— his first campaign event since he lost the presidential election last month. but as he's made clear on twitter in just the last few hours, mr trump is still refusing to concede tojoe biden. negotiations between eu and british representatives will resume on sunday after an hour—long phone call between prime minister boris johnson and the president of the european commission ursula von der leyen. the sense of urgency is clear as the uk will transition out of eu trade rules on december 31. for a second weekend running, there've been violent demonstrations in paris. riot police used tear gas to disperse protestors who are opposed to a draft law protecting french officers from being filmed on duty. protesters attacked shops, ripped up pavements and burnt cars and barricades. now on bbc news, dateline london.

hello and welcome. i'm shaun ley. this is the programme which brings together bbc specialists with the foreign correspondents based in the uk who file their stories for the audience back home with the dateline london. wagon‘s roll! it's been the week when vaccine began its journey to our shores. guess where from? the eu! will those lorries keep coming brexit, trade deal or no deal? donald trump takes his case to georgia, where voters still have the power to deny joe biden at least some of his power. what is the place of us courts in determining the outcome

—— of this most contested of presidential elections. to discuss that, we're joined byjeff mcallister, a former white house correspondent, london bureau chief for time magazine, and a practising lawyer. as well as writing for portuguese publications, eunice goes is an academic in london, exploring the importance of ideas in politics. and back with us in the studio after weeks pounding the sidewalks in the united states for presidential election, bbc presenter and foreign correspondent, clive myrie. good to have you back, clive. "we're a much better country than every single one of them" — the cabinet minister gavin williamson's tiggerish patriotism was on display in a radio interview about vaccine approval. naked nationalism was on display across the channel. where clement beaune, france's europe minister was blunt. "i want to tell our fishermen, our producers, the citizens, we will not accept a deal with bad terms." well, if the talks fail, getting those vaccine—filled trucks over from the continent could become a bit slower.

eunice, what do you make about all this rumbling noises? i mean, how seriously should we take the french threat to veto an eu trade deal? well, i think we should take that threat very, very seriously because emmanuel macron in france is relishing the role of being the bad cop in the final stage of the brexit negotiations. but in reality, france is not alone. old allies of great britain — denmark and the netherlands — are also very concerned and ready to use their vetoes, together with spain and italy and the standing issue of course, the issues of fisheries. the understanding in europe is it is actually a bad deal, no deal is better than a bad deal — that is essentially the realisation of several member

states — and that is why the negotiations have been paused — because they don't want the eu to make any more concessions. the eu made considerable concessions, particularly in the area of a level playing field. fisheries, level playing field, and arbitration issues. and the understanding in several european capitals is it is better not to sign a deal that will tie us up for a long period of time — let's say a decade — then deal and face a really terrible 2021. and then we will — that will force us to a modus verendi find a way back to the negotiating table after we have faced the cold of the no—deal brexit, so to trade under wto rules, we will then actually find an accommodation and the united kingdom, that's the expectation in many european capitals the united kingdom will understand and come to realise that there is a very hard trade—off between regulatory sovereignty on one hand and access to the single market of a50 million.

on the question of fish, the interesting realisation of this week has been that other european countries have also strong cultures around the sea, around the fishing industry — though they represent quite small sections of their gdp. but they also — in britain, we have come to the realisation and fishermen are coming to the realisation — that most of the fish that is caught in british waters ends up on european tables. it is not consumed in the united kingdom. so british fishermen and scottish fishermen in particular will come to realise that, yes, they might have access to all their quota, so they no longer are sharing their quota with other european fishermen, but what is the good of that if they cannot then export it or they will export at a much

higher level — at mich higher prices that no—one is ready to pay for if there is no deal? so these are essentially the issues. jeff, picking up on what eunice was saying there, it is very tempting that idea, isn't it, that talks are allowed to collapse after a few months of difficulties that might make everybody a bit more amenable, a bit more willing to compromise because they have seen the alternative and the alternative would be too painful. how big a risk is it that that kind of sentiment takes hold in the coming days? i would be frightened of that kind of an outcome. i think the idea that people become more rational when faced with trauma has not been borne out in recent politics in any country. london bookmakers are still giving 80% odds for a deal. to be betting on rationality in these negotiations has never seemed like a good result would come. but it is so obvious that fishing — 0.1% of the british economy should be the tail

wagging the dog, of 40% of exports and 50% of imports. it just doesn't make any sense. impractical terms, too. —— in practical political terms, too. while borisjohnson has been a leader, in some sense, of a head—banger brexit faction, labour says it will vote in favour of a reasonable deal. he probably can isolate the nigel farage brexiteers and get a majority if he has anything that's pass offable as a reasonable deal. this could all be last—minute kabuki. i hope so. if there are queues of lorries in kent stretching back ten miles and people cannot get food and medicine and all the obvious things taken for granted freom brexit for years, it could concentrate the mind. and i know there are a lot of people who are anti—brexit who would kind of like to see that but i don't think it would be a productive way to get negotiations in six months or a year.

how much does boris johnson need a deal? i think there is a sense among quite a few members of the parliamentary party that, as is the case clearly with the europeans, that a bad deal is worse than no deal. and i think borisjohnson would be relatively sanguine in bringing that home — as long as he can make it clear, as far as his supporters are concerned, that he did his best, he fought for britain. it was those damn europeans wanted too much, they wanted to smash our fishing industry. which, you know, unlike what we have just heard, doesn't make — might not make any practical sense in terms of how important it is to the british economy, but it is totemic in terms of the emotional relevance. there is a bit of a danger there, isn't it? becausejohn major tried that with roast beef and it rather blew up in your face, beef and it rather blew up in yourface, if beef and it rather blew up in your face, if roast beef can blow up in your face. that is true, but fish is slightly different in this context because the french are involved and it is

the european union and this, you know — i remember the cod wars from the '70s and all that kind of stuff — but i think it is fascinating, this whole divide between the european union and britain. the months of discussion that have taken place have boiled down to two very important things that go to the heart of brexit and what brexit was about, and go to the heart of the point of the single market and the european union and the trading bloc. the first is the so—called level playing field. the idea that the uk wants to take back control — which is what brexit was all about — and at the same time that might potentially mean it undercutting its rivals on the continent. that goes to the heart of undercutting the legs of the single market, of the very point of the european union. so it's interesting that we are in this last chance saloon, everyone is propping up the bar and everyone is getting slightly drunk, but time is really running out. so is your rhetoric now! look, if there is no deal

by the end of this week, beginning of next week, will it be ratified by the 31st of december by all the european parliament? i don't think so. eunice, you lecture a lot on ideas in politics and it's very interesting what clive was saying there — you have this idea of sovereignty, the idea that uk has to establish for its own voters, as well as the rest of the world that it is an independent, sovereign nation again, and on the other hand, you have this concept of the free market, the ability for companies to freely throughout, whether in labour or in goods, we know it doesn't work in services yet, but let's leave that aside. are they irreconcilable as concepts? they are. becuase there is a trsde—off. you either have sovereignty and regulatory sovereignty or you have a free trade area and you are trading with the world as freely as possible. the europeans have found the concept of pool sovereignty, and that is the genius

of european integration. the idea is you are pooling yourself — you renounce — you give a little bit of your sovereignty in exchange to being stronger when facing the outside world. and so you create a single market, you pull your —— pool your sovereignty but you have something to gain. there is that acceptance that there isn't a trade—off and that trade—off is to your benefit. in britain — and essentially why brexit happened — there is a very absolutist, purist view of sovereignty, which, very interestingly, only the british are concerned with their sovereignty in relation to europe. because the british government — in particular the conservative party — is not very concerned with losing sovereignty vis—a—vis the united states or with regarding trade with china or even in the acceptance of having multinational corporations deciding their own tax policy. so it is actually a very selective approach to national

sovereignty but it is one that has dominated and shaped british politics for the past a0 years or so. and could well do for a0 years more, perhaps! thank you very much. now, the uk has become the first country to authorise the use of a vaccine for coronavirus. having previously over—promised a world—class test and trace system to identity those infected with the virus, the prime minister displayed some caution this week, warning of the "immense logistical challenges" involved in getting people vaccinated. jeff, is this a time to perhaps under—promise? yes, it is always better to under—promise and over—deliver. and it is also interesting, though, that all of the vaccine news seems to be good! the trials — there are seven that have reached final stage trials, all of them seem to have remarkably high effective rates and they are coming on relatively quickly. the manufacturing chain seems to be primed.

this is actually a fantastic success of international science and capitalism to produce these — and government cooperation to get this all teed up. now, the interesting part is going to be acceptance. if you look at the survey data in britain, about 70% say they will voluntarily take a vaccine — that still leaves 30% out. the older people are willing to take it, the younger people more affected by the anti—vaccine crusades and i think internet memes and all that kind of strange conspiracy stuff are less likely to take it. but the governments are prepared. i mean, the uk has bought multiple doses of vaccines, advanced purchases — as have other european countries. they have up to up to four to six doses per person in major european countries pre—bought — including the uk, because you're hedging your bets.

and now it is up to a public information campaign, which could be an opportunity for big pharma, which has been so reviled, i think over the past year. being the producers of oxycontin and price gouging and all sorts of social ills. now they have a true public health miracle, in some sense. cheap and probably very effective — something that can solve a big problem both economical and medical — and they have just got to sell it. it is something we will see a lot of — very slick advertising campaigns and good public information campaigns — and it is a good thing. it is something that will test, then, the capacity to get the system to actually get the vaccine to where it is most needed? logistically it will be very, very difficult. the hope is over the next week, possibly ten days, we could get the first shots getting, first jabs taking place, probably in hospitals, because they are in the facilities that they can deal with extreme temperatures that this vaccine needs to be kept under.

but i think we need to be careful that hopefully this is the beginning of the end of this trauma but it does not suggest that this thing is going to be over any time soon. i mean, we know the four chief medical officers across the uk this week have written a letter, making it clear they don't believe the roll—out of this vaccine is going to necessarily cut radically the numbers of hospital admissions for the nhs over the next three or four months of the winter period. we know that there is going to be a slackening of the rules concerning people getting together in households over christmas. the chief medical officers are worried about that for the hospitals. we know the covid, the lateral flow test, there are problems with that. it gives you the results in a few hours, but false negatives are a big part of the problem in close to half of the people who were tested. so even if people have the test and they are told you are negative, you have still got to social distance and wear a mask. crucially, the idea this vaccine is out there might psychologically make people feel they can relax a little

bit, they can forget about the six feet distance between each other and not wear masks and so on. there is still a lot that we have got to work through with this, despite the vaccine being hi, which is something we should all applaud. eunice, that is the key point, isn't it? in terms whether we adapt our behaviour, the virus still needs people to feed off and the vaccination is going to have to go a long way before it runs out of people to feed off and is effectively starved of what it needs to continue reproducing? absolutely. that is why the world health organization said yesterday that the vaccine does not mean the end of covid—i9. people need to continue to be alert, the rules of social distancing, mask wearing and all of that, they need to continue to be in place because the virus is rampant. there will also be problems with production of the vaccine. pfizer announced they are having difficulties in terms of delivering the number

of doses they were aiming to have ready next year, because their vaccine is very complicated, access to raw materials has been very difficult. the other vaccines have complicated supply chains for their production. i am thinking of the oxford astrazeneca vaccine. it has not yet been regulated by the uk. then there is the logistical problems of rolling out vaccines, they need to be delivered in a very special conditions and circumstances. it will take a good year until the vast majority of populations in britain, in europe and around the world are vaccinated. that leaves us with at least ten months of living

with the virus and if we relax too much it means we will be living with a third wave, potentially a fourth wave of the virus. you are a cheerful soul, eunice. the great covid—sceptic donald trump is campaigning in georgia this weekend. the republican family is staying loyal, knowing his endorsement could make all the difference to holding the two senate seats subject to run—off elections in a month's time. victory then will sweeten the loss of the white house because it will make joe biden‘s task of governing that much harder. before you are isolating, because he have to coming back into the uk from the states, you were on the campaign trail. is there anything you recall from that experience that brings home some of the real, raw tension that is in american daily life as a result of this election? this is my seventh us presidential election i have covered, '96, bill clinton against bob dole was the first.

i have been going back to america and live there in that intervening period. this is the first... this was a shock to me, the first time i came across that deep melding and the intertwining of fact and fiction in news. i had never seen this on this scale anywhere in the world. and it has to be said, it is a by—product much more prevalent as a result of the last 3.5 years of donald trump being in office. the idea you have facts and you have conspiracy theories and they can go together. the idea you can have suggestions that are put out on facebook groups or by russian trolls possibly that are poured out there, that is absorbed into the body politic and into the national political debate and it becomes part of the narrative, it becomes part of the story. so you don't necessarily have people saying i believe in this conspiracy theory, and the facts are rubbish. what you have is people saying, i don't know. i am not sure.

it is that confusion, the sense of discombobulating that people have that makes them, makes it difficult for them to make the decisions a lot of other people around the world might think, why have you decided to do that? the facts clearly state this. that was a big, big shock to me and something thatjoe biden or whoever comes after him in the next ten, 15 years is going to have to grapple with in a really meaningful way, particularly a social media giant to become more powerful and more and more important. as an illustration of that, we have this debate over the voting machines that have been in use in many us states and that has got caught up with the conspiracy theories about the allegations of stolen votes of results being changed and so on.

why has that hit home for so many, particularly republicans and trump supporters, who feel the selection has, in some way, been stolen from them? because that is what trump says. there is absolutely no proof of any of it. all of the detailed examinations, the court cases, the republican secretaries of state keep saying the same thing over and over again. trump has, absolutely as clive says, figured out a way to magnify lies for his own benefit. he is a genius at it. there is an ecosystem of right wing media, fox news is chief among them, but lots of others and they all become self— reinforcing. he dismisses things he finds inconvenient as fake news. he has now undercut people's faith in neutral recording. this all becomes a matter of tribe rather than nationality.

people say, if trump says it, it must be true. i feel aggrieved, i don't like those political elites. he plays the grievance and uses social media to bamboozle people. it has worked and it is absolutely a scary thing for the future of american democracy. we hope a normal, stable fellow like joe biden can pull away from that, turn the volume down and get people back to talking normally about politics. but trump is probably going to stay on the stage with his millions and millions of twitter followers and keep throwing as much gasoline into things as he can to keep himself prominent, keep himself rich and keep himself out of jail. it is going to be a very complicated thing to bring the us back from this dangerous place.

eunice, jeff talking about the tribalism and the bitterness that has crept into the body politic over the last few years, there is a temptation forjoe biden to reach out. on the other hand, you could argue that barack obama tried to govern across the aisle, much good did it do him and after eight years the response was the republican voters went for donald trump, the strongest medicine they could possibly have chosen. it doesn't suggest that biden has much hope of reaching out. yes, i would agree with that argument. that argument is going to be tested very, very early on into biden‘s presidency. he will try to get a stimulus package approved or any remedial measures to help the american population who have become unemployed because of the pandemic, and there are many millions

and unemployment is rising very steeply in the united states. this goes far beyond what a politician likejoe biden can do or even the democratic party. this is where the media and different news organisations need to reach out, need to change the way they produce news. because as clive said earlier, the big problem has to do with the inability of people now of being able to distinguish what is fact from a lie. everything with which you disagree is fake news and everything you agree with is news, is a fact. this is really, really serious. the german philosopher hannah arendt said the road to a totalitarian regime became very clear when people were no longer able to distinguish fact from truth. america is not becoming a totalitarian regime but the fragility of democracy is, it is all there for us to see. it is very important that organisations in society and the media that plays a very important role in sustaining democracy, but the media starts

to perhaps be less polarising, perhaps bringing more grey shades of opinion, as opposed to yes or no positions. they need to bring this into the body politic, so it reaches people and they start to discuss politics in a different way from the one we have been discussing in the last ten years. it has been so poisonous to our democracies. it will be a particular challenge to do that while this political debate continues unabated. we have the georgia elections coming up next month and those elections could determine the effectiveness of the biden presidency? absolutely, a lot of people, and this includes americans, forget there are three branches of government in the united states. millions turn out for the presidential election and in off year votes for congress, not as many people bother to do that.

i think ifjoe biden can win those two seats in georgia it would bring a tie in the senate so the vice president kamala harris will have the deciding vote and that would be easier for him to get his legislation and measures through. the elements are pointing in the right direction for democrats. georgia voted democrat in the election, first time in almost 30 years. the two republican candidates have their own problems, ethics violations, potentially and a lot, some suggest is racist rhetoric towards the democratic opponent. the importance of these races is important for democrats to see now, as a result they are motivated to get out there and produce the result on the day. but i also think potentially covid could play a part in this as well. joe biden seems to have a plan, he seems to have some kind of way of dealing with this mandate wearing of masks in the first 100 days. the vaccine is rolling out and that could tip the balance towards them.

indeed it could make joe biden getting his legislative agenda out there a lot easier if he wins the senate. if, the most powerful word in the universe. clive, eunice, jeff, thank you all very much. thank you for being with us this weekend. geeta guru—murphy is in this chair next weekend. dojoin her then for more dateline london. from all of us here, goodbye. well, the chilly weather is here to stay for the next few days. it's not desperately cold but certainly cold enough

the cold air is here to stay for a few more days. in fact there are signs that most of there are signs that most of the week ahead will be quite chilly as well. through the early hours we have a few showers there across northern parts of england and eastern scotland, temperatures hovering close to freezing in many towns and cities and then, i think, central parts of the uk during the course of sunday could have aafew the course of sunday could have a a few showers on the whole the weather looks mostly dry the weather looks mostly dry the united kingdom. some sunshine in belfast, glasgow and in the south of the country. the outlook for the next few days you can see it stays chilly with temperatures in single figures. a slight rise in the temperature towards the end of the week.

welcome to bbc news. i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories: president trump attends his first campaign rally since losing the election, and he's still refusing to concede. britain's prime minister borisjohnson and the eu commission president talk at length and decide post—brexit trade negotiations are to resume on sunday. ajapanese space capsule lands back on earth carrying possible clues to the origins of the solar system. carbon—rich molecules may hold some clues as to the building blocks of life on earth. and venice lights up for christmas, but you may have to be a local to see this year's spectacular sight.