Hungary to Hold Referendum on Anti-LGBT Law after EU Legal Action - BBC Newsnight

Jul 27, 2021 • Hungary’s national spokesman speaks to Newsnight to defend its controversial anti-LGBT law which will now face a referendum, weeks after the EU launches legal action against the country.

Hungary’s new law - which limits the teaching of homosexuality and transgender issues to under 18s - will face a referendum in the new year.

Viktor Orbán’s government calls it a 'child protection law' and says it keeps sexual propaganda out of schools, TV shows and adverts.

Critics say the law conflates homosexuality and paedophilia, and the EU has strongly condemned it as discriminatory and launched legal action against Hungary.

Emily Maitlis is joined by Hungary’s Secretary of State for International Communication and Relations, Zoltan Kovacs.

Coronavirus: Covid Rules to End, But with Cases Rising Is It the Right Time? - BBC Newsnight

ul 5, 2021 • Boris Johnson announces the end of most Covid restrictions in England. But are we prepared, and able, to be our own risk managers?

UK PM Boris Johnson announces face masks will no longer be legally required and distancing rules will be scrapped at the final stage of England's Covid lockdown roadmap.

The rule of six inside private homes will be removed and work-from-home guidance abolished as 16 months of on-off restrictions on daily life end.

The PM said he expected the final step would go ahead as planned on 19 July.

This will be confirmed on 12 July after a review of the latest data.

Newsnight's political editor Nick Watt reports.

Newsnight: Saudi Princesses "Imprisoned" by Royal Family

The mother of 3 Saudi Arabian princesses speaks to Jeremy Paxman - alleging that they have been "imprisoned" by their own relatives in the Saudi Royal Family

‪Newsnight - David Starkey Reaction to Brexit Vote‬

Justin Trudeau on Syria, Republicanism, and Being a Sex Symbol - Newsnight

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, gives an exclusive interview to Newsnight's Evan Davis, covering republicanism, Syria, handsomeness in politics, and his family name.

Germany's Asylum Policy Fuels 'Rise' in Far Right – Newsnight (BBC)

A senior German intelligence official has told Newsnight that Germany's decision to take in asylum seekers is fuelling a rise in the far right. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have arrived into the country in recent months. Gabriel Gatehouse reports from Saxony in eastern Germany.

James O'Brien Grills Daniel Kawczynski MP on Saudi Arms Sales - Newsnight

Should there be an international investigation into possible war crimes in Yemen? James O'Brien asked Daniel Kawczynski, member of the UK's Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Syrian Government on IS and Obama - Newsnight

David Cameron Chats to Evan Davis - Newsnight

Evan Davis Newsnight debut - he interviews the Prime Minister at Conservative Party Conference 2014

Alastair Campbell Savages Mail Editor Over Miliband Slur

THE GUARDIAN: Newspaper's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, stands by attack on Labour leader's father in heated debate on Newsnight


The row between Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail continued on Tuesday night as a senior executive from the newspaper refused to apologise for its attack on the Labour leader's late father but admitted that publishing a photograph of his gravestone with a pun about him being a "grave socialist" was an error of judgment.

In an interview on BBC2's Newsnight, the paper's deputy editor, Jon Steafel, refused to retract the paper's savage attack on Ralph Miliband in an article in Saturday's edition headlined: The man who hated Britain.

Steafel's appearance was an unprecedented public outing for a Mail executive. The paper's editor pursues a strict policy of being an "outsider" who believes his journalism can speak for itself and refuses to publicly pronounce on his paper over the decades he has been at the helm.

He said the piece was based on Miliband's public views and was justified. "Ralph Miliband's views were spread widely. His views on British institutions, from our schools to our royal family to our military, to our universities to the church. What he said was, he felt that all of those things were bad aspects, were unfortunate aspects of British life," Steafel said.

He said Miliband's father's views expressed in his "writings, his diaries, his books, his speeches", combined with his Marxist ideology, showed he was "very antipathetic to the views of a lot of British people". He added: "We thought it was reasonable to highlight those views." » | Lisa O’Carroll | Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Related »

Daily Mail Deputy Editor Defends Miliband Father Profile, But Concedes 'Error of Judgement' Over Grave Image

The Daily Mail's deputy editor defended its profile of Ed Miliband's father in a heated exchange with Alastair Campbell on Newsnight, but conceded the paper made an 'error of judgement' in using an image of Ralph Miliband's grave in online coverage.

Read the Telegraph article here | Rhiannon Williams | Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Related »

WIKI: Alastair Campbell »

David Starkey Cleared Over 'Racist' Newsnight Remarks
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: David Starkey, the historian, has been cleared by the broadcasting watchdog over comments he made on newsnight that led to complaints he had been racist.

Ofcom will take no action over the comments made about the August riots on BBC2's Newsnight.

The BBC came under pressure to apologise after Starkey claimed that "whites have become blacks."

He blamed black culture for starting the riots and said that culture had spread into other parts of society.

Ofcom received 103 complaints claiming the comments breached rules about race discrimination or racial offence.

But Ofcom decided that the programme had been balanced and the discussion well-handled by presenter Emily Maitlis. » | Monday, October 03, 2011

The Saudi Women Taking Small Steps for Change
BBC – NEWSNIGHT: Before I flew to the Saudi capital Riyadh to make a film about the position of women in the kingdom, I met a Saudi woman studying in the UK who told me, "Saudi Arabia is the biggest women's prison in the world".

Can I quote you? I asked. "You can quote me," she said, "but you can't name me."

I heard that same sentiment and request to remain anonymous repeated during my 10-day stay in the kingdom.

Few dare criticise the 
country openly, though the restrictions on women are scarcely believable in the 21st Century. A woman can't drive and she is not allowed to work or travel without the permission of her male guardian, father or husband.

Customs such as arranged marriages, under-age marriage and polygamy still prevail.

Workplace revolution

The on-going battles to bring about change tend to be small ones.

Twenty-year-old Dina, with her heavily kohl-rimmed eyes and diamante cuffs on her abaya (the burka of Saudi Arabia), is a revolutionary in the workplace. She sits in the Jeddah studio at Radio Mix FM with a man.

Up until a few years ago, men and women were not allowed to work in the same room and broadcast journalism has so far proved one of the very few exceptions.

But, beyond that, Dina's message is hardly revolutionary. She acts as a kind of agony aunt for the station's young audience.

A 17-year-old girl sends in an e-mail complaining of boredom. Dina tells her to take up a hobby like painting or photography which, because an unaccompanied girl is not allowed to leave the house, she will have to do at home.

If an 18-year-old wrote in asking how to meet a member of the opposite sex, Dina says she would respond by saying, "It is not possible and [you] must accept it - it is our culture".

At the end of her shift, her boss accompanies her down on to the street and waits until her brother's car pulls up to collect her.

"You present your own radio show and yet you can't drive?" I asked. "It's normal," she said, and closed the car door.

She has to watch what she says. The radio station receives angry calls from the country's religious conservatives who are appalled that women like her are allowed to sit in the same room as an unrelated man.

Any false step or unguarded remark could see the station closed. (+ video) » | Sue Lloyd-Roberts, BBC Newsnight | Monday, March 28, 2011

In the Mubarak Era: Muslim Brotherhood - Egypt

BBC Newsnight: Douglas Murray on the Muslim Brotherhood

Anjem Blows His Cover on Newsnight

Douglas Murray on BBC Newsnight

Douglas Murray vs Tariq Ramadan

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams: Bankers Have Failed to Repent
TIMES ONLINE: The Archbishop of Canterbury has waded into the debate on bankers' bonuses, warning that financiers feel no "repentance" for the excesses of the boom that led to financial meltdown.

Dr Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England, said the Government should have acted to cap bonuses and he warned that the gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly "dysfunctional" society.

Dr Williams told BBC2's Newsnight programme: "There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year.

"There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty'."

Asked if the City was returning to business as usual he said: "I worry. I feel that's precisely what I call the 'lack of closure' coming home to roost. It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don't have them."

His remarks referred to an article he wrote in The Spectator a year ago in which he warned that society was at risk of turning to idolatry in its worship of wealth. >>> Robert Lindsay | Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Roxana Saberi on Iran Protests
Watch BBC Newsnight interview: Journalist Roxana Saberi talks to Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman about her imprisonment in Iran earlier this year, and her views about the protests in Iran over the disputed elections. >>>

BBC Newsnight to Ask the Question Tonight, “Why Democracy?”
BBC: As international broadcasters begin a season of films about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy - Why Democracy? - the BBC's Paul Reynolds looks at what it means today.

The triumph of democracy in the 20th Century was so great that it is curious that doubts have gathered around it today.

Its success can be judged by recalling the words of the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who told Western ambassadors in Moscow in 1956: "History is on our side. We will bury you." He could not have been more wrong. It was the Soviet Union itself that was buried in 1991.

All this led to the famous, infamous perhaps, statement from the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1992.

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such," he wrote.

"That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Too optimistic?

The end of the Cold War did see the rapid spread of democracy, especially into the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe. The European Union advanced to the Russian border. Democracies managed to assert individual rights and create prosperity.

And yet, even as he wrote, some critics felt that Fukuyama was being too optimistic - that the world would in due course resume its weary way.

Some alarms did go off. In the former Yugoslavia, majority voting in the component parts of the federation led not to a democratic agreement but to war. It was a lesson that democracy is about more than majority voting and that defining a majority is not always straightforward. The issue is currently an active one in Kosovo.

There have been disappointments: in the West, Russia is now felt to have strayed too far back to autocratic ways. Africa has not advanced as much as had been hoped - except for the shining example of South Africa. And the great prize of China remains elusive.

The recent crackdown in Burma shows that the struggle for democracy often has a high price.

And there is the threat from al-Qaeda and its followers. This goes beyond a disagreement over foreign policy. Osama bin Laden himself called on the United States to convert to Islam to avoid continued war. Still only two cheers for democracy (more)

BBC:
Newsnight, tonight, will be asking “Why democracy?

It is to be hoped that the Newsnight team will draw the right conclusion!

Mark Alexander