Alex Campbell
Newsnight producer

Lord Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the time of the 7/7 bombings, spoke to Newsnight ahead of the 10th anniversary of the atrocity.

Recalling the police’s efforts in the face of “medieval carnage”, he revealed how officers boarded the bomb-torn bus to reach the dead and dying – despite fears of another live explosive. 

He also described balancing his role as head of police with the knowledge that his own son was travelling in London as news of the explosions reached Scotland Yard. 

Asked about contemporary efforts to tackle extremism, Lord Blair cautioned against taking a tougher stance on fundamentalism, adding: “Some people might argue we must take a much tougher approach but I couldn’t agree less with them. We have to take a very resolute approach… But you don’t do it to them, you do it with them.” 

The full interview is online here. 

Allegra Stratton
Newsnight Political Editor

Image source, Birmingham City Council

Three weeks ago I reported that George Osborne was considering dramatic cuts to tax credits as the centrepiece of his promised £12bn of welfare cuts.

Tonight I understand that the cuts to tax credits will affect families with more than two children and will apply to so-called "flow" not "stock" - that is new families coming into the future system rather than those families already in the system.

So for instance a mother of three earning above the tax credit threshold, whose salary later fell below the threshold, would only receive tax credits for two of her children. The Treasury believes this move will save £1.4 bn.

The chancellor was persuaded to limit the change to tax credits by those in Downing Street who couldn't see how he could cut some £5bn from the £30bn tax credit budget and not hurt working families. The deep concern inside Number 10 since entering government is how the government can claim to be "one nation" Tories while taking away money from families in work.

 Osborne will also ease the initial pain of the benefit cuts by slowing the pace at which they are made. The £12bn cuts were due to bite by 2017-18; my understanding is that they’ll now be done by 2018-19.    

Tory insiders are are confident they will not pay any serious political price for backsliding on their cuts timetable. They point out that there is nobody out there who will attack them - the Labour party is in partial disarray, and actually if they had ploughed ahead influential newspapers like the Sun were gearing up to make their lives very difficult for them.

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Brussels

Another topsy turvy day and the heads of government meeting is only just beginning. The anger about the lack of detailed proposals seems to have simmered away - although there's still a sense that time and trust have been wasted. The French in particular may be a little bruised that their diplomatic push wasn't followed through by Greece today.

Brussels is currently experiencing an outbreak of "deal optimism". That's driven by three things: the Italian PM saying a deal is close, previously hardline Eurogroup Finance Ministers saying the meeting was productive and the Greek presentation was well received and clarity on the timetable ahead.

Tomorrow Greece will formally request a third bailout programme in a letter with technical proposals. The Eurogroup will discuss that on a conference call and then the institutions (the IMF, the ECB and the Commission) will formally assess the technical details. At that point negotiations can formally begin.

All of that process should provide the ECB to keep the banks alive whilst talks continue, removing one imminent  threat to the Greek economy.  A deal would still require big moves from Greece or the creditors or both. But if Grexit felt like a 65/35 chance a few hours ago it's swung back to 50/50 now. That could of course change again!

It's hard to see how a deal could be finalised before the crucial ECB payment due on the 20th July. One way forward might be a (very) short term bridging loan to tide Greece over whilst a deal is finalised. That could be a subject the leaders will discuss further tonight.

Image source, Reuters

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Brussels

There seem to be no new Greek proposals today to break the debt crisis at the Eurozone leaders talks in Brussels. Here's the latest from Duncan Weldon at the talks:

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Brussels

Mark Urban
Newsnight Defence and Diplomatic Editor

The standard response of many to an inconvenient truth is lies and evasion. Twenty years after the worst war crime in Europe of recent decades, the awful truth is accepted by almost everyone. Following the extradition of General Ratko Mladic, the architect of what happened, to the Hague in 2011 to face war crimes charges even hard-line Bosnian Serbs seemed to give up arguing.

Yet in the months following the overwhelming of a so-called UN Safe Area by General Mladic's forces in July 1995 all manner of lies and excuses were deployed. Pretty quickly though attention started to focus on a list compiled by the International Red Cross of more than 3,000 men who had been taken prisoner by Bosnian Serb forces but whose whereabouts could not be established. Over time it has become clear that thousands more were murdered following the Serb victory, but since these had not been recorded by the Red Cross as captured, it took longer for these 5,000 or so additional cases to be logged.

Among the first journalists to travel into Srebrenica following the war's end, the Newsnight team was anxious to gather clear proof of what had happened. We use footage taken by a Serb cameraman from a Belgrade TV station of Bosnian men taken into captivity; there could be no argument that they were alive at that point. We then traced the men, found their families and asked if they had ever reappeared. We also went to places where two survivors of the massacres conducted by Serb forces described what had happened to them, in search of evidence.

The resulting film transmitted seven months after the massacres is not easy viewing, and even today the testimony it contains moves me to tears. 

As time went on the evidence clarified and it also became more evident that the UN system had itself failed horribly at Srebrenica. We already understood, even in early 1996, that the Dutch troops tasked with protecting people in Srebrenica had hardly been able to make use of Nato airpower in defence of the 'Safe Area' and something smelt very bad about that.

Over time a series of inquiries in the Netherlands and elsewhere established more and more compromising details about the UN's failure. It was a stark indictment of the entire international community's involvement in the Balkans wars.

In 2009 Newsnight producer Maria Polachowska, who had worked with me on the 1996 film, teamed up with reporter Olenka Frenkiel on a new Srebrenica investigation for the programme. On this 20th anniversary this film also should be watched as a reminder of how complex international mandates, evolved by countries that want to be seen to be helping but are actually rather risk averse, can crumble under pressure from ruthless belligerents.   

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Brussels

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Brussels

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Brussels

Here, the Greeks will present a new offer to their creditors and the question is: will they take it? Time in running out for Greece, the ECB is tightening the squeeze on the banks.

The situation is now binary: either a deal is done (and soon) or Greece leaves. The old third scenario, that prolonged crisis leads to the fall of the Syriza government and the establishment of a more Troika-friendly administration has fallen by the wayside since Sunday's vote.

It's now decision time for Greece and decision time for the Eurozone.

Image source, Reuters

Stories today include crunch talks between the Eurozone leaders and Greece. Deal or no deal today? We will also be looking at the changing nature of the terror threat ten years on from 7/7. There will also be a lookahead to the Budget tomorrow.

Allegra Stratton
Newsnight Political Editor

The big Budget question in Westminster this week is how the government cuts tax credits - as much as £5bn from a £30bn tax credits budget - without unleashing mega pain on working people. Here on Newsnight we broke the news of this some weeks ago now and since then there has only been confirmation from senior tories as high as the PM and chancellor that this is what they are going to do. But I have a feeling about this… twinkles in the eyes of Treasury sources suggest something more is going on. 

Sure, there is an attraction for Tories in cutting back the Gordon Brown regime of tax credits… George Osborne said as much in his interview on Andrew Marr yesterday. But they’ll want a trick. The new chair of the work and pensions committee, Labour’s Frank Field, agrees with them that the tax credits regime should be cut… how would he do it? 

Like Osborne he would tie it to productivity. Field would stagger these cuts to tax credits over the five year period of this parliament - allowing firms to plan how they are going to increase their employee’s wages. He would turn the Low Pay Commission which currently sets the minimum wage into a fair pay commission. He would then task that commission with setting fairer pay in a variety of industries. The key to low pay is that is actually not too strenuous for banks and big finance to pay living wages because they actually don’t have that many low paid employees. But it is harder for the retail sectors with more low paid employees. 

But the key thing is how to get these firms investing in the skills of their staff in order to beef up Britain’s productivity levels. Field would incentivise firms to pay a higher wage through cutting the level of national insurance contributions they make. Field would tie this cut in national insurance contributions to the amount of training they have to give employees. More training means more skills and so output per hour would go up.  

I don’t think the government will necessarily go down this route… but the key question is what route they will go down. How does the government cut back tax credits, while also reshaping low paid Britain?  

Emily Maitlis
Newsnight Presenter

Most of the time you ask an urgent question and and expect a fudged answer. This time was different. 

Chris Bryant stood up in Parliament today and asked John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, about the truth of rumours that the BBC would be forced to shoulder the cost of free TV  licences for the over 75s. Yes, said Whittingdale. The BBC will start to take it over in 2018 and it will happen gradually. Full costs will be met by 2020-21. 

Mr Whittingdale made clear he wants to see the BBC reducing its "over reliance" on the tax payers - that means the BBC will have to find £650 million of its budget to cover those costs. But he also said the licence fee will be modernized to include catch up services. The licence fee will go up in line with the Consumer Price Index - as long, he warned, as the BBC demonstrates it is undertaking serious cuts. 

There's lots to unpick. Why wouldn't you just cut the licence fee rather than shifting it to include the free offer to the over 75s? Why would you increase the fee in line with CPI ? And how much will the modernized licence fee - including iPlayer - bring in to a service now grappling with thousands of job cuts?

The curious thing is the timing. Everyone was expecting this to come in the budget. And to come from the chancellor. The fact that it has come two days early will leave many wondering what the political game is at stake.  

I have just  interviewed the former culture secretary Ben Bradshaw who called the decision by the government  to ask the BBC to take on the free licence fee for the over 75s the "outsourcing of social policy". He said it looked like it would be "used as a substitute for treasury public spending " when George Osborne was faced by the need for big spending cuts in Wednesday's budget.

And he said to present the deal without putting it before parliament first was  "overriding democracy and the independence of the BBC". The charter, he added," belongs to the British people, not the Conservatives. "

So where does this leave the BBC in terms of the choices it is allowed to make ? John Nicolson of the SNP questioned whether the BBC would be able to means test TV licences for the over 75s.

The Culture Secretary told him that there was " a very clear commitment in the Conservative manifesto.... That would be honoured throughout this parliament". But that the BBC had requested to take on responsibility for  that policy over the next parliament".

Rough calculations suggest the cost to the BBC - when you include a modernized licence fee and a rise in line with CPI will be flat. So who is really paying here?

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

Old habits die hard. After months of poring over the sub-data of opinion polls, the "only poll that matters" (©every politician ever) rendered all of that a big, fat waste of time. 

But, two months on, even though the polling industry is still scratching their heads to work out what went wrong, aComRes poll, externalout on Friday intrigued me enough to dip my toe back in the water.

The headline result was interesting enough in its own right. The Conservatives were on 41%, Labour on 27%. This follows a quite well established phenomenon in polling where people like to associate themselves with the winning party and disassociate themselves from the "losers". Indeed, this is often the explanation for the polling quirk where more people say they voted for a party retrospectively than actually did. 

But what about the nuggets within sub-sets? First off, two important health warnings. Firstly, the sample sizes can get very small and margins of error very big at this level. Secondly, the whole credibility and accuracy of polling in this country is still in the balance.

However, with that in mind:

• Women now decisively back the Tories (42%)
• Men are really out of love with Labour (24%)
• Labour are doing well in the North (40%) but badly everywhere else (their 24% in the marginal-rich Midlands is particularly poor)
• The most shocking (and most deserving of caution because of sample size) finding is that the Tories are now way ahead of Labour in Scotland (28% to 13%)
• The theory that the Lib Dems have reached rock bottom might be optimistic. According to this poll, they are only holding on to 75% of their 2015 vote. 13% of it has gone to the Tories and 5% to Labour. This might be explained by the "loser contagion" factor mentioned above.
• On a related note, following the Lib Dem collapse, the South-West seems to have become an impregnable Tory fortress. They have 63% of the vote there, which makes the SNP's 50% in Scotland look a bit underwhelming by comparison.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems are in a state of paralysis as they choose their new leaders, leaving the field to the Tories to make all the political running. If they can each pick a new leader with a style and message that voters like and/or if the Conservative run into problems, then all of this could change very quickly.

To cite a lesson from history, the first opinion polls following the Tories' surprise election victory in 1992 put the party on 45%, with pundits predicting the imminent demise of the Labour Party. We all know how that ended.  

Ed Brown
Newsnight producer

Bear with me here as I pay tribute to Bishop Berkeley, an 18th century philosopher. To horribly oversimplify, Berkeley thought that things only existed when someone or thing was perceiving them. This led to a problem commonly presented as: if a tree grows but nobody sees it, does it exist? 

I thought of Bishop Berkeley as I heard speculation that Jeremy Corbyn's campaign for the Labour Leadership was going great guns after the endorsement he received from Unite the Union. This, some good hustings receptions, and a lot of overexcited tweeting leads to speculation that Jeremy Corbyn is doing much better than he was expected to in the Labour Leadership race.   

Thing is, nobody actually really knows how well the Labour Leadership race is going. Because nobody has, as far as I am aware, asked the actual electorate in this race (Labour members and registered supporters) what they think. 

Yes, there 's been a poll putting Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper as the front runners - but, crucially, this was of Labour voters rather than Labour members. And it was a tiny sample at that. More often we are left with such scientific delights as the 143 sample poll of the Socialist Health Association's members (guess who they liked? Clue: it wasn't Liz Kendall)

The "feel" of how audiences react at hustings might give the candidates some idea. But again, it's not hard to imagine that this is a bit of a skewed sample - presumably these will be the most enthusiastic, engaged voters, but their votes mean nothing more than the disengaged, unenthusiastic ones that stayed at home. One can imagine these two groups of people might vote differently.

Finally, Twitter. On this, I would merely point out that if sheer volume of tweeting was a decent predictor of electoral outcomes, Labour wouldn't be having this leadership election at all. They'd be in Government.

Which brings us back to Bishop Berkeley. If Jeremy Corbyn's support grows but nobody measures it, can we really state that it has grown at all?

Bishop Berkeley said that God was perceiving everything anyway. So that solved the tree. 

Unfortunately, neither we, nor the Labour Leadership candidates have the luxury of being infinite and all-perceiving. That means we're stuck with our own perceptions and measurements. And right now, they are at best blurry, and at worst utterly baseless.

Jeremy Corbyn's support may well be growing. But those that want to know for sure are going to have to wait for the election itself. Or ask God.

Lewis Goodall
Newsnight producer

Image source, Jeff Overs/ BBC

Former Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson has told Newsnight the Labour party has retreated from the difficult thinking needed to rehabiliate its fortunes: “Everyone said in the first 24 or 48 hours  after our defeat this year, oh my God we’ve really got to think radically and overhaul and realise where we went wrong. Since then the Labour Party seems to have gone back to sleep somewhat. You know, that sort of awful complacency, that sort of desire not to make difficult choices, or take difficult decisions that might be inconvenient for the Labour Party or create some tension or division, no, let’s leave that alone, let’s hope that a new face at the top will simply get us back to where we want to be. It won’t. It won’t.”

In an interview for Newsnight to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1945 general election, Lord Mandelson,  who was one of the architects of New Labour warns that Labour will never win again until it has readjusted its policies to fit with a new age: “You have to think with each successive era, particularly after the spectacular defeat we’ve just had, what new, what different what improved is required to enable us to win next time. And until and unless the Labour Party faces up to that as they did stupendously in 1945  and again subsequently, until we do that, we won’t win.”

Mandelson's grandfather was Herbert Morrison, the Deputy Prime Minister in Attlee’s 1945 Labour administration. Newsnight will also be speaking to Labour politicians present at the time and since, including Lord Healey, Lord Carrington and Lord Hutchinson, amongst others on its legacy and what the party can learn as it faces a new leadership election.

You can see the interview below. You can watch the film in full tonight on Newsnight at 10.30pm BBC2.

Laura Kuenssberg
Newsnight Chief Correspondent

Image source, BBC News

All around Athens, OXI posters, which means No, adorn pillars, billboards, shopfronts, windows, anywhere there is space it seems. If the referendum vote had been decided purely on the vigour of the poster campaign, the result would have been much easier to predict than the polls suggested. Despite predictions of  a neck and neck result, in the end it was a thumping majority for those who wanted to reject the EU's offer. 

But Yiati, or why? Talking to people in Athens today who voted No the big message is "we've had enough". One volunteer at a health centre this morning told me "It was our chance to stand up", after being "terrorized" by the Yes campaign. The doctor there, at the clinic that was boiling hot, crammed, staffed only by volunteers and able to prescribe only donated drugs told me,"I don't think it will be better, but it will be better for our dignity".  

It's clear for many people the decision to vote No, 61 percent of them, was not about the economics of what might happen, not about the risk of leaving the Eurozone, but about the damage that five years of cuts and chaos has already done that has left them willing to take a gamble that Syriza might be able to get a better deal from the rest of the Eurozone.  And it was a chance to send a message to the rest of the world that Greece still has pride, and the ability to influence its own fate, even if the eventual outcome does harm. 

It is easy today to sound defiant perhaps, easy to feel that telling Brussels and the IMF to go hang was the right thing to do. But it solves none of Greece's fundamental problems, and whether it will give Syriza more leverage in the coming days to get a deal that relieves the debt is unclear. Early signs this afternoon suggest Tsipras the Prime Minister may offer his fellow EU leaders a deal based on what Jean Claude Juncker was offering last week. Whether his mandate can stretch that far despite the convincing vote would be a gamble too. 

Ed Brown
Newsnight producer

A quick note in addition to Marc Williams' post on BBC funding. Yesterday, George Osborne seemed to be suggesting to Andrew Marr that one of the areas that the BBC could save money was by reining back its "imperial ambitions" online. He suggested that "If you've got a website that's got features and cooking recipes - effectively the BBC website becomes the national newspaper as well as the national broadcaster".

Perhaps, he seemed to be implying, this could go some way to balancing the books after the effective £650m cut of having to pay for free TV licenses for the over 75s.

Let's put aside arguments over the sort of services it is appropriate for the BBC to provide - and just look at how much money it might save. The answer lies in this rather dull looking table in the BBC's annual accounts from 2014 (I have highlighted the relevant line in yellow):

Even if the BBC stopped funding Online entirely it would only save about £170m. Presumably if you just ditched the features and the cooking recipes the saving would be much less.

And as Marc pointed out, it seems unlikely that in the short run revenues from requiring a license fee to watch iPlayer alone will make up this difference. As a rough figure, the drop in revenues since 2011, presumably at least partially because of people substituting free iPlayer for license fee paying live TV, has been about £150m.

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

Image source, Alan Wright/Focus Images

There's a term in football called a "hospital pass". This is defined as "a pass to a player likely to be tackled heavily as soon as the ball is received."

Following credible reports that George Osborne is going to offload the £650m annual cost of providing free TV licences to the over 75s, it seems that the Chancellor is about to give the BBC one of those hospital passes.

Let's play a game of "good chart, bad chart" for the BBC, Let's start with the bad chart:

Image source, ONS, BBC

This obligation is manifestly a demographic time bomb which will detonate at yearly interviews as the number of over 75s continues to grow over the next twenty years. Indeed, the number will nearly double in that period.

So, what about the good chart? Here is BBC analysis of use of iPlayer by demographic.

The quid pro quo for taking on the over 75s obligation is that the BBC might be allowed to charge for use of iPlayer. Here the demographics are working in the BBC's favour. At a time when linear television watching (and ownership) among 16-34s is in decline, iPlayer viewership among that same group has been stable. 

Whether these people would continue to want to watch BBC content if they had to pay for it remains to be seen. However, at a time when the BBC is faced with a long-term existential threat to the licence fee, the short term hit (and it would be considerable) suffered by taking on the free licence fee cost might in the long run be offset by financially binding in a group of people who might otherwise disappear over the horizon, never to be seen again.

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent

The morning after the night before, the Greeks have voted decisively no, the finance minister has resigned and the financial-diplomacy is moving quickly. 

A dividing line is opening up in the Eurozone and it’s still unclear whether the decision to hold a referendum will be remembered as a masterstroke that unlocked debt relief or a desperate gamble that failed.Our Economics Correspondent Duncan Weldon sets out the options below: