12/08/2014 The Papers

action from the super cup final, and Gareth Bale's return to Cardiff with

rail Madrid. That is in 15 minutes, after the Papers.

Hello, and welcome to our look ahead to what the papers are going to be

bringing us tomorrow morning. With me Sam Coates, Deputy political

editor at The Times, and Randeep Ramesh, social affairs editor at the

Guardian. Tomorrow's front pages, we'll take a look at what has

arrived so far tonight. The Independent says that ten different

enquiries have been launched in under three years into Greater

Manchester Police, and specifically into its handling of the rape and

sexual abuse cases. The Financial Times has a striking image of a

Russian aid convoy. Hundreds of tracks are currently on their way

towards eastern Ukraine. And a warning from Colonel Tim Collins is

the Telegraph's front page tonight. The retired military officer, famous

for his rousing speech on the eve of the Iraq war, says that Britain is

failing in its moral obligation to intervene. A photograph of the late

Robin Williams, found dead in an apparent suicide at his home on

Monday, dominates the front of the Daily Star. It is also the image

that fills the front page of Metro, which says that the agony of the

actor's final hours has been revealed. And Robin Williams and his

daughter are on the front of the Express. That paper also has an

update on its campaign to try to end hospital car parking charges.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail speculates that financial worries may have

played a part in Robin Williams' death. The Guardian leads with news

that we have been covering here this evening, that Britain is

intensifying its involvement in northern Iraq.

Welcome to the news channel tonight. We will start with Iraq, and

particularly with what the Telegraph has to say. Colonel Tim Collins, one

of the media's favourite retired military officers. Will this strike

a bit of a nerve, do you think? It certainly plays into a growing

chorus of calls for Parliament to be recalled and for greater

intervention, and perhaps even for a direct tackling of Isis, which is

actually not UK or US policy at the moment. What Tim Collins is saying

is that Britain has a very long, historic relationship with Iraq, and

with the Kurds in particular, since we went to war to protect them in

the Gulf in 1990, and that we should do much more than we do at the

moment. He says the age drops are like a pebble in the ocean, and that

we need to get stuck in and start fighting on behalf of the Kurds, to

push back the Islamic State, and to protect the region. Randiv, he is

also saying in this interview about the danger of historic civilisations

being wiped out. We have heard a lot of apocalyptic language over the

past few days, yet there is also a poll being quoted by the Telegraph

tonight, which says that whilst most people are in favour of more aid and

the rest of it, they are dead set against any idea of troops on the

ground. It is a big dilemma for the politicians. When it comes to

ancient civilisations being wiped out, I think it is a good headline,

but unfortunately we have lost plenty of those. You can see the

wreckage in Syria, you can see what happened in Lebanon on 30 or 40

years ago. These things do disappear under the waves of war. I think the

late motif of this kind of conflict probably goes back to that Gulf War

crisis, where we set up a safe zone for the Kurds to operate, which

allowed them about 25 years of democracy. I think that is the fear,

perhaps, of this mission, creeping into a situation where we patrol the

skies of Iraq in order to insular this kind of humanitarian corridor

for the Kurds to operate and protect them from Isis. `` ensure this kind

of humanitarian corridor. That is a political decision. We have not got

anywhere near it, but that is what lies behind these Army guys coming

out and saying that we cannot begin this process without an end in

sight, and I think that end does lead you to this kind of project,

which I do not think David Cameron really wants to go to. There are a

lot of easy calls in the moment in the political world for a recall of

Parliament and for further action, but very live in peoples minds at

the moment is the experience last year over Syria, where there was no

clear plan, yet there was a recall of Parliament and a botched boat

that resulted in a slightly inconclusive set of votes in the

Houses of Parliament and Britain ruling out military action there. ``

botched vote. I think one of the things that the government is

conscious of, and which the military wants to make clear, is that you

need some sort of and endgame. So that if we did get further involved

in what is going on in Iraq, we would know what I clear objectives

were, and how they would end. And I still do not quite see that we have

got to that point. Whether it is a sort of permanent patrolling

presence, to allow a Kurdish state within a state to continue to

existing safely, or whether we look to actually try to maintain control

and maybe even decimate the Islamic State itself, which is an altogether

bigger undertaking and probably pretty difficult at this stage. I

think that is true. I think as we have found out, when it comes to

Iraq and Syria, there are things beyond our control. Baghdad, what

happens in Damascus, what Turkey decides to do eventually with the

Qataris and the Saudis, that is London's problem. It really does not

have much of a dog in this fight. The other problem for Britain is

that anything that it does do, America can do far better. And

bigger. And bigger. So there is no distinctive role. There is no need

for Britain to get involved other than a sense of symbolism and

history, and a need to show solidarity with the US and the

Kurds. And it is a lot of money just for that. Sam, you mentioned the

vote on Syria last year, and of course there was much controversy

over the role of Ed Miliband. I'm still not `` Downing Street have

forgiven him over that. But it seems that conservative researchers have

found, according to a story at the bottom of the Daily Telegraph, that

Mr Miliband is one of the biggest reasons why swing voters in the

Midlands will be reluctant to vote Labour at the next election. What do

you make of that? That is an extraordinary curious story. You are

quite used to reading poll stories, which are based on research done by

poll companies, reputable poll company to publish their

methodology, explaining how the vote is broken down in different parts of

the country. Robbie speaking, they show that the Labour Party is ahead

by something between four and seven points, on polls that are taken

nearly every day. `` broadly speaking. On the front page of the

Telegraph we have a new phenomenon called conservative research, and

hey presto, it comes out with the unbelievable conclusion that David

Cameron will win the next election because of Ed Miliband's

unpopularity. Now, he is unpopular, but the Tories are still behind. The

big question is, why are they doing this? Why are we reading this story?

What is happening is that conservatives have long presumed and

hoped that the improvements to the economy will bring with it a rising

tide of votes. And that is not happening. And so you are seeing

doggedly determined poll leads of 47% for the Labour Party, and people

in the Tory party are getting unsettled. This is, I suspect, their

attempts to calm the nerves. Do you agree with that? Do you think it is

about internal reassurance for conservatives, rather than actually

aimed at Labour, or indeed the swing voters? I think it is undeniable

that the polls do show that Ed Miliband is a weakness for his

party, but that is not news, and I think Sam is probably right. You

have to wonder, you have cut out the middleman and printed the press

release. It appears, if one can use that formulation, because this is

what the Conservative research Department would say, surely? OK, we

will move on. Enough said, as you might say. We will move on to the

Financial Times, and this image, which I noticed the Telegraph have

just managed to get onto their front page. It is this image of these

tracks with their lights on, so it is a moody, Twilight image, of these

innocent looking white trucks on the one hand, but on the other hand, if

you are a Ukrainian in Kiev, you might perceive this as a sort of

stealth invasion. You do have a split screen feeling of events in

Iraq taking place while once again that is in Ukraine are just starting

to read up again. There has long been a fear or a suspicion that

President Putin would use the next big international events to make his

next incursion into Ukraine. He has arranged a humanitarian aid mission,

280 trucks, seemingly under the cover of the International Red

Cross, though actually as it happens the International Red Cross denied

that this was their convoy this morning, in a rather powerful and

spectacular tweet. And the Ukrainians are saying they will

allow the aid in, providing it is transferred to the Red Cross. Very

murky. It does look like a military convoy, with the perfect distance

between each track. You wonder whether there are 30 soldiers in

each vehicle, standing to attention and waiting to be unloaded somewhere

west of the border. Putin is nothing if not a clever politician. This

sort of says to the west, these people require humanitarian aid, I

am going to deliver it. You cannot say that this is anything but

material support for people in need. Of course, the Ukrainians will say,

hang on a minute, you created this problem. You gave them the guns and

the weapons. the comparison is with Syria. In Russia, it was blamed, and

there are two calculations. One is that there are lot of ethnic

Russians in that part of the world, and the reception will be purely

positive. There is a need that he is answering. The West tried to look at

the difficult sanctions, which the European Union needs to get 28

countries to agree to. They could not get very far to it. Is a

newspaper man, what do you make the decision to go big on this story? On

the sanctions question, the Financial Times are nothing if not

good at following the money. That is where the Russian question is. It is

being watered down. Whilst there are distractions in Iraq, it becomes

even harder. Just briefly, let's look at the Independent story on sex

crimes. This is quite something. The suggestion that has emerged that

Greater Manchester Police face ten different enquiries into and a half

years. We have lost the end of this, but the bureau of investigated

journalism done a lot of work. It is whether they were right to proceed

with surveillance when a vulnerable child was placed in danger. The

story is so Peter Fahy. He could be in line to take over at The Met. He

is innocent until proven guilty. But there will be a question in anyone's

mind. He leads the counterterrorism strategy, and he has been seen as

being quite effective. Bell the last word is on surveillance. Police have

misused surveillance in recent years. Thank you both for joining

us. You're going to carry on looking through these, we will be back with

you again at 11:30pm, but for now, that is all for us. At 11 o'clock,

we are going to have a report from northern Iraq, where tens of

thousands of refugees crossed a mountain range is to flee from

Islamic militants. Now it is time for the sport.

Hello and welcome to Sportsday ` I'm Azi Farni.

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