20/07/2017 Newsnight

Do you want the journey to Brexit to be a slow Wade, or would you rather

it was a fast, clean leap into our new arrangement? It's becoming a

refight of the battle between remain and leave. The transitional

arrangements, how fast we exit, is a slow transition simply a ploy to

stop Brexit all together? The old and tired phrase, it looks like a

duck, walks like a ducks, quacks like a duck - it is a duck and the

soft Brexiteers are in fact people who've always rejected the result.

We'll debate the pros and cons of different transitional plans. Is

this the future of Counter-Terrorism? Automatic

monitoring of suspects on a database watch list. We have got to be

vigilant all the time and mustn't let our guard down. We must use the

latest technology to take the fight to the terrorists. Grenfell - a new

Deputy Leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council and he's taking over

the authority's response to the fire. We meet him. I think the

mistake was that we thought that we could do this on our own. And the

scale was much, much lanker. If I was going to point to the biggest

thing, we delayed before we started engaging on a national level and

getting support. Hello. The Brexit talks between

Britain and the EU carried on again today. The sides are still stuck on

the divorce bill and citizens' rights. More on that shortly. Away

from the negotiation with them in the EU, there is something of a

negotiation going on here within the UK, or more precisely within the UK

Government. It's about a potential transitional arrangement, the day we

leave the EU - how long does the transition need to be and xa exactly

happens in it? It's becoming the central divisive question in the

Conservative Party on how Brexit should proceed. Our Political

Editor, Nick watt is with me. Nick, let's just start on the negotiations

with the EU first, the ones today. How are they progressing? Today was

round two of the Brexit divorce talks in Brussels between David

Davis, as you see there, and Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator.

Supporters of the Brexit secretary said the talks went much better than

expected on two of the key areas, progress on the rights of EU

citizens and on Northern Ireland. The big difficulty is the money. The

UK's made clear there is absolutely no way it's going to pay the ?100

billion euros that has been mentioned in Brussels. I spoke to a

senior source who said that if the UK was able to say it reduced that

figure by say around two thirds, then it may be up for paying what

would still be a substantial sum of money. Now, the reason why that's

important is that Michel Barnier gave a much less upbeat assessment

and he said the UK has got to clarify its position on that

payment. Right. I mean that's all the

immediate stuff isn't it. Let's think about the issues coming down

the line. This particular one of transition? That's right. The focus

in Brussels is on the immediate sort of divorce arrangement but the

debate in the UK has been on the immediate period after the UK leaves

the EU in the spring of 2019. Now, in her Lancaster House speech in

January, the Prime Minister talked about how there would have to be an

implementation phase between leaving the EU and then fully agreeing that

future trading relationship. Now, since the election, a rather bullish

Philip Hammond who of course voted Remain in the general election, he's

been talking about a transition period of a couple of years. That

would involve a very close relationship with the core bodies

and institutions of the EU. I've been looking at the debate in

Cabinet on the highly charged issue of that transitional phase.

MUSIC You can have a transition agreement

that keeps as little disruption as possible. We are not going to be

talking a couple of months, it will be a couple of years. It has to have

an end date. To transition or not to transition? That is the question

that's been dividing ministers. Whether Britain should sever its

formal links with the EU at the point of departure or whether the UK

should move at a slower pace as lain at the heart of recent Cabinet

squabbling. In the so-called soft Brexit corner stands Philip Hammond

who's called for a transitional period of a couple of years after

the UK leaves the EU. Over in the hard Brexit corner stands Liam Fox

who echoed the Prime Minister's language when he talked recently of

an implementation phase lasting a few months. Allies of the Chancellor

say Philip Hammond is increasingly confident that Cabinet Ministers are

coming round to his view as they heed his warnings about a cliff edge

Brexit. There is talk about how pragmatic leaves will accept what is

described as Norway plus, associate status within the single market, a

looser relationship with the customs union, to allow the UK to negotiate

free trade deals around the world and a special court to end the deaf

intive jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over the UK --

definitive. The Chancellor's camp say the blueprint represents a

challenge to Brussels which is saying the UK should be subject to

all of the rules of the EU during a transition period. A Remain

supporter even talks of maintaining the status quo for a limited period.

Even though we have left the EU at that period, for the time scale that

it would take to negotiate a new trade agreement, so maybe a couple

of years, we would still keep the same status quo to give businesses

certainty and to give them time to adjust to the new economic

arrangements. Liam Fox slightly changed tack this week when he said

he wouldn't be troubled been aimplementation phase lasting two

years. One leading Brexit supporter is wary of talk about a transition

period. Well then we are only out of the European Union in some

theological sense that if we are subject to rules of the single

market, the regulations of the single market, we are subject to the

European Court of Justice, we are paying for the privilege and can't

do free trade deals with the rest of the world, we are in the European

Union and the old and tired phrase, it walks and talks and quacks like a

duck, it is a duck. These soft Brexiteers are in fact people who've

always rejected the result of the referendum there, the Tony Blairs of

this world who wish it hadn't happened and think that they can

magic it away. I don't think the British voters will accept that.

Jacob Rees-Mogg believes under most scenarios, a transitional phase may

not even be necessary. If the talks are going well, and we know in

advance, some margin in advance of 2019 that there will be an

agreement, then any implementation period will be very short. If on the

other hand the talks are going very badly, then it will be too late to

announce an implementation programme right at the end because people will

need to have made plans for no agreement. On either basis, there's

not much for an implementation to take care of. Either it's terrible

and it's too late, or it's gone well and then you've already got time to

implement between the talks being concluded and the final date of our

leaving. As Parliament finally breaks up for the summer recess,

there are tentative signs of the Cabinet coaling around a transition

period last ago few years -- co Al elsing. Brexit supporters remain

deeply suspicious. Nick, what there would the debate

within the Conservative Party about the need for a transitional period

or not. Let's work through the substance of that now. Do we need

one? I'm joined by Stephen Bullock, whose job did once involve

negotiating with the other member states. Ukip's Suzanne Evans also

joins me. Stephen can you perhaps explain why you think we do need

some kind of transition? I think the two clear reasons why a transition

is absolutely necessary are, I think the first reason is that there is

simply no chance in the time available of fully comprehensive

Free Trade Agreement being agreed. I think we'll be or should be very

grateful if the divorce agreement and some agreement on the future

relationship including possibly a set of principles and possibly a

transitional arrangement, if that's what the UK wants, be agreed by the

end of that time. I think there is no chance of getting the FTA. The

level of complexity involved also, that simply requires a much longer

amount of... Longer, you just said longer. That was the word. How long?

What do you think it needs to be as does it have to have a final date

before we go in, or do you basically think it can be indefinite? Well,

personally I wouldn't mind if it was indefinite. I think the European

Parliament's said very clearly that it would want it to be having a

clear end date and they wouldn't want it to be some sort of half way

house permanently. I don't think it's in the EU's interests to want

that to be permanent with the ever present threat that the UK then

decides it wants to end the arrangement or start a new

arrangement, then we have to go through a similar process than the

one we are going through now again. Suzanne Evans, do you think we can

get away without any transition, is that really possible? This is what

we were told. Going back to the EU referendum campaign, I don't recall

the word transition being used once. This is a ruse that has been brought

in by the people that want us to stay in. Fascinating to hear Stephen

talking about, it's not in the EU interest to keep the transition

phase going forever. Of course it is, we are a major net contributor

and will be subject to their laws and migration controls. We won't

have any freedom at all. The fact is, the people of Britain know

exactly what they voted for, they voted to take back control of our

minute, our laws and borders -- our money, our laws and borders. We are

not going to be take back any of those for goodness knows how long.

We either leave in March 2019 or are held hostage for an indefinite

period of time. Why is it so bindery, what is the hurry because

it's quite possible we won't be ready to leave then but we will be

ready to leave a year or 18 months, two years later? This is always

Ukip's concern about doing the Article 50 route, that lays out a

two-year period. If it's not possible to do it in two years, why

did Article 50 say it should be possible. The whole thing is utter

nonsense, clearly a ruse. As for the Free Trade Agreement that's

apparently going to take a huge length of time, Free Trade

Agreements are struck around the world without 28 countries having to

agree in a matter of months. The only reason we won't potentially be

able to do a Free Trade Agreement is because the European Union is

expressly forbidding us from starting those negotiations with

other countries now. So it's a bit of a false argument. One can't help

but feel there is there something to be said, Stephen, that you do just

want to delay Brexit or stop it all together and hope that maybe after

two years something else come ace long and we never go through with

it. Isn't that deep down what you are really saying? Well, my personal

view as a Remain voter are that we should scrap Brexit as we have

discovered that it's unbelievably harmful to the UK or going to be.

There was a landmark study done by the UK in the changing EU at Kings

College today, it was released today, it showed very clearly that

leaving without a deal would be absolutely catastrophic,

particularly economically. All economic predictions are that it

will be a catastrophe. The leave campaign promised it would be

excellent and that there would be lots of money flowing, that we could

use for lots of lovely things. That's not what's going to happen. .

The point is that there are a series of realities here, such as food

standards, aviation, we have seen it with Euroton over medical treatment,

all this needs agreement. That is very helpful but let's take the

specifics and put them to Suzanne. Michael O'Leary of Ryanair said

timetables are coming out in a year, they need to know whether they are

allowed to fly and it's not fixed up. If you ask Michael O'Leary and

Stephen, they would say they want the transition period to go on for a

long time because they don't want it. If they play hard ball and say

we are not talking to you, what will happen? I don't think we will be

playing hard ball on aviation rights. We'll be begging them to let

them fly into their air space? The same with trade. Stephen said the

economic case will be disastrous if we leave. That's not true. If we

have tariffs and trade under World Trade Organisation terms, that will

bring economic benefit of ?12.7 billion. What happens on aviation

rights. Supposing they say we are waiting for a proper negotiation and

we say no, we are leaving, what happens? There is no treaty

governing... But that's not going to happen, is it? Stephen is it going

to happen, is it going to be said that you can't have nuclear

materials and fly out of Heathrow Airport? I think it's actually

slightly worse than the aviation market. Everyone talks about the

aviation market. I only found out recently that aviation safety is

currently done by an EU agency which is covered by the ECJ, as they all

are, and that the UK doesn't have its own capacity for the

certification of the people who repair aeroplanes. At the moment

they have 19 months to establish a regulatory framework on the and to

recruit and train people to be able to do that. My point is that there

are literally hundreds, it's a 40-year complicated relationship,

there are hundreds of areas that keep cropping up. Every time I run

into a sector expert in Brussels he tells me about the difficulties that

there are going to be in his area. I'd never thought of the energy

market, for example, I know that energy experts thought about Euroton

and Isotopes. We are going to see more of these moments that we didn't

realise... Suzanne, she is shrugging in a weary way as though she's heard

it all before. I'm sure she is because she believes in Brexit at

any cost to the economy. This idea of the cliff edge, the

fact is, this shows how deeply embedded we have got into the

European Union. This is what we have to get out of. Is it whether we have

time to create border posts and understand the structure? To you

except we need even now we need some sort of transitional period? We

should be doing that right now, that is the issue, what we can do right

now, this is about Article 50, this slow move progress, designed not to

allow countries to leave but to keep them in. If we were to repeal the

1970s European Communities Act, ultimately it would have been to our

benefit. Thank you both very much. We have to leave it there. Time now

for a Viewsnight - the part of the programme where we give space for

original and provocative opinion. Tonight we hear from Naomi Klein -

activist and author of "No is Not Enough - defeating the New Shock

Politics". At the centre of the hapless

response to the Grenfell Tower fire is a London borough,

the Royal Borough of By universal acknowledgement,

it failed to rise to the challenge. And as the owner of the building

and inspector of building works, it is in line

for other criticism, too. Those who survived the fire

are understandably angry at the council -

and that erupted last night at a council meeting which confirmed

in post a new council leader. Well, the Communities Secretary,

Sajid Javid, updated the Commons today on Grenfell and made the point

that the council won't be trusted The initial response

from the local authority There is not a lot of trust there,

not a lot of confidence. And that is why, once Kensington

and Chelsea Council takes over the recovery operation,

it will do so under the supervision of the independent

Grenfell Recovery Task Force. It is there to provide advice

and support and see to it that the council does the job

that is required of it. The council has now at least

appointed a deputy leader, who is to take responsibility

for the Grenfell response. His name is Kim Taylor-Smith,

and I met him at the council I asked him where he thought the

council had gone wrong in the response to the disaster.

I think the mistake was that we thought we could do this

on our own and the scale was much, much larger and I think

if I was going to point to the biggest thing,

we delayed before we started engaging on a national

I was talking to somebody today and they were criticising this and

We have two people in our comms department and we had 5000 people

They just weren't able to deal with this scale.

It seems remarkable that you didn't throw money at it?

You have huge reserves as a council, ?274 million.

Well, we obviously do have large reserves and thank goodness we do

because obviously the application of those is going to be

As far as specifically, on the first day, we booked 350 hotels,

Money wasn't a limiting factor in terms of that,

We were giving emergency payments as well.

When Nick Paget-Brown, the former leader, when he stepped

down, he talked about perceived failings of the council and he

Can I ask whether you think there are perceived failings

I think I have to be a little bit careful.

There is going to be an enquiry on this.

Certainly, from my perspective, there were a lot of things

that we could have done better and a lot of things that we should

So I think we have failed as far as our local

Can I ask why you would be hesitant to say that there were failings?

Because to most of us it is so obvious there were failings,

there should be no hesitation in just saying, we failed.

It is not that it could have been better, it was terrible.

And the council let people down very badly.

Where I feel quite strongly is that we have officers in this

situation, not councillors, we have officers in this time

of situation who have worked incredibly hard and from day one,

and they have a shadow cast over them in terms of the overall review

So, I am going to be a little bit guarded in terms of laying criticism

So, last year, the council took ?55 million in social rent.

And invested less than that back in social housing.

Is it appropriate for a council effectively to make money,

to see social housing as a moneymaking operation

as opposed to a money spending operation?

First of all, the numbers you have quoted, you have given

a gross figure of rents, in terms of net it is actually

about ?11 million a year, which is still a sizeable

Again, I don't want to sound evasive.

On why that wasn't spent or how that was spent.

Certainly as far as the commitment we have given, we have committed

to do 400 houses within the next five years and we have

I really want to look forward in terms of what is going to happen

rather than what has happened in the past.

It has been easy to write this disaster up as a council that was

too good at looking after wealthier residents, the majority in the area,

and was not concerned really about the poor residents. Do you think

that is a reasonable way of looking at what happened at Grenfell? No, in

terms of investing to a certain sector, if we go to Grenfell, that

was part of the ?60 million investment, there was the new

school, with 1000 local children, there was a new sports Academy and

refurbishment of the Grenfell Tower, all from local people. Not

gentrification. A lot of people said, the purpose of the cladding

was to make it look nice for the richer residents who lived around it

so they did not have to look at the old Grenfell Tower? Is there

something in that? I totally disagree. If you are going to

refurbish the building, why would you not want the building to improve

how would looks? The meeting last night, the Grenfell Action Group,

the leader said he was appalled by the behaviour of councillors, there

was whispering and giggling, would you answer that? If that behaviour

was going on I was not aware of that from where I was sitting and I would

not condone that. He said the council are managing this as a PR

disaster. Public relations, rather than as an actual disaster. Any

fairness in that? I am not sure we have done a lot of PR in order to

manage the disaster and of the work, we have seemingly failed in terms of

that. Some people would say that after such a calamity, the

appropriate thing is for people who warned about this or who wanted

change beforehand are the ones to take over, not the people who were

in charge beforehand? We have an election in May, we also have to

keep the wheels on the bus, this is a large borough and there is a lot

of things we do well so there is benefit to continuity and the skill

sets of the people we have got within the new Cabinet, whilst I

accept what you say in terms of trust and mistrust, they are the

right people to do this. Kim Taylor-Smith, thank you very much.

It is fairly routine these days for cameras to be programmed

But Newsnight has learned that highly advanced computer technology

is being tested here at the far more complicated task of

The idea is that it can help keep tabs on terrorist suspects.

The technology works by comparing images of suspects on a terrorist

watch list with the images of people who pass special cameras

Alerts can be triggered if they approach high-profile

targets, for example, or if they associate with other

Could these face recognition cameras become as common as CCTV?

The scale of the thread is huge, three terrorist attacks this year,

35 people dead. Five attacks have been stopped in the past four

months, some have told Newsnight it is time for a new approach. Is this

the future of counterterrorism in the UK? Affects surveillance camera

monitors people coming out of the building. Most are not on any

terrorist watch list. But this person is. And his face is

recognised automatically. Triggering an alert. With 23,000 now on the

watch list, is this the way forward? It is impossible to use conventional

means against that number of people, it cannot be done. The arithmetic,

it cannot be done. The technology is able to do that job right now and

therefore it is the responsibility of society and politicians to decide

what is the appropriate way that might be deployed. We do need to

debate to start to use these images in a more intimate and aggressive

and more defined way. After the suicide bombing at the Manchester

Arena in May, MI5 let it be known that 23,000 people in the UK have

had links to violent Islamist extremism. 3000 are current threat

and 20,000 have recent links. We know some of them are high up on

those lists and getting constant attention and we also know that

people might be down the list and might have featured years ago and

have gone quiet and all of a sudden they become activated and carry out

terrorist outrages, it is a huge challenge society as to how we deal

with these potential suspects. The conditions are extremely difficult

but they are proceeding as quickly as they can... Andy Trotter was

deputy chief constable for British Transport Police at the time of the

London bombings in 2005 and Chief Constable after that. Rejecting

crowded spaces has been central to his 45 year police career. The

dreadful events of the last few weeks should stick in our minds

forever, they should not fade away. We have to be vigilant all the time

and must not let our guard down and we must use the latest technology to

take the fight to the terrorists. Both the leader of the Manchester

attack and the leader of the London Bridge Rampage later when known

extremists but they were assessed to be a low priority. They were on the

radar but not under the microscope whenever they attacked. With 23,000

on the list, how do we as a society monitoring that number? There is a

technique called automatic face recognition that can help, it uses

the images of faces taken from cameras deployed either overtly or

covertly. They kind of automatic face recognition we are talking

about relies on a machine learning and artificial intelligence, where

computers teach themselves to identify people more effectively.

Newsnight can reveal this technique was used in live surveillance

operations before and after the recent terrorist attacks in

Manchester and London. A small British company called Digital

barriers has developed an advanced face recognition system. We set up a

simple scenario using actors to show how this works. This is a typical

surveillance camera but this is loaded with face recognition

capability so you can see it as capturing everyone coming from the

store away in a crowded space. Unknown on the left, this person is

high risk. Somebody on the list has been spotted coming from the

entrance of a typical camera and on the top left-hand side of the

screen, because that is registering the match, we can see the identity

of that person and that alert will go to the right place. This could be

one of many thousands of such cameras in use every single day of

the week looking for people against that database. The system uses an

artificial intelligence technique called machine learning. We feed the

computer millions of reference images where we know what the

results are on the computer knows those results as well and when we

feed it images it has not seen before, it can unfair what they

might be and we allow the system to become ever better at the job of

recognising people. The designers of the system say it can even work in

bad light and we did our experiment, recognising faces through glass. We

look at multiple reference points on the face of a person and in essence

we create a map, biometric map, which is just code about as compared

to the same maps created as people pass the camera.

The use of video is key, enabling the system to analyse thousands of

frames. It has been used in a whole range of applications. Should these

tactics be yewed to monitor known extremists? He spent much of his

career at the top of UK policing, a source, he says he believes most of

the public will accept it. He says the UK's Counter-Terrorism tactics

are out-of-date. Current Counter-Terrorism tactics were

developed in response to Irish terrorism. From the 1970s on,

terrorist networks were infiltrated. Bugs and probes were placed,

suspects physically tracked. This approach takes a lot of surveillance

officers on the ground. We recreated a classic operations or follow. We

spoke to a former surveillance officer who spent five years working

for the Metropolitan Police. Essentially we had the first

operative following him the same side of the pavement to the corner,

then they disengage and carry on because he's turned left. From this

side of the street, cross over, re-engage on the left hand turn and

the end of the street will be the primary position. Sounds like a

labour-intensive process? Yes, it is. And that's without considering

that you may need to have extra vehicles with extra crews on board,

extra bodies on the ground, changeover shifts and potentially

somebody on overwatch to operate the remote viewing equipment or even on

the roof top. Another former surveillance officer told me he'd

seen MI5 operations that used 40 people to trail one target over 24

hours. It is a hugely labour-intensive operation. These

people might do nothing for months, years, and all the time there might

be others who need even more attention. That diverts resources

from other things. If we can use this technology sensible, can good

judicial oversight because obviously clearly there are issues here, I

think the overriding civil liberty is keeping our society safe. If we

can use this technology, we should. If an alert is triggered, what

action should be taken? If an alarm is run through your camera system

picking up one of these people, what do you do? At this stage all you've

got is a positive identification of somebody on a watch list. Do they

represent a threat? Are they planning some form of attack? Are

they just going about their normal business popping down to see their

mum or going out shopping? At London Bridge, protective rails have been

installed but face recognition could offer a broader approach. In rising

order of controversy, you could use it with targeted investigations,

monitoring people entering and leaving an address, for example, or

use multiple cameras to protect crowded spaces like stations or the

citizens could become as ubiquitous as CCTV to build patterns of

behaviour. We can take a database of muttple tens of thousands of people.

So what are the patterns behind people's behaviour, so how many

different times have people on a list that you may be interested in,

visited certain locations or been in the same location at similar times

to others you are interested in. This is being used in secret. We

haven't had a conversation as a society about how or where and when

it should be used. What we need is to have that conversation and we

need to interrogate whether we are willing for something that can be

very invasive and have a real impact on innocent people's freedoms every

day, whether we are willing to have that installed in our society and

what we need to make sure that we are protected from it going wrong.

If you protected every single crowded place, people would feel

they were living under some form of surveillance society so where does

the balance end? The biggest attack on our civil liberties is the murder

of our children and our people in Manchester and in London. Yes,

there'll be an intrusion, of course there will but that is a price to

pay if we can protect our society against the terrorist threat. The

London bombings in 2005 remain Britain's worst terrorist attack.

Back then, Newsnight revealed that the leader, Mohammad Sidique Khan

featured in surveillance before the attack. He slipped through the net.

With an ever lengthening watch list, some say the trade-off between

intrusion and security must change. I'm concerned about civil liberties,

as is anybody. I'm even more concerned about making sure we use

the best kit we can to take the fight to the terrorist. We do not

want to be having memorial services and we don't want to be thanking the

blue light services for outstanding responses, we don't want to do this

any more. Anything we can do to fight the terrorists and serious

criminals, we should use it. Advanced face recognition will never

replace conventional intelligence gathering. But it could help manage

the watch list given the scale of the threat will society accept it?

Richard Watson there. Almost time to go. Let's take a look at the papers,

or some of them. The Times leads on transitional arrangements, borders

will remain open for two years after Brexit. The Chancellor is juend

Studioed stood to believe he has support of every Cabinet Minister

for a deal, a new immigration regime will be put in place after the two

year period. The Daily Telegraph on a similar theme, not quite the same

story, it's one that says foreign criminals will be able to stay or

some of them after we leave the EU. OJ Simpson on the cover of one of

the papers, he's been given parole over in the US. And finally the

Forwardian, free movement may go on until 2023, ministers accept, so

that's a transitional arrangement that is a little bit longer. Well,

that is it for tonight. Before we go, what have Bing Crosby, Paul

Newman and Meetloaf got in common, they are one in part of the 12 women

and 200 women who suffer from one form of colour blindness. A Belgian

photographer's released a photo book using infrared exposure and hand

painted images. A high proportion of residents suffer from total colour

blindness in one area. Historians believe the gene that causes the

condition can be traced to a King who repopulated the island after a

tsunami, wiped out almost the entire population in the 1700s. So we leave

you tonight with images from the island of the colour blind. Good

night.