.

We'll talk about leadership and election tactics shortly.

But when it comes to social care, is this a case where,

to adapt a line from Churchill, we are fumbling towards the right

Chris Cook, our policy editor, reports.

The English care system is a running problem for the government.

Although, to be blunt, it's a problem because we choose it to be a

problem. The amounts of money that you need to fix it, are not huge. We

are not talking about the hundred billion plus we spend on the health

service. An extra two, three or four billion in social care will go an

awful long way. It's almost nowhere when you throw it at the NHS. The

care system has three moving parts to think of, we call them the

savings for comedy care cap and the means test. Let's start with the

means test. What asset account when the state works out whether you can

get paid for care or not? At the moment if you live in a care home,

all your assets count towards a means test. But if you get care in

your own home, your house doesn't count to the total. The Tory

manifesto last week, though, proposed putting the house in the

means test for everyone. A big take away by the government. Today you

announced a cap. The point of these proposals is that Mrs May wants more

money. In ten years' time there will be 2 million more people over the

age of 75. The social care system will collapse unless we do something

about it. The second moving part is what we call the floor. Once it's

checked your assets, under the current system the state doesn't

start helping you out until you have spent your assets down to just over

?23,000. The idea is you should have a minimum amount of cash you should

keep. Last week, though, the Tories proposed to raise that to ?100,000.

This element was a modest giveaway, although it's unclear how modest.

It's very hard to know whether the proposals the Conservatives are

putting together will cost or save money, particularly the proposals

last week, which were to raise money from the Winter fuel allowance and

raise money from that in the means testing and spend some on the means

test. It wasn't clear without knowing the details of the levels at

which all those things would occur what the overall net effect would

be. The third element is what we call the cap. This was the part

added today. The idea is to say, you might have a load more money than

the floor, but even if you get very sick, you should never need to pay

more than a fixed amount for your care. Save the cap were ?150,000,

even the very rich would never need pay more than that before the state

would start to help. The idea is to pool risk, like issuing insurance.

When we are faced by something where there is the risk of something

really nasty but it's not very likely, we don't all of us want to

save enough just in case a nasty risk occurs. We want to save the

average amount, spread out across the whole population and join

together, recognising that if we are one of the unlucky ones, we will be

fully covered. Today we saw a big U-turn, introducing a cap having

ruled it out last week. A reminder that it's not just the cost that's a

problem with social care, it is the unpredictability and the fact it

hits the sickest the hardest. Well, at the beginning

of the campaign, when the Tories had huge poll leads,

it was said that there would be a Tory wobble,

and we are certainly witnessing The polls are moving

in Labour's direction. I'm joined by Rachel Sylvester

of the Times and Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail, which surprised

many of its readers by seemingly supporting the original

social care policy. Are you happy that they have put a

cap in? I think there is no doubt that the original policy was a clock

up, and own goal. Having realised that, having had a panic about the

polling over the weekend, Theresa May has done what she had to do,

which is to put a cap in. What does it say about her steely

determination? I thought she was decisive and listened? I think it

says quite a lot of things about her. They obviously rushed at this.

I think she is too reliant on one or two advisers. Particularly Nick

Timothy, although he's a very clever chap. The policy that was announced

on Thursday is kind of leaning to left. And yet it was an own goal and

she allowed Jeremy Corbyn to sound plausible in his criticism of it.

That's the irony. They didn't think it through. She has done the

sensible thing in saying there should be a cap. Spotting she needed

to retreat. What does it say about the Daily Mail because your headline

was very positive. I don't write the headlines, but the feeling was that

it was brave of her to try to tackle the issue. Young people can't be

expected to subsidise old people for ever. That was the feeling behind

it. Rachel, what do you think it tells us on the policy-making site

about Theresa May's mastery of issues perhaps outside the Home

Office briefed. She was very strong there where she served for five

years. What worries me most is into the U-turn, which I think was

sensible. It was that she ended up with this initial policy in the

first place. Because it didn't solve any problems in a social care

system, as your people explained on the films. The issue is the lottery

between those who have certain conditions and those who have other

conditions. The policy they put forward didn't deal with that at all

so it missed the point. She went through this whole controversy and

rout for no purpose. We have ended up in a better place, but it

reflects badly on her ability to make policy.

And the campaign is around the coalition of chaos under Jeremy

Corbyn. Do you think this damages the brand of Theresa May? Of course,

she prides herself on her confidence, a safe pair of hands,

that is why she is the strong unstable candidate up against Jeremy

Corbyn. But this completely undermines that. I can only imagine

what you guys would be writing if Labour had you turned on a policy

within four days of publishing the manifesto. I think there is no

question that she has made a mistake, but having made a mistake,

she is trying to dig herself out of it, and I suspect that in a week's

time we will have forgotten all about it. The second aspect of this,

and in some ways the more surprising, is her inability to

stand up and say, it didn't play well, we listened, and just pretend

that this was always intended and if you read the manifesto carefully, it

never said there wouldn't be a cap. The obsession with looking strong

ends up making her look weak, and I think it was bizarre to pretend that

what was a U-turn wasn't. I think she is relying too much on her small

coterie. It is a U-turn? It is either a shift or a U-turn, she

hasn't gone back in the other direction, she has just... She has

gone from no cap to cap. It is an own goal, a one. When it comes to

Brexit negotiations, you're a European leader, this woman lasts

for days under pressure and then caves. What mincemeat are they going

to make of her? We surely want a leader who is going to be flexible.

We have agreed that she made a mistake, she has realised it and

seems to have the policy on the right tracks. We surely want a

leader who can back in as the mistakes she has made and face up to

them. But she can't do this too often. It is a slight echo of the

national insurance in the budget, where they blamed it all upon poor

old Hammond, when of course Number 10 knew about it. Do you think the

comparison to Gordon Brown is a valid one at this point? Like him,

she has a slightly tin ear, so she misses the emotional point of

politics, and that is potentially very bad in the European

negotiations which will depend on empathy and relationships as well as

being a difficult woman. Thank you both indeed, an interesting day.

And before we move on, let me tell you that social care

is one of the subjects that is bound to come up next week when Newsnight

will be debating the generation gap in British politics.

It's a special programme coming from Newcastle,

and we will have an audience of over 60s and under 30s.

If you are in one of those two categories, you may be

If you are, do e-mail us at [email protected].

OK, our next item is another one that has snagged various political

parties in the past - university tuition fees in England.

At the last election, Labour promised to cut them to ?6,000.

This time the party is going much further,

It is, by some margin, the most expensive promise Labour has made.

It costs more than four times more than the money

they've found for social care, for example.

And to make it even more real as a pledge, they've said students

starting this September will have their fees

So, is this the best way to spend ten billion a year of public funds?

I'm joined from Salford by the Shadow Schools

Mike, thanks for joining us. Can I just ask, confirmation, really.

Students who have already passed through university and got debts of

50,000, they will get no help, even though in a way they are paying

twice, paying their own university fees and a higher taxes to pay for

everyone else's university fees? The average debt the students leaving

university is around about ?45,000, and that has come about because

under the last Government, tuition fees were tripled, nursing bursaries

were abolished and also the maintenance grant of our poorest

students, many like myself who relied on to go to university, was

also scrapped, in direct violation to the last Tory manifesto. So that

is why we have the huge level of toxic that in our graduate

population. Your plan is for people to pay higher taxes, and you say

those taxes will fall on the very wealthy to pave the university

tuition. Those people who have got their 50,000 of debt will both have

paid the tuition and pay the higher taxes, is that correct? And you will

do nothing for them. Unlike the Conservatives we have a fully costed

manifesto. The key thing here will be that... So no help for them? It

in your manifesto. We have the most indebted student graduates upon the

planet currently, living in a toxic debt cycle. In my constituency I

have 3000 people with 5000 children in those families living in toxic

debt. We are creating a middle-class toxic debt cycle of students, and

the nation just can't afford that going forward. ?80 billion of

student debt now among that generation, and the Government's

already saying it won't be able to collect one in ?4 of that debt. You

said that the party policy is costed. What growth in student

numbers have you factored in when you remove the fees? Because

obviously the fees must deter some students, that is one of the reasons

why you would want to remove them. What growth numbers IU factoring in?

You asking about implementation. This starts in autumn 18/19, because

there is no way we will be able to get this into the students starting

next autumn, although we will retrospectively pay off their

student loans for those students starting in the forthcoming autumn

term. This is costing around 400,000 students, 366,000 of them are

full-time. I don't want to go through the basic costings. Have you

factored in growing student numbers as a result of this policy, or are

you expecting that the numbers will not grow? Currently because of the

toxic debt, universities can't fill the places, and that is the problem,

so this is costed at around 400,000 students full-time and part-time.

Sorry to interrupt, we don't have much time. Is it not the case that

student numbers will grow, or is it your plan to limit the numbers of

students who will go to university and put a cap and say it is 400,000

or whatever the number is? Brexit taught me three things. People are

worried about their skills, immigration and the changing pace of

technology in the workplace. People feeling left behind. This is a

policy designed for the 21st-century, but people don't feel

left behind. I was testing this on the doorstep today... I am going to

interrupt, so sorry. Will you ration the number of places at University?

No cap. No cap on the number? We will relieve any pressure that comes

about because we have already made commitments in higher and further

education... But will you tell universities, will you stop their

department Lee McCoy expanding, can universities just expand their

department as they like and be paid for every student who goes there?

Because that is very different as was one we had no fees, the numbers

were controlled and universities were told how many students they

could take a different subject areas. Is your proposal that any

university can expand as much as they want and anybody can go to

university and the Government pays? University can't do that currently

because they can't fill places because young people won't take on

that level of debt. But it is up to them to make that decision? Will it

remain their decision or will it be yours? I met a student who graduated

two years ago today with ?47,000 worth of debt. She does and

administration job at ?17,500. She won't go for a promotion because she

will cross the threshold of ?21,000. These people will never pay that

debt back. We have students living with their parents into their 30s

and 40s... I understand it is not nice. We can't allow our young

people, they can't even rely on the bank of mum and dad after the

dementia tax. How can you say the policy is costed if you have said

there will be no rationing of places and you have not allowed for any

growth in the numbers of students? One of the things one would assume

is there will be more students if it is free to go to university.

Somewhere, the policy doesn't add up. The policy is fully costed, as

all our policies are and have been tested from outside the political

realm as well. This is a commitment with ?9.5 billion to fourth --

400,000 students per annum. Students at a level now can register to vote

by midnight tonight and they have a real choice coming forward as what

they want society to look like, what they can achieve it university going

forward. Mr Kane, thank you very much for joining us.

Now, is Facebook a publisher of content, like the BBC, or a platform

on which content appears, like a manufacturer of A4 paper?

The organisation seems to think of itself as something in between.

We know this thanks to the Guardian, which has published Facebook

guidelines on what content is acceptable and what

The moderators themselves seem to find them confusing.

Clearly not everything is acceptable to Facebook.

Spencer Kelly, the presenter of the BBC technology

magazine programme Click, has been trying to

Somewhere in the mid-90s, the World Wide Web became the wild wild West,

seemingly full of filth, crime and crazy fonts. Many mainstream users

welcomed Facebook with open arms, and nice, clean, tidy, safe wall

garden where everyone looked nice, everyone was your friend, and cats

could be grumpy and safety. So why, then, does Facebook allow this. All

this? Shocking though they may seem, they don't break the rules here.

Facebook's terms and conditions outlined what it expects from its

users. The text is longer than the US Constitution, but then, why not?

Its population is six times as large, after all. And on the inside,

Facebook moderators use very specific rules on flow charts to

determine what violates those terms and conditions, and it is these

leaked guidelines that show how a social network is trying to tread

the line between being accused of censorship and being accused of

being a platform of racists, pornographers. If you want to create

the world's most popular social networking site, you will face a few

problems. First, size. As your popularity explodes until you are

receiving 1 million up dates every single minute, how'd you check them

all? Well, you can't. You can use algorithms to block the more

obviously unacceptable content, but after that, you've got to rely on

your users to report things that they find offensive. Then your team

of moderators can take a look, that even now they are reportedly

struggling to spend more than a few seconds on each case of extortion,

child abuse, violence or hate speech to determine whether it is

inappropriate. And second, inappropriate to who, anyway? You

want to be truly global. You want to be a platform for free speech and

free expression. Whose laws and values should you uphold? British

tastes are too liberal for some countries, whilst we find some of

their laws unacceptable. It is a standard social network argument

these days, that the responsibility for all this shouldn't lie with the

website itself. Facebook wants to be seen as a platform, not a publisher.

But that chestnut might just be getting a bit old. So it's not

really about platform or publisher or pipeline. There is a much bigger

issue. There is the issue of cyberspace as an environment. So in

the environmental movement, there is a principle called the precautionary

principle, which puts the onus on companies not to pollute the

environment. So when it comes to social media, who was responsible

for the clean-up? And if its reputation as a polluted causes

users to go elsewhere, so will the advertisers who I think may just

have the biggest say in what is and isn't appropriate here.

Spencer Kelly from click. Dr Jennifer Pybus is senior lecturer

at the London College of Communication, University

of the Arts, London. Her main research area is

the political economy of big data. Jim Killock is the executive

director of Open Rights Group, a digital civil liberties

organization. Just a quick one, is it good that we

know what the guidelines are? Is it good that it's in the public domain?

Absolutely. Maybe the bigger question now is, why is this after

Facebook has been in operation since 2005 is this the first glance we are

seeing at the ways in which they regulate content. Are you glad we

are seeing it or is it their own business? I'm glad we get some

insight into this. We have to recognise that if those people who

are game the rules nor exactly what the rules are, it will be a problem.

-- gaming the rules. This doesn't surprise me in the least. Anybody

could watch the moderators on Vimeo that will show you what happens with

the moderators and the training they go through. This is a fictional

thing? No, it's a real documentary. But we have seen the mistakes made

down the years. It's not surprising. They are rigid rules and badly

applied a lot of the time. Let's take the question of platform

against publisher. Where are you on that one? I think if we think about

what Facebook is, they want to present themselves as both. On the

one hand, if they are a platform, we understand Facebook for what it

really is, an entity trying to make as much money as possible. Money of

all the data that its 1.9 billion users upload every single moment of

the day dustup as a publisher we have to be really careful because

what does publishing actually mean? It is not a normal publisher because

it doesn't produce its own content. It doesn't take responsibility for

its content. They don't produce it, they just put it out there. They

cure rate the content, which is interesting. They say they just

manage it, they put it up there, but they don't take responsibility for

what's in the content. You are thinking they are more likely

publisher than platform and they can't walk away from taking some

responsibility? They have to take responsibility. What about you? I

think what they rely on is their ability to take enough

responsibility for their users to want to continue to use them. We say

that, your package said it was about the advertisers, but the advertisers

are only interested if they have users and the users will only stay

if they have a nice time and like the product and don't find things

more offensive than they can cope with and the overall experience is

positive. Of course Facebook wants to moderate because it once its

users to be happy. What's the right standard for them to moderate to?

The BBC moderate is everything. To quite a high standard. Would you

like Facebook to moderate away everything that's kind of offensive,

or only everything that is so offensive it really is illegal or

almost illegal? I think we need to stand back. If Facebook's mandate is

to make as much money as possible, what is its goal in terms of the

content it is curating for its users? It once its users to spend as

much time as possible on that platform. If that is the goal, then

it wants to give users contend that it will find interesting, that they

will share and pass on. In that sense the responsibility for

themselves if they want to make sure their users are happy. As a society

we are allowed to say to Facebook, we are interested in what you are

doing because you are a big player. What would you like the standard to

be? There needs to be another third party that sits in there and helps

them decide how to moderate. Somebody else helps moderate?

Absolutely. I'm not keen on that, I have to say. As soon as we say third

party, that says to meet government, or something that is even easier to

moderate than Facebook and that means more censorious practices than

Facebook has right now. I worry about that as an idea. They are

quite censorious, actually. The rules are often fairly arbitrary and

don't often make sense, but the end goal Facebook has got is to censor a

lot more content than we would ever dare sensor in a legal sense. How

far would you go? The one the papers have made a lot of today is this

one. To snap a woman's next, apply pressure to the middle of your

throat. Deeply offensive, but should it be removed? We need to understand

the context in which it is put out there. It is problematic and

worrying. That's why everyone is paying attention to it right now.

What all of this unveils is the way in which this is managed, we could

call it a black box. The algorithm that decides what content will be

seen and erased for the first time is open for us to take a look at.

People are now intervening in the debate and saying, we have to have

these bigger conversations. If we are precluding those conversations

and just allowing Facebook to do it by themselves, I think that's a

problem. 1.9 billion people on there all producing content. We have to

leave it there. Thank you both very much.

The deadline for registering for the vote on June the 8th passes

You have until the clock strikes midnight.

But some of us are far more likely to turn out than others.

Turnout has historically always been lower among young voters and those

from black and ethnic minority backgrounds in particular.

We asked the writer Afua Hirsch to explore this for us.

Here's her take on the problem as she sees it, and an idea

Conversations at this gym in Tottenham can get very political.

But the sentiments expressed here are not necessarily landing any

Yeah, yeah, I feel people feel incredibly

They feel like political parties don't represent them enough.

It really does feel like a men's private club.

You know what I mean, where they just influence everything

and we are just left out in the dark.

Derek, the gym's owner and a mentor to many of its young people,

feels they have been left behind by government and are having having

Scotland feels alienated from Westminster, but people

who are five or ten miles down the road are equally alienated.

I think, again, young people can change it,

but at the moment the politics that a lot of the young men and women

have got to deal with is getting from home to school,

This disillusionment goes some way towards explaining why black

and minority ethnic voters, as well as those aged 18 to 25

are less likely to vote than all other groups.

According to recent research, 57% of 18-24-year-olds did not vote

That's more than double the number of over 65-year-olds.

Registered black and minority voters had a turnout of only 51%.

And 24% of eligible black voters are not on the voter register,

compared to just 14% of eligible white voters.

According to the campaign group, Operation Black Vote,

getting out to vote is more than just a matter of principle.

When you look at 50 of the most marginal seats in the country,

30 of them could easily be influenced by the black

Could that vote actually sway the outcome, is that

That vote could decide who wins and who loses in this

When you consider that Theresa May has a working majority of 12,

and we could significantly influence 30, maybe even 70, then we are big

Many young people are politicised, but I think there's something

about the often arcane language of politics and the way it's

This debating event, or democracy cafe, in south London,

is run by young people, for young people, in an attempt

One of the barriers for young people not voting is just

because they don't or didn't get to learn about it enough.

If they were taught about it in schools from early primary

school, secondary school, I think more young people

There are a lot of adults who merely think, oh,

young people never vote, so they shouldn't even be

Or they shouldn't even be, I guess, let into certain things

But how would more voting among these groups affect the outcome?

Traditionally both young and minority voters have been

Recent polling has found that's changing.

In 1997, Labour received 80% of the black and ethnic minority vote.

Data from YouGov suggests one in four now support the Tories.

A lot of my friends that I am at university with are actually

voting Conservative, and some of them actively support

the Conservative Party outside of just voting.

And part of that is because actually they want to start businesses

or have gone to work for businesses and they have seen the business

It's a serious problem for democracy, when elections

are essentially hijacked by specific demographic groups.

In this case, over 65s, white voters, as well as other

categories like those who own their own homes.

It undermines the entire credibility of the Parliamentary process.

And it seems that the changes required to remedy that

It may require something more radical and I think it's compulsory

I absolutely think people ought to be compelled to not only vote,

So if you have a national insurance number, you should be registered

There are millions of people not even registered,

some 7 million people, not even on the electoral register.

There are 25 countries with compulsory voting laws,

including Australia, whose turnout in the last

It matters. It matters.

It's an idea I discussed with director of research

with the young activist group Bite the Ballot, Kenny Imafidon.

I have come around lately to quite a radical idea which I think might

solve all the problems you're talking about.

I think compulsory voting could actually be the answer.

I don't feel like we're in that sort of, I don't know,

state of emergency, where we need to consider compulsory voting.

Maybe once after we get people the education they need in school,

and we have a generation of people who have been taught that in school.

So you don't think it's that big a problem, the fact that so...

Young people and people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds

You don't think we have reached crisis point yet?

I feel like we can do that whole process without

At the end of the day, people have a right to vote

and the right not to, and I feel like sometimes we have

to allow people to have their right, if they choose not to vote as well.

It was once said that in a democracy, it's

not an election itself, but the act of voting

And this democracy is leaving far too many behind.

Some breaking news of some kind of incident at the Manchester Arena.

Details are sketchy but Greater Manchester Police have confirmed

they are at the scene and have urged people to avoid the area. Some

pictures from social media, unverified reports on social media

there might have been explosions. Buster Ariana Grande a was

performing at the Arena earlier. -- pop star. More details on the

website and news channel.