01/09/2017 Newsnight

The obstructionist Democrats would like us not to do it but we have to

close down our government. We are building that wall.

Trump's already threatened to shut down government

Is he prepared to fall out with his own party -

Tonight we're on the Arizona border looking at the divisions

The battles being fought within the Republican Party, much like the

tensions within the Trump White House, can be seen as a fight the

globalists and the Nationalists. The wall has become a symbol of that.

We have the most expensive childcare in the world.

The Government's increasing the subsidy for working parents -

even for those who are quite well off.

But should it be targeting the very poorest families instead?

We'll hear the case both for and against.

The man who has most doggedly chronicled London is the writer

He says hIs days of footslogging across

the capital are at an end - Steve Smith takes him out

Closed against the rest of England, London was now an island, open for

business, only if your business is business.

Texas needs levies - not walls - said one US

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, will the President have a change

of heart over his plans for the border wall with Mexico,

the ultimate soundbite of his election campaign?

Trump released photo images today for the structure

he wants to build and has vowed to shut down

government - if need be - to get the funding for it

But Trump's own legislators have other plans.

Senior Republicans are resisting spending on the controversial

wall when the money, they say, should be

The wall was meant to separate America from Mexico.

But the divide so far has been between the President

Division that points to a gulf of differences on other issues

between those who are - broadly - internationalist and those

Gabriel Gatehouse has been to the site of the wall in Arizona

Donald Trump is feuding with his own party.

At odds over trade, health care, law and order, and over the

We are building a wall on the southern border, which is

We have to close down our government.

That would be an awful decision that would backfire badly,

not just on the President but all the Republicans

Donald Trump said Mexico would pay for the wall but

So, now the president needs tens of billions of dollars from Congress

and he's likely to face opposition, not just from Democrats but from

The battle is being fought within the Republican

Party, much like the tensions inside the Trump White House

can be seen as a fight between the globalists

And the wall has become a symbol of that.

It's become the totemic issue at the heart of this battle.

Arizona, like America, is divided on the issue of the wall.

But those who want it built see opposition to it

as part of a wider pattern of obstruction of Donald Trump's

The wall represents a symbol of trespass.

It's a symbol of, don't come across here.

We stand for who we are as Americans.

By not having anything there, it's open transition.

If I behaved like they're doing in Washington, DC,

People have hope with this president.

Donald Trump won Arizona in 2016 but by a far smaller

margin than the Republican candidate in 2012.

America has not made its peace with the fact of his

presidency and that includes much of the Republican establishment.

Arizona's two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff

Flake, have been some of the most outspoken critics of the president.

Now, as we know, Donald Trump doesn't take criticism well and he's

He's looking for candidates to challenge Jeff Flake,

a senator from his own party, when his seat is up for re-election

During a recent visit to Phoenix, the president met with Robert Graham

to sound him out as a possible challenger.

He's a former chair of the State Republican Party

and ran the President's campaign in Arizona.

Trump, he says, was elected to shake things up and

So, disrupters generally get effective, positive

change if they can ensure through the change.

And so, right now, the politics as usual people, when he

talks about draining The Swamp, he's disrupting the universe.

He's not concerned with the optics in

politics and what he says, he is concerned with the outcome.

It's been a chaotic summer in the White House.

Five senior staffers have resigned or been forced out in as many weeks.

You can think it's chaos in there but I can tell you it's

organised and intentional what they're doing.

What he's doing is he's behaving like a CEO.

When I see people like Reince Preibus go out,

it doesn't make me think he's pushing an ally that was America

first ally, I think that was somebody that really didn't

have his best endgame in mind when he was in

the White House and even before the White House,

given discussions that I had with Prebus beforehand.

In the Nationalists versus globalists

narrative, one of the biggest rift is over trade.

Donald Trump leans towards economic nationalism.

He said he'll probably pull the US out of

the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Classical Republicans, including Arizona senator, Jeff

I don't believe there's any more articulate champion

of free trade and conservative values than Senator Flake.

It's a very odd political strategy to me

but it seems he's doing everything possible to settle scores within his

own party, then expanding the playing field in terms of

The president would most likely find it a lot easier to pass

his agenda, whether it is health care or any other issue if he had

some more votes to spare in the United States Senate.

Donald Trump promised his voters he would make

The implicit reference to a bygone era has

sparked a battle for the soul of this country.

It's a battle that is also being played out in the White

House, among staffers in the Nationalists

The Republican establishment is pinning its hopes on the latter to

try to wrest back some control of the Administration.

I think there is a battle going on in the White House

in terms of control over how the president moves forward.

I would like to see that the good people on

I do believe the country is better served with

them being in key positions and continuing to fight, to try to turn

The drive from the Mexican border towards the state

capital Phoenix takes you through the town of Tombstone.

The gunfights of the old Wild West were a mixture

Hard bitten local ranchers versus Northern newcomers, looking to

We got talking to Mike, owner of the Doc Holliday saloon.

Tombstone today is a theme park shadow of its once

edgy self but still old habits die hard.

A snarky remark from a neighbour sparks off some long simmering feud.

Be a man and stand up to what you want to say.

He was the one who walked by - take care

He keeps running his mouth and I'm tired listening to it.

No, it's about what's going on in the bar.

And we are building a wall on the southern border

It turns out Mike was at the rally in Phoenix last month,

standing directly behind the president.

Mike can tell us something very important about Donald Trump.

Something his detractors often fail to understand.

With his base, his popularity is pretty much

It's like you're talking to your buddy.

It's like you're talking to somebody you know.

It's not like talking to a politician.

He turned around a couple of times and he like puts his hands out

And it just reminded me being at home with my uncles and stuff.

And I agree with pretty much everything he said.

In fact I agree with everything he said.

And so the battle for the Republican Party continues.

In the cities, the metropolitans are chipping away at

Out here in the desert, they like their politics

Joining me now is Priscilla Alvarez - Politics Editor of

Nice of you to join us. Do you think that Donald Trump is having a change

of heart about the wall? To some degree, yes. We are seeing reports

that he is backtracking. White House officials are telling Republicans

fear backtracking on the $1.6 billion they are asking for. He has

threatened the Government shutdown if he does not get funding for the

border wall. He has done that in the past. This is the second time the

White House has seen difficulty in getting this through and would

backtrack from the initial decision. This is presumably because Donald

Trump's defining policies are nativist. He is looking quite

isolated in the White House, isn't he? It goes further than that. The

Republicans have a lot of items on their agenda. We are talking about

raising the debt ceiling and relief for Harvey. They want to get the

border wall funding through those that they do not see it as a

possibility. Paul Ryan, when he was questioned about the threat posed by

Trump, he also did not see it as something that should happen. The

Government shutdown should not happen for border wall. Other agenda

items are taking priority goes up to your point, Donald Trump has always

surrounded herself with people who hold the nationalist agenda for the

a lot of is used have to do with who he surrounds himself with. Whether

we see a change in coming months as to be seen. It is fascinating. One

point is, the people who are so strongly behind the wall are his

supporters like the voices we heard in Arizona and beyond that. With

they forgive him if you let that core policy go? It is interesting. I

think his base is very gung ho about the wall. It is tangible and they

want to see it go up. There are parts of the border that are already

friends. They want to see happen. Some of the immigration restriction

-ists see other things as more important. They want to see

legislation to cut illegal immigration to the United States.

They have other policies. Whether they reconcile some immigration

restriction is to groups who want legislation passed and the base that

once the border war built, that would be the interesting thing that

will happen. -- wall. What is fascinating is the journey between

Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Do you think he is more

aligned with them now or do you think the splits that we are seeing,

whether over immigration policies, the wall or spending are getting

bigger? I think this month, September, will be a big month to

answer that exact question. He has spent the summer months criticising

leadership and Republican senators. He has blamed them for several

things like health care. There have been reports that he has been in a

feud, an ongoing feud. I think that now, as we look at tax reform and

the budget, ill be the tell tale sign. Will he push for this funding?

If he does so, will the Republicans follow him? Steve Bannon followed

shortly after by the Hungarians advise as well last week. They have

promised to make America great again from outside the White House. How

does that work? How do you, in the lobby, explain that? Are they

supporting Donald Trump or undermining the White House?

David Simmonds -- Steve Bannon was editor at Breitbart and he is back

there and it is likely he will push the same thing they are pushing

which is pushing these agenda items and pushing for an Thai immigration

laws and immigration is a big part of this. What that is going to do is

continue. They will get louder. It is going to be Trump who has to face

that and it will be his White House that decides how they react to it.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Childcare in this country

is just about the most A full-time nursery place costs -

on average - more than ?150 So there should be plenty of parents

of three and four year olds in England today celebrating

the news that, from today, they're eligible for an extra 15

hours of free childcare And that's on top of the 15

hours they already get. But are we funding free

childcare the right way? Is it time for a radical rethink

on what free childcare is for? For years, all three and four year

olds have been eligible for up to 15 That's regardless of

whether their parents work, From now on, that will double to 30

hours a week during term time. For the extra entitlement,

both parents have to work and earn at least ?120 a week,

although if either Mum or Dad earns more than ?100,000 a year,

they no longer qualify. Some think the whole system

pumps too much money They say it should be

scrapped completely, with the money redirected

to the poorest in society. This policy is unlikely to benefit

the poorest children because either their parents don't

work or they don't work long Instead, what we could find is that

they're even more disadvantaged by the policy because nursery

providers might have to prioritise those children who are eligible

for the 30-hour entitlement and whose parents do earn more

money, or they don't get enough funding from government

and therefore don't have enough money to invest in high-quality,

well-staffed provision There was a time when not only

was childcare inaccessible to the poor, but a chimney sweep

could take his three year old to work with him,

as in this clip from 1933. Parents don't always know best,

but it used to be taken for granted that they were the best people

to bring up children. Why now, in an age of austerity,

are we spending so much money having Well, schools often argue it's good

for very young children to experience playing in groups,

so perhaps a social benefit. It's also argued that people

who want to go back to work, but couldn't afford

to without the free places, Our research suggests

that if anything at all, it will increase parental

employment, but only slightly, and only

for mothers who have no other One reason why this is the case

is that when offered with free childcare,

parents don't use Instead, they reduce the number

of hours of childcare that they pay for, or the number of hours

of informal childcare provided For many parents, it's

a make-or-break issue. The cost of childcare -

along with mortgages - the biggest outgoing

in their family budget. But is this the right way to be

going, is the money getting to the right people,

is it benefiting the kids? Joining me now from Manchester

is the Labour MP and former Shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell,

who is calling for just such And with me is David Simmonds,

the Conservative Vice Chairman Lucy Powell, you would tear up

the new system and start again, Well, not just the very poorest. I

think what we have got to have with the early years is some really clear

policy objectives and I think what your film showed as the myriad of

schemes that we have are failing many objectives at the same time.

There are two reasons why the state should invest in early years and

childcare. One is to support working families to go back to work, to

boost maternal employment rates. And the second is for social mobility

reasons, to close and narrowed that developmental and educational gap

that exists already by the age of five. So why would you not wanted to

go as widely you could? Both reasons apply to nearly all families, right?

Yes, they can do, but what we are seeing under this government is the

skewing of that money now very much focused on working families. And

better off working families, not even lower income working families.

A report I published yesterday with the social market foundation, the

analysis found that of the new money the Government is going to be

spending over this Parliament on the early years, 75% of that, ?9

billion, is going on the top half of earners and the most disadvantaged

families will seem less than 3% of that money. You just cannot justify

that. David, it is hard to argue against focusing on the poorest in

society, is it? There would be many disappointed parents if the scheme

being rolled out where to be scrapped, including me. When the

childcare for low income families was first introduced in 2013, the

Government gave a commitment that when it could afford to do it, it

would expand that scheme so many more families including higher

income families, could access it for the reasons outlined in your

introduction, it is amongst the most expensive month dress childcare in

the world. This is the fulfilment of a promise when childcare was

introduced for lower income families that it would also be made available

to others. So you are now, as an ethos, the party of working parents,

of working mothers? Councils are involved at the front line of making

sure that children get the best possible start in life. We know the

money you spend... Go back to the question, that has been a difference

between Labour and the Conservatives, the Conservatives

were never scared to say, we think parents that stay at home might be

raising their children best, and you have said that mums that stay at

home are raising their children best, has that gone from your floss

survey? I cannot speak for the Government on this but from the

perspective of a Conservative council, we see the benefits to our

local economy of making sure good quality childcare is available.

There is lots of research over many years showing the impact that has.

Whether we are looking at it philosophically or politically, it

is right to make sure that is available to ask many people as

possible. David says there will be a lot of middle-class families and

this would disproportionately hit, I think, working women, who would say

they cannot afford to go out any more to work. I think you have got

to try and do both, but I think the Government is now almost entirely

focusing on the better off working families. My eldest child is about

to start school in September so I have had seven, eight years of

spending a huge amount of money on nursery fees and I am well aware of

those costs. So you would do something more? Should you not have

been receiving any of that free childcare? Your own circumstances,

you work hard as an MP and you would not have been able to do half of

that, would you come if you had had children at home you could not

afford to send out? I don't know your circumstances. I got relatively

little help really from the state and yes, it is very difficult for

families to manage those costs, but it did not affect whether I was at

work or not and that is one of the policy objectives we have got to

look at here. It is about whether rewards work fundamentally. Do you

want to say, we are going to help you and help more families to have

two parents going out to work, or is that not important? It is important,

but it should not be the only policy objective and a fear over the coming

years, that is now becoming principal policy objective. When we

look at the developmental gaps at the age of five, they are dark. Over

half of children from disadvantaged families are not at the expected

level when they start school and the single biggest indicator of how well

you do at GCSE is your attainment at the age of five. Children from more

affluent families will have heard 30 million more words by the age of

three compared to those from disadvantaged families. We cannot

afford not to do something about it. David, would you agree that the

earlier children have any kind of schooling, any kind of interactive

nursery, the better off they will be? You could say, as Conservatives,

we will give you the money, you can spend it on nursery care if you want

or on children's shoes and clothes if you prefer. That was the

old-style Tory policy. You now saying every child should get into

education in whatever sense that is as early as possible? We deserve

every child deserves the best start in life and the early years

curriculum... That is a slightly different question, the best start

in life could be whatever the parent thinks is the best start for them,

you are pushing them down the line. The research is clear, it shows good

early education is a fantastic indicator and if you get that right,

children do better at primary school and secondary school and they go on

to university and college. We know the money spent in this way is the

most effective use of that money and that is why the Government is

committed to this and why councils are supporting this. We have issues

with the small print of the policy, it is clear it can be too complex

and many nursery providers have valid concerns. But the Early Free

curriculum and the access that offers and the balance it brings is

undoubtedly the best way to spend the money. We are out of time, thank

you very much. These are fractured times,

when everything from Brexit to the Grenfell Tower tragedy seems

to show up just how divided and complex our country,

and capital city, can be. One man who has been doggedly

chronicling London, and Londoners, at ground level is the writer

Iain Sinclair, whose 2002 book 'London Orbital' had him walk

the whole of the M25. After 40 years or so,

he's announced that his days of slogging across the capital

are at an end, with a final book called 'The Last London'

and an accompanying exhibition at Gallery 46 in

Whitechapel, East London. Before he hangs up his boots,

Sinclair joined Stephen Smith for one final trip to discuss how

the city has changed. Everything that I try and get

is earned by long, grinding walks. After all that foot slogging,

we thought we'd let # Come fly with me Let's

fly, let's fly away #. The foot-sore

chronicler of London, a day, so we thought we'd

give him one last spin One thing he won't miss

are Artisan coffee outlets. I hear these conversations

in Hackney where people are discussing the making of coffee,

as if it was now a chemical formula. And they can't actually sell it

because they're too busy finessing their own genius

in this field. And the moment when really it

came for me is that, having walked around

London all through one long night Bethnal Green, there's a sign

pasted up in a window - 'No coffee kept on the

premises overnight'. This is what builders used to put up

on their vans about their tools, From his vantage point at street -

or rather, bridge - level, Sinclair has perhaps picked

up more of what's really That invisible cockpit of pollution

rising from the loop of the M25, the orbital motorway,

had closed against London was now an island,

open for business, only if your London is a kind of

gigantic cruise liner. It's doing its best to sail away

from the rest of Britain, who is lost in another kind

of world altogether. And much more related to a world

of corporate cruise liners, with a third-world class slaving

away to keep the thing running, One reason Sinclair is hanging

up his boots, he says, is that the old cultural givens

about London no longer obtain. There are cities within

cities within cities, but they don't connect,

unless there's some horror like Grenfell Tower,

a sudden crematorium chimney erupts And we then fall into a thing

of public mourning. It was horribly predictable,

in lots of ways, in that the public There are sites that are almost

like dumping grounds, that are hidden and pushed

and starved of funds London is so severely

fractured and atomised now, in a way that I've never seen

before, that references As you move through London,

you can't help noticing them. The numbers of people

who are sleeping under bushes, Plenty of people do seem

to manage not to notice. I mean, you document

them in your books. You only kind of notice them

if you're moving fairly For Sinclair, his fellow Londoners

often miss what's around them, preoccupied with their bikes

or smartphones, or both. Like the cyclist he

rescued from a canal. "The bike weighs nothing

when I pull it out. It must feel like riding

on an idea, a line drawing. He seems like a decent chap,

in shock to be grounded. He shakes his head

to get the water out. The man is most concerned

about his phone. He pats Lycra padding,

with multiple pockets, The glinting wafer didn't

appreciate the sudden baptism, Time for a souvenir of the writer's

last circumnavigation I was mad enough to feel this

personal connection with the city, as if the molecules were exchanged

as you walked. It feels very odd to have come

to the end of that system, which began in 1975,

and I've been following one way Before we go, it's that time

when we traditionally call upon you to feel nostalgic

for the departure of something you haven't actually thought

about for over a decade, This time, it's the Yellow Pages,

which will cease publication - as a paper copy, at least -

after more than 50 years. As much a metaphor for heft

and anonymity as a phonebook, the Yellow Pages will perhaps be

most fondly remembered for the hard journalistic

sleuthing of one author - I don't suppose you have a copy

of 'Fly Fishing', by JR Hartley? Never mind, there's

still a few more to try. We don't just help with

the nasty things in life, like a blocked drain,

we're there for the nice things too. Good evening. As we step into the

first weekend of September, the weather