this is bbc news. the headlines: the somali president has condemned a massive bomb attack in the capital mogadishu, which killed more than 70 people. he believes al—sha bab, a group of islamist militants, are to blame, but said they wouldn't succeed in demoralising the somali people. the us democratic presidential hopeful, joe biden, has tried to clarify comments in which he appeared to rule out testifying at donald trump's impeachment trial. mr biden told reporters that he had always complied with legitimate requests from congress. riot police have made arrests and fired pepper spray in a hong kong border town after about 100 masked demonstrators gathered in a shopping centre. they were protesting against shoppers from mainland china. demonstrators have been targeting shopping centres across hong kong all week. more protests are planned leading up to january 1st. now on bbc news, it's time for dateline london's look

hello, and welcome to dateline london, the programme that brings together some of the uk's leading columnists with the foreign correspondents who file their stories for the folks back home with the dateline london. it being a reflective time of the year, we're looking back on 2019 — when britain backed boris to get brexit done, when donald trump was impeached, when street protests felled one north african dictator and shook governments from western europe to hong kong. with me are david aaronovitch, columnist with the times janet daley, from the sunday telegraph the russian broadcaster alexander nekrassov, and michael goldfarb, host of the podcast

the first rough draft of history. very good to have you all with us. with one electoral bound, he was free. borisjohnson spent his first few months as uk prime minister at the mercy of a house of commons he could not command, making promises he couldn't and didn't keep. the first december election in nearly a century was a bitter one for labour, experiencing under jeremy corbyn its worst defeat in more than 80 years. the nationalists triumphed in scotland, setting up a fresh battle for independence. northern ireland elected more nationalists than unionists for the first time. david, we know the results of the election, huge story win. how do you think we should interpret that result? not as some kind of huge endorsement of boris johnson, because essentially the opposition were gulled into having an election when there didn't need to be one.

the parliament had a couple more years to run. his strategy of saying it is me orjeremy corbyn, and his cut—through of "get brexit done" both succeeded excellently. both did very well. the consequences, the one that you see around that mark, the british electoral system is pretty good at producing results like this from time to time, and it now sets up a whole series of problems, but the one thing it does resolve is whether or not there will be a brexit. that will happen. it doesn't tell you what kind of brexit it will be or the consequences, but we're almost certainly like the rest of the world heading for an economic slowdown and the election from all sides was a cornucopia of promises of what would happen. we are now going into unpromising circumstances to deliver that. meanwhile, for 18 months there is no opposition in britain to speak of, except that offered by the scottish nationalists who have only one opposition point

which is independence for scotland. janet, what does he do with this majority? the exhilarating fact of this for me was seeing the absolute shock in westminster where we all circulate all the time, at this result. it wasn't a shock to any of us who went out into the country and talk to real people. westminster seems to have no idea of the degree of rage and alienation in the rest of the country. not only had all these elected politicians, who had in all their manifestos promised to abide by the result of the referendum, and passed article 50, not only had they betrayed that trust, but they had then spent three years inducing, bullying and threatening and patronising the people they were betraying. if you're right, they got

their comepuppance. exactly. it was one of the most shocking and things in parliamentary history. the rage never went out onto the streets as it would have in many countries, and the faith in institutions in this country was extraordinarily inspiring. they got the result that they wanted. westminster had a very close call in terms of losing the confidence of the country, nearly. michael commented nearly go badly wrong? no. i was in a state of anxiety leading up to the election, but then, there is such a thing as reality. this election result was foretold. gerrit —— jeremy corbyn was elected

leader by a bunch of people who joined the labour party for the same price as a pint of beer. he was never going to be prime minister. let's remember that on successive occasions, theresa may brought her deal to parliament for a vote, and borisjohnson refused to back it. crosstalk. he played a hard hand of ha rd crosstalk. he played a hard hand of hard politics and he won. and now the government shall be upon his shoulders. it is the season for that phrase. david brings up the scottish nationalists. it interests me about what comes now with all of this power, the fact is, there is no effective opposition. he has a fixed term of at least five years. they are going to abolish the fixed term parliament act. well, they should really think about it. they play an extreme

game of power politics. look out the democrats in america —— republican party in america. they are as whipped and as disciplined in a very narrow range of ideals. lam not i am not convinced that boris johnson can be convinced to grant a second referendum without a lot of fighting. you mean the scottish referendum, because it's very easy to confuse our referendums. yes. it is all on the british government to ground. i am not really seeing him asa to ground. i am not really seeing him as a granter of a lot. he is the minister of the union, after all. with a line down the irish sea. but the conservatives are not disciplines like the republicans. there was an enormous conservative blockage of the whole process. crosstalk. the republican party has purged away all of its moderates... they were not moderates.

save it. it was an extraordinary election. every single party avoided the real issues, the proper ones, the economy, banks out of control, people are in debt... not a word. brexit, brexit, brexit. brexit, and we'll give more money to the nhs. the nhs does not need more money. it needs reform. it is a waste of money. the labour party, just like in 2017 did everything to lose the election. everything possible. in 2017 the tories would not hear about this. this time they won because jeremy corbyn really went for it. he said we are going to tax all of you. nobody was gonna vote for him. they are amazed that they lost in such a big way. why? the other opposition parties destroyed themselves.

the lib dems said crazy things, nobody would vote for them. you mean the promise to revoke article 50? everything, the climate, everything. the greens destroyed themselves as well. the reason the snp did so well is because they are using that to hide. they don't have anything to offer. this whole independence thing is going to collapse because it is mad. if you are leaving the eu. "no, we are not leaving the eu because our part of the country voted to stay, so the rest of the country doesn't matter." london can succeed as well, presumably. —— secede. but the snp victory in scotland was rather misleading. it was largely due to the labour collapse scotland.

if labour had not collapsed, the snp victory would not be... if — the most powerful word in the universe. donald trump ends the year facing trial in the us senate for high crimes and misdemeanours. his republican party has the votes to prevent him being forced from office, but already the impeachment process has coloured the nation's politics ahead of what will be election year. democrats have called the shots over impeachment thus far, but they appear no nearer to settling on a champion to face mr trump in the presidential election. i mean, he has been impeached, but it has not been a bad year for donald trump, has it? he is still there so i think it would have been a good yearfor him. his popularity is still there. 42—43% of the electorate will vote for him no matter what. that leaves him 3 to 5 million votes behind him. if he wins a few states, because of the nature of our electoral system which is as outdated as first past the post in terms of reflecting the true democratic wishes

of the polity, yet he still there. and in a sense this is something slightly ritualistic. everybody, from the moment nancy pelosi, the speaker of the house, decided that the ukraine situation, and it is to complicated to go into now, but this attempt to hold up funding for the ukrainian government to provide defence capability against the increasingly aggressive... which biden did, by the way, on tape. he acknowledged it on tape. please don't go there! she thought there is no way of getting out. there are two very narrow articles of impeachment. 0ne there are two very narrow articles of impeachment. one of them, interestingly, is obstruction of congress, not obstruction of justice, becausejohn has worked very ha rd to justice, becausejohn has worked very hard to stop people who have been subpoenaed from testifying. ——

trump. it will go in the senate, and they don't have the votes in the senate. it then becomes a case of how further politicised this is going into next year as the democrats try to elect one of three 70—plus people to face donald trump who will be 7a. biden, elizabeth warren, or sanders. once the actual voting starts in the primaries, it is a slightly new game. so anyway, he's made it to the end, much to my surprise. i didn't think he would get this far. you said on this programme a year ago that he will be gone but it won't be anything to do with the russia...

so you are right. there was a time when it seemed like the republican party might actually, in congress, step away slightly from trump. he has insulted a lot of people. and yet they've all come toadying up to him just like certain members of the politburo... the democrats started the impeachment process because they know they're going to lose the election. they are desperate. the republicans can't stand trump but they're stuck with him because you can't change him months before the election. so he can say whatever he wants and they will still support him. this is a stupid situation, an extraordinary situation. is he in much trouble? politically, realistically? leaving aside whether it's right or wrong what happened.

it depends on who the democrats nominate and the strength or weakness of their campaign. it is a very good year to be a strong democratic candidate for president this year. trump is pretty unpopular. he is not spreading outside his own area, he is not going to take any votes that he didn't have in 2016. there is not much prospect of that. if they can close off wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania, which were lost by incredibly small margins in 2016, then trump is utterly beatable. far from him looking good, trump often looks fairly desperate to me. i'm slightly old—fashioned in this way. the first question that occurs to me is, did he do the things that he was accused of in the impeachment? the answer is clearly yes, he did. the second question is, do they rise to the level of impeachable offences? ask yourself, if hillary clinton had

done them, which the republicans in picture? the answer is yes. is he comprehensively the worst president we've had in our lifetime? yes. he will probably get to be in prison. all we can hope, democrats around the world, is a decent democratic candidate comes up and defeats him and we get out of this pattern of trumpism, relieve the republicans of their incredible self—imposed burden, and try and get back to the world as we have known it, with alliances being alliances. janet, does it take for you, a decent democrat, and when you look at that shortlist, is there a decent candidate? they are mediocre. that is part of the democratic problem. there is a crisis in selfless politics for complicated reasons. we can go all the way back to the cold war. the democrats have overplayed their hands, perhaps deliberately. they can't depose the president because

he is incompetent. it has to be high crimes and disc demeanours. when he said, can you do us a favour? he meant the country. it is very difficult to prove that he didn't mean the country. no he didn't. we know that he didn't but that is psychological analysis. will it stand up in court? i don't think so. to take it back to whether there is a candidate out there. spending time in georgia and texas during the midterm elections, this year, in an off year election, democrats took a governorship in the old confederacy. they removed the governor

of kentucky and remove the house of burgesses in virginia. the empiricalfact, and this is just a level below joe biden and elizabeth warren, is there is a tremendous organising going on at grassroots level. it is not students and lefties. it is mostly women who are on the million women march, and they will. .. just let me make a point about the soft left. the reason hillary clinton ran such a disastrous campaign was not a coincidence. she took identity politics, when women were worrying about putting food on the table. what we can say is what in

the labour party in this country, that was created to be the voice of the industrial proletariat, there is no industrial proletariat any more. there is no working class as we knew it. that makes the problem of democratic ce ntre—left politics, by extension, very difficult. if there's one abiding image for 2019, it's street protest. from the middle east to the far east, in europe and in latin america, people power proved more resilient than many would have predicted. in sudan, it ended the 30—year dictatorship of omar al—bashir. in hong kong, it persisted in defiance of beijing even if its objectives remain unmet. it changed policy in chile and in france, deposed a prime minister in lebanon, and remains an unspent force in iraq. i'm rolling a lot of very different things together there. segway of the year! what you take from them? some of them at lease, perhaps the majority of the most significant ones,

the idea of democratic self—determination has become embedded in in our consciousness. it is very moving to see hong kong holding up uk flags. they understand the principle of democratic self—government which actually seems to have become rather lost in european politics. it has become one of the driving forces of brexit. democratic self—government, wanting to be able to elect and remove their people who govern you. it is significant how much that is ineradicable now from our modern political consciousness. in all kinds of context and settings. are you inspired? i am not inspired at all because all revolutions and civil wars lead to ordinary people living worse lives in the bad guys living. every single one.

you take the french revolution and the civil war in the american revolution lotion, anything. let me finish, please. you've spoken too much by the way. i must tell you that this is a great conception. that people hitting the streets changes anything. the bad people behind—the—scenes manipulate this. they come to power very quickly. take the arab spring, what did they end up with? the same dictator, even worse. we had islamist taking power. communism in russia using this so—called revolution which was a coup, by the way, not a revolution. so all of these revolutions are a bad example of politics, horrible example. but people have no choice. they never change anything for the better. if you don't have democratic institutions are a democratic process, that is the point

i was making about britain. the fact that they... what we're seeing in hong kong will change anything. that has nothing to do with social change. so what should people do who are living under what they consider to be totalitarian despotism? what can they do if they don't have that democratic institution? there is a sign of democracy of whatever. democracy doesn't work. it didn't work in greece. it does not work?! it didn't work they cancelled it. they said it didn't work. democracy is usually the role of a tiny minority behind the scenes. look at the election. the much of parliament is the same. how is it the same every single minister comes from the... how are they going to change this.

i'm going to let you both pause for breath. david, do you gain optimism from those protests? saying the obvious thing that people are talking about, climate change, the big international movements and street process and peaceful disruption, changing politician's mines. disruption, changing politician's minds. there are obviously good and bad things that can happen as a result of street protests. it is possible that the street protests imagine for a moment that the strength of their feeling trumps the other feeling of other people who are not out on the streets. that is always a dangerous moment. there is always a dangerous moment the street protesters when they lose sight. the other problem is that it is quite easy for big authorities with more resources to outlast them. they are very rarely deciding

the outcome of an event. the civil rights demonstrations in america that actually brought about a change in the law. but the planning went on for a decade. just to say two things here. several hundred people have been killed in iraq, possibly more. hundreds have been killed in iran. people have not reached their limit yet. this is not revolution, just street protests. twice last year people came onto the streets of london but they were very polite and english about demanding a second referendum. hence, they didn't get a second referendum. no, they did, they got a rep and election that was the second one. each to its particular circumstances, but i wonder if a different environment now simply because if there is a different

speed communication, and in parts of africa now people have access to mobile phones even if they don't have much cash themselves. suddenly they can communicate in a way they didn't communicate before. in hong kong the protests were pretty much controlled online if they were controlled at all. greece is still in the euro and the euro is still functioning in the brits have left europe. the arab spring. i remember a reporter in cairo jumping around with young protests. look at what they're doing, they're communicating they are flash mobbing. this is going to liberate the world. here we are, at the end of the decade, and every...

over the last 72 hours, iran has switched off bits of the internet, but it is better now for the resume to work in the dark now if they really want to organise some significant change in their government. we feel that should be true. i take some optimism from the fact that people are sufficiently interested in politics and the big events want to make big protest, as long as they understand the limitations and responsibilities of those. i take a great deal of pleasure looking at young people going onto the streets with extinction rebellion, as long as they understand what the limitations of such protest will be. it requires engagement and a level of self—education and engagement with others. it is one of the blessings of a democracy that you look out and there is somebody who disagrees...

wants the government to tax people even more. how is it against the government? i have written in fact that we will look back on these last horrible three years as a golden age of political engagement. people arguing about brexit in the street and in the shops. in the final minute of the final date line of the decade, what was the best moment of 2019 for you. for me? it was interviewing john dean and others who participated in the impeachment that have preceded this, and learning how different this one coming up will be. i have to say the election result because the defeat of an anti—semitic, hard left communist effectively party was so important and significant. i was so reassured about the sanity of the british electorate.

the goal in the semi—final of the european cup, easily the best moment for me. tottenham. i think the press in 2019 as a whole got everything wrong. it was absolutely amazing. thank you all very much for being here all year and for being here today. happy new year to all of you. we'll be back in the new year for the first dateline of 2020. dojoin us then. hello there. saturday sunshine was in short supply.

many was in short supply. of us stay cloudy through tonight. many of us stay cloudy through tonight. persistent rain across northern and western scotland. the sky should clearfor northern and western scotland. the sky should clear for northern ireland, the north—east of scotland and late in the night towards the east of england allowing things to turn a little bit chilly. for most, a mild night. tomorrow, many spots starting with cloud, mist and merc. a better chance of the cloud breaking up. perhaps even in north wales and north—east england. some summary wales and north—east england. some summary spells here. 0utbreaks wales and north—east england. some summary spells here. outbreaks of rain across the far north—west of scotland, the northern and the western isles. as far as the temperatures go, mild for all of us but particularly the north—western part. some rain in the north on monday. sliding southwards and it will be cooler for all of us on new year's eve stop.

complicated reasons. welcome to bbc news. our top stories: somalia's president says his country will not be demoralised after a bomb attack kills more than 70 people. translation: you will never succeed in discouraging the somali people and their government and you will never stop us from achieving our goals in developing and rebuilding our country. thousands of volunteer firefighters are to be offered compensation for loss of earnings after battling the australian bushfires for weeks. democratic presidential contender joe biden says there's no legal basis to force him to testify at donald trump's impeachment trial. "we bought a zoo." a french crowd—funding plan