24/10/2013 This Week

Tonight on This Week, we've caught the Great British baking bug. The

Prime Minister has got himself into a sticky mess in the Westminster

kitchen. What would Mary Berry make of David Cameron's recipe to reduce

energy bills? It is too chewy. Environmental campaigner and organic

bread-maker Jonathan Porritt flours his board. You know what, the

government should stick its half baked energy policy is back in the

oven and start all over again. Delicious.

Home Secretary, Teresa May, now accepts her policy of telling

illegal immigrants to "go home" was half-baked. Journalist and

commentator Medhi Hasan gets to lick the political bowl. I will be

assessing the latest bunfight in the Westminster village, including the

row over energy prices. I guess you cannot bake cakes if you don't have

power. Here is one I made earlier. Yummy.

And while Great British amateur enthusiasts shone in the Bake Off

tent, when it comes to teachers, how important is it to have the right

qualifications? Baking music in the This Week oven is violinist and

Classic Brit winner Nicola Benedetti.

I did not need an officially qualified teacher to show me how to

do that. Don't go to bed, I promise you won't

see my soggy bottom. Evenin' all. Welcome to This Week,

the wilting bag of throwaway salad in the BBC current affairs fridge.

But we're not the only thing going off this week. Oh, no. Relations

between the United States and some of its closest allies are also

starting to smell a bit funny. The French are having a crisis, an

existential one, naturellement, following the allegation that over

70 million Franco phone calls were monitored by American spies in one

month alone. Whilst the Germans are demanding to know why President

Obama has been bugging the hell out of Chancellor Merkel's mobile. As

someone who grew up in East Germany, Frau Merkel takes it rather

personally when the United Stasi come snooping. So the US ambassador

in Berlin was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and told to provide

a slightly less pathetic explanation than "Er, look, we're not doing it

now, nor in the future". And where was Little Satan, aka Britain, in

all this? Keeping their little GCHQ heads down, that's where, with David

Cameron refusing to answer questions at today's EU summit, sticking to

the traditional de-Fawlty Towers position that when it comes to the

Germans, don't mention the war of words. Speaking of those who are

guilty of far more than we will ever know I'm joined on the sofa tonight

by two men, who were surprisingly not chosen to give spiritual

guidance to young Prince George. Think of them as the godforesaken

and God grief of late night political chat. I speak, of course,

of #manontheleft Alan "AJ" Johnson and #sadmanonatrain Michael "Choo

Choo" Portillo. Your moment of the week. It was indeed the selection of

the godparents for young Prince George. This was thought a public

relations triumph because instead of choosing members of royal families

from other countries they chose personal friends. I am not sure it

was a triumph. There was a reason for choosing royals from other

countries, which was that it was a way of strengthening the bond

between different countries, a kind of diplomatic effort. Some of these

friends turned out to be quite aristocratic. Very posh. Very

double-barrelled. I had a feeling it make them look like a clique, rather

than modern. Is one allowed to say Toff? I know that some words are not

allowed. My advice is not to use the word blurb. -- pleb. It is

asymmetric. You can use one but not the other. I can hear TV sets

switching off across the country. It has been a good week for a hedge

fund is. The Royal Mail have acquired this children investment

trust, who have taken the second biggest stake in Royal Mail. My

moment of the week is the Co-op. The good news is that the taxpayer will

not have to bail out the Co-op, as with other banks. The bad news is

that 70% is now owned by two aggressive New York hedge fund is.

So it is not a Co-op. This is my point. Everyone thought that after

the banking scandals there would be more ethical banks, more mutuals, to

give choice to consumers. It now looks like the great-grandfather of

all the mutuals, 170 years as a mutual, Mike the drift away from

their ethical status. Cooperative instincts and hedge fund instincts,

not quite the same? Not quite the same.

Now, remember those lovely husky-hugging days of "Vote Blue, Go

Green", when call-me-Dave pledged to lead the greenest government ever?

Well, three years with plummeting living standards is a long time in

politics, and under pressure to cut energy bills, the PM now talks of

rolling back the green charges he claims are pushing up energy costs,

but which he campaigned for, voted for, and even introduced some of

them. So where now for the green agenda? We turned to Prince Charles'

environmental adviser, Jonathon Porritt. THis is his take of the

week. This has been one bad week for the

green agenda in the UK. On Monday the government announced its

commitment to new nuclear reactors in Somerset. On Wednesday, David

Cameron indicated he wanted to roll back green levies and regulations to

keep prices down. In the process, the government's green credentials

have been shattered. Energy bills are going up in the UK, too often

and too fast. If you are a reader of the Daily Mail you probably think it

is because we are covering the landscape with the hated windmills.

In fact, no more than 9% of the average bill today can be attributed

to these green measures. When it comes to nuclear power, this is a

wretchedly bad deal both for the country and consumers. We still do

not know what we will do with the nuclear waste. We know that nuclear

freeze is out the alternatives, like renewables and energy efficiency.

And we know that nuclear is unbelievably expensive. Ministers

acknowledged that Hinkley Point will cost ?16 billion, which has gone up

14% in just one year. I am baffled by the obsession with nuclear power,

especially when I compare what we are doing with Germany. They have

decided to phase out nuclear power and relying instead on solar, wind,

biomass, smart grids, electric vehicles, storage technologies, all

of the ways of holding the green economy that we should be doing in

the UK, too. David Cameron's own commitment to the green agenda can

be seen for what it always was, a cynical sham, announced with a lot

of husky hugging flimflam before the last election, to decontaminate the

Tory brand. But who is surprised? He is having to deal with more than 100

backbench MPs who are not persuaded by the science of climate change. As

for the Lib Dems, they are increasingly irrelevant to the whole

green agenda. And from the kitchen cabinets at

Puro Design in Marylebone to our own little kitchen cabinet here in the

heart of Westminster, Jonathon joins us now. Michael, he is right, David

Cameron, though Lou, go green, it was just PR flimflam. It was part of

an attempt to decontaminate the Tory brand, not a real commitment. It was

an important part of decontaminating the brand. It made people think, if

the Tories have changed their mind on this they are worth looking at

again. But that was a PR position, not a position of policy decided on

merit. It was a very important PR decision. I do not think it was

insincere. One of the things that has always struck me is that Tory

voters are much more likely to be green than Labour voters, because

greenery is expensive, which has been proved in the last few weeks.

My ex constituents in Kensington and Chelsea, when they were changing

their fleet of cars, could afford to think of hybrid cars, electric

vehicles or whatever. Gordon Brown's constituents in the heart of

Scotland were lucky if they had a car at all, and would not think

about how green it was. So it was natural for Tories to be is pathetic

to green policies. -- to be sympathetic. The economy has been

flat-lining for a long time in living standards have been squeezed.

People care more about their fuel bills than the green agenda. But

guess which part of the economy has been growing fastest in the last

couple of years. The green economy. That is true. With all those

subsidies, it should have grown the fastest. When Michael says you can

only do green if you can afford it, that misrepresents a huge part of

the green agenda. Improving quality-of-life by improving homes,

investing in energy efficiency, creating new jobs. It is such an old

and tired view that he can only do green if you are a middle-class

Toff. And some of the green levies would help Gordon's constituents

most. But they are paid for by people paying average fuel bills.

You put a levy on ordinary fuel bills which will subsidise people

who are poorer than them. It is a regressive tax. Cameron wants to

take it from the consumer and get the taxpayer to pay. If the agenda

was to intimate lofts, give double glazing and take out old appliances,

that is quite sensible. But the agenda is to charge people money on

their bills, ?110, apparently. And how much do you think goes on green

measures, and how much on energy efficiency? 50-50. If I could finish

the sentence, part of it goes on building wind turbines. Wind

turbines, as we know... I thought we would get there! They need back-up

capacity because the wind does not always blow. It is undeniably

expensive because you up to double provide the capacity. That is a

Daily Mail fiction you need to disabuse yourself of. The wind blows

all the time? Of course not. When you have a grid system and the wind

is blowing some of the time and the sun is shining some of the time, you

can balance the grid to use that intermittent source of energy when

you want it. How are you scoring it? How do you think Germany is managing

to provide 25% of energy from renewables. 52% of German

electricity is generated by coal. Germany has done what you wanted, it

now has the highest electricity prices in Europe. 300,000 households

each year in Germany are cut off from power because they cannot

afford the bill. Germany is building new coal-fired stations, and its CO2

emissions are rising. Its CO2 emissions are temporarily up. They

are at the moment. But Germany has made the biggest investment... It is

building coal-fired stations. It is building one. It is going to burn

the dirtiest fuel in Europe, and its CO2 emissions are rising. That is

why I do not agree with Jonathan on nuclear energy, and I think Michael

is right about baseload and nuclear energy could provide that. It is

secure. We are generating it, not importing it. When I looked at it,

and when the Lib Dems, who have done two conversions, on student fees and

nuclear, even Chris Huhne looked at this in detail and actually nuclear

has to be part of the mix if you want to reduce CO2 emissions. The

price of nuclear winter by ?2 billion and they have not even

started building it. The cost is off the scale, Alan. It is impossible we

can put that extra cost on bills when consumers are already feeling

hard pressed by this. The reason we are going into this expensive

nuclear power is that we have taken the decision to close down oil fired

power stations. We have been closing down the plant much faster than we

have been opening plant, so we find ourselves in the position where,

having ruled out cheaper options, we have to go for the more expensive

option. And we are now negotiating in a hurry, so the energy companies

have a gun to our head. And why do you think we are doing that? You are

probably one of the Tories who finds it difficult to accommodate the

reality of climate change. Every country will have to deal with

climate change. That means lowering carbon emissions. That means you

have to get rid of cold. If you think that coal is the answer, then

all you are doing... The government has accepted your green agenda. It

is rowing back on it, but it is because it accepted the green agenda

that they are now paying for a nuclear power station. Ed

Miliband's price freeze was good politics and a popular move. I am

not commenting on the economics of a price freeze or the climate

obligations of getting off the green agenda. But if Mr Cameron does this,

he says he will cut your energy bills. It is a big mistake. It looks

as if he has dreams of the policy to protect himself at PMQs. There is

nothing worse than a Prime Minister announcing, " I am announcing

today... " but the accusation David Cameron stands up for the week, he

does not stand up to the strong. He is doing what the energy companies

want them to do. There was a time, 2008 being the peak of this, when

every party voted for the Climate Change Act. Except for some Tories.

It has got a lot tougher, hasn't it? The politics has got tougher and

there are many more who questioned the speed we need to introduce these

low carbon measures. That means we need more leadership than we needed

back in 2008. So, the betrayal of that quality of leadership now by

David Cameron and the failure of the Lib Dems... He voted for the climate

change? He not only voted for it, he put in some measures. This is an act

of political weakness. When the going gets tough, he heads off into

the embrace of the big six all over again. But fuel bills being cut

would be good politics? I think it is a short-term measure which does

not take into account the need to balance these different objectives,

energy security, low carbon, fuel poverty and that means a different

tariff thing system so you can look after the needs of the less well off

and simultaneously increased security on low carbon. I have a

feeling this is not going to go away. It may be late, but squeeze

out the last drop of doom out of the dish cloth, because waiting in the

wings is the recent winner of a classic Brit award, Nicola Benedetti

is here to talk about the importance of qualifications.

For those of you with a great three CSE in TV criticism, we love nothing

better than reading your chat on the Internet. The government must be

kicking itself. It had to admit its infamous go home

fans were a bad idea and then it turns out they were more effective

than they realised. One man did in fact go home. One man! To Pakistan,

but only after reading about it and the fans in the Guardian. A Guardian

reading illegal immigrant. We decided to pick up where the Home

Office left of an Medhi Hasan hit the streets. This is his round-up of

the political week. This week, we bid farewell to the

controversial immigration vehicles, who were accused of being divisive

and racist, and which led to just one illegal immigrants volunteering

to go home. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, slammed the brakes on

the whole thing and decided to ban the van. As for me, this? The This

Week team thought I needed the exercise. Politicians should step up

and admit when things have not been a good idea. Immigrants should not

rake out the champagne just yet, the government is still gunning for

them. The debate in Parliament this week calls on landlords and banks to

be on the lookout for foreign types who have no right to be here.

Visitors from outside the UK, don't get sick when you go to buy your

sofa nears, because a report says you are costing the NHS ?2 billion a

year. That is a lot of travellers cheques, and the government wants to

get some of that cash back from you to pay for new nurses. We don't want

to turn GPs into border guards, but we need a system where if someone is

not entitled to NHS care, they don't automatically get a full NHS number.

Those immigrants, coming here to our NHS and staffing it with doctors,

nurses and care workers. Outrageous! Foreigners in our NHS,

no, no, no. Foreigners in our nuclear power industry, yes, yes,

yes. The government gave the green light for a nuclear power station to

be built by EDF Energy and some investors. The government is opposed

to foreign-owned assets, unless they are owned by the French. By 2030,

the average consumer bill will be ?77 lower thanks to having nuclear

in our energy strategy than otherwise if we had a non-nuclear

strategy. This week saw the return of Sir John Major. The former Prime

Minister, 1990. The big grey, a bit dull. He is not dull Annie Moore. He

regaled an audience of journalists with jokes. Calling three of my

colleagues bustards was unforgivable. But it was true. But

it must have caused a stir inside number ten when John Major made his

remarks. It is difficult for one Tory Prime Minister to dismiss

another one as a mad lefty. The government will be forced by events

to provide more assistance for people prepare -- needing more help.

If it proves to be the case, it will be reasonable for the council to

recoup that money back from the energy companies in a one-off

payment, given the scale of their payments -- profits and the

unjustified nature of the increases. A windfall tax? A one-off windfall

tax. How is Ed Miliband doing with his communist freeze on energy

rises? He seemed to have David Cameron on the defensive at PMQs.

John Major was a Prime Minister who won a majority, unlike this Tory

Prime Minister. The former Prime Minister says, given the scale of

their profits, we should recoup that money. That is a quote from him. He

wants to do it through a windfall tax. I say we need a price freeze.

What does the Prime Minister want to do to recoup the money for the

consumer? We need to roll back some of the green regulations and

charges. Yes, yes. We all know who put them in place. David Cameron's

message seems to be voted loo and stay blue. But the Greens cannot be

too pleased. John Bercow was not pleased with David Cameron either,

and he gave the Prime Minister telling of up PMQs for calling the

leader of the opposition a conman. The Prime Minister is a man of great

versatility in the use of language, it is a bit below the level. It

wasn't just the Prime Minister who got a public drilling, the former

chief whip, Andrew Mitchell was back in the headlines as the police

officers at the centre of the plebgate saga went in front of the

Home Affairs Select Committee to explain. Can I say, we have found

your evidence most unsatisfactory. You are welcome to stay and listen

to what the chief constables have said. If you are a wealthy, white

politician who has been wronged by the police, you can go after them,

demand an apology. But that does not apply to non-white poor kids in

council estates across the land who would like to do the same, but

can't. I have just got a text message from the UK Border Agency.

You are required to leave Westminster. You no longer have the

right to remain on This Week. What? ! I now have to go home also. Which

way is Hertfordshire. He could have advertised for a job

on the Daily Mail with that. Miranda Green, welcome back.

Mr Clegg said he had 30 minutes notice of David Cameron's U-turn on

green levies. That is almost about as much as he gave Mr Cameron on his

opinion on free schools. It has not been a great week for coalition

unity. Lots of people have been saying the pre-general election

desire for both sides of the coalition to differentiate

themselves to their voters has started to early. It has been ill

judged and it looks to those people who don't pay attention at every

twist and turn of politics, I don't think they like squabbling. People

won't like it. Obviously the separate issues you have been

discussing, energy price rises and fuel bills is serious, as the John

Major intervention made clear, this is something that matters if either

side of the government will appeal to people on the ground. But, the

merits of each particular case aside on the policies, I think getting

into a slanging match on flagship policies in public like this, it is

a spectacle and it does not really help the overall strategic object

death, if you are the Lib Dems, which is to say, look, the coalition

can work. I sense a coalition compromise over this green levies

business. It will probably come out in the autumn statement. That is the

Tories will get a cut or reduction of some of the levies but the

Treasury will find some way of putting it onto general taxation.

They will say your fuel bill is coming down, but taxation will have

to pay for this and that is fair? It is. That is more progressive. But

the general principle you should maintain a diverse area of supply of

energy, is going to be difficult to get the Lib Dems to shift on that.

He has energy companies putting price rises up. He has a problem in

Grangemouth which we will talk about and Hezbollah the green levies, some

of them for the chop. He is not happy. Some of those levies are to

do with helping households in fuel poverty. They could pay the VAT out

of general taxation? Yes, they could. Partly sparked off by your

old mate, John Major, who made his intervention saying about a windfall

tax. His justification for calling you and others names is because it

is true, what do you say to that? Literally we were born out of

wedlock bastion Mark he said it was unforgivable he use such a word, and

his justification was, it was true? Of whom did he use it? You, Michael

Howard, John Redwood. You think it was a new? There is ambiguity. Are

you saying, " not me love". I don't know. There was an interesting line

from John Major when he talked about the millions of silent have-nots

locked into a lace curtain poverty. It was very emotive language. I

assume the speech had been written and he considered very carefully

what he was saying. It was, from David Cameron's point of view,

unhelpful. John Major can use that. He said, these are my people and I

was brought up with these people. That's why I found it so strange,

John Major who has been loyal and quiet, unlike some of his

predecessors, choose this moment ago public in front of the cameras.

Slagging off Duncan Smith big-time. He said it would be criminally easy

to overlook these people. These are the people who voted for him? He got

more votes for the Conservative party than any Prime Minister ever.

I suppose the point he was making was to try and drag David Cameron

back to what he would think himself, was the bat and he handed over to

him of modernising the Conservative party. The Conservative Party have

been trying to replay the slogans from that general election. And John

Major is here saying to them, that is all very well but you need to do

something about appealing to that massive centre ground of voters, who

I managed to garner, otherwise you will not get the majority. I want to

move on to a real issue, Grangemouth, the biggest industrial

story to hit the country for a long time. Why has the Unite union made

such a shambles of this? I would think their judgement must come into

question but there was an article in the Spectator which said you cannot

keep all of the blame on the union. It takes two to tango. I have known

union officials in difficult situations who have negotiated

reductions in pensions and pay freezes. I am not sure what has

happened. This is 2% of our GDP. I am not sure about the story. Inside

Grangemouth, the union was planning the takeover of the Falkirk

constituency. The company complained and the union threatened to strike.

I thought it was a peripheral issue and it now seems central, whereas I

would have thought the central issue would have been about making that a

going concern. It is not even clear tonight, even though it looks like

the union has done a total climb down and is prepared to accept what

the management once, it is not clear that that petrochemical plant is

going to reopen tonight. I think it is a disastrous situation. Only by

ten, but the majority of the workforce did vote for the new

package, against a recommendation to vote no. The owner, who is somewhere

on his yacht, is not totally innocent in the way he has handled

industrial nations, and he said it is not a big enough majority for him

to make those changes. I have not seen a proper negotiation going on

here. OK, you want to freeze pay for two years. How about freezing it for

a year? It is certainly not the normal way industrial relations are

conducted. It rings everything together, energy prices, industrial

policy, fracking India knighted States. It brings everything

together. -- fracking in the United States. How does this play to Alex

Salmond? We will see in the fullness of time. If the plant closes

altogether it leaves Scotland looking ridiculous, claiming it can

live off oil when it has no refining capacity. On the other hand, if the

plant closes, it will be yet another Scottish grievance, which may play

through into more people voting for independence. What do you think? The

petrochemical plant is closed for now. The refinery has closed

temporarily. Indeed, but the baseline case for independence, to

do with being a self-sufficient economy would be seriously

undermined if this enormous industrial facility was not there

any more. But also, this idea about where Britain stands in competition

with other industrialised nations, for a massive global company like

this to invest in, is much more significant. This chap has said he

does not like doing business in the UK. And he is clearly biased in

favour of leaving. If not now, then later. So perhaps a larger

alternative strategy is called for. And others are not queueing up to

buy it either. To be honest, there is a worldwide glut of simple

petrochemicals. This is an ethylene making plant and there is a

worldwide glut of these things. In America you can make them for a

third of the price of here. What is your view of how the Police

Federation behaved with Andrew Mitchell? Well, I struggle with this

one, because I do not know everything Andrew Mitchell said. I

know it is open season on the police at the moment and they have not

played this early and leave. But I am still scratching my head to know

why, at the start of this, it was not the Police Federation that

accepted Andrew Mitchell's resignation, it was the Prime

Minister, and why at the start of this Andrew Mitchell was not very

clear about what he said. He has got very good friends. To have David

Davies on your side, he is a formidable campaigner, but it is

getting to the stage now where everyone seems to make an assumption

that actually Andrew Mitchell... Actually, swearing at a police

officer is an offensive can be arrested for. It is said that he did

not swear at, but he swore in front of. Swearing in front of a police

officer may be an offence you can be arrested for.

Now, when a Diane Abbott-shaped vacancy appeared on the This Week

sofa, we were inundated with literally thousands of begging

letters and CVs, all from a certain A Johnson esquire, BA Hons,

University of Life. Although given that he'd previously held one of the

great offices of state, whilst Diane most certainly had not, we at first

thought him over-qualified. Then we met him and it all made perfect

sense. And that's why we've decided to put qualifications in this week's

Spotlight. You may not know it yet, but once

George is already eligible for the big job. The only qualification he

needs to be King is a royal birth certificate. Nick Clegg thinks the

education system should not have it so easy, calling for all teachers,

including those in free schools, to be fully trained and tested. It

makes no sense to me to have qualified teacher status if only a

few schools have do employ qualified teachers. Maybe he has the North

Korean dictator in mind, after he was awarded an honorary doctorate in

economics this week by a Malaysia and university. Former civil service

chief Gus O'Donnell certainly thinks MPs could be better trained,

claiming parliamentary candidates should be vetted before standing. So

how important our qualifications when it comes to doing a job

properly? The future monarch can certainly manage without any. It

seems the rest of us plebs may not be so lucky.

Nicola Benedetti is back. Well comeback. Thank you for having me.

Teachers. Schoolteachers, music teachers, did they all have good

qualifications to teach? They taught me incredibly well and I'm the

product of a mixture of teachers. Some did not have official

qualifications, which made up most of my musical education. And many

teachers that did. So some of the best teachers that taught you music

were not necessarily qualified. They were great musicians but not

qualified to teach music. That is part of the whole discussion. You

can be almost overqualified in your subject. If you choose to then have

a passion to teach the subject but do not have a qualification in

teaching it, that definitely was the case with probably all of my violin

teachers. But it should be said that individual one-to-one lessons for an

instrument is a very specific kind of skill, a specific kind of

environment. There is no crowd control. There are so many sets of

skills that are in national curriculum for learning to teach a

class that are not necessary for the violin. One of the things that your

teachers needed was to recognise early on that you had a natural

ability. Exactly. This is where I am feeling that the question is not so

much about whether a teacher is officially qualified, but what are

those qualifications they are asking for. There is obviously a very real

reason why plenty of teachers are feeling a frustration with their

ability to be free, creative, to respond to what is in front of them,

to teach the class in the way that... I could name hundreds of

examples of teachers I have spoken to, not just musical teachers but

from all fields, that have said, I am strangled by something that is

too restrictive. That is not to say I do not think the qualifications

should be there. I do think so, but what are they, and can they be

developed, and can they be spread, I guess, to include more creativity,

which I think teaching needs? I am slightly puzzled by Nick Clegg's

emphasis. Of course, you want a well qualified teaching profession, but

don't you also need flexibility? I was looking back and listening to

Nick Ferrari on LBC, and it turns out that Westminster School, around

the corner from here, one of the greatest schools in the world, which

Nick Clegg went to, a lot of his teachers were unqualified, in the

sense that they did not have a certificate saying, you are

qualified to teach. They just happen to be leading experts in the fields

they were teaching. And historically, I imagine that would

have been largely the case. I do not know because I did not ask to see

their certificates, but I suspect when I was at school in the 1960s

lots of teachers had not been through a formal process of teaching

them to be teachers. In those days, there were people who had come out

of the Army in the Second World War, men and women of great experience.

And they had an ability to communicate. Of course, many people,

because their parents actually teach children for much of their lives. --

because they are parents. It is difficult, frankly, to improve on

what Nicola has said on the subject. Where it gets political is that it

is not just about whether somebody is qualified. There is also an

implication, and I think there is a lot in this, that in the process of

teaching teachers to teach, you actually, in some cases, are

narrowing those people. You introduce agendas and ideologies

about the nature of teaching. That is why some politicians want to

introduce teachers who have not been through that process, because they

have not have that narrowing and the ideology. I agree with Nicola. Music

is a special subject, in a sense, because my worry would be that so

few children have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, despite

initiatives by governments of all persuasions. Mainly it is because of

finding people who have those talents. If you find somebody who is

a great musician but they cannot spend three years getting the

property can qualifications, I think you should use them. That is

probably your point, about some flexibility. At the margins. Have

you done some teaching of the violin? I have done a lot of

teaching. I go to many schools. I am travelling and performing all the

time and I teach in most cities that I travel to. But I would absolutely

agree with that. I cannot understand how you cannot come across a piece

of writing or race that stick, any amount of research -- or a

statistic, that will disagree with the fact that a greater artistic

creation, the greater creative education. It is astonishing to me

that somehow it is still not, I hear constantly of it is not only being

implemented but it being decreased. To me, it is an enormous

underestimation, not just underestimation, but a complete

misunderstanding of what that education is, what is the substance

of it. Has it been misconstrued before? Where did it go wrong? But

we totally manage to misunderstand what a great creative education

does. Yes. I saw a finger there. That's your lot for tonight, folks.

But not for us. Because we're in luck. Nicola's promised us our very

own private recital tonight, on her trusty violin, which makes a nice

change from Alan on his rusty spoons. So nighty-night, everyone.

Please don't let our embarrassing lack of talent compared to Nicola

bite.