quake has hit albania the defense ministry says at least 6 people have been killed the 6.4 magnitude quake struck just north of the capital tehran or a number of aftershocks are being felt in north orators of called on people to stay outside in lebanon supporters of 2 shia movements have been fighting with antigovernment protesters for a 2nd night running hezbollah and amal opposes protesters demands for a complete overhaul of lebanon's power sharing system where posts are divided on the sectarian basis benjamin netanyahu doesn't have to stand down as israeli prime minister even though he's facing corruption charges netanyahu has been indicted for alleged fraud and bribery right up to date those are the latest headlines inside story is next. thing during the prime minister. i should introduce the critics on the part of the budget and making this country

the greatest place on the british departure is delayed. follow good drama of bricks it on al-jazeera. the u.k. goes to the polls next month that is the election about great except for health wealth and education the conservatives are promising a deal to leave the e.u. labor's promising to tax the rich and increase social spending but what matters most for voters this is inside story. of that and welcome to the program i'm the stasi attain now the u.k.'s general election is less than 3 weeks away it was called by conservative prime minister barak johnson more than 2 years early in a bid to get a parliamentary majority so he can quote get it done his pledge on britain's exit

from the european union is at the center of his party's election campaign labor party leader jeremy corbyn is concentrating more on making britain a fair a society he has unveiled a radical public spending plan higher taxes for the rich and a crackdown on tax dodging will get into more of what's been promised by the policies talk a bit fast it's hear from the 2 leaders get brits arm and we can restore confidence and certainty to business and if that is get brits done that will see a pent up tidal wave of investment into this country get bricks it done and we can focus our hearts and our margins on the priorities of the british people very is romana for a. very thorough amount of growth grow to give greece 3 in also 3 to give hope to prepare all the right the wrongs that have happened over 10 years

of historic 3 right now our interpreter in the middle. the area where our grew up. we conserve your property. i'm on a 1st go through a boardroom written. on will be delivered for what the problem of the rest of us will have to probably for a while let's have a look at how the 2 major parties see the big issues now and bricks in the conservative party promises to get its deal through parliament by the end of december and leave the e.u. in january labor says it will come up with its own deal and put it to a public vote within 6 months and that would include an option to remain forest johnson's about a festive freezes the tax rate of 80 national insurance and income tax while jeremy corbin's will raise taxes for people earning more than $100000.00 a year both parties have made a big pledge to the national health system the tories are promising $50000.00 more nesses labor is saying it will increase spending by more than 4 percent

a year and labor's announced a 500 $15000000000.00 fund to tackle climate change and to achieve most of its emissions reductions by the 2030s while the conservative party's recommitted to its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. let's now go to our guests joining us all from london we have tony travers festa a professor at both the school of public policy in the department of government at the london school of economics we also have alan wager who is a research associate at the u.k. and changing europe policy think tank and we have sonia panelled author of just boris a tale of blonde ambition sonia was also the former deputy to parse johnson at the daily telegraph a warm welcome to you all now we've just outlined some of the major commitments in both parties manifestos but i didn't notice that the labor party's manifesto is about well nearly double the length of the tory party is manifest or and i always

feel like boris johnson would have wanted to have just handed out leaflets that said bricks it get it done sonia how much of this election is about bricks it. well i think it's all about bret's it really i mean boris johnson has always wanted to be prime minister brit is his vehicle i happen to believe that he doesn't actually believe in it i was his deputy at the daily telegraph he used to write very critical pieces about the. community as it was then but he he is also very sympathetic towards the great projects however saying that publicly was not going to help him become prime minister so it is all about bricks it but the other thing the extraordinary thing about boris johnson is that as long as i've known him since the 1990 s. and even before that he always wanted to be prime minister that's always been his chief aim is what's got him up in the morning and kept him late at night but the lady with thing is it's never been clear what he wanted to do once he became prime

minister and i suspect that this very thin manifest as we see it is potent postulate that there isn't a johnson isn't apart from it well any any aspect of johnson ism is creating buzz johnson is a prime minister there isn't really any kind of body of ideas will thoughts of philosophies that define his approach to politics apart from his own self advancement and in a way i think the manifesto is a reflection of that and if people are expecting all these years of astaire's to all the hardship that we've been through as a british people to end as a result of this manifesto is changes very very little i think they will be very disappointed and i think going through with boris johnson's terms will actually make us poorer and it will be harder therefore to bring back person as a cohesive united fairer country i'm really quite worried about this we're going to drill down into some of those policy suggestions from both parties in mind but i do

want to stay with us just from moment here tony it's been nearly 3 and a half years since that referendum and it did seem to take a lot of people by surprise that 52 percent and decided to vote for leave do you think that this has caused a bit of a reckoning in british politics a bit of a next essential crisis and has that changed anything going forward. or the difficulty the brics vote back in june 26th created was that nobody had a fully worked through picture of what bricks it would be that how the united kingdom would indeed leave the european union and the whole of british politics since then has been struggling with that difficulty this election doesn't really take as that much further forward even though bracks it is an overlay on the election with the conservatives with this regularly repeated theme getting breaks it down which actually means really getting started and the labor party offering

a source of potential way to a 2nd referendum the liberal democrats the 3rd party effectively saying to stop the whole process and go back to the u.k. simply being in the revoking the whole process so bracks it remains an issue it really is an issue in british politics but going back to something funny or said and i agree with this the. conservatives here in their manifesto are simply trying to say vote for us we'll get rates down then everything will be fine and wonderful but of course it's not at all clear how the money can be found for any of these parties actually to pay for the kind of improvements in public spending that they're promising particularly given that the u.k. economy is now growing raw i mean many european economies are actually growing more slowly than they used to alan just staying with banks that for one more question here i do want to ask you this because you worked on the role of the u.k. in europe if we were to have

a referendum tomorrow what what would happen what it believes what it may remain. i think right now the most opinion polls indeed almost all opinion polls for the last 12 to 18 months or so and there be a slight remain leave but the can under a slight majority for remain if there was a referendum tomorrow but that won't necessarily translate into this election which is basically a referendum in a couple of weeks and that's because although jones has managed to effectively in the campaign thus far unite. is here in favor of leaving the european union they remain voters remain split fundamentally between the labor party although they gathering an increasing number of votes from those remain as the liberal democrats and over the next couple of weeks as this campaign progress which will ultimately be a sort of form of a referendum on bricks if you like the key battle be whether or not the labor party can hoover up

a whole load more of those remain voters as well as trying to gain back a couple of those leave voters some of those leave voters from the from the conservative party and that's why we're seeing this really big tussle between economic agenda on the one hand from the labor party and boris johnson trying to make this election all about bricks it well when you talk about these economic issues and we will come to some spending issues just now but there has been all this frustration with with breakfast and how long it's taken and there's been the teeth samia that set in around that but now some polls are also talking about different social issues that might be superseding rex it as a priority for some british voters as particularly issues around health care tony what's driving british voters primarily as they go to the polls and. well it's to you in a in a sense when you get to a general election even with an issue as important as bricks it the truth is other things come into play the u.k. has had 9 years of austerity reduced public spending which has had particular

effects on the state u.k. as a relatively small state by european standards and so what we've now got is a kind of upwards option really with the political parties saying well the brics it's come to an end we can spend more on the n.h.s. national health service hugely important in british politics it's also on education and a whole range of other issues building more railways and transport infrastructure now then the question is how does the electorate pick between these offers and decide how far is realistic with some of these manifestos really to increase public spending and investment as fast as particularly the labor party and the liberal democrats are proposing so you've got a kind of curiosity here which is the next it's still there but we're also now trying to deal with well what's going to happen to the rest of public policy in the

coming years and will as the conservatives are saying brics it liberates all this extra public spending or are they really 2 separate issues which frankly i think they are well i do want to take a look at a graph just to take a temperature of where voters are at the moment and this is the latest election tracker from you gov and from their polling and it shows the tories in blue with a relatively substantial lead over labor who are also in red but then if you go back to where those lines cross over that that's july and that's one of our strengths mccain prime minister so let me ask you sonya is this conservative party leader being driven by boris johnson. well it would appear so math think a lot of people i mean to my amazement sometimes it has to be said think oh good old boy was a he someone to get things done he's he's quite the man i saw tweeted earlier that's the kind of comment that some people say i think if they actually looked into what he promises and how many times he's broken his promise or how many times

he's been fine he's been fans of mess and misled the public i think then people start to change their minds but you know normal people out there strangely enough don't spend all day watching t.v. or reading twitter or reading the newspapers don't necessarily keep an eye on what's actually going on they form their impressions from personalities and in a sense boris johnson has almost a cult of personality the girl was a thing so it's got to the point where a bit like donald trump in the states that could do almost anything will be found to be lying about almost anything and for a significant number of people in the u.k. it's almost as if it doesn't matter and this is an extraordinary place of british politics to have a right but i think that is where we are what you do about it from the other side isn't quite clear yet some people say well you have to attack back with a personality of your own some people say that's jeremy coleman i happen not to

agree but some people say it is some people say you have to keep going on about the policies that's the only way to get it boris johnson but i mean the fact is he has been caught to have misled the public that queen poem and and yet they use all these points ahead in the polls it is really quite astonishing in some ways all of this is essentially a question then about the political discourse that's taking place in britain and do you feel allan that the social fabric of britain has changed in the last 3 and a half years and the level of political discourse and i know we've now it's just been talking about we've seen this huge in the radical perhaps the most radical and lay. a manifesto in peace time especially when it comes to public spending and ever perhaps do you feel like that level of political discourse is pushing and that the 2 major parties faha to the ends of the political spectrum it is really a sort of case of economic populism from the labor party against social populism

from the conservatives on the one group the one we're going to zation that's been exasperated so far by both the major parties manifestos is the i.f.'s institute for fiscal studies who say the conservatives aren't willing to deal with the big structural issues in the economy and they're saying the labor's approach just isn't realistic in its ability to deal with those challenges in the face of of a tightening budget for the for the u.k. government in the in the long term and i guess i guess i guess it's i guess it's going to be a real big battle over the next couple of weeks over whether this economic or social populism wins out there some signs the some red lights on the dashboard for the for boris johnson he has lead over jeremy called in is narrowing in the opinion polling over the last week or so on who would make the best prime minister some aspects of this manifesto jeremy corbin's are pretty popular on their own as individual items of public policy so it's not actually clear as things crystallize

over the next couple of weeks that this message of get bricks it done will survive what is going to be a 2 weeks of pretty intense campaigning well if as alan says well the institute of fistfuls fiscal spending has said that labor party is manifest recently not credible and is also raising questions about the tory manifesto and tony let me ask you then is this about then moving away from the 2 party system what it what a vote is choosing here is that now run for them to look towards independence to the lib dems to other smaller parties well it would appear not actually if you look at the graphs that you were showing a moment ago the total of the. the conservative and labor vote is around or over 70 percent and one of the curiosities of this election is it looked at one point as if the liberal democrats and the brick sit party of a sort of very hard pro breaks it line was somehow going to break through and here we are more than half way into this election campaign and the conservatives and

labor are yet again dominating and i think actually something else that's interesting the going on in in this campaign is that the conservative party in particular is trying to migrate to being a somewhat different party to the one that many of its traditional members joined it for in this election they're trying to win many leave voters in the midlands in the north of england from the labor party that often in traditional labor voting areas and that of course requires the reorientation of the conservative party traditionally a party of tax cuts and business now to being a party of smaller tax cuts less business but actually more sort of social care and social security for lower income households and places that have been left behind apparently according to a lot of evidence about why people voted for breaks it in the middle as in the

north so we've got the conservative party which is a remarkable institution a very long standing political party always able to reinvent itself trying to reinvent itself but labor under its particular leader many of its own m.p.'s not terribly supportive of the current leadership not quite sure how to respond to that and i suspect they won't know how to respond to after the general election if they've done better than they're expecting then they might try to carry on as now if not they might try to change themselves in some way as well and we're talking about the conservative party trying to reinvent itself let me ask you sonny is it working have they managed to do. well i mean depends what you call working and a lot of traditional choices science has been saying do not like the direction in which the conservative party is now going so you see some independents i don't grieve and david former cabinet ministers who are now standing as independents which is you know when you quite insignia may have

a chance i think particular maybe don't agree that getting back in as an independent rather goes against the general swing of it being a tory versus labor party election the other interesting thing that's going on in these are the summary which is a county just outside london affluent leafy traditionally tory now we see that some of those 3 m.p.'s are under threat to the liberal democrats and so you have everything shifting the old certainties of a british political life no longer exist so the north like that we've just been discussing could well go more tory the south could well go more labor i think where we end up is a very difficult thing to say but i think one thing we can say is that the tory party will no longer be the broad church it once was i mean all of the candidates who are standing for the tory party of have to sign almost in blood that they will . vote full to burst johnson's deal so you know we no longer have that kind of

consensus and coalition of different voices in the tory party will be. more right wing party it will be i think calling it a one nation tory party will turn out to be very innocuous in deed and i think it will eventually also be punished for the fact that it says get brett sit down now but as tony said earlier that what that means is get started i mean if we go on with this we're going to have bricks that dominating everything for years i think once people realize that i wonder whether the tory party as we call it now will exist in the medium term i want to talk about undecideds because there's been talk of an extortion. are a number of people who are undecided in this election and we're talking here about a lack of certainty about a whole range of different issues how decisive will those votes be i see just after the last debates that a few more of them just a narrow margin swung towards corbin rather than johnson how decisive will that be for the outcome of. the key group of voters that is currently most undecided is

labor voters in the last election who voted leave so that means that both parties are targeting those voters with their core message is boris johnson say those voters vote for me i'll get burk's it done jeremy corbyn sort of persuade those voters with a whole string of economic measures that they should forget about brics it and vote for economic equality instead as they've done previous in previous elections and that's the big move a quarter of those voters are undecided again something like 9 or 10 percent of conservative remain as so over the next couple of weeks the big battle ground is going to be those particularly those voters as you said in the middle and in the north they could be decisive in the key constituencies and still haven't yet made up their mind well as they're all deciding presumably they're going to be trying to decide who they can trust as well and both johnson and suffer from an issue of trust and i remember johnson rather famously said he'd rather be dead in a ditch than miss the breaks at deadline and he's well he's not dead in the ditch

and while lots of polls also suggest that people don't particularly like jeremy corbyn say how crucial is trust and is ideas of this cult of personality when people are making those decisions understand the twelth how important is trust cheney well there's no doubt the public does believe that trust is important and indeed the institutions of u.k. government parliament and government you know the u.k. government is was a subset of parliament are all the members of parliament and against that backdrop the public's relative lack of trust in m.p.'s perfectly m.p.'s members of parliament as a group is a profound challenge but of course sania said earlier on boris johnson in particular though he has relatively low approval ratings there when i don't know where near as low as germany corbin's him. but the truth is. is sonny said earlier

boris johnson does seem to have this remarkable willing capacity of people to say well of course i don't trust him but i do like him and that is an amazing lucky asset for a politician in a competitive democracy now whether that will play all the way through to election day i mean as alan said the husband some narrowing in the i see it in the approval ratings particularly were boris johnson's become a bit less popular than it was and jeremy couldn't well actually he was unpopular but he's got a bit more unpopular jerricho been very unpopular slightly less so there's a bit of narrowing bartz the truth is that it's a broader political issue that people feel that politicians say one thing and then do something else or untrustworthy and that's a systemic issue that u.k. politicians parliament in particular needs to address i see you nodding their son and i want to ask this as as my final question which is really around the mood of

the nation and feels like rex it's gone on for such a long time of the discussions around wrex that that there has been this this erosion of trust a huge broad level of disillusionment across and across the electorate and as we go into this election when our just under 3 weeks out i want to take stock because that elections are also about hope i imagine going forward feeling like things could change for the better so let me ask you this then do people care right now about politics do they feel that it's an important relevant part of their lives and do they have hope going forward as they cast those ballots understand the 12 i as a really good question i think people are really tourne that they're terrified about the future they always turn the radio off will shut the newspaper or don't go into it or because they're terrified of what they might read i think people are quite frightened they're quite down as to where we're going as a currency letting any of us. camembert time when we were so you know factional so

divided so hungry so bitter so resentful as we are now hate crimes have gone up descriptions of anti depressants have gone up. people are losing their jobs now and a few friends of mine have done so i think this is a really really frightening time and there is this thing that i must watch everything because i need to know what's going on against i just want to shut the whole thing down and and hide behind the sofa people just don't really quite know what to do hope isn't really short supply now i'm rather surprised that someone hasn't stood up on a platform somewhere and say we doesn't have to be like this we could be better here and yet no one is painting that vision i feel we're very unblessed with our politicians at a time when we need to more than ever and we're going to leave it there for now and then i'm sure he's speaking to you all and coming out with lots of this ongoing

discussion about the future of britain thank you to all of our guests tony travers alan wager and swung a panel and thank you too for watching you can see this program again any time by visiting our website al-jazeera dot com and for further discussion do go to our facebook page that's facebook dot com for trash a.j. inside story and you can also join the discussion on twitter our handle is at a.j. and story for mean a star and a whole team here by frank thank you. the brazilian journalist investigating a politically struction of land grab all the farmers helped yet another elected and he's reprieve them that's empowering everyday people to profit from the destruction of the rain forest people are willing to give their life away and daring to see the occupation of villains is journalism the last hope in the fight for sleep the

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