Ed Brown
Newsnight producer

Image source, AP

This is not quite as silly a question as it looks.

David Anderson, the Government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, pointed out, external a couple of years ago that people in the UK are roughly as likely to be killed by stings from hornets, wasps and bees as they are by terrorism. US citizens are killed as regularly by their furniture.

You'll have seen that report is a few years old now - but the statistic still more or less holds out - as does the general point. Far more people are killed by falling off cliffs (18 in the last year for which the statistic exists), a similar number are hit by lightning. You can find your own comparator in the ONS' slightly grisly mortality statistics, external.

Now, plainly these comparisons are slightly disingenuous. If the government took the entire budget for the security services and spent it on stopping bee stings, no doubt the number of fatalities from bees would fall and the number of terrorist attacks would substantially rise. 

We do not know how many attacks the security services stop - for all we know, this statistic is an illustration of their remarkable effectiveness and success.

But perhaps this gives us an illustration of why the Prime Minister (and many politicians before him) put such an emphasis on British values and identity this morning. 

Terrorism, arguably, causes a lot more trouble than bees not because of the number of people in the UK that it kills but because of its effect upon the national consciousness - its sense of self.

It all sounds rather wishy-washy - but this stuff makes a difference. It's widely accepted that financial markets can rise and fall purely on the basis of the general mood of investors. Lest we forget, Scotland almost left the UK last year as a result of a difference on national identity. 

Which brings me back to my original question. Are terrorists as dangerous as bees? As someone in the UK, you should probably be roughly as scared of dying by terrorism as dying by a bee sting. But the point is you're not. You're scared of terrorism. Unsurprisingly. Because terrorism is inherently scary. It can divide or unify the nation. And that can be just as, if not more, important than the raw mortality statistics.

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

We are so used to politicians tearing chunks out of each other that our suspicions are naturally aroused when one offers praise for one of their erstwhile foes. This is particularly the case when that politician is George Osborne, one of the most tactically-adept operators around. 

The Chancellor has strode onto enemy territory to make the case for the Government's welfare bill in the Guardian , externalthis morning. In his article, he offers this praise for Labour's stand-in leader Harriet Harman, who had warned against blanket opposition to the Conservatives' proposals to cut the welfare bill:

"She recognised something else important in a democracy: that oppositions advance only when they stop blaming the public for their defeat and recognise that some of the arguments made by political opponents should be listened to."

The proposals will be put to a vote in the Commons this evening and the headline of the Guardian piece ("Calling all progressives: help us save the welfare state") would suggest to the casual eye that Mr Osborne would welcome Labour support. But the Chancellor surely knows that his article and praise for Ms Harman is very likely to scupper any chance of many Labour MPs taking even a neutral stance. Why would they do something that George Osborne has asked them to do?

And perhaps this is exactly what he wants. The dream of the Conservatives for the next five years is that Labour repeat what they see as the "mistakes" of the Miliband era: opposing every welfare change and allowing David Cameron and his successor at the next election (which might be, ahem, George Osborne) to recycle the slogan that they have become the "Welfare Party" rather than the Labour Party. 

So, George Osborne may not just be damning Harriet Harman with faint praise: he may be condemning those in the party who want a different approach from 2010-15 to being labelled as "Tory sympathisers" within the Labour movement. 

Stories today include the Prime Minister's speech on radicalisation, possible Labour splits this evening on a Commons vote on welfare cuts and the ongoing controversy over the Sun's publication of a video of the Queen doing a Nazi salute when she was 7. 

Kids Company has responded this afternoon to new critical press reports about its leadership, including Chris Cook's post from earlier today " The mandarins speak on Kids Company". 

In a press statement Alan Yentob, Chair of the Board of Kids Company Trustees says: "the trustees have today announced that Camila Batmanghelidjh the founder and inspiration behind the vision and growth of Kids Company will be redefining her role within the organisation. She will be focusing on clinical innovation, which she has pioneered alongside her team and academic collaborators."  

He goes on to say  "A formal search for a new full time Chief Executive Officer is underway.  We aim to have a new CEO in post by 31st October." Camila Batmanghelidjh will become President of Kids Company.

Image source, Newsnight

We have the result of the vote in the Bundestag: it's a "Ja" to the Greek bailout. Not everyone is happy though. "We can't keep throwing good money after bad," Hans Michelbach told me. He was one of 50 rebel MPs from Chancellor Merkel's CDU/CSU bloc. Outside, there was more opposition, this time from the left. A relatively small group of protestors chanted "Pay back your Nazi debt, Germany" (a reference to the country's war-time debt, some of which was written off in the 1950s, by Greece, among others.)

But the debate over the terms of the bailout (too harsh or just medicine?) obscures a more fundamental sense of unease here in Germany. A country that has spent the last 70 years trying to repair its image in the rest of Europe, now finds itself again cast as the continent's leading bad-guy. 

That makes many deeply uncomfortable. But there's another view as well: the war, some say, is ancient history. Time to stop apologising and move on. These people are often young, from a generation whose grandparents weren't old enough to bear any responsibility for the Nazi era. Germany, this view holds, should embrace its leading position in Europe, with all the tough choices and potential resentment that entails.

Chris Cook
Newsnight Policy Editor

It's a large part of my job working out what officials are saying in private. Sometimes, though, they speak publicly. Today, we have a bit of insight, external into the Cabinet Office's decision to give £3m to Kids Company solely if their leader, Camila Batmanghelidjh, stepped aside.

A letter published today shows that officials at the Cabinet Office sought a so-called "ministerial direction" in late June. That means they told ministers that they were concerned about a decision, so ask ministers to reconfirm it in writing. 

This shows the depth of concern among civil servants - part of the chain of events that led ministers to request a change of leadership in the charity. This is a rare event; under the coalition, there were only three "directions" sought across central government. This is the key section: 

Something that this letter makes clear is that the £3m was an additional bail-out to help restructure the charity. And you can understand the mandarins' worries about it.

In addition to previous "last" government grants, a parliamentary question asked this week by Tim Loughton, a former children's minister, reveals that a official was placed in the charity for 13 months during the last parliament to help them learn how to tap other sources. 

Whitehall has run out of patience.

You can read more about this, external by my partner in crime on this story, Alan White at BuzzFeed.    

It's exactly one year today since Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in Eastern Ukraine killing 298 people, including 10 Britons. People in eastern Ukraine have held a ceremony to honour the dead . It's still not known who was responsible for the downing of the plane, but a Dutch-led team - investigating the disaster - says it has identified "several persons of interest".

One year ago today Ben Pocock, a student from Keynsham near Bristol, boarded flight number MH17.  At the end of last year Ben's family spoke with Kirsty and told her how some of the families are still waiting for the most basic of answers. 

You can view the interview with Ben's father, Jeremy Pocock and his sister Emily Pocock below:

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent

The government has published its consultation document on the future of the BBC, saying it will ask "hard questions" about the size and ambition of the Corporation. The BBC says the Green Paper paves the way for "a much diminished, less popular" Corporation. 

James Purnell, Director of Strategy at the BBC and Daily Mail columnist Stephen Glover debated the government's consultation paper on last night's programme. 

You can watch it below: 

Stories today include the German parliament voting on the Greek bailout deal, and UK pilots embedded with coalition allies' forces have been conducting air strikes over Syria against the Islamic State group. There is also the continuing debate about the future of the BBC.

Mark Urban
Newsnight Defence and Diplomatic Editor

Image source, Getty Images

Speaking to a conference of senior Royal Air Force officers this afternoon, the defence secretary invoked the heroism of "The Few" 75 years ago, describing the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State as a, "new Battle of Britain... once again against a fascist enemy". It was pretty extraordinary language, and it moved a senior Times journalist to tweet, "how can anyone with a straight face let alone the defence secretary... liken bombing raids against ISIS to the Battle of Britain?"

Of course politicians can get carried away with rhetorical flights of fancy, declaring a "war on drugs" or indeed one on poverty just as easily as they might use the language of conflict to describe the actual business of killing in the national interest. Having been in the (largely uniformed) audience for the speech, it seemed to me that Mr Fallon, fresh from his unexpectedly swift budgetary victory against the Treasury was seeking not just to galvanize the RAF with a sense of its mission, but to justify increased defence spending. 

Last week, when Mr Fallon got the extra cash needed to keep the UK's military budget up at 2% of GDP until 2020 (something the Conservatives had not been prepared to commit to during the election campaign) I predicted that he would soon be talking about the gravity of the threat to national security in ways he had been unable to do during the campaign. Sure enough, today he told his audience, "the world is a darker, more dangerous place".

Actually, that's my analysis too. Events in Ukraine, the Middle East and North Africa are creating the most serious challenge to national and European security since the end of the Cold War. The question now for Mr Fallon, and indeed those who argue that even spending 2% of GDP on defence (and that could be adding £6bn a year to the MoD's cash flow by 2020) is inadequate to meet these new threats, is how such big increases can be justified when everything from public libraries to social services or family tax credits are getting chopped?

The defence secretary actually deployed several different lines of argument in his speech: from bombing the "fascist" Islamic State; to having air power second only to that of the US in terms of global reach; being a good Coalition partner (trying to retain the Americans' respect in other words); and sustaining industries that support 100,000 jobs directly and 125,000 in the wider supply chain. He admitted also, that he would have been, "horrified", if he'd been unable to secure the government's commitment to maintaining the 2% spending pledge.

So why then was the Conservative Party not prepared to make the argument in these terms, with the spending increases implied by them, just a few weeks ago, when campaigning for votes? They didn't think it would play well perhaps or thought they could be accused of wanting to ramp up spending on weapons of death rather than hospitals or the poor. I hope a quickie book from a Tory election strategist might soon shed some light on this.

All of this hints at a lack of confidence about public support and a need to formulate a new narrative for national defence. The idea that jihadist terrorism poses the kind of existential threat to Britain that the Luftwaffe did in 1940 is palpably incredible. On social media it has already exposed Mr Fallon to the kind of mockery that followed Michael Portillo's 1995 party conference speech extolling the SAS.

There is one sense in which the 1940 analogy may, just, hold some water. The number of people flying over Iraq and Syria or acting on the ground is very small. "The Few" of 2015 may not be running the same risks, but the fate of the captured Jordanian pilot burnt alive by IS leaves little doubt that they are engaged in a dangerous business. The defence secretary's speech writers need to find ways to rally the public to spending what's needed to support the forces on these and other missions - and to do so without reaching for dubious historical analogies.                       

Neil Breakwell
Newsnight Deputy Editor

So Jeremy Corbyn, according to polling obtained by the New Statesman, external, is now the frontrunner to win the Labour leadership contest. Lord Mandelson told Newsnight last week that since the election, his party “seems to have gone back to sleep”.  Well, it’s woken up now.

Polling and elections, as we know, are never wrong and so let me be the first to invite Jeremy Corbyn onto Newsnight in his new role as leader of the official opposition. Voting hasn’t closed yet so Labour members might yet change their mind or have yet to make up their mind, but for now, it’s Jeremy’s to lose. Remember, polls are never wrong. 

So how did we get here? How did we get from Mr Corbyn being the rank outsider, to frontrunner? Perhaps it’s simply the pitch that Jeremy Corbyn is making: a return to socialist, left wing principles, with policies to match. And his party are loving it.

When Newsnight hosted the first TV Labour leadership debate in Nuneaton last month, it’s fair to say that Jeremy Corbyn was the one who won the most applause and he did so without telling any jokes. When producing a TV debate you’re usually under pressure from the press officers to produce the dullest show you can. So that their man/woman comes out unscathed. On this occasion, Labour high command were actively keen that all candidates were properly tested and be seen to be tested. Good telly, in other words. I thought this meant that the other three candidates would come out fighting and fighting each other. In the end, they didn’t. It was quite polite. I won’t say dull, but they did try.

And that has been a feature of this Labour leadership campaign thus far. It’s been a little bit, well, meh. In the Victoria Derbyshire debate Andy Burnham, perhaps rightly, said that people were fed up with soundbite politicians. He then said this: “people want politicians they can believe in” and quite a few mentions of getting out of the “Westminster bubble”. I mean, honestly.

Jeremy Corbyn is unquestionably having the best campaign of the four, though he started from an easier place. Bottom. His success though (he’s going to win – the polls say so) tells a story of the Burnham, Cooper and Kendal campaigns. They’re not going to plan. I can only assume they haven’t been looking at the polls.

Allegra will be looking into this story tonight, on BBC2 at 10:30pm

Katie Razzall
Newsnight Special Correspondent

How do you prepare to meet an opera legend?  There’s no doubt Placido Domingo is that.  One of the three tenors, he took opera mainstream.  Pavarotti died in 2007, Carreras retired for 10 years, but Domingo is still regularly performing at the best opera houses in the world, with 145 roles to date (“they are ripe now”, he told me).

Now 74, he sings baritone, though he admitted “I don’t pretend to be a born baritone, but I know I give all I have, I sing with all my heart.”  As for the critics who’ve described his new register as “dull”, “unexciting” and “compromised”, he’s unruffled.  “I think people that like my voice, they just don’t care if I have a darker sound.  The public comes out of the theatre happy.”

Domingo always said he would retire from the stage leaving audiences wanting more.   When will that be?  His voice can’t go on forever but he told me “I will know when I have to leave.”

For the moment, he’s staying put.  He’s in London at the Royal Opera House presiding over his global talent competition, Operalia.  This, he feels, is his true legacy, an important part of his quest to nurture the talent of the future.

The interview with Placido Domingo will be on Newsnight tonight on BBC2 at 10.30pm. 

The Labour leadership contest seems to be taking a surprising turn if we are to believe the press. The odds on left-winger Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour leader have been cut again following media reports that private polling shows him ahead. The New Statesman said surveys by two rival camps have found that the veteran MP is on track to top the first ballot. One apparently suggested he was 15% ahead, while another showed he was in a "commanding position". He is said to have been getting lots of votes from new and younger party members, and has accumulated 40 nominations from local associations. 

Ladbrokes now puts Mr Corbyn's chances of emerging victorious at 5-1.  The Islington North MP - who only made the ballot paper because colleagues lent him their nominations despite favouring other candidates - has overtaken shadow health minister Liz Kendall, on 8-1. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham is still favourite at 5-6, with Yvette Cooper on 11-4. The result of the leadership election, which is carried out under an Alternative Vote system, is expected to be announced in September. 

Here is Jeremy Corbyn being interviewed on Newsnight recently about his Labour leadership bid:

On Newsnight last night a former MI5 spy broke cover to give us an unprecedented account of his life in service - and describe his anger at the way he was treated. The agent, codenamed Robert Acott, said he spied for 18 years, mostly following Islamic and Irish terrorist suspects.

He says MI5 pushed him out after he suffered symptoms of stress, later diagnosed as PTSD. MI5 would not comment on the claims - but security sources said they felt his was only one side of the story. You can see Nick Hopkins report below.  

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent in Athens

Stories today include more on the spy who spoke out, the future of the BBC, the latest in the Greece debt crisis, and the LibDem leadership.

A former MI5 surveillance officer has broken cover to give us an unprecedented account of his life in service - and describe his anger at the way he was treated when the stress of the job became too much. 

The agent, whose codename was Robert Acott, said he worked undercover for the agency for 18 years - mostly following Islamic and Irish terrorist suspects, but also Russian spies and serious criminals. 

Acott, who has since been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder brought on by his career in the service, says the agency pushed him out after he suffered symptoms of stress. 

MI5 said it would not comment on any of Acott's claims. However, security sources said they felt this was one side of the story.  

Read the full story here