the european space agency launches its euclid telescope from florida on a mission to produce an enormous sd map of the cosmos. the intention is to study the nature of dark matter and dark energy euclid will enter a fixed orbit in order to photograph deep space with a huge camera developed in the uk. now on bbc news...newscast. hello. chris mason. i sound a bit throaty myself, though, because i'm about to talk about how you've got no voice whatsoever. i have a rather croaky voice, yeah. which is probably going to get worse from this point on. so that's yeah, i've not done much tv and radio this week for reasons that will become apparent, but we'll have a go at newscast. you don't have whisky in that mug, do you? it's just water. i've tried the honey and the lemon and the gargling salt water, but i think it's just one of those things thatjust takes time and that requires me to not talk very much. and also, ijust interrupted you as you were speaking, which i'm using one of your rare words. the word kind is very narrow tonight. but luckily we're joined by somebody

who's got loads to say. it's thangam debbonaire, shadow leader of the house of commons. hello, hello, hello. and thank you so much for mentioning us in the house of commons last week. this is how it went. the leader famously once reassured this house that another prime minister wasn't hiding under a desk. words immortalised on the bbc's newscast intro. now i hear from the parliamentary press gallery reception news that she's a big fan of the podcasts. so, mr speaker, i'll end by tempting her to update newscast and update this house. is that where the prime minister really was on monday evening, hiding under a desk? so this is a great way for our politicians to get on the podcast. just name check us in parliament, put us in the historic record forever for historians to read about. and then you can come on. yeah, but i'm the first, i was the first to put newscast in hansard and that was very exciting moment. i mean, if this starts an arms race, it will be amazing. who knows?

but thank you for listening and for listening over the last few years as well. yeah, i mean, i used to listen to brexitcast in the good old days, as i ruefully refer to it now quite often just to try and make sense of whatever it was that we'd done that day. and, and i've kind of stuck with you. i've stopped through the covid years, and now here we are in the newscast. yes. oh, thank you. also, i notice as a rhetorical device, sadly, it didn't work, though, because penny mordaunt didn't really she didn't bite. i mean, you know, penny is a great opponent. i really enjoy sort of sparring with her. she's fantastic to sort of go up against on a thursday morning. she's been really interesting to work with, obviously, the shadow leader of the house and the leader of the house. it's one of those weird roles in politics that almost nobody understands. and you guys do it. obviously, you guys do because you listen to business questions, which i was about to give a shameless plug for thursday mornings, 10:30am. and but we also have to work quite a lot offstage, which is unlike other roles because we're both house of commons commissioners. so we're responsible for 18,000 pass—holders and a unesco world heritage site,

which is no small task which we share as commissioners. so we get to work together quite a lot in a completely different way. now, talking of double acts, you've got you and penny, you've got me and chris. the latest podcasting double act is george osborne and ed balls. they're going to be doing podcasts. what do you think of that? well, as a podcast aficionado. right. let's get on with this episode of newscast and see how long chris mason's voice will hold up for the newscast. it's adam in the studio. and it is croaky chris in the studio. chris, put it on a t—shirt. i'm joined by thangam debbonaire, who is the shadow leader of the house of commons, who very nicely mentioned newscast in parliament for the first time ever last week. so thank you again. chris, i'm just working out how this is going to work out tonight. am i going tojust say all the news and you'lljust sort of like cough if i got it right or give me a thumbs up. so for people watching or maybe i can do sort of thumbs up or thumbs down on your political analysis and then for people listening on the pod, maybe i'll say yes or no or i attempt short kind of, you know, paragraphs of answers rather than my usual long winded, verbose adlibbing. a colleague of mine who i won't embarrass but did once

give me great advice. in her exact words, it was, "your colleagues will always "thank you for your brevity." that's so true. well, let's give this a go then. so the first thing we're going to talk about is the privileges committee. that's the committee of the house of commons, which originally investigated borisjohnson and found that he'd misled parliament in his comments about party gate and they recommended the 90—day suspension. now, one of the reasons the suspension, how am i doing? ok so far? good, good. was so long is because he himself had criticised the work of the committee and kind of tried to shed doubt on the work it was doing. but it wasn'tjust him. it was also some of his parliamentary allies. people like nadine dorries and jacob rees—mogg could also very publicly criticise the committee and challenge the political background of the chair, harriet harman, and things like that, and dragged up all the tweets of her about party gate. so the committee did another inquiry into that and they published their report on thursday morning and they were quite critical of the mps for weighing in against the committee. yeah, but a handful of them in total, seven mps, three peers, i think, in total who were named. and in essence here you've got this argument about freedom of speech, freedom of expression versus the tone of political debate, really.

now, i think it's worth putting in some context, which is that these were a small number of vociferous supporters of boris johnson. they were a lot of people who either were supporters of borisjohnson or never were who would make an argument that would say, look, you've got to be quite careful about the extent to which you criticise a committee like this when it's doing its work, not least because the members of that committee can't actually say anything in public about the work that they are doing when they are doing it. and they were particularly critical of what they felt were coordinated, systematic attempts to undermine their work. and they drew a distinction between the tweets and the tv and the radio contributions of some of them, and others like bill cash, the veteran conservative, who had his issues with the committee but had made those submissions in what were deemed to be a parliamentary way. so either by writing to them or by saying stuff in the house of commons as opposed to going on the telly or going on twitter. so it's kind of like an addition, a stapled addition to the report that they had of borisjohnson, of them saying some pretty fruity things, the committee, about what they saw as the conduct of these just under a dozen parliamentarians

being pretty outspoken about them, not least because the view of some has been why on earth would you possibly want to sit on something like the privileges committee in the future if you thought your reputation, your integrity, was going to be dragged through the dirt at a point when you cannot possibly respond? on the other hand, you have people, both those who were named by the committee and others, who say, hang on a minute, this is not a court of law. why should an mp have limitations on what they can say about a fellow mp or collection of mps who are passing judgment on another mp? well, that was definitely the view of simon clarke, who is the former communities secretary, who has been quite critical of that committee. as mps, we must all be free to legitimately critique the work of any committee of the house of commons, and we can't have committees which are effectively beyond criticism. and i do think that if we go down this route, then frankly the committee is never going to stop

having to follow up with mp5. thangam, what's your view? well, it's interesting. i mean, chris mentions the free speech angle, which i know quite a lot of mps have made, and the committee takes it head—on and they say in point 18... you have a highlighted copy! i'm not going to read aloud because you've got listeners and viewers to entertain. but i mean, serious point here... the point they are trying to make is that free speech is at the heart of our democracy. and at the same time, this was a procedure which all of us had agreed upon. we'd all vote... well, we didn't need to vote, we were unanimous in our support for the membership of the committee, which we knew from the start. we knew that it was a majority tory mps, four tory, one snp and two labour. we knew who was going to be the chair. and all along there was a steady stream of criticism and undermining. the power of the court of law is misleading. it's a parliamentary committee set

up on parliamentary terms and one of the things that they are claiming is that this could have been what's called contempt. now, contempt means if you look in your erskine may, the parliamentary rule book, and there is an online version so people can look it up to check my working. the important point here is that contempt is any act or something that someone says or the opposite. so not saying or not doing something in a way which would obstruct parliament's work. now that really matters because parliament is here to represent the people, to serve the people, and if we are obstructed in our work, then we can't do that properly. and i felt like last monday, when we debated the original privileges committee report into borisjohnson, who had been shown to lie, that was a really important moment of reasserting democracy and reasserting, frankly.. and that still happened fine, despite these comments. yes. but what would be an ok thing to say about a committee that might be a bit critical but then didn't stray

into that really negative territory? i mean, we could infer from what the committee has done is that they haven't criticised — as you said, bill cash and there were others who used parliamentary procedure quite properly and made quite strong criticisms, but didn't take to the airwaves, misuse their position in public and try and undermine the entire process. so i think that's different from saying i do not agree with the conclusion they've come to, but i have read the report and i've come to my own conclusion, from the whole process was flawed from the start. what do you think now would be an appropriate thing for parliament to do? should should these named parliamentarians have to apologise, for instance? well, the house will decide, and i was all ready to ask penny mordaunt, my opposite number, this morning if she was going to make time for a debate with an amendable motion on this report, which the committee has asked us to do. and yet she announced it straightaway. we are going to do that a week on monday, on the 10th ofjuly. and we've been talking

about the courts already in this conversation. but the court of appeal was pretty active today. they were considering the government's rwanda policy. so the back story here is the government has this new policy of sending what they call illegal migrants to rwanda rather than processing them in the british asylum and migration system. some people challenged that in court. previously the high court had said, yep, go ahead, it's lawful. but that was then appealed by some campaign groups. i'm filling here so you don't have to talk, chris. this is all good. thank you. i was waiting for some nods. thumbs up. yeah. anyway, so the court of appeal ruled today that actually the high court was wrong and the rwanda policy is not lawful. and correct me if i'm wrong, thangam, the argument from thejudges, or two out of the three judges because another one disagreed, was that the risk was that somebody could be sent to rwanda and then through the rwandan system then be sent back to their home country, where they could fear persecution, which would not be lawful. exactly. and the key thing here

is that the government's now in a real pickle. so the bill's been going quite a while now, and many of us, myself included, have been asking the government, well, where is the impact assessment? and an impact assessment is something you're supposed to have with every bill. and an impact assessment should have shown parliamentarians before we debated on it, before we voted on it, before i voted against it, but before all of that we should have had that to show us what are the consequences of this bill if it goes through. we didn't have that. i do rather wonder now whether that was because they were anticipating that things might go wrong in the courts. i don't know. but we got that report this week and it wasn't great for the government. so they are in a pickle. because one of the things that these impact assessments do is work out the costs and benefits of things. and one of the things we learnt this week was that the average flight to sending a person to rwanda will on average cost £169,000, which people are saying is actually more than it would cost to house them here. although the net cost, the net additional cost would be considerably less than that because there'd be money that would be saved because they would no longer be here.

but some of the other things that that impact assessment got into, i mean, effectively, what the impact assessment said was this is incredibly complicated. and a lot of these numbers are guesswork. but built into it was an assumption that only if the scheme were, over time, to deter roughly four in ten people — of course, you'd probably never be able to prove that, but only if it deterred around four in ten people from coming to the uk in the first place, would it become kind of cost neutral? would it break even? and only above that would it start saving money. now, of course, it's not only about saving money, but that is an element of it. i think, speaking to people in government, they expected this would always end up in the supreme court in the end. and they've appealed the appeal. that will probably happen in the autumn. but of course, all of that is pushing back the point at which this policy could start, if it ever starts. but then i guess there's a question for you guys and for labour,

which is that few people dispute at the moment the whole issue with small boat crossings is kind of out of control. the numbers are huge. there's a problem for the government to wrestle with, potentially for you guys to wrestle with if you win the next election. and maybe if the existing set of policy solutions isn't working, you have to think radical. they make the argument they are thinking radical and they're pursuing rwanda. what would you do? what we've got here is a backlog problem. this is actually a situation that has grown over the last few years. when i was first an mp, the home office actually had a service standard for six months for a decision on asylum, which meant that within six months, somebody who wasn't entitled to be here could be sent home, and somebody who was entitled to be here could start working, which is generally what they want to do — contributing, making a life for themselves, until it was safe for them to go home or they decided to settle, and then they would have to go through another process. that six months is gone. it's months or even years for most people and that is the norm. and even getting the most

basic information out of the home office is difficult. so we have a backlog problem. and when you have a backlog problem at a home office that is basically, as far as far as i can see, has been gutted of skilled personnel to make those decisions, we then end up with an accommodation problem. so people aren't working out of the asylum accommodation and they get stuck in hotels. and all of this is a system that you guys could inherit, relatively soon, within the next, say, 18 months, if you were to win the election. and at the same time, of course, we are seeing lots of people coming across on boats. it's a point at which, hypothetically, you guys inherit this system. what do you do? you use the money that would have been used on rwanda, which, obviously, would cost a fortune. so you would junk rwanda straight away? it's currently costing zero! well, that's not true, they have already spent millions on it not working. they have spent millions on developing the policy and yet nobody has gone. if, at the point there is a labour government, there are flights that are going to rwanda, do you stop them instantly? there's too many hypotheticals because we don't know what the report is going to say. there's only two hypotheticals.

either they are not happening or they are. and if they are happening, given that you are currently opposing them, logic would suggest you would stop them. well, the first thing we would need to do is deal with the backlog. if we don't deal with the backlog now, it's only going to be worse by then. and even the government's own impact assessment said there was very uncertain evidence that this rwanda deal would deter people from coming, and that's supposed to be the point. it's striking that you can't say, in a situation where the rwanda flights are happening at the point where a labour government takes office, that you would stop them. the list of things that the conservatives have done over the last 14 years that i want to undo is so long that that would be crowded for competition, what we choose to undo and how we choose to undo it. on a different note — literally a different set of notes — are you still playing the cello? lam. are you still in the statutory instruments? i most certainly am, we played just last week. we played last week at the women's prize for fiction, and very good fun it was, too _ 0k.

so you know the newscast theme tune, of which you are a super fan, is quite string—heavy. i'm sure there is a cello in there. i think there is. if not an actual cello, it might be a synthesised cello. if we could get you the sheet music, would you give it a go? oh, gosh, yes! we'd love to do that! i'm not sure there are any copyright issues. you'd have to find out. a lovely place to end. thank you very much. thank you for having me on, it's been an absolute pleasure. thank you for plugging us in parliament. any time... well, not literally any time! we don't expect that! that would cheapen it. now, we arejoined by the conservative peer lord danny finkelstein. i don't know if you are a musician as well, are you? sadly, no. i can play the cd player. but even that you don't need any more. i can play sonos. talking about cd players, in your new book, which is called hitler, stalin, mum and dad, it is all about the amazing journeys of bits of your family

across europe in the build—up and during the second world war, isn't there a bit where you get given a short audio clip of somebody — turns out it's a dvd, not a cd, and its four hours long? a dvd of my dad. and if i hadn't had that, i don't think i'd have been able to write this book because it told me so much detail about his experience in the state collective farm, his father's experience in the gulag. that was amazing. we didn't have very many records at home, by the way. we only had six. my father had no teenage years, so one of them was sooty and sweep — i think that must have been mine... the other five, because he had no teenage years, he had very little music in the house in that way, which is odd, because he had loads and loads of books. tonnes and tonnes of books. he was a very cultured person. give us a potted sense, for people who are just coming across your book, about the extraordinary story that you are telling of the two sides of your family. absolutely — so my mother was the daughter of a man called alfred weiner, one of the leaders of germanjews in the 19205. part of this book is about his extraordinary attempt to document everything the nazis did,

his involvement in the nuremberg trials and the eichmann trials, the way that he served nazis in the 19205, his encounter with goering, having to leave germany. they're coming up again in holland, and my mother's life, then, in the same german—jewish community as anne frank and margot frank, being trapped in holland and ending up in the concentration camp. so it's a story people will know, the holocaust story. but an extraordinary version of it. ultimately, they are involved in a very rare exchange, using a paraguayan passport, despite not being paraguayan. and my father's side — somebody said to me the other day, your grandfather was quite well—off, and that is actually to understate it. my grandfather was called the iron king. that was his nickname, i found out when i was doing this. he had a huge, fancy house. a huge, fancy house what we now called lviv, but when they were born it was lwow and was in poland, not in ukraine. when the nazis came into poland from one end, the soviets came in from the other end, and they arrest everybody who's got even the slightest hint of civic leadership.

my grandfather had more than that. as well as being a wealthy capitalist, he was also on the city council. he was representative of the jewish community, so he had a lot that they could arrest him for. except not actually having done anything wrong. but they didn't require that. and he was accused of strengthening the might of capitalist poland. he disappeared into the gulag. my grandmother is told, come back in four days and we'll tell you what happened to him. and after three days, they arrest everyone else, including my grandmother and my father. you've got these two forces, the nazis and the communists, both arresting elites. in the case of the nazis, it'sjews, who happen to be shopkeepers, and in the case of the communists it's shopkeepers who happened to be jews. and similar things therefore happened to both sides of the family, hence the book is hitler, stalin, mum and dad, and they sort of process their experience, i suppose, in the same way, and we ended up in hendon in the suburb looking to the future

and building a life here. and they and your grandma just leap off the page, and there's a bit where your mum is going off to do a talk and she said, do you think they'd be interested in the fact that i knew anne frank? i found myself laughing. i thought, i shouldn't laugh, you can't laugh about anne frank. but actually, you can laugh about somebody having a lovely family where they make remarks like that. i'm sure mum would want you to laugh, actually. and one of the things that she said to me that was so striking, when there was that big fuss aboutjustin bieber going to the anne frank house and people couldn't believe that he wrote in the book, "i hope she would have been a belieber". people thought this was unbelievably crass because they see anne frank as like a demigod in some ways. but my mother, knowing her at the time, as contemporaries, and me and my aunt seeing her in belsen, her and margot, they saw them as just kids. my aunt actually said on one of her interview tapes, to her she wasjust a kid in the class. and as a result of that,

my mother said, well, actually saying that she would have been a belieber is spot—on. she probably would have been. and my mum managed to be quite... ..to deal with what had happened to her in a very calm way. i think she was determined that these events wouldn't spoil her life. and what i say is, because so many very powerful, emotional things happen in this book and disasters overtake both sides of the family, i don't think it's a sad book because in the end, despite all the sad things that happen, and of course relatives die and i tell the story of that, this is the story of two people who survived to meet each other and lived a very happy life. i think they would have wanted to stress that. i had boxes and boxes of papers, and just pulling them out, and i will give you one small example... i pulled one out and i could see that the first word in this, clearly written by my grandmother in a blunt pencil, the first word was the word "omelette".

and i couldn't understand what this was. what it turned out to be was that when people were in belsen, they talked all the time about food. if you read any accounts of concentration camps where people lived for any period, because lots didn't live at all, but where they live, they talked about food all the time. and what my grandmother had clearly done was write down recipes that she could remember. they weren't fancy things. they were things like, "don't cook the omelette and don't burn them." these little things where you get these papers, they've got these immense historical import, after all, written by my grandmother when she was starving to death, her children are starving, to remind herself of food. and yet it had this resonance of hendon dinners in the 19705. i wonder as well how much — and maybe the answer to this is not a lot or nothing — but how much, consciously or subconsciously, your family's story and what you were aware of it before you wrote this book, has shaped you broader world—view? absolutely.

the first thing, in a big way, i try to look at things in proportion. so let's, for example, say i'm a conservative peer, you had thangam debbonaire. i kind of understand that the things that divide me from her — although they are important and we argue about them — are the stuff of politics, are not the big things in history that divide, that did these things to my parents. i can tell the difference between those, that introduces a sense of proportion that is very important to my politic5, and hopefully a moderation and a willingness to compromise, all of which are vital. second, clearly it will have an impact on my attitude to the refugee cri5i5. we are talking on the day of the rwanda legaljudgment. i couldn't vote for the illegal migration bill because i didn't approve of that policy, and it's difficult to read the stories of the desperate search for papers for families, including my own, that form part of this book, without having a feeling that we need an international refugee system that deals

better with asylum. but thirdly, and this is less common among people who have that view of immigration, it also led me to be a liberal internationali5t. or, more crudely, it has led me often to feel that it's right to take up arms in order to influence the internal affairs of other countries, because i find it hard to sit by while gaddafi, for example, kill5 lots of people in libya. and i recognise that that has led me into 5upporting things that haven't worked out very well or to be over—enthusiastic. iju5t find it difficult because of my history. so unquestionably, in very small way5, just my belief in the rule of law when i was a kid, i wouldn't tape people's record5 onto ca55ette5 because it broke international property law and copyright law.

and it may seem absurd to other people, but my father always used to say to me, there's no point anyone being involved in politics if we all think we can disobey the law. and he felt that in this country, laws were made with some due process. there were individual rights. and he had seen what not having that meant, his father being sentenced to eight years in the gulag for being an anti—social element, effectively, for doing nothing other than being a political opponent of the regime. daniel, thank you very much, and thanks for a very, very compelling book for us all to go and read. thank you. and thank you very much forjoining us on this episode of newscast. if you would like to chat about the podcast or anything we have done in this episode, you canjoin the discord server. there is a qr code on your screen, if you're watching us. if you get your phone out, and i can keep talking for long enough... shall we make chris do this bit with his croaky voice? keep talking for ages and ages!

you will be able to click on the link, which will take you to the invite to join us on discord, and you can chat about whatever you like and maybe even give chris mason some sore throat remedies. bye! bye— bye! newscast. newscast from the bbc. hello. we start off the first day ofjuly on a fairly fresh, unsettled sort of note with sunshine and showers. certainly it's a little bit cooler than much ofjune. in fact, it looks likejune is going to turn out to be the warmestjune on record in the uk. so we've got some blue skies and sunshine already starting to break through. really, through the rest of the weekend, that mix of sunny spells and scattered, blustery showers, but most of the showers will be across the northern half of the uk. yesterday's cloud is exiting towards the east, and we've got clearer skies now rolling in from the atlantic, still bearing a few showers with them.

most of the showers for the rest of the day will be across scotland and northern ireland. more persistent rain, in fact, across the far north of scotland, but easing away gradually through this evening and overnight. so a dry end to the day. then, as we head through to the early hours of sunday morning, it will be a little bit cooler and fresher than it was first thing saturday morning. so temperatures in the countryside just about getting down into single figures. so through the day tomorrow, then, we've still got low pressure sitting out towards the north—east of the uk. the winds are rotating around that low pressure, bringing us a few showers. a bit like today, most of the showers tomorrow will be across parts of scotland and northern ireland. there will be more persistent rain for the likes of caithness and sutherland up towards the northern isles at times. lots of sunshine further south. still a bit of a breeze blowing, probably not quite as strong as it is out there today. temperatures just down a notch, so between about 11; to 22 north to south on sunday. no great change in the weather as we roll through to the new working week as well. if you have got tickets

to the ashes, of course, at lord's, that continues — it looks like a dry day tomorrow, temperatures about 21 degrees, and a noticeable breeze coming in from the west. now, moving through sunday night and on into monday, there is that low pressure not moving in a hurry, sitting across parts of scandinavia, so more showers rotating in on that west or north—westerly breeze, pushing into parts of northern ireland, western scotland through the morning. later in the day, some of those showers arrive across england and wales. but it is eastern areas that will keep driest for the longest on monday. temperatures between about 13 to 21 degrees. all in all, much of the week ahead is looking fairly unsettled, so there will be some showers at times. some sunshine in between some sunshine in between those showers as well, those showers as well, so not a complete write—off. so not a complete write—off. but it looks like it will be but it looks like it will be a bit drier and warmer a bit drier and warmer at least in the south, at least in the south, later in the week. later in the week. some of those showers could affect some of those showers could affect the championships, the championships, which, of course, which, of course, begin at wimbledon. begin at wimbledon. goodbye.

live from london. this is bbc news. more than a thousand arrests in france following a fourth night of violence — officals say a state of emergency cannot be ruled out. i'm alive in paris where authorities are bracing themselves for another night of unrest. the dutch king makes a personal apology for his country's role in slavery , we'll speak live to a cultural historian. and the final frontier — the european space agency launch its euclid telescope hoping to shed light on the dark side of the universe.