14/06/2012 This Week

Forget the footie highlights tonight - This Week brings you the

political highlights from a week in Westminster.

As the boots fly in Poland and Ukraine, back home there's disquiet

in the dressing room between coalition team-mates. The BBC's top

striker, Eddie Mair, hangs out in the political goal mouth. This was

the week in which Jeremy Hunt saved himself, but without the support of

many of his own team-mates. As England prepare for their second

match, the Government announces tough new transfer rules for

immigrants. Play-maker and author Sarfraz

Manzoor thinks the plans should be kicked into touch. Theresa May may

think she's hit the back of the net, but I think her plans should be

given the red card. And as age-old grudges come to the

surface in Warsaw between Russians and Poles, is it really possible to

divorce sport from politics? Football fanatic, author and

comedian David Baddiel gives us a pitch-side view. No. Someone in

Spain will have considered those four goals tonight revenge for the

wrecking of the armad ta on the southern province of Ireland in

1588. They think This Week is all over

the place - it is now! Evenin' all, welcome to the Open University.

Sorry, This Week. And a very special wakey-wakey welcome to all

those viewers who made it through to the bitter end of Snoozenight -

all three dozen of you. Let me explain why we're here. Following

the BBC's Diamond Jubilee One Show River Pageant two weeks ago, BBC

bosses - known collectively as "Yentobs" - have decided to risk

yet another avalanche of viewer complaints and unfavourable

headlines by shunting the This Week ratings juggernaut off BBC One and

on to BBC Two. Just because some overpaid middle manager Tristram

wants to show that, even though he played rugger at Eton, he's really

down with the peeps and thinks football matters more than we do!

Not that we're bothered about our viewing figures. "Build it and they

will come" has always been our motto. A bit like Michael's quiff.

But not like Leveson, the never- ending media studies seminar that's

run longer than the Mousetrap, and whose ratings are so low they've

stooped to inviting every ex-Prime Minister with a grudge to parade

their prejudices before it. Today it was the turn of Call-Me-Dave

himself, where everything was going swimmingly, until he had to explain

what Read-Me-My-Rights-Rebekah was doing sending him overly cosy texts,

assuring Dave that "professionally, we're definitely in this together."

Oh, dear. Speaking of deeply inappropriate

relationships, I'm joined on the sofa tonight by two people who know

it's wrong but just can't help themselves. The Woody Allen and

Soon-Yi Previn of late-night political chat. I speak, of course,

of #jacquiam, Jacqui Smith, and #sadmanonatrain, Michael "choo-

choo" Portillo. Your moment. Right, well, bear with me on this one.

is not going to be long is it? deficit of private pension funds in

this country has reached �312 billion. It is four times as much

as was used to bail out Spain this week. It has gone up from �25

billion a year ago to �312 billion. By more in a month... Private or

state? Private pension funds. Why is this happening? Mainly because

the Bank of England is printing money. As it prints money the value

of gilts decrease in value. A deficit in a pension fund is the

gap between what the pension fund needs to pay pension and what it

has. This is a massive problem and it's brought about by Government

policy. And the bank have announced the commercial banks can borrow

another �80 billion for the first time. Money, money, everywhere.

That almost was like an Open University speech. Three dozen

people have fallen asleep. moment was the appointment by

Theresa May of Tom Winsor as the Chief Inspector of policing.

Strategically the right thing to do, to bring someone from the outside

in for the first time to inspect the police. Tactically the wrong

thing to do to appoint Tom Winsor. There was a certain feel that if we

look back to the Blair years, if you are really irritating the

profession you must be doing something right in terms of public

sector reform. I'm afraid this was a time when it wasn't sufficient to

irritate the police to make it a good idea to appoint Tom Winsor.

There are other things you can do to reform. Simply irritating the

police isn't enough to reform them. And they are irritated.

Now, just when you thought the Government had run out of U-turns,

along comes the biggest of all, when the Prime Minister abandoned

his "no child left behind" approach to education by leaving his

daughter in a pub. But one Cabinet Minister who's not for turning is

Home Secretary Theresa May, who told the House of Commons that she

still planned to reduce net thousands by the next election. And

to this end, the Home Secretary announced further curbs on so-

called "family migration". We asked author and journalist Sarfraz

Manzoor to pay a visit to Britain's Museum of Immigration for his take

I'm the son of an immigrant. My late father came to Britain from

1963 from Pakistan. He wasn't rich. He just believed in hard work and

dreamed of a better life. I was joined in Pakistan and my mum and I

joined him in 1974. This week new controls on family migration were

announced. In the future if you want to bring a husband or a wife

from outside the EU to the UK you will have to be able to prove thaw

earn more than �18,600 per year and an extra �2,400 per child. Theresa

May claimed it is only by excluding the spouses of the low paid that

the burden on the state is going to be reduced. It is all part of this

campaign to try and bring net migration down to the tens of

thousands. But I find it incredibly frightening, because under these

rules my mum and I would never even have been allowed into this country.

I think this is naked populism and there is something rather sickening

about this Cabinet of millionaires punishing the poor. In one fell

swoop they are penalising every poor citizen who happens to fall in

love with somebody from outside the EU. Never mind the unfairness, why

are we judging someone's worth by what they earn? Are earnings the

only way we measure a person's I think immigrants are heroes, far

from being scroungers they are much less likely to be claiming state

benefits than people born here. Many arrive here with not much more

than a suitcase. They work hard because they have to. They

shouldn't be penalised, they should be celebrated. And we need the

energy that they bring. Don't get me wrong. I'm in favour

of open borders with no controls. I think if you come to this country

shoe be able to speak English and play a full part in big British. I

also think that on the whole it is probably a good idea to marry

somebody who is already in the country. But why should marrying a

Pole be easier than marrying a Pakistani? Is it to do with race or

religion? I hope not. The masty party lives on.

Sarfraz Manzoor joins us from Britain's Museum of Immigration to

our little museum of immigration. Welcome to the programme. Are you

saying that financial circumstances should never be taken into account

when determining who can come here? I think it is quite an arbitrary

decision in that sense. Thing the idea of choosing this figure,

�18,600, how do you, what happens if you lost your job the week

before you lost the application? What happens if you are a self-

employed person. It seems like marriage is turned into a mortgage,

where you have to provide tax statements for the last three years

and declare your earnings. It is not just what you are earning at

this point. I think immigrants have the energy, so they don't have

anything at the beginning. It is what they bring in the future.

the British taxpayers have a right to expect that we should give

priority to those that we think will have most to contribute if

they come here? Absolutely, but I don't think this calculus is the

right way of doing that. For example when my dad came here he

worked in a factory. When my mum was brought over, she had

absolutely no money, but the values they brought, of hard work, which a

lot of people in this country haven't got, and the immigrants,

because they don't have the safety nets, and a lot of the connections

that the political class have. What I find really offence sieve that

the people making these decisions didn't necessarily get there

through pure hard work, but because they had the right connections.

Immigrants don't have them and they are punishing them. If their

motivation is they want a better life, to work hard, to get on, even

if they come for a low salary, their aim is to get much better,

should they therefore from the moment they come here have a right

to welfare? I actually think that if you have come 6,000 or ,000

miles and you have come that far to come here, I don't think you're the

sort of person who is going to be happy with just welfare. I agree

with that, but should they have the right to a welfare that they've not

contributed to? I would rather they will the right to work, regardless

of how they got here, than the right to welfare. So if you were an

asylum seeker I would rather you used the resources you had to

work... But they would have the right to welfare, as we brought

them in, they are not immigrants. If you are here just because you

want welfare, you are not the right type either. That last point is

what the Government is on to. This suffers from generalisations. It

may be generally true that immigrants want to come here and

work hard but it is not true of everyone. The Government is trying

to get at a minority of people who come here and live off welfare.

They are not trying to separate families. If you are on low pay you

have the choice to go back to wherever you came from and marry

whoever you choose, but the British public has the right to say you are

not going to come here with your family as well when you are not the

sort of person who is able to support that family in this country.

What do you say about the argument that why should one sort of

relationship or love be personed as opposed to another one? Why if you

fall in love with someone from Poland you are not the same as if

you fall in love with someone from Pakistan? It is because Poland is

in the European Union. But that isn't true of Pakistan. Yaki?

is some argument to expect people to be able to support their family

if they are bringing their family. Although you make the very

important point about the rather crude measure that's being used and

the fact that somebody could lose the job the day after somebody's

come over, or they might be working hard and making a big contribution

to the economy. The problem here is the Government has made a rod for

their own back through an extremely crude emphasis on reducing net

migration to tens of thousands. The only way, they should be be held to

account for not achieving it, but the only way they can achieve it is

by being tough on family union, overseas students, which will also

be detrimental to this country, to I read somewhere that 17% here are

foreign born but only something like 6.4% claim benefits so the

idea that they are sucking money from the state isn't true.

Government doesn't claim that. It's dealing with those cases where they

are. But isn't this a case then of a sledgehammer being used to crack

a small nut? No, a nutcracker being used to crack a nut. What kind of

numbers then? It's something like 54,000. But this isn't only about

benefit claimants, it's about this total number of net migration which

is 250,000 and incidentally has remained at about that since the

Governments came into Government setting this cap. The problem with

that cap is that it's crude. It doesn't recognise... What should

the cap be? I don't believe there should be a numerical cap that

attempts to cover migration like that. There is a strong argument

for taking students out of that cap, for example. On the whole they

don't tend to stay here for very long but they do massively earn

money for us and they're very important in terms of our approach

in the world. You paint a picture of thwarted love, but you also know

that some communities here use marriage to get round the rules?

totally agree. I married somebody from this country and I think for

reasons, that's a better thing. To be honest, it's the same with

education, there will be loopholes that people try to go to work on. I

agree with that, but I think ultimately there's something which

I find distasteful, the idea that if you are rich, things are

different than if you are poor, when actually it could be the poor

people that could be the next generation of the wealthy creators.

Whoo they are trying to deaf Rennes -- what they are trying to deaf

Rennes shait between is not between the rich and poor, but those who

are making a difference. -- difference between the rich and the

poor. You are likely to work hard, but if you don't, you won't get

welfare. Should we do that here or not? This country on the whole you

are not eligible for welfare either. Explain that, because that's

interesting? You can't come if you are going to need what they call

recourse to public funds, you can't come if you are an unskilled worker

from outside the EU now. If you,from within the EU, it's

because you are going to be working and if you are a student, you are

not gaining benefits either. If all those things are in place, and they

are, all the Government is doing is doing a proxy for another part of

the case where people already settled here seem to bring in an

established point which is already established in immigration law that

you have to pass certain hurdles. Or is it a proxy for simply

reducing immigration. That's exactly what I was going to say. If

you want to achieve your target, this crude cap they've set, the

only way you can do that is by massively reducing the number of

people coming in. The point you made about the subcontinent, call a

spade a spade. Be honest about it. My siblings married people who

would not have been allowed into this country under the rules and

they are both successful and contributing members of society.

Doesn't seem right that my marriage is valued more than theirs. When it

comes to numbers, net migration is still runs at 250,000 a year,

roughly the same figure you inherited and had been under Labour

for a long while. Even if this change is fully implemented, it

isn't going to get immigration down to the tens of thousands that the

Government claims. That may well be right. It is right. But it's

pointless bashing the Government every time it takes a step towards

trying to achieve this ambition. The ambition would be broadly

welcomed by the British public and for the Government to be attacked

every time it comes up with an idea... It's legitimate to attack a

Government for setting a cap that either they knew they weren't going

to be able to reach, in which ways they were lying to the electorate,

or they believed that they were going to be able to reach, in which

case they are ridiculously disingenuous. For both those

reasons, it's perfectly legitimate. The final say? This smacks of the

political coward es from the whole political class in not being able

to make a more positive case for immigration. Thank you for being

with us. Is it no good to have too much jubilympics? Or too much Will

Iam? David Badeel joins us. You can give us your thoughts on the

programme on Twitter on the website. Twock This Week. Please can we come

home Mr BBC One controller? We'll be good, we are versatile, we can

do the football highlights if you want. To prove it, we have asked

Radio Four presenter to round up a week of political football at

Westminster. Come on! Come on! Come on! Yes!

Yes! Can you think of anything where

tribalism matters more than in football? Where the team you

support can be in the blood, in the family for generations, where the

passion it arouses can seem to others to be out of kilter? Of

course you can that,'s why you are watching This Week and not the

footie highlights. You love the political football and, as chance

would have it, I have that football here. Spain's bankers did better

than Spain's footballers this week in that at least they got a result.

George Osborne is still worried about the effect playing in Europe

is having on the domestic leagues. The challenge that's made to our

economic strategy rests its case on the low growth over the last 18

months and there is no-one in Britain who would like to see

stronger growth more than me. It's not so long ago that the

Captain of the Reds, EdwardoMillibando was treated on

the bench like those in Poland are treated. He's had a few weeks to

make Jeremy Hunt pay the penalty for his pre-match huddle with Sky.

The thing about Ed Miliband is, he's a very proud Leeds supporter.

In fact, Ed's proud of a lot of things. I'm proud to represent the

people of Doncaster, I'm proud to be Jewish, I'm proud to be

English... Bewhat about being proud to be British? And I'm proud to be

British as well. Anything else, Ed? Somebody who

people say looks a bit like Wallace from Wallace and Gromit.

Wednesday's grudge match was shaping up to be a classic fight

between red and Blue, but before an Ed Balls could be kicked, the team

in yellow pulled out citing illness, citing all the deals with Murdoch

made them physically sick so Nick Clegg did the decent thing and none

of his team played in any position. So, the Prime Minister went into

this game with several men down. Yes, I'm going to torture this

metaphor until we get a phone call from The Hague begging me to stop.

Red Ed started by trying to dribble slowly, very slowly around his

opponent, before finally he made his first shot on goal. If the case

is so strong of the Prime Minister, high is his deputy not supporting

him? The Prime Minister appeared to have left his best arguments in the

dressing room. Or the pub... What What we are talking about here is

the relationships that Conservative politicians and Labour politicians

have had over the last 20 years with News Corp, News International

and all the rest of it. To be fair to the Liberal Democrats, they

didn't have that relationship and their abstention tonight is to make

that point and I understand that, it's politics. Ed Miliband failed

to capitalise on that open goal so a midfielder stepped in. There is

absolutely no dishonour in correcting the record. However,

what the minister just referred to was his rely on 7th September when

he said it was for reasons of cost that he wasn't able to provide

anything more. He's lied to Parliament! I wish to draw the

House's attention to the very important distinction between

inadvertently misleading this House and lying. The truth is, he only

remains on the team thanks to the manager who himself had to deal

with some indirect free kicks at Leveson. Mrs Brookes you made clear

from your statement was a friend. When you were at your constituency

at weekends, did you see her every weekend or most weekends in the

period 2008-009? Not every weekend. But most weekends? Mrs Cameron

keeps a better weekend diary record than I do and she reckons we

probably didn't see them more than on average once every six weeks, so

that is a better answer than what I Old football managers end up buying

pubs or are on TV pundit panels. Old politicians end up at the

liefrplt let's hear it for renowned team player Gordon Brown -- at the

Leveson Inquiry. Did you authorise your aides to

brief against Mr Blair? No. Do you think they may have done so without

your exples sit approval or even with your knowledge? If they did so,

it was without my authorisation -- explicit. Fantasy football, they

tried from the terraces. Euro 2012 will be long gone by the Time Lord

justice Leveson delivers his match report. Will it be back of the net

for David Cameron or a giant own goal? The football pitch in West

London. Michael, a bit odd to see a Prime Minister in the dock even the

dock of his own creation? It is unusual, but Leveson never skewers

anybody, does it? None of them has really had much of a difficulty.

George Osborne, Gordon Brown, Rupert Murdoch. You wouldn't call

it a grilling would you? It would not. Be interesting to see what

comes out in the report but it would seem to me that the skills of

the judge and of the barrister, the counsel, do not compare with the

skills of the politician who is face them, or even the business

people. There is something different though isn't there about

seeing a serving Prime Minister in front of this inquiry as opposed to

all the ones that were Prime Ministers? Yes and I suppose what

was disappointing about seeing him there today is that he is the

serving Prime Minister and he's responsible for the future, he's

the person who set up the inquiry and yet he seemed to be rather

diffident in actually putting forward some future forward-looking

proposals. I was quite surprised because I presumed that what he'd

do, as well as answer the obvious questions about his relationship

with Rebekah Brooks, was to try to frame who he hoped would come from

the inquiry and there wasn't much of that at all. There was no

smoking gun but it was in a way damaging at times, there was a lot

of this, I don't recall or I don't recollect or not to the bes of my

recollection and the one Tessst text message from Rebekah Brooks

was pretty damaging? The whole process is a cancerous procedure as

far as the Government's concerned. I mean it's sustained damage. I

dare say if the Prime Minister could have his life again, this

commission would not have been established. So although it isn't

skewering people and we don't know whether the report will be

interesting or important, nonetheless, the long, drawn-out

business of feeling that something isn't right, that there's something

nasty in the wood shed is damaging to the Government. All leading

politicians have relationships with the press or senior editors, which

has happened down the ages, but Mr Blair and Mr Brown and now Mr

Cameron have taken it to a new level. Difficult for me to judge

that because I don't really know what things were like between Lloyd

George and the press barons. Could you imagine Rebekah Brooks having

become Margaret Thatcher's best friend? No, but Margaret Thatcher

is the keepion to the rule. If you go back to Churchill and beaver

brook, we might have been in the same world. He sat very hard on the

accusation that would damage the Government or the Conservatives

specifically. That is the accusation that they traded the

support of News Corp before the election for support for News

Corp's bid or News International's bid for BSkyB. Of which we have no

evidence? And George Osborne sat there and said it was complete

nonsense. That's the danger to the Government and that's what Osborne

tried to crush. What did you make of Gordon Brown's performance?

was clearly very... Some of that was being very angry about the way

that he had been treated, his family had been treated in terms of

the revelations about his son's medical condition. He was very

angry about the suggestion that he'd had this threatening phone

call with Rupert Murdoch and in actual fact, the fact he denied it

and Rupert Murdoch said it under oath means... Somebody's lying?

Did you believe Mr Brown when he said he'd never unleashed his

special advisers to brief against I'm not sure that was the most

convincing part of his testimony. Shall I take that as a diplomatic

no? It depends how the question was put to him. Wasn't he asked whether

or not he asked them to do it or something like that? No, he denied

every part of it. He said they would have done it without his

authorisation. On this point, let me say that there are very few

exceptions. I know perfectly well that one Prime Minister after

another asked press secretaries to brief against colleagues. Indeed

and even Mrs Thatcher's press secretary. Even then. But it seemed

to reach an industrial scale between Mr Blair and Mr Brown.

Think -- I think you're probably right. I think where Gordon Brown

seemed weaker, people watching obviously felt that he was right to

be angry with what the Sun tried to do with his son. I believed him

when in effect the Sun put a gun to his head, hoping if they went along

with it, it would give them a bit of control over how it was

presented. If someone had done that to me, I wouldn't go to their

wedding. I wouldn't stay best friends with them. I'd do it and

get over with it. That's where his testimony then fell down. I suppose

the argument is but he then continued to be Prime Minister

afterwards. You have to go to somebody's wed figure you're Prime

Minister. Gordon Brown is a man who famously bore no grudges. He's a

cheery fellow who shrugged off every offence and turned over a new

leaf each day. It's been open season on Mr Hunt, the enemies

don't seem to be getting anywhere. It shows that if the Prime Minister

sticks with you, you can't get him. Surprisingly, I can't understand

the Prime Minister's justification for sticking with him, you're

right... I think to protect himself. Exactly. But he is and it does

appear that you know, despite a pretty robust approach on Wednesday

in that debate, with it seemed to me all of the arguments on the side

of those saying, but surely there are questions that at least should

be asked about whether or not he breached the ministerial code,

whether or not he breached it in terms of the way that he gave

information to Parliament, whether or not he breached it in terms of

his relationship with his special advisor. There are questions toance.

Yes, that is what they're there to do. Though the Lib Dems their

abstention at the vote on Mr Hunt that Labour put down, in the grand

scheme of things may not matter much. My goodness it's alloweder to

MPs to burnish their ire against the Lib Dems. Yes, I think

completely unjustifiabley. The Lib Dems have given terrific support to

the basic strategy on reducing the deficit. They've never waivered on

that. You think they're wrong to bear a grudge. They are. Let's come

onto the big issue, over shadowing everything on Europe. Where are we

on the Portillo Richter scale of world coming to an end. I can't

remember how the scale works. If you say naught to ten, where we're

about 7.5. We still have quite a long way to go. I was talking to

someone the other day who said we're in 1913. They said people in

1913 didn't know what was going to happen in 1914. We're on the edge

of something very good. At the weekend, Spain through the

governments, get this 147brl -- 100 billion euro bail out. That bought

them only a few hours. Tell us what you think. I think the euro has

fundamental problems. It's perfectly clear. For 30 years we've

been telling countries that get into difficulty, what you have to

do is control your deficit, control inflation, make sure public

spending is right and so on and devalue to make yourself

competitive. Inside the euro you can do the first three, but you

can't devalue. Neither can you prifpbt money or change your

interest rates. This is such a basic, glaringly obvious point,

which is why the countries don't recover because they can't make

themselves more competitive. They can only drive their economies into

a spiral of decline. It also surely it's because you have the eurozone

without the necessary whilst you've got a monetary union, you don't

have a banking union. You don't have a fiscal union. You don't have

the political will. At the time people said that was the reason why

a lot of people opposed the eurozone, including Michael, they

said all that. We were told, I remember it well, we were told at

the time, no, no, the single currency doesn't need all that.

I now cannot quite understand and it's worrying I think for politics

as a whole, that you have a set of senior politicians who don't seem

to be willing to take those steps and you know financial people.

That's because they have lect rats. If we in the position of Germany

and we were trying to convince the electorate to take all our hard

earned money and hand it over to the Greeks or the Spaniards, you

try to get your electorate to do that. We know we will come back to

that next week. The English are pathetically satisfied with not

getting beaten by the French. The Spanish is about clinging on for

dear life and the Greeks are headed for the Grexit and the Germans look

like winning, again. Yes it's the beautiful political game with

nightly riots thrown in for free, euro Zone 2012, a display of inept

tactics, non-existent economic strategy and widespread national

delusion. Enough of of euro crisis, what about the footy ball I hear

you cry? This is why we decided to give into the inevitable, note this

controller of BBC One, we put the politics of sport, into the

Euro 2012 has certainly kicked off both on and off the pitch. The

choice of Poland and the Ukraine as hosts paent come without

controversy. The British government refusing to attend matchs in the

Ukraine at the protest of the arrest and jailing of the country's

former Prime Minister. I hope for our team, it's a great sporting

event. But of course, it's, we don't want people to understand

that as giving political support to some things that have been

happening in Ukraine that we don't agree with.

And as pan ramma revealed it's not always fun and games in the stadium

either, with violence and racism still very much a problem in the

old Eastern Bloc. The clashes between Russian and

Polish fans prove that historic grudges are still very much a

reality in modern football. Meanwhile the FA knows the

importance of sending a message, but David Hodges's men skriping

training in favour of a sobering visit to Auschwitz, a tactical

change of pace for the players. Soon all eyes will be turning to

London, as Danny Boyle gives us a glimpse of his idyllic vision of

the opening ceremony. Everybody from the Prime Minister and the

mayor, all the people involved in the different stages in pulling

this remarkable things together, you kind of put it into the mix.

Can any high profile sporting event really divorce itself from

politics? Or is it the price we pay for hosting the world amid all its

worries? We're joined by David Baddiel.

Welcome back to This Week. How are you? David, the idea that football

is only a game could not be further from the truth. Well, it is a game.

But it's a game that's connected with history. And nationalism.

example, Holland Germany played each other this week in Euro 2012,

and that game, you cannot see it without seeing the international

relation. It is a metaphor for the history between those two countries.

In 1974 when Germany beat Holland in the final, there was a player

who was playing midfield whose family was murdered by the Nazis

and who said before the game, I don't care what happens, I just

want to humiliate the Germans. When the Dutch lost, it was a massive

issue, they felt it was their chance in some ways to revenge

themselves. They didn't manage to do it until euro '88. When they did

it, a banner was unfurled which said grandma we got your bicycle

back in Amsterdam, which was a reference to the fact that the

bicycles were confiscated by the Nazis. Our tabloids still take

playing Germany as a rerun of the Second World War too. Yeah, they do.

I wonder if it heals. There is a sense that the game played between

Holland and Germany actually is that there was less acrimony than

in 1974. The fact that that generation that suffered straight

away after the war... Has gone. gone and that football itself may,

and I'm being positive here, I'm not talking about the riots so much,

it's possible through football you can sort some of this out. If it's

a metaphor for war... Never quite worked in Glasgow, does it?

doesn't always work out. That's only 150 years. Even the decision

to hold this tournament in Poland and the Ukraine is a political

decision? It's certainly a political decision by FIFA. It's

always a political decision by feefya. They're always looking to

expand the game for fiscal reasons where they can make more money.

This is the point where I come on the programme to say this shouldn't

take place in Poland and Ukraine because of the human rights issue.

Some bad things are going on in Ukraine. I can't make a judgment on

that, like I can that it was bad for the England team to go to

Berlin in 1938 and do a Hitler salute. Did that happen? Yes.

team did a Hitler salute in 1938? I'd love to bring it up now.

years after the Berlin Olympics. When we had seen the Nazis...

after the Nuremberg laws. I never knew that. That's interesting

because the England team get there. No doubt the players had no idea of

the significance of it. They're asked to do the salute. Someone in

these positions needs to be in control and understanding the wider

context. When we're told, you're not telling us tonight, many people

do the sport in general, football, brings people together and so on,

then you watch the Russians, a thousand of them march through

Warsaw this week, you begin to think that ain't going to happen.

No, well, you know Russia is a good example. When Russia first played

Poland, they unfurled a banner saying "this is Russia." which it

had been for a long time. Those things are always going to come up

as well. I'm going to be positive. There was a goal scored by the

Polish captain. He had a very terrible personal history. He saw

his mother being killed by his father when he was 11. He overcame

that trauma and the scoring of that goal and he looks to the heavens

after, is for him, a way of finding immense redemption through becoming

a national hero. I think it's possible that if people aren't

actually fighting outside the grounds and aren't deliberately

bringing up the history in order to create trouble, there's a way

through the kathars is of football to get this stuff sorted. Both with

the European Union and with something like the European

football tournament, the idea is that they bring us together. We

think of a continent. We think that we're European as well as British.

It isn't happening, is it? If anything, the eurozone and now the

European football tournament, it's making us emphasise our nationalism,

our differences. Some of these scenes from the streets have been

horrendous. I think you're slightly torturing the analogy to make the

eurozone the same as the football. There are a few tortured analogies

tonight. That is our subtitle. don't think an international

football competition is actually about bringing nations together,

bringing individual nations together in that way. It's a

competition. It is going to amplify some of the feelings of tribalism

and competition you feel. Earlier this week, even my son, who has

been brought up to be, you know, very international says "England v

France, the time when we forget that football is or that our

international relations because really we just want to beat them."

That's the feeling that you get. It's not necessarily wrong if it

doesn't then go over into other more unpleasant battles. You, I

think, care about football even less than I do. Is that possible,

yes. Tell us the significance of Spain's defeat of Ireland tonight

and the overall eurozone crisis. Ireland is the small and weak

country. Spain is quite a large and weak country. Not if footballing

terms. You know, there are three million Irish and 40 million

Spaniards. They should have a better team. If a country is going

to the wall, like Spain appears to, whether or not the fact that they

might win this competition, they won the World Cup an the European

Championship, does that save them? Does that mean a Government going

to pieces can still win an election. Apparently it can. They've only

just had an election. I don't think anybody wants to run it. The sports

authorities do end up having lots of power, so much so that

governments put missiles on high rise blocks in the East End. I

think we're having lanes for the athletes. You have written a book.

Yes the Death of Ely Gould. To some extent it's about the death of the

idea of the great man, greatness and masculinity. I was thinking in

terms of sport. Sport might be the only arena left where you can have

a type of greatness. If you are great of sport, it's unarguable.

agree with you. The name again? death of Ely Gould. That's all

tonight. Not for us. We're off to the Plough Inn, near Cheggers.

Apparently Nancy Cameron is sourcing another of her famous all-

night lockins. With Blue Nun milk shakes and feckless fathers all

round. When Nick Clegg went to dinner by Rupert Murdoch he was

snubbed by the mogul and sat the end of the table, where the

children sit, he said. We leave you with the exclusive footage of that

event. Nightie-night, Deputy Prime Minister. Don't let the children