Johann Hari

This week, a battalion of angry addicts brought London to a standstill. They snarled up the traffic, then marched on 10 Downing Street to demand their fix at prices they can afford. Across the world, in countries as different as the US and Iran, fellow junkies are rising up in rage. Their addiction is to a gloopy black drug called petrol – and we are all about to go cold turkey.

In the past seven years, the price of oil has soared from $30 (£15) a barrel to $140. By the end of next year it could be at $200. No matter how much we plead or howl at our governments, it will never go back: the final act of the Age of Oil has begun.

The era that is ending began at 10.30am on 10 January 1901, on a high hill called Spindletop in south-eastern Texas. A pair of pioneer brothers managed to drill down into the biggest oilfield ever found. Until then, the dribbles of oil that had been discovered were used only for kerosene lamps – but within a decade, this vast gushing supply was driving the entire global economy. It made the 20th century – its glories, and its gutters – possible. Humans were suddenly able to use in one frenetic burst an energy supply that had taken 150 million years to build up. A species that died before the age of 40 after a life of boring, back-breaking labour spurted forward so far and so fast that today billions live into their eighties after a life of leisure and plenty.

Oil now drives everything we do. It shuttles us across the globe, we fight wars for it, and we even eat it: to farm a single cow and deliver it to slaughter burns up six barrels of oil – enough to drive from New York to LA. That's why food becomes expensive when oil becomes expensive.

It is totally understandable that most of us want to live forever in that sweet niche in history when we had seemingly infinite reservoirs of oil, and no awareness that burning it would, in time, burn us too. But, alas, we need to wake up and smell the fumes. There are three reasons why the placebos demanded by the petrol protesters and the politicians cowering from them across the world – lower taxes! find more oil! dig! burn! – are a delusion.

Reality Check One: Petrol is finite. There is a limited amount of oil in the world, and we have already burned more than 900 billion barrels of it. There is a complex scientific debate about when we will reach the point of "peak oil", when we will have used up more than half of all the supplies on earth. Some geologists think this moment has already passed. Others – mostly oil industry flunkies – think we have as long as 30 years to go. But all agree the remaining oil is harder to reach, and much of it can never be accessed.

The facts are stark. All the biggest oilfields on earth were discovered before my parents were born. The discovery of new oilfields peaked in 1965, and has been falling ever since. The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was the year I was born: 1979.

So we have a diminishing supply – at the very moment when billions more people want access to it. Car ownership in India has trebled in the past decade, and it will treble again by 2020. In China, three-quarters of urban Chinese say they plan to buy a car in the next five years. These factors mean we are unquestionably moving from having a world with growing pools of cheap oil to dwindling supplies of expensive oil.

Reality Check Two: Even if we had infinite supplies of free petrol, we couldn't afford to use it without dramatically destabilising the climate. To use just a few examples: Spain and Australia are currently suffering their worst droughts since records began, and several cities are on the brink of running out of drinking water. The oceans are rapidly turning more acidic, to levels scientists didn't expect to see until 2050. The Arctic is almost free of sea ice in the summer.

This is all with just one degree of global warming. The world's climatologists agree that if we burn up most of the remaining dribbles of oil on earth, we could be on course for six degrees this century. The last time the world warmed so quickly was 251 million years ago – and 95 per cent of everything on earth died.

Reality Check Three: Our addiction to oil means we can never undermine the Islamic fundamentalists who want to kill us – and often actually help them.

Most of the world's remaining oil is in the Middle East. In order to access it, we have a twin-track policy. To start with, we support the most repressive dictatorship in the region – the torturing, sharia-law enforcing House of Saud – because they keep the supply running nicely. The Saudi state then uses the money we pay at the pump to fund a vast network of extreme madrasahs and mosques across the world – including within the US and Europe – preaching that democracy is "evil", women should be subordinated, Jews are "pigs and apes", and gays should be killed. We do not query this because, as the writer Thomas Friedman put it, "junkies don't tell the truth to their dealers".

Where we cannot find a friendly local tyrant, we invade the country in order to control the oil ourselves. Even John McCain admitted this month that Iraq was about oil, arguing that energy independence would "prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East." (He later claimed with a red face he was talking exclusively about the first Iraq war.)

On their own, each of these inconvenient truths would be enough to require us to begin an urgent transition away from petrol. Together, they are unanswerable.

Of course it's tempting to draw the oily covers over our head and cry for tiny little steps like cutting a few pence off petrol taxes, or squeezing out a few more barrels as Gordon Brown begged yesterday. But these measures would be at best a local anaesthetic, putting off the moment when the rapid transition to a global economy run on carbon-free energy sources must start.

The longer we delay, the harder it will be. As Paul Roberts puts in his book The End of Oil: "The real question is not whether change is going to come, but whether the shift will be peaceful and orderly or chaotic and violent because we waited too long to begin planning for it."

Every penny now should be spent not on perpetuating petrol, but on developing and disseminating alternative fuels. The addiction that began a century ago on a hill in Texas is ending – and we have no choice but to check en masse into petro-rehab.

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POSTSCRIPT: In my column today, I talk about how the age of oil is drawing inexorably to an end. Quite a few readers have e-mailed to ask why, if the case is so compelling, we aren’t seriously weaning ourselves off oil yet. Why would we continue trashing the climate, funding Islamism and relying on a dwindling supply, if there were realistic alternatives?

Well, the oil companies are spending a fortune trying to obscure our understanding of the crisis. Their private interest conflicts with the public interest, and they have bought many of the people who are supposed to guard the public interest – our politicians – with vast donations, especially in the US.

But we can’t blame them alone. The truckers protesting in London this week were not despatched by the oil industry. In truth, we understandably and naturally love the relative luxury and ease of the oil age (as it has been experienced in the short-term, in the West). A transition will be bumpy. Some of us will be worse off initially. It is natural for some of us to imagine we can stay in the oil bubble forever, and to fight for that fantasy.

It’s also true the price tag for the transition is hefty - but it would still cost less than scrambling for the last dregs of petrol. Don’t take my word for it. A 2004 study funded by the Pentagon, then run by a far-left campaigner called Donald Rumsfeld, calculated that “it would cost less to displace all the oil the United States now uses [by shifting to renewables and nuclear] than it will cost to buy that oil.” By 2025, a transition to carbon-free energy sources would be saving $130bn a year.

And that’s before you even factor in the gargantuan cost of global warming – or all the foul Islamism we fund and foster by backing the House of Saud and by viewing the Middle East as a giant petrol station.

If you want to comment on this postscript, or read the comments of others, click here.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: One of my best friends, the excellent publisher and FT journalist Rob Blackhurst, has a new website here. Read it! Link to it! Wallow in it!

Tonight, the corpse of Mary Whitehouse will rise from the grave for a few gloating hours. The vicar’s wife – and self-appointed spokeswoman for God – is the subject of a new BBC film called ‘Filth’. She is played by Julie Walters as a warm Northerner whose campaign against “depravity” on television is in the long tradition of English eccentricity. The programme has already inaugurated the media cliché of the week: nice progressive people are sprouting up everywhere to declare that, although they didn’t like her at the time, they look through the pimp-my-ride TV schedules and realise she was right after all.

But this is only possible if you forget what Mary Whitehouse actually stood for. She was not driven by opposition to violence, but by the Christian fundamentalist belief that women should be “submissive”, homosexuality was a disease, and great swathes of those who disagreed with her should be thrown into prison.

In the film, when she sees two men having sex in a bush, she reportedly waves cheerfully. In reality, she said gay people should be forced to have medical treatment because “psychiatric literature proves that 60 per cent of homosexuals who go for treatment get completely cured." She believed their “repugnant” feelings were caused by their mothers having “abnormal sex… during pregnancy or just after.” If gays persisted in their “depravity”, then they could expect to die horribly: Aids was, she said, “God’s judgement.” These weren’t just words: she fought to have people jailed for showing homosexuality on stage, and for condom adverts to be banned at the height of AIDS.

She saw sex everywhere. Whitehouse wanted the Chuck Berry song “My Ding-a-Ling” to be criminalized because it “encouraged self-abuse.” And she wanted the greatest British icons criminalized, demanding a ban on the Beatles and Monty Python, and for Darwin to be expunged from the curriculum.

Every time there was an advance in freedom for women, Whitehouse tried to slap it down. In an old episode of her favourite show, ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, you can see the dark side of the world she fought to preserve. When Constable Dixon stumbles across a woman being beaten black and blue, he reassuringly tells the camera it’s nothing to do with the police.

While Whitehouse presented herself as the plucky Everywoman standing up to a depraved elite, she was a theocratic bully who said her opponents were “the Anti-Christ.” Any why did she do it? “The way the Lord is using me,” she said, “is quite incredible.” I too am uncomfortable about kids watching the violence on TV today too – but the idea this vindicates her theocratic bullying is bizarre.

What would London look like today if Mary Whitehouse had won? Gay people shuttered in the closet. Women locked in loveless marriages. No rock concerts. No comedy. No teaching about evolution. No freedom to mock her fundamentalist religion, which would be relentlessly enforced by the state. Now that would really be filthy.

This column was also accompanied by some boxes.

Box I:

Londoners are so ungrateful! This weekend I went to the West End with a friend to see the new Woody Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell {pictured}. We were the only people in the audience. Now, I grant you the film was an unimaginably awful attempt at a sort-of-gangster tale – imagine Woody directing an Eastenders omnibus – but my theory is that he has given us such joy that we owe it to him to watch his duds. It’s like visiting a senile relative in a home. Have you no conscience, Londoners?

BOX II:

There’s a campaign here in the East End to rename Shoreditch High Street station before it finally opens in 2010. A few local councillors who want to call it Banglatown – and I love the proposal. One of the best things about the tube is the richness of the station names. In New York they are bone-dry and unevocative: take the A-train to 53rd, then the C train to 32nd. But in London you can hop from Angel to Barking to Mudchute to Tooting: names that suggest worlds. This is Banglatown, just as it was once the Shtetl – so give it the seductive name it deserves.

BOX III:

I have mixed feelings about the Dalai Lama’s arrival. I totally oppose the Chinese rape of Tibet - but then I remember the time His Holiness called me fat. When I interviewed him in 2004, I didn’t want to go into the usual fawning you’re-so-great routine, so I challenged him about the fact that when he ran Tibet, it was a slave-owning theocracy. He became uncommunicative, so I brought it back to something we agreed on. “You’re very critical of income inequality in the West,” I said. “Yes,” he replied, "Why do the rich need so much? We each only have one stomach.” He paused. "Not you. You appear to have two." The bitch!

[Various Indie writers were asked who they're backing in this series of the Apprentice. I picked Lucinda...]

I’m backing Lucinda, because – with the possible exception of Lee – she is the only contestant on this year’s Apprentice who appears capable of showing any empathy or self-knowledge. The others seem to believe success in business – or in life – is about stamping on everyone around you until their internal organs burst. Alex slithers around, silently undermining everyone else; Clare barges past them without even offering an apologetic shrug as they are sent tumbling off the cliff.

Amidst these velocoraptors, Lucinda is a little beret-wearing bear. She tries to succeed by articulating her own feelings, and understanding the feelings of everyone around her. It’s this quality that has made her the only good manager in the entire series: she figured out how to get the others to perform by – a shocking concept! – listening to them carefully, and at every stage talking it through. Her degree in psychology paid off. As a result she even earned a rare sliver of praise from Margaret Montford, Sir Alan Sugar’s mildly terrifying henchwoman.

In the early episodes, Lucinda was dismissed by the other contestants as “lazy” because they simply couldn’t understand her approach. Whereas everybody else rushes to be The One With Glory, Lucinda quietly tries to get it right.

She is also – unprecedentedly for ‘The Apprentice’ – self-aware. Michael was still jabbering that he was “a brilliant salesman” after failing to sell anything at all with his distinctive technique of shrieking at customers “For God’s sake you’re a fool if you don’t buy this! Don’t you know what you are doing to ME? What’s WRONG with you?” Lucinda said all along she was rubbish with technology – so why was Helene surprised she screwed up after being put in charge of a complex computer programme?

Of course she can get too emotional, and sometimes she overdoses on honesty – like when she told Sir Alan Sugar that “closing a deal isn’t my greatest strength”.

But do you want ‘The Apprentice’ to be a celebration of autistic ambition and self-promotion, or of the quieter office operator who hangs back, figures out how everyone else feels, and tries to make sure everyone does their best? If you’re down with the second team, then join me in donning a beret of solidarity over the next fortnight.

PRESENTER: Jonathan Dimbleby

PANELLISTS: Tony Wright
Chris Grayling
Sarah Teather
Johann Hari

FROM: Christleton High School, Cheshire

DIMBLEBY
Welcome to Cheshire where we are in the village of Christleton, which is just outside the city of Chester. Christleton, so named because it was settled by early Christians, it means literally the place of the Christians, was also the scene of fierce fighting during the English Civil War. We're here courtesy of the high school which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with an enviable academic record as the first school in the country to have combined mathematics and computing with business and enterprise status. I say courtesy of because the instigator of the event, I'm invited to report, is one of the 300 sixth formers Alex Smith, thanks Alex.

On our panel: Tony Wright is the influential chairman of the Commons Public Administration Select Committee. Chris Grayling is the Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions; Sarah Teather speaks for the Liberal Democrats on business, enterprise and regulatory reform and Yohann Hari is one of the younger columnists of the street of shame, who writes for The Independent and is the winner of this year George Orwell Award for making, I quote "political writing into an art". He evidently loves to be loathed, using his website to cite the fact that Noam Chomsky has denounced him as a Stalinist and the historian, Niall Ferguson has called him horrible Hari. He's the fourth member of our panel. [CLAPPING]

Our first question please.

WILLIAMS
Hi, Mark Williams. Would the panel agree that with an 18% swing to the Conservatives in yesterday's Crew and Nantwich by-election that this is the end of New Labour?

DIMBLEBY
Chris Grayling.

GRAYLING
Yes I think it is the end of New Labour and I think aspects of the Labour Party's campaign over the past two or three weeks I think has totally undermined the coalition of voters that Tony Blair put together in 1997. Edward Timpson, our successful candidate, the new MP for Crewe and Nantwich, was derided as a Tory toff, he's actually the son of a family made good, who built up a successful business. And if we start to decry people who've made a success of themselves in life in this country it will be a sad day. So yes I think it's the end of what Tony Blair put together then. I don't think it means that we're somehow immediately on the brink of power, I think we've got a long way to go, I think we've got to demonstrate over the next two years that we have a genuine alternative platform for government, that we can deal with some of the problems and challenges this country faces. And unless we do that we won't deserve to win but we've certainly got the opportunity to do so.

DIMBLEBY
Sarah Teather.

TEATHER
I mean I think I certainly agree with Chris that the campaign was completely despicable but I think probably where people were voting yesterday was really as an anti-Labour vote. If there'd been a label on that ballot paper that said vote against the Labour Party I think that would have won almost regardless. There's a real feeling against Labour at the moment. And I thought it was very sad, looking at the campaign that Labour ran here, remember what Tony Blair said just after his elected, he said that this was the end of the class war but the war on equality had only just begun and yet 10 years after Labour came to power inequality is worse and they're using class as a means of trying to win a by-election when they're absolutely desperate is a really very sad time. And I wonder whether Labour really have to begin to question what they're about. When you look at some of the policies that they've taken recently, the decisions they've taken, like, for example, the decision to abolish the 10p tax rate that has affected the very people who they said they were there to support and to work for. So they have a real crisis I think, you know what is the Labour Party for? And it's much bigger than Gordon Brown.

DIMBLEBY
Do you [CLAPPING] do you share the view of Chris Grayling, as I understand it, that it's not in the bag for the Conservatives, in the sense that Labour could none the less recover?

TEATHER
Yes I mean I don't think it's in the bag for the Conservatives. I sometimes use the analogy that it's as if the country are going through a kind of messy divorce with Labour and they've gone through that phase of betrayal and anger and they're looking around for something else. And sometimes the relationship between the electorate and government is a little bit like that. And I'm not sure that they're yet ready to make a long term commitment to the Conservatives, you know image might be important if you're on the rebound but I'm not sure it's quite so important when you're looking for a long term relationship and that's what forming a government is and when you vote people in at a General Election it's about that long term stability.

DIMBLEBY
Is it the end of New Labour Tony Wright?

WRIGHT
Well can I just pick up the point that people have made about the campaign to start with? I think it's always the case that by-election campaigns are not for the fastidious. I think if you're a person of reasonable sensibility you'd like to avoid them. It's always a mistake to personalise things I think and there's temptation I'm afraid sometimes to do that. Mr Simpson [sic] who's won seems a very agreeable chap, indeed I owe my soul to him. Well you know what I mean. And you know we shouldn't do that kind of thing. But I think we're entitled to point out - entitled to point out that 60% of the parliamentary Conservative Party are public schoolboys, aren't we?

DIMBLEBY
Does that incapacitate that them from holding office effectively?

WRIGHT
Well I think you're entitled to point out who wants to represent you, otherwise why would the Conservatives themselves be embarrassed about the fact that there are only 17 women in the parliamentary Conservative Party, I mean it's because they think you should be broadly representative of the society that you want to govern and so it's perfectly proper to make that point, although I would have nothing to do with any kind of personal attack.

TEATHER
But Tony I completely agree with you that there's a desperate need for more women in parliament but I would never say that that precludes a man from representing men and women, you can't make that kind of generalisation. You can make a point about the overall numbers of people representing a country in parliament but to make that point about an individual is surely nonsense.

WRIGHT
No well I've agreed with that, I think by-elections are the sort of political equivalent of binge drinking, people do it, they feel very bad about it the following morning, they're rather ashamed of what they did and they promise to do better next time. But they won't.

DIMBLEBY
If we come to the question - if we come to the question - you've talked about the campaign - how deep is Gordon Brown's trouble in representing New Labour and getting so humiliated in this by-election?

WRIGHT
The convention on these occasions is to say that actually things were not as bad as they seemed and every party person jumps up and says this. I mean the fact is for the Labour Party this was spectacularly bad, for the Conservative Party it was spectacularly good - let's just be honest about that. But - but - and this is the rather more cheerful news from my point of view - there never has been and there isn't now any correlation between what happens in by-elections and what happens in the subsequent General Election. People in a by-election are wanting to kick governments usually, General Elections they're choosing who's going to govern them. So you've just got to keep remembering that. And I - if Jonathan gives me time - will tell you why I think it's best to have a Labour government and ....

DIMBLEBY
No I won't give you time to do that at the moment. I'm going to bring in - I'm going - well we might explore it during the programme but I'm going to bring in Johann Hari.

HARI
I think the answer to your question is yes, it probably is and I think we will probably live to regret it. The only way I can see Labour clawing it back now is if people like me, journalists, start doing our job properly because at the moment the Labour government's flaws are being ripped out and left in the sun for all to see, that is absolutely right - I spend at least half of my time doing that - but the Conservative's flaws are not being exposed, they're not even being lightly frisked to see if they've got any sharp edged policies I'm afraid. You know there was one journalist said this week that David Cameron could announce the killing of the first born and everyone would say it was great news for second children - I think that's probably true. [CLAPPING] It's worth bearing in mind that when George Bush ran for president not so very long ago he ran as a man who would stand up for poor children and immigrants - we know how that turned out. The - I want to give you just a very specific example of how Conservatives can run as nice cuddly liberals and turn out to be something other. Boris Johnson was just elected in my city, despite my best efforts, and he promised during the election campaign that he would provide housing for those who needed it, in fact his housing policy he's introduced it sounds very good - first step housing scheme - the problem is to qualify you need to be earning £60,000 a year, he calls those people ordinary middle income people. Actually they're the top 20%. And this is why I think the question of class comes in, that Tony was talking about. There is an intelligent way to talk about class in politics and a stupid way and the Labour Party chose the unbelievably stupid way. They particularly were foolish to do it when they were running the daughter of the former MP as their candidate, which is not exactly a shining example of meritocracy. But there is - I'm afraid the reality is that class is a bigger factor now in British society than it was when my parents were my age. If you look at the major studies we are a less mobile society, this is really important though ....

DIMBLEBY
Yeah but okay class is very major - no just on that point - you think it's very, very important because of mobility and a number of other reasons, let me just let Chris Grayling respond to that.

GRAYLING
Well there is clearly a serious issue of social mobility in this country and it's not actually across most of our society, it's at the bottom end. That actually there are fewer people able today to move out of a deprived upbringing than has been the case for a very long time in this country and that is something that is wrong, it is something that any decent government should seek to change. But you won't solve that problem by addressing an old fashioned concept of class that says if you're successful, if you build up a good business, if you make money for yourself and your family somehow you become part of an elite that isn't fit to govern. If the Labour Party's view is that then it will be a sad day for this country and the sooner we get rid of ...

DIMBLEBY
Let me bring in - I'm going to bring in Tony Wright and we've heard from Labour backbenchers, other Labour backbenchers, to the effect that there need to be new faces in the cabinet, new policies, Graham Stringer says there should be a cabinet challenge to the Prime Minister, he's one of your backbenchers. And we hear a former cabinet minister's prowling in the Westminster undergrowth seeing what kind of support there might be etc., what's your view about that?

WRIGHT
When your team suffers a heavy defeat you have sharp words in the dressing room afterwards and that is right and proper. What you don't do is to go and attack colleagues in public who are doing a good job, that's just I think a basic fact of political life and loyalty. So we'll be having an inquest on what happened, shall we think that it's all Gordon Brown's fault - no we shan't. Shall we think there are lessons here for us in terms of what we say and do over this next couple of years? Of course we will. Shall we try and restate what is the essence of the case for the Labour Party so that people don't sleepwalk - it's easy you know - it's easy you know at a time like this but so that people don't sleepwalk into the vacuousness of a Conservative Party which I know I shouldn't attack them but as you - as you watch them they are united by one thing, they are united by a desire to be in office. Now that - there's nothing ignoble about that but it's not very uplifting either - they will say and do anything to achieve that objective, they will give you all the mood music but when it comes down to deciding to who you would like to govern the things that will produce your schools and your hospitals and things that really matter to you in your daily lives, it matters.

DIMBLEBY
Johann Hari.

HARI
If Gordon Brown wants to turn this around this should be a great moment for him because he can finally say to himself you're free, you've almost certainly lost, now you can be the kind of Prime Minister you always wanted to be for two years. If you're going to lose lose fighting, don't lose like this in this pitiful way, pandering to these people you hate, choose some policies, stand up for them and go down fighting. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY
Mark Williams, who put the question.

WILLIAMS
Right thank you for that. You talked a lot about class, is class something to do with money - toffs - as Sarah was saying or is it to do with social values and aspirations?

DIMBLEBY
I'm going to leave that very pertinent question hanging in the air with an invitation to anyone who wants to respond to come on in Any Answers after the Saturday edition broadcast of this programme, the number is 08700 100 444. The e-mail address any.answers@bbc.co.uk. Mark Williams thank you for that question, could we have our next please?

NADIN
Peter Nadin. Considering the current very high price of petrol and diesel shouldn't the government reduce the duty on fuel to help people who drive for living, people in rural areas, and the rest of us already overtaxed motorists?

DIMBLEBY
It is going to go up because of the escalator by 2 pence or it's supposed to this October as a consequence of the decision in the budget. Sarah Teather.

TEATHER
I think it's very difficult in the current climate with the government's economic circumstances being so hard for them to reduce the duty on fuel right across the board but I think there are other things that we should do. For example we could look at the example of France where they have a system of derogation, so in different areas - in rural areas - they have lower rates of tax. And that might be something we could do in the short term. In the longer term I think we need to move towards road user pricing, so that again it becomes cheaper for you in a rural area than if you're in an urban area and you have an opportunity to use a car. But of course the most important thing here is that we actually accept that we can't go on being so reliant on oil, we have to move towards an ability to deal with - to find our energy from other ways and I think this should be a real kick start for the government. We've failed to invest in renewable technology to the extent that we need to. We've failed to give homes the flexibility to pay money back into the national grid. We haven't done the kind of things that we need to do to improve home efficiency, we have anything up to five or six million people in this country living in fuel poverty. These are the things that the government can do something about.

DIMBLEBY
But in the short term what your view is that you have to stick with the problem that has been identified, if he's correct, by our questioner and that you continue with the 2 pence in October and if prices rise because of the costs of fuel continue to rise, will continue to rise, so be it in the short term?

TEATHER
Well I think - I mean as I said - I think you can look at ways of reducing the cost for people in rural areas ....

DIMBLEBY
Immediately?

TEATHER
I mean - well you can't bring it in tomorrow, that's something ....

DIMBLEBY
In the next six months or so?

TEATHER
... that's slightly more complicated ....

DIMBLEBY
In the next six months or so?

TEATHER
I don't know how long it would take but I think it's something the government needs to begin work on now. But I think it's almost impossible for any political party to say that we need to dramatically change the amount of money that we raise on fuel without then saying where we're going to raise that money in tax to pay for other things at a time when the money is frankly very stretched for the government, it would be irresponsible of any party political to call for that I think.

DIMBLEBY
Johann Hari.

HARI
I know it's not popular in this audience but the answer to your question is no. The government has to level with us. The era of cheap oil is over and it's never coming back and that's for three reasons. One is we're reaching the point now where we've used half of all the oil in the world, it takes millions of years to build up. And we've got more and more people chasing that diminishing supply, we've got billions more people chasing that diminishing supply. Secondly because of global warming - if we burn up all the oil that exists, that remains, we will be in a position where we have dramatically destabilised our climate in a way that is profoundly dangerous for everyone in this room. And thirdly because the more we chase after this oil, where is the oil? It's in the Middle East. What do we do? We buy it from disgusting tyrannies who then propagandise hate against us. We fund both sides in the war on terror. We fund our side and we fund the House of Saud - who go around saying that we're disgusting and evil. And of course we get entangled in wars in the Middle East for it. You know who was it that said about George Bush - the Bush administration is the only - are the only people in the world who could go to war for oil and not getting any oil which unfortunately is what's happened. I'm afraid the government has to level with us, we need to begin a remarkable and rapid transition away from a petro economy. It's going to be hard, we're all going to have to sacrifice but those three things are just facts of life and we can huddle together and deny them and we will end up with a much worse world. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY
Tony Wright.

WRIGHT
I think there are - there are shorter and longer term issues here. On the longer term issues I think you are absolutely right - we just have got to work out how we live in a world that's moving to a low carbon economy, that's really serious about doing something about climate change. The difficulty is that it's easier for people to be green so it seems, when the economy is on the up, when it starts going down the paradox is that's when we need to realise we have to be more green but also it's the time when we find it harder because some of the things that we depend on go up and we've just got to be realistic about trying to get people from here to there. I confess that a few months ago I bought for the first time in my life a diesel car because I thought it was going to save me money. I wasn't ready for what happened to diesel prices. On the tax point I did some digging into this, it turns out that yes we do have - we do have some of the highest petrol prices and diesel prices - certainly diesel prices in Europe but the tax take from fuel though has actually gone down quite substantially, it's gone from about 80% in the late 1990s to about 60%. Now that's no great consolation to people when they're paying prices at the pump. We're not so out of kilter with France and Germany, for example, in terms of the amount of tax taken at the pump. But I think there are two things I would suggest that we can be hopeful for, at least we could be if there were money in the state coffers. One is the fuel duty escalator, this was put on in the 1990s by the Conservative government, quite rightly by the way, to make sure that a built in increase each year for good environmental reasons on the fuel tax. It seems to me though that it's petrol prices and diesel prices themselves that are having that effect now. If you wanted to teach people an environmental lesson you don't need it through the fuel duty escalator, it's happening at the petrol pumps.

DIMBLEBY
Do you believe ...

WRIGHT
That's why - just to finish - that's why the government I think has been correct to suspend it and I think there's a case for suspending it further. And the second thing is ...

DIMBLEBY
Let's hear that. It was suspended, it's due to come in - the 2 pence - this October, what is your view about that?

WRIGHT
My view I think the suspension should continue while price is at this stratospheric level because, as I say - and that's not an anti-green argument because the point of having the escalator in the first place was in order to teach people an environmental lesson, my goodness people are being taught an environmental lesson at the moment. And the second point - and this is a self interested diesel point - as I've now discovered that unlike most of Europe we don't have a differential in duty between petrol and diesel, almost everywhere in Europe does, so we have by the far the highest diesel prices in Europe and I think there is a case for looking at that.

DIMBLEBY
If you are urging, as you clearly are, the Chancellor to scrape the 2 pence increase this autumn, which was in the budget, and he says look I'm right to the limit of borrowing, or he's told he's right to the limit of borrowing, that's an awful lot of money that has to be found from somewhere.

WRIGHT
Well I did put the caveat in about the public coffers, all I'm saying is in terms of the intellectual justification for putting it in the first place, which was quite correct, actually the market is doing that job at the moment and that escalator I think is not required.

DIMBLEBY
Chris Grayling.

GRAYLING
Well I think the central issue is actually about public finances, I don't think that the issues right now are purely about petrol, prices are going up across the board - we've got the rising food prices, we've got rising petrol prices, we've got a whole variety of other ways in which the family budget is coming under intense pressure. Now what we needed right now was a government which had public finances in good order and which was able to actually pull genuine tax cuts out of the hat and ease some of these pressures. I think Britain is now being taxed to the limit. I think people are fed up with paying the amount of tax they are and I think their willingness to accept more tax rises is frankly pretty limited. What's going to happen this autumn? Well I'd love to see a postponement of the fuel tax increase. My suspicion is the government won't be able to do that because I don't think there's any money in the coffers. They've already promised a huge tax cut before the Crewe by-election, must good it did them, that's got to be funded, it only lasts until next April. You know what they've done, the old biblical story about the seven lean years and the seven fat years, what they've done is they've emptied the grain store during the fat years and there's now nothing left and they're going to be scrabbling around trying to make ends meet for the next few years ...

DIMBLEBY
So you would not ...

GRAYLING
... and the consequence is we are going to end up paying the price in higher taxes in the autumn and beyond I suspect.

DIMBLEBY
So although you say you would like it you share, do you, Sarah Teather's view that it would irresponsible to scrap the 2 pence this autumn, given the finances?

GRAYLING
It's not a question of being irresponsible, I don't know how much Alistair Darling is going to have in the kitty, I don't know how he's going to fund the 2.7 billion pound tax cut. He can only clearly do something if he's got the money, I don't think he's got the money and so therefore I think we're going to be disappointed.

DIMBLEBY
Peter Nadin, were you disappointed by one or two of those answers and maybe encouraged by one of them?

NADIN
I certainly was. It's interesting that the Americans are up in arms, that they're paying - I think it's $4 a gallon and I know their gallon's slightly different to our gallon. But you imagine what they would do if they were charged the price we're paying in this country.

DIMBLEBY
Let me just ask our audience here, whether you agree with those on the panel who said that for a number of reasons it should not be scrapped, the 2p fuel duty, the levy, who thinks it should not be scrapped, would you put your hands up? Who thinks - Johann Hari you're not at the moment in the audience, you're on the panel, but you agree with that group of the audience - who thinks it should be scrapped? Well in this unscientifically selected audience there is an overwhelming majority who believe it should be scrapped. Our next question please.

ARMSTRONG
John Armstrong. Has Her Majesty's government delegated responsibility for the health and safety of our armed forces to HM Coroner for Oxfordshire?

DIMBLEBY
This is in relation to the RAF Nimrod inquest in which 14 servicemen died while their plane was refuelling on its way to Afghanistan and the coroner has said that they should - the whole fleet should be grounded. Tony Wright.

WRIGHT
I think all you can realistically say, I mean I was shocked when I heard this report today, I cannot pronounce on the safety of the Nimrod aircraft. What I can say is if the Oxford coroner, who is a coroner who's seen many of these cases and I think over the years has learnt what he's talking about, says on the basis of what he knows that he thinks there was an issue of this kind then I think as some people have said today we ought at least to bring them out of the service for the time being to see whether what he says is true or not and if it's true for goodness sake do something about it.

DIMBLEBY
Apparently the MOD is reported as having said at the inquest that the planes were - I think I quote accurately - "tolerably safe" - close quotes.

WRIGHT
I think if I was flying in one of them or I think if my son was flying in one of them I would not be reassured to be told that they were tolerably safe. I think we have duty of care, as far as it can be exercised, and I think if there's any query that's been raised about it we just have to stop using them until something is done about it, that as an ordinary person is what I would think.

DIMBLEBY
Sarah Teather. [CLAPPING]

TEATHER
I think rather than delegating responsibility I think they've just failed to take responsibility for the safety of our armed service personnel full stop. I mean this is an absolutely unprecedented statement from a coroner. And we've seen a series of crises and controversies over safety of equipment from apache helicopters through to hercules aircraft and whether or not they have the right fire retardant foam. So there's been a kind of whole series of these kind of crises. And it was brought home to me a couple of years ago when I was - I was flying out to the US on business and on my way to the airport I met a young soldier who was just 19 and he told me he was about to do his second tour of duty in Iraq and on the way to the airport he was telling me about how much money he had spent on his own kit and it ran to the best part of a £1,000 that he'd borrowed from his family. And I was absolutely horrified. You know we expect our soldiers to fight wars that aren't often even - aren't always even legal, that are often unpopular in this country and yet we do not kit them out to make sure that they're safe, this is absolutely appalling. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY
We have a very clear conflict between Andrew Walker, the coroner, who said the fleet had - quotes - "never been airworthy" and the Armed Forces minister - Bob Ainsworth - who apologised of course to the families who died but since said that the Nimrod was safe and the RAF's most senior engineer - Air Marshal Sir Barry Thornton - who said that serious design failures highlighted by the coroner had been eradicated and he added: "These measures have been supplemented with enhanced aircraft maintenance and inspection procedures to ensure the aircraft, as it is today, is safe to fly." Johann Hari.

HARI
We're all going to agree on this panel that clearly this is a disaster and clearly they should be grounded. But to be honest with you if you're worried about the safety of our troops this is maybe the 50th issue we should be talking about. If you want to talk about the safety of our troops let's talk about what's happening in Basra, the majority of people in Basra, according to every opinion poll, Iraqi people, want the troops to leave. The troops - according to opinion polls of them - want to leave. We the British people - according to every opinion poll - want them to leave. We have the unwilling occupying the unwilling on behalf of the unwilling. And it has to end. If you - the government was told this week about the armed - having an armed forces day, I completely agree with them - the day we celebrate the armed forces where they get in free to Alton Towers. Personally though I would rather have my legs than a trip to Alton Towers for free. I think we need - the other issue ...

DIMBLEBY
Because - we are - I mean we could talk about Iraq at great length and we do very often but is there anymore on the specific Nimrod case that you had to say, just that it should be grounded, regardless of what we have from the RAF itself?

HARI
None of us here are qualified to comment on this, this has just broken but there are a lot of things we could be doing in Afghanistan to make our troops a lot safer. Our troops in Helmand are fighting a ludicrous war - there's a perfectly legitimate war against the Taleban that I support. Our troops are also being sent in to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan, 60% of the Afghan economy is in opium, there is a huge need in the global market for opium for medical treatments, you've got a bizarre situation where in Karbul hospital people are dying in agony because they don't have any opiates and up the road they're destroying the opium fields. A group called the Senlis Council has come up with an excellent plan - legalise the Afghan opium crop so it can be bought and used for medicine, then we would be approaching the Afghan people not with guns to destroy the only cash crop they have but with money, I think that's the way to make our troops safe.

DIMBLEBY
Johann you have strong views on this and it's [CLAPPING] important territory but you did steer us somewhat away from the question that we were being invited to - or you were being invited to discuss. Chris Grayling.

GRAYLING
Well I think the other aspect of this - you've got to remember the Nimrod's been with us, in the RAF, for something like 40 years, it's supposed to be being replaced. Why is it in this country we're always so bad when it comes to major new defence projects - they run years late, they never quite happen, they run over budget. Why isn't it possible to set a timetable and deliver a replacement in a timely way? Actually the truth is the government promised to replace these Nimrod aircraft. Had that happened we wouldn't be having quite the same discussion tonight. We might about the accident itself but we'd be looking to the future where there were new aircraft coming on stream and the issue would be passing us by. This project and many others before it, many others taking place alongside it a the same time, we just seem never to be able to deliver major investment projects in the way that we should do and it really ought to change. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY
You phrased your question very dryly John Armstrong, what's your own view?

ARMSTRONG
My own view is that this is yet one of what appears to be a series of similar instances, as Sarah pointed out in her answer, where equipment is an issue and what I am concerned about is that the British public need to have the highest of confidence in the people who we are sending out to represent us in very difficult and dangerous situations. So it's really a case that the coroner is exercising his function, his colonial function, in highlighting what he considers to be severe shortfalls on this and other occasions. What confidence do we have that the Ministry of Defence is actually taking that as seriously as it should be?

DIMBLEBY
Thank you. If you have thoughts about that the number to ring 08700 100 444, the e-mail address once more any.answers@bbc.co.uk and that's after the Saturday broadcast of this programme. Our next please.

VICKERS
David Vickers. How can the government justify spending £2.7 billion on rectifying the 10p tax fiasco when they refused to honour an independent police award of just £30 million?

DIMBLEBY
Johann Hari.

HARI
They can't is the short answer. The police do an unbelievably hard job, it's not true that it would have caused runaway inflation if we'd given them £30 million, you're absolutely right. On the 10p tax rate, this is more complicated, the way to put the 10p tax - the 10p tax rate was basically - I think of it as Gordon Brown getting out the electoral razor and committing self harm, it was unbelievably bizarre and it actually trashed his one genuine real achievement. The poorest people in Brit - I know this because some of my relatives benefit from it - the poorest people in Britain are £4,200 better off because of tax credits - David Cameron has said he'd get rid of them, that's a clear dividing line, that's something Gordon Brown ....

GRAYLING
... not true.

HARI
Well David Cameron's spokesman compared them to the nationalised industries of the 1970s and David Cameron said I want to introduce a budget that gets rid of all these tax credits. [Talking over] Well people can look up the quote, people can look up the quote, I think that indicates [talking over] ...

GRAYLING
... unequivocally we are not going to get rid of tax credits.

HARI
Well okay so when you compared them to the nationalised industries of the 1970s that was praise was it?

DIMBLEBY
Can I suggest we move forward.

HARI
I think his silence tells us the answer to that. The point about this is - the point I'm making is Gordon Brown should be, if he wants to put this 10p tax debacle right, he should reverse the decision he made and pay for it by taxing the extremely wealthy. In this country at the moment [CLAPPING] in this country at the moment Alan Sugar and Roman Abramovich pay a lower proportion of their taxes than their secretaries, that is a disgrace, 74% of British people think this country's too unequal. That is the way to pay to lift all the poorest people out of taxation altogether. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY
Can the government justify this Tony Wright?

WRIGHT
Well we've got both 10p and we've got the police here, this is two for the price of one. All I'd say on the 10p, yes it was a fiasco but I'll tell you why it was put right. It was put right because the mass ranks of Labour MPs who were proud of what we've done on child poverty and on pensioner poverty said we are not prepared to see a tax change made that will make poor people poorer.

DIMBLEBY
In fact you were saying you will be brought down Prime Minister if you don't ...

WRIGHT
If I tell you inside the parliamentary Labour Party Labour MPs said we are in the business of being in politics to help people like this not to injure them. And it was put right and it's easy in opposition you know to say all kinds of things but to tell your own people this is - remember this is what we're in politics for, that was what produced the change. If you wanted to know why it's worth having a Labour MP that's the reason because that's what it produced. And of course since then - since then, because it was a fiasco, people have now I think got permission to attack the government on anything because we got it wrong on the 10p and I bet you if it rains on Bank Holiday Monday next week there'll be people who will say it's all Gordon Brown's fault. On the police, very quickly, I think I really didn't - I really didn't like what they did to Jackie Smith this week, I have to say. My respect for the police was diminished somewhat by that. You don't bully - you don't bully someone like that, you don't try and demean them. It's like the NUT used to do to education secretaries, it's - I just think it's not courteous to do ...

HARI
Well she has got a few bodyguards to look after her.

WRIGHT
Well she sat there and took it with great dignity but I ...

DIMBLEBY
Aren't you meant to have pretty thick skins when it comes to ...

WRIGHT
Yes all those things and I'm sure she has, I just do not think it did them any good. On the case I happen to think that the police, like the armed forces we talked about just now, are in a special position because they've given up the right to strike. They used to strike, there was a great police strike in 1918 by the way, until we got the present arrangements. But I think you - if you have a group that has given up the right to strike and are doing a thing for the community which is indispensable and they're putting their life and limb at risk everyday I think to that group you're entitled to say almost uniquely that we'll have some kind of binding arbitration on pay so that whatever is decided we will take and that is part of the contract we have with the armed forces or with the police. So I think that's the lesson that we learn from all this.

DIMBLEBY
Do you also accept what Johann Hari said that to suggest that somehow £30 million was contributing to inflation if it went ahead just doesn't stack up in economic terms?

WRIGHT
No the government was trying to keep its pay police intact, now that is not, you know - when Chris gets into government, if he does get into government one day, he will have to learn all this kind of stuff. Governments - governments don't pick fights with teachers and policemen and nurses just for the fun of it. They do it because they think that the national economic interest at the time requires it and there's nothing new about this, this has always been the case. What I'm saying to you is I think there are certain groups, of which the police clearly are one, because they're in a very special situation, deserve special arrangements to be made, that's my essential point.

DIMBLEBY
Chris Grayling.

GRAYLING
Well I don't quite know what Tony thought was going to happen to Jackie Smith when she went to the police conference, not in the least bit surprised by the way they treated her given the way that the government have treated the police. I think the biggest reason that the police have for frustration is just how inconsistent this government is, what does it actually believe in. Now it's perfectly happy to get all macho with the police and I've no doubt it was Gordon Brown who took the decision to get macho with the police. The reality was a few weeks later they were giving a higher pay rise to other groups in the public sector, so there was absolutely no consistency in the public pay round. And then when it becomes politically necessary to do so they'll find money they haven't got, they're borrowing - they don't know where the money's going to come from next year to fund a tax cut to try and buy off an electorate in Crewe who weren't interested in listening to them anyway. The whole thing is fiasco and what you have a government that appears to have no clear sense of purpose, no clear idea of what it's trying to do, no clear consistency and seems more interested in its own political survival than actually doing the right thing.

DIMBLEBY
You said earlier in the [CLAPPING] you said earlier in the programme that the £2.7 billion was only for one year, does that mean that were you to come to office in a year's time that you would find a way of retaining that expenditure of £2.7 billion so that that £120 or whatever the figure - precise figure is would be retained?

GRAYLING
Well you're tempting me into hypotheticals because much though I would like to have a General Election between now and next budget day and I think the country probably would as well we're not going to get the opportunity. And I have no idea how much money's in the kitty. But the reality is I think Gordon Brown is going to find it very difficult to have provided this tax cut now and then to take it away again next year.

DIMBLEBY
Sarah Teather.

TEATHER
I think the Conservatives have only come up with one tax plan so far and it only benefits the 6% richest in this country, so I think it's pretty poor for them to criticise the Labour Party for doing exactly the same thing. I think this - it was a pitifully small amount of money for the police settlement and it was one of three examples that I can think of that have made me really, really angry with the government. One is about the Post Office closures programme, which is only saving £45 million, the other is the £100 million that they're saving by effectively killing off the Open University, is the consequence of it by stopping people from being able to have another qualification when they've got a qualification which is an equivalent level. Very small amounts of money, it's a kind of stubbornness about Gordon Brown that once he's decided he's going to do something, irrespective of whether other people say this is crazy or it's wrong or it's going to have massive electoral consequences he has to be dragged kicking and screaming. And then he makes that huge enormous amount of money in order to prevent himself from losing a by-election, it doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make any sense at all whatsoever.

DIMBLEBY
Yes, Tony Wright.

WRIGHT
I couldn't help just be prompted by Sarah, she started reeling off the list of things that we had spend more money on. The more - the longer I'm a member of parliament and being batted by pressure groups and interest groups everyday about the need to spend more money on their particular cause I've just got this idea that I've developed now that everybody who makes a proposal to spend more on something should also have to accompany it by a statement about what they're going to spend less on or who they're going to tax more to pay for it, that should be the discipline - I'm not saying these are not all good causes, we like to spend money on all kinds of things [talking over]... no I can assure it's one thing that opposition politicians and pressure groups do not do and that's what makes them different from government.

TEATHER
But Tony £2.7 billion is a very, very expensive way of dealing with a problem which the government started in order to try and fund tax cuts for the better off, which is how this began. It was again another bribe before an election, we thought at that stage we were going to have a General Election, so there was a tax cut for people who were in middle income brackets, funded by a tax increase on the poor when that goes against everything that the Labour Party is supposed to be about. And then when they thought they were going to lose another election they then did a very expensive and bureaucratic way of trying to fix the problem.

WRIGHT
We finished up - we finished up with a tax cut for everybody on the standard rate.

TEATHER
Apart from the poorest - 1.1 million poor are still worse off.

WRIGHT
I think what we can ...

DIMBLEBY
Very briefly.

WRIGHT
... and Johann made this point, as we enter tough times I think people are increasingly going to say though if people are to make sacrifices from now on who is to make the sacrifices in order to pay for what? And there's no question, as Johann said, that there's now a super class of people in this country - the tax avoiders, the [indistinct words], the hedge fund people, the speculators - who are not paying their whack and we need them to pay their whack and I think that we're going to have a lot more attention to the issue of basic social justice and basic social inequality in this country and that's another good reason for having the Labour Party in power.

DIMBLEBY
Very briefly Chris Grayling.

GRAYLING
Before you start raising taxes still further, we were talking about defence a moment ago, your government is the one that was happy to spend a billion pounds refurbishing the Ministry of Defence building but couldn't afford the basic equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq.

DIMBLEBY
We're going to leave that there now and go swiftly please to our next question.

MERCER
Harold Mercer. Should MPs expenses be scrutinised at the level of detail of those released today?

DIMBLEBY
These concern the expenses of 14 MPs, amongst which we discover that Mr Blair spent £10,000 on his kitchen in his constituency second home, a £1,000 on fitting a mantles shelf and Margaret Beckett spent a lot of money on her repairs and she had gardening expenses partially rejected - £600 for plants and her pergola. And Barbara Follett claimed more than £1600 for window cleaning with the cleaners visiting on 18 occasions at £94 a time. Do we need to know all of this Johann Hari?

HARI
I don't think it harms us, I'm slightly worried about answering this because journalists attacking anyone else for their expenses claims is not a very good idea. But the - yeah ...

DIMBLEBY
It is your proprietors money that you're wasting.

HARI
It's perfectly healthy to go through all this. I think it's sad really because actually most - critical though I am of virtually every politician in Britain most of them go into it for the right reasons. I totally disagree with Chris, I don't doubt for a minute that he genuinely believes that the British people will be better off if we follow the plans he puts forward and that's why he does it. I actually have very rarely met a politician who isn't like that. But the impression we get from this stuff, which they bring on themselves, is just that they're all kind of lying scumbags. So I don't think they actually are. I don't think you become a British politician for the money, to be perfectly honest, but sadly I think - but you know of course we should go through it and of course - but one thing I would say though is when they are always reported - when these are reported the headline figure always sounds very high, you know £200,000 expenses per MP, that does include their staff and that's always buried in the small print of the newspaper story. Actually you can't really be an MP if you don't have staff to answer the letters and sort out your constituents. So I'd say be slightly wary but obviously if we're paying for Margaret Beckett's plants I don't want to do that.

DIMBLEBY
Sarah Teather.

TEATHER
I think I'm afraid parliament's got to wake up and get into the modern world and we have to accept that secrecy breeds suspicion, especially when you have a few bad apples who have obviously broken the rules. And I mean there are a few bad apples in every employment - there will be journalists who break the expense rules, there are people in every organisation that do. I suspect when all of them are published a lot of it will be boring detail and as Johann says they'll find out that I spend most of my money on my staff and on my office, all things that are essential. But we will also find out other things that I think do need to be scrutinised and reformed, for example, London MPs at the moment - many London MPs - are able to claim for a second home, something I think is completely unjustifiable. And I think when that comes out and people realise how much everybody's been claiming and what they've been doing with it that will be changed and that will be a good thing.

DIMBLEBY
[CLAPPING] Chris Grayling, it's virtually impossible now for a politician to say that there shouldn't be this level of intense scrutiny isn't it?

GRAYLING
I think that's right, I mean we've had a number of incidents in the last few years of things that clearly shouldn't have happened. And by definition that means that we have to adopt a regime that's much more open. I mean Johann's absolutely right, I mean a lot of the so-called expenses are actually things that would never show up on the expenses of the normal commercial life, you don't pay for the contents of the stationery cupboard or for the cost of the phones or buying the computers in the office on your own personal expenses, whereas we are effectively running - effectively small businesses. Much of the expenses we incur are that kind of thing - the cost of employing staff. But I think because of all that's happened we've just got to be totally transparent. David Cameron said back in March that we had to be totally open, we're going to start publishing our expenses at the start of July, the Lib Dems too. And I think we've just got to be absolutely open, there's nothing to hide, why should you not be able to ask difficult questions of us and get an answer?

DIMBLEBY
Tony Wright.

WRIGHT
Well I didn't discover all the things I could be claiming for until all this blew up, as my wife pointed out to me. But when all this started I wrote to the committee on standards in public life, the independent body, and said I think you should do this, I don't think it should be done in-house, there should be a proper independent review of all this.

DIMBLEBY
This was in your role as chair of the committee.

WRIGHT
Yeah whatever role I'm in. That wasn't the view that was taken, it's being done inside the house by a committee. I think there's a huge obligation on them to come up with a system that can withstand public scrutiny, that has proper audit built into it so that some of these attacks on every aspect of public life that we have these days which are very corrosive for us can be put to one side. I don't for a moment say this is not damaging, it is, we've got to make sure that the system now has public confidence.

DIMBLEBY
Thank you. We can squeeze in one more if our panel is very brief in their answers.

CHRISTIAN
Neil Christian. If you were the Prime Minister how would you spend the Bank Holiday weekend?

DIMBLEBY
Chris Grayling.

GRAYLING
A long way away and completely out of touch with everybody and definitely not doing any television interviews.

DIMBLEBY
Sarah Teather.

TEATHER
Looking for another job. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY
Johann Hari.

HARI
I would spend it banning SUVs which are a monstrous waste of resources and a terrible - have a terrible effect on the planet.

DIMBLEBY
Tony Wright.

WRIGHT
Well I spent I think the happiest time of my life with my grandfather on his allotment, I would get Gordon an allotment. And I would give him time to reflect and muse while he's digging and he'd come out a much more serene person as a result of it.

DIMBLEBY
On that touching note we come to the end of this week's programme. Next week Eddie Mair's going to be in the chair, I'm away for a couple or three weeks, with him Nick Herbert, Norman Lamb and Germaine Greer and one other as well. Join them. Don't forget Any Answers but from now in Christleton High School goodbye. [CLAPPING]

This is a great week for Gordon Brown. You've lost. It's over. The next general election will result in a Conservative victory. So you have two years now – two liberated years – to be the Prime Minister you always wanted to be.

Of course it must be tempting for him to say: but couldn't I claw it back? Yes, he can point to the fact that electorates across the world are more volatile than ever. Voters now roam across the savannah of politics capriciously. In 2004, the Americans flocked to Bush big-time; in the 2006 mid-terms they elected the Democrats with a landslide. Last year the French love-bombed Sarkozy into office; this year the Socialists have a big lead.

And, yes, Brown can rightly reason that David Cameron is little more than a corporate spin-doctor, hiding a startlingly right-wing agenda behind caring rhetoric. Cameron's policy review actually recommended US-style deregulation of the mortgage market so that sub-prime mortgages could be sold to the poor – just before that policy caused the world economy to tank.

None of this can stop 2010 turning into a national Brown-out. He has the right-wing press against him, and even the liberal press is falling for Cameron's spin. Meanwhile, the country has watched Brown take out his 10p razor and commit electoral self-harm too often. Nor is the idea of using that razor to cut the Gordian knot by switching leader any better: the electorate would be appalled by a Prime Ministerial misery-go-round and kick Labour out anyway. Besides, who would want to be PM for a year and then lose?

So Brown now has an energising choice. You can be an honourable failure who goes down fighting for the causes you always believed in, or you can be an amoral failure who dies with an immigrant-bashing belch. Over the next few weeks, choose three or four progressive causes you can push through before 2010 that the Tories would find it hard to reverse. Go through the black marks against New Labour in the history books, and put some of them right. Go down fighting.

Let's start with the cause that drove you into politics – opposing extreme inequality. Before the 1997 election, you vehemently argued against Tony Blair, saying we should have a higher top rate of tax for the wealthy. You lost then. Go back to it now. Even after a decade of mild redistribution, 74 per cent of the British people think the gap between rich and poor is too great. So make the wealthiest pay a 50 or 60p tax rate – like even Thatcher did in her early years – and use the money to increase tax credits for the poorest. Do a string of press conferences with the once-poor parents who are £4,200 a year better off as a result of the credits, and ask how they feel when they hear David Cameron compare them to the failed nationalised industries of the 1970s.

Or how about global warming? Britain's carbon emissions are now slightly higher than in 1997 – far higher if you include emissions from the manufacturing we have shipped to China. Brown has set us on a track to even more warming by championing airport expansion and coal. But before he goes, he can start to put it right. At the moment, two of the most popular destinations from Heathrow are, shockingly, Manchester and Edinburgh. So use your last few gallons of power to treble the cost of all domestic flights – and use every penny to bring train fares down. Make it economically rational to make the environmentally rational choice. And while you're at it, price SUVs off the road with fatter road taxes, with the cash again flowing on to our train tracks. Cameron would have to choose between backing you, or tacitly conceding his greenery was a cynical exercise in rebranding.

Then there is the greatest black mark on Labour's record (and, more trivially, on my own as a commentator). Nothing Gordon Brown can do now will bring back the 650,000 Iraqis who have died as a result of the invasion. But he can do something for the 5 million who have been driven from their homes. At the end of the Vietnam war, the US felt obliged to take in 800,000 refugees from the country they had destroyed, and to pay for the resettlement of others elsewhere. (Those refugees, by the way, went on to enrich America massively.) Brown should issue an apology to the Iraqi people on behalf of Britain, and fly in a fair share of the Iraqi refugees rotting and penniless in camps in Syria and Jordan as the most minimal act of compensation. Instead, we are actually deporting many of the Iraqis who make it to our shores, on the grounds that it is "safe" there, even though the US aerial bombing campaign has been stepped up once more in the past few weeks.

This apology could also have a jolting effect on the US presidential race, putting America's closest ally into alliance with Barack Obama. Cameron could hardly complain that Brown was junking the tradition of British leaders not interfering in US politics: he lovingly introduced the hard-right John McCain as "the next President".

If you are going to lose, Gordon, lose with style. Lose as the man who said Labour is "at our best when at our boldest". But please, don't lose like this – paralysed and pitiful and pandering to people you detest.

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In my column today, I talk about the imminent death of the banana. Towards the end, I touch on a possible way out: the Banana Genome Project. Some scientists believe they can create a banana that would be immune to the killer-fungus, by using genetic material from fish or radish genes. This would avert a starvation crisis in the poor-world: when I spent weeks in rubbish dumps in Peru or in the war-zones of the Congo, I met families who literally lived on Cavendish bananas.

But there is a huge resistance to GM foods. Let’s start with a bad reason to be against them – and then move onto the good ones. The worst reason is the ‘Urgggggggh!’ factor. Just because something sounds gross doesn’t mean it is. When they first began, some of the greatest advances in medical history seemed so counterintuitive and disgusting that a majority opposed them: vaccination, organ donation, IVF, stem cell research and – as we have seen over the past few weeks – the creation of chimerical embryos. George Bush’s favourite medical ethicist Leon Kass tried to give this an intellectual sheen by calling it “the wisdom of repugnance.” It is not wise; it is anti-intellectual and anti-science.

Yet there are more persuasive reasons to be wary of GM foods. The first is their control by the mega-corporations who have caused the current bananapocalypse in the first place. If corporations were able to slightly alter and then patent (say) forms of rice, they could charge a fat premium for it, and shut down farmers who tried to grow it without their permission. The world’s poor would be effectively indentured to them for as long as the copyright on the patent lasts. Natural products that are currently free could become corporate commodities.

The other danger is that man-made genetic alterations to crops could ‘leap’ from GM foods into the wild, with irreversible consequences we can’t predict.

But – fortunately – neither of these worries applies to genetically modified bananas. Almost all current banana research is being carried out by publicly funded institutions, and the scientists working on it have strict contracts stipulating that their work must remain in the public domain, free to everyone. Corporations cannot hijack it.

Nor can genetic changes to the bananas we eat seep out into the wild, because they have become so domesticated they can only reproduce if human beings actively help them. Bananas are the Cliff Richard of fruit: they haven’t had sex for thousands of years. Instead, every banana tree has a corm that lies beneath the ground as a sort-of bulb. Every now and then, a sucker grows out of the corm. This sucker has to be dug up and replanted somewhere else – where it will grow into a corm of its own. Escaping into the local area and causing mutations is physically impossible.

And yet, and yet… I am torn. Some of my more deep-green friends will tell me this is a terrible solution. Tinkering with nature is what got us into this mess; tinkering more can’t be the way out. I don’t quite agree with that: we can’t return to a pristine ecological balance. We have to muddle through now as best we can, trying to keep six billion people alive.

But that still leaves two ways to try to do it. We can try to create a disease-free GM banana (with no guarantees we can make it happen), or we can adjust our palates to the crunchier, more acidic varieties of banana out there. A more bitter banana isn’t so tough for those of us who have a shelf-full of other foods to pick from in Waitrose; but for the people I have met who eat nothing else, who would have a terrible transition period with disrupted food supplies, it would be bitter indeed.

Sitting in my London flat with a full fridge, I am inclined to say we should adjust – but would I say the same if I was back standing in a Peruvian rubbish dump, or a burned-out Congolese village? Is it immoral?

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