clear skies. that north—south split there for tuesday, with more rain across southern counties. more wet weather with this area low pressure the further south you are as we go into wednesday. but, as you can see in dundee, it stays dry here. and by thursday, christmas eve, most places become dry again, most places feel much colder as well. that will lead into a chilly night to take it into christmas morning with a widespread frost, particularly across finland and wales stop there will be a few showers dotted around first light across the east. there will be some rain later in the highlands and islands of scotland, but for most, it will not be a white christmas apart from the white frost in the morning, but it could be a fairly sunny one. hello this is bbc news. the headlines. millions in england and wales are told to stay at home, as tough new coronavirus restrictions come into force similar restrictions will follow in scotland — swathes of the country will be placed under the toughest restrictions from boxing day last night's tier 4 announcement prompted a rush to london's stations — footage on social media shows large crowds trying to board trains — the transport secretary says extra

police officers will be deployed to enforce the rules belgium has reportedly joined the netherlands in banning travel from the uk — as the first case of the new covid variant is detected in continental europe now it's time for dateline with shaun ley. hello, i'm shaun ley. welcome to the programme that brings together leading columnists in the uk, bbc specialists, and the foreign correspondents who send their stories to audiences back home from the dateline london. this week... the eu and uk agree to keep on talking, the us supreme court declines to hear, and borisjohnson sees no covid crisis because of christmas — provided it's a little one. joining us this week, ian martin whose columns appear in the times newpaper. jeffrey kaufmann, a former network news anchor in the united states. here in the studio

with me is celia hatton, asia—pacific editor for the bbc. it was the english puritans who cancelled christmas. borisjohnson is no puritan. in the 17th century, the festival had become an excuse for licentiousness, or — to use the argo of 2020 — failing to observe social distancing. this week, the welsh government departed from the uk—wide consensus brokered just last week — up to three households able to meet indoors. in wales, it will be two households. mrjohnson didn't sing it, but he did plead with people around the uk to "have yourself a merry little christmas". celia, is this a case of boris johnson wanting to have his christmas cake and eat it? it's tricky, we are seeing political leaders around the world struggling with this issue. in some issues, germany, we've seen these pre—christmas

lockdowns being imposed, but other countries are really struggling, too. the philippines in particular, really what we are seeing borisjohnson struggling with, we are seeing the philippines leader rodrigo duterte struggling with this as well. the philippines is 94% christian, so christmas is a really big deal. for weeks now, he has been pleading with the population to keep gatherings small, to stop singing, so church choirs, but also karaoke. and he is trying to introduce the idea that christmas should include small, solemn gatherings. a lot of people are probably going to ignore him. it is really interesting watching that play out in two different countries around the world. martyn, how worried do think some of boris johnson's parliamentary colleagues and his conservative party are about this? about the decisions being taken?

very interesting, because of course at the time of talking there are meetings ongoing about what to do about the situation in the south—east of england and in london in particular, so it is that cluster around the capital where there are reports of a new strain. and that is reforcing him to rethink the christmas rule. it is a issue across europe, not unique to the uk. boris johnson, a few weeks ago you would have said, and i certainly wrote, that he would come under immense pressure in parliamentary terms to not cancel christmas, something he doesn't want to do. but actually there is a sense of exhaustion, and i'm sure people feel it in countries around the world, but in the uk politics is taking a back—seat here. people have had a really tough year, and i think actually the expectation, and you mentioned the tory tribes,

and he does have serious issues on his back benches, but on the christmas issue i do not think that he will face that much criticism. the battle will be early in the new year, because of course britain is already vaccinating. it will be how quickly the post—christmas lockdown can the uk can open up and try and get the economy moving again. jeffrey, you are joining us from spain. that is a country that locked down early and dramatically in the spring. it hasn't necessarily solved all of the problems. how are things there at the moment? i thinkjeffrey has frozen while we try to get him back, let's think about what will happen in the coming months. given the pressure coming from the other parts of the uk, do you think that is

looking more likely? i think it is, i am not a lockdown sceptic, i have argued for other approaches as well but it seems pretty clear from the numbers what is happening in terms of case numbers but alos admissions to hospitals. particularly in parts of the south—east of england the concern is allowing people to mix more over christmas and new year, the five—day window in the uk, a price will be paid for that in the middle ofjanuary. so as ever throughout this crisis, the concern of the uk government is a sense of the nhs, the national health service, being potentially swamped. it is not a uniquely british problem. across europe, look what has happened in germany this week, look how sombre angela merkel was with the new restrictions

in germany. a very big deal obviously for germans to face even tougher restrictions on christmas, a time that really matters in german culture. i think it's just seen as, we are so close if not to the finishing line but light at the end of the tunnel, probably in march, by which point certainly in the uk and hopefully in other parts of europe, large numbers and hopefully all vulnerable populations will be vaccinated. the vaccination programme can then start to move further down the vulnerable list. by march—april, the hope is you will have something that feels more like normality. as i said earlier, i think that is where the crunch point is going to come. because many people will then say, look, the vulnerable in uk

terms, say 15 million people, have already been vaccinated, we cannot go on borrowing and spending in this way. we have to get the economy moving around easter time. i think that will be the battleground. but i think anyone who is saying no lockdown injanuary is going to be disappointed. i think there will be really quite tough restrictions across europe. on that, geoffrey you are in valencia, what is happening there now? there is a odd sense of dystopian normalicy. everyone is open, everyone living life in a way that shows no sign of coronavirus, except everyone is wearing a mask, it is the law, on the street, when you are cycling. people have been terrified given what they have gone through in 2020, and it is particularly notable that young people, 18, 20 years

old, all wearing masks. the compliance here inaudible. that being said, there will be no travel between regions over the christmas holidays, and you just have to look at the united states to see what happened in late november to see why spain and other countries are worried about the holiday period. inaudible. more and more records being shattered in the us, 300,000 dead, 3600 deaths in the us on wednesday, the highest ever. intensive care units in the us running out of beds. every country, this virus knows no borders, it sets its own agenda. political leaders and smart people everywhere are following it. what is extraordinary when you compare spain to the united states

is here, there seems to be a real consensus. in the us, of course, a very different story. we will leave it there for now. donald rumsfeld, the former us defense secretary, wrote a book recently, the center held, in which he argued that president gerald ford, for whom he worked, had helped to save american democracy after the turmoil of the late sixties and watergate and the corruption of ford's predecessor, richard nixon. half a century on, despite donald trump's tirades against the "most corrupt election ever", the electoral college met this week to confirm joe biden‘s victory. injanuary, he will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the united states. half a century on, geoffrey, you are in spain as i have said, but looking back at what has been happening in the united states,

it sounds a strange question to pose, but it's been a very strange period after the election. how close do you think america came to becoming a dictatorship? there were certainly rumblings, there were moments when trump might have liked something like that, but the institutions of american democracy have been tested and survived. it can be overstating it to say that normality will return. the damage to the credibility of the electoral system, the damage to the institutions, the credibility of the voting system. even though there is zero evidence inaudible the ongoing narrative in american elections. i don't think it's a question of a dictatorship for people, inaudible. we had the former

national security adviser michael flynn tweeting about suspending the constitution limited martial law, a national real election, it never came to any of that. but notwithstanding the us electoral college a lot of republicans voters still say the election was stolen. i think ultimately the concerns are overdone and flynn had his particular bizarre experience during the trump years. what is fascinating about the trump personality, persona, is watching the volume turned down. whole days can pass and you no

longer have to think, what is trump thinking and doing? it has been a very stressful period. the republic's not perfect, the founders were not perfect in how they designed it, however they did a pretty good job. and actually on the whole, the institutions and constitution have held remarkably well. the comparison with ford that donald rumsfeld makes is rather a good one. what america now needs is a period of relative calm, and a president that can try and speak for, if not all americans then a far greater number of americans. he's going to have huge difficulties. look at what he is inheriting. in the most spectacular way since the cold war, this week. the hacking.

huge challenges with the virus in the us. policy has always been divided, this is not a new development, but it is particularly vicious at the moment. the marvellous thing about american politics is we have just had one electoral cycle and it all begins again. already the republicans are thinking about reorganising for the midterms, coming up, and that is the beauty of the american system. it will move on and it will make it possible to forget, sort of, donald trump. i'm not sure everybody would use the word "marvellous" but in terms of the challenge joe biden faces, all very well for him to talk about consensus and reaching out, but quite a few people on the progressive side of the democratic party, the last thing they wanted him reaching out to republicans, that would mean further compromising an agenda that they don't think is radical enough in the first.

absolutely. a lot of people have been biding their time and waiting for a democrat to go into the white house again, and they are not looking for co—operation, they don't want the center to hold. they want the left to take its place and ideally roll back a lot of what donald trump put into action. so it's going to be really interesting to see how joe biden navigates this course. there is also a lot of pressure on him, as was said, to really get him to unite the two halves. a lot of people in the united states are tired of this ongoing split in us politics, and the challenges it puts up. geoffrey, do you think biden can be another gerald ford? you know, the potential criminal charges donald trump faces, will he pardon him? particularly given how much trump has tried to rig the system in his own favour.

you can argue this both ways. on one level we should move on, the government should let it go and put this to rest... the message cannot be that trump is above the law. this is not quite nixon. nixon did his dirty tricks and covered them up. trump faces a series of potential criminal charges that really make up a very long list. more than a dozen specific issues. it is an interesting question. there is a perception that the republicans govern themselves. and on the left there was a sense of wait a minute, we are inclusive and they get in and they...

they get in and theyjust do what they want. i think biden has made it clear. if you look at his cabinet picks, given the exhaustion, the seriousness of the political divide, trying to build this is by far the wisest of choices even if it does in some cases alienate and upset some of the far left of his party. i do think biden is going to find it particularly difficult because the republicans actually are rather well placed, they do have the hope that trump gets tied up in litigation, which he probably will for the next three or four years, he will spend most of his time in court. they don't want him to set up his own party, a third party runa bit like

ross perot in 1992. a lot of the forces unleashed by trump, i would say the republicans are not in bad shape. —— are still there, and i would say the republicans are not in bad shape. brexit — it's the gift that keeps on giving. well, for headline writers at least. threats and deadlines are made and passed. on sunday, there was optimism after the latest deadline was reached — and the uk and eu decided to let it pass and keep on talking instead. at the end of the week pessism — no trade deal, warned borisjohnson, unless europe moves "significa ntly" on fish. good job, as dateline was the first to reveal, that the prime minister is off to india next month in the hunt for a free trade deal. but again, things aren't always quite as they are presented. ian, why should we treat with some caution the things

that the participants say about the negotiations at this stage? that is a good question. both sides, both negotiating parties, are obviously trying to brief the domestic audiences. there are messages that they want to be heard, showing that they are being tough, and standing up to the other side. ultimately what it comes down to is almost all of the deal is done, hundreds of pages of text and individual agreements, it is all there, effectively, apart from a couple of minor things on level playing fields, we think. but the big issue is fish. the two sides, and this is why i think no deal is still really very possible, and people shouldn't be blase about it, simply because the account is always kicked down the road and people think

this is what the european union does and they willjust be a deal at one minutes to midnight on the final day. the split on fish and the gulf in understanding is still so wide that one or both sides is going to have to move quite a lot on fishing rights and access to british waters after the transition period. it is perfectly possible, and sometimes this happens in history, you get a disaster or you get an outcome but no—one intended to happen, almost by accident, because both sides misread each other. at the moment they are genuinely stuck. the british negotiator, lord frost, very close to borisjohnson, issued his warning the other night, saying that the divisions, the stumbling blocks are serious. he was trying to put people on notice that no deal, it's a 50—50 potential outcome.

and what is incredible about this is that fisheries is really such a small part of the european economy. depending on which numbers you read, it is about 0.01% or0.02% of the british economy. economically inconsequential, but let's not be dismissive, because if you are a fisher in the coastal regions, involved in fishing or processing, it matters, it's yourjob. the thing about fishing, people understand territorial waters. they understand the ancient rights of fishing and the property rights associated with that. and so it becomes a tangible thing about taking back control, and that is the mantra brexit was sold on. so while it's inconsequential beyond the small group of people directly affected, it has a much bigger role, an outsized role i would say,

given its place in the economy. so it becomes this political symbol that simply neither side wants to back down on. celia, this opportunity the prime minister has taken to visit india, to be a guest of honour at the independence celebrations in january, you can see the potential importance. but even the foreign secretary said it could take, he doesn't think it will take, but it could take up to ten years to seal the deal. around asia and the pacific region, what are the financial opportunities for a relatively small country geographically, a long way away, like britain? it is quite tricky. i think britain really has a difficult road ahead. let's look at china, britain's third—largest trading partner, china in particular, way before, when borisjohnson

was touting the benefits of brexit, he was talking about signing a trade deal with china. well, now relations with china have plummeted in the past few years. and that is because china has changed its outlook on foreign policy. it's adopted a much more assertive foreign policy. this mantra that you're either with us or against us. we have seen this happen with several countries where china has taken trade and used it to punish many countries that have criticised beijing on human rights. australia, most obviously at the moment. australia now, but we have seen it play out with norway, south korea, canada, it has happened over and over. and now britain is wading into it as well, because we have seen borisjohnson and his colleagues criticising china on its treatment of the uighurs. and the decision on 5g. absolutely. to exclude huawei. when britain is looking at its biggest trading partners

and wondering whether it can sign favourable trading deals, it's going to be very difficult for it to sign one with china, for example. so really, those trading deals which are plum forthe picking, i'm not quite sure if they are there. a century ago we talked about imperial preference, there was a big debate about using the empire and getting favourable trade arrangements with countries like australia and so on. we have a commonwealth now. do the commonwealth nations open up much potential opportunity? did the australians and new zealanders feel well disposed towards the uk? the uk more or less abandoned them when itjoined europe. maybe a little, on the fringes. i have long been a sceptic on the centrality, the idea that trade deals are central to the whole project of brexit. actually quite a bit of progress seems to have been made by the department for international trade, they have rolled over a lot of deals and they seem optimistic

about what comes. britain is largely a domestic economy. it is still one of the most open global economies in the world, but even so, more than 70% of its economy is domestic. the idea that because we can't sign a trade deal with china, which actually, the british certainly, after the experience of covid—19 and everything going on in security terms, there is no way a british government is going to want to sign a trade deal with china. are there other parts of asia where the brits will try and do favourable deals? of course they will, but it's a rolling process. on the united states, it's never been, other than a brief window before the midterms, when the republicans got hammered, there has never really been the likelihood of a big all—encompassing trade deal with the us. you might get smaller sectoral deals and progress, but the us and the uk do loads of trade at the moment now, without an all—encompassing

trade deal, and with lots of sectoral agreements. so there'll be more of that. i think it's a process over the course of 10 or 20 years, there will be a huge adjustment post—covid with people wanting manufacturing to be closer to markets. that's going to take yea rs to resolve. and also the key thing with biden, is there going to be a reorganisation of the west around the democracies trying to resist china, organising around what boris johnson was talking about, the d10 notion. and will security and intelligence co—operation against china and russia, against the autocracies, does it have a trade connotation as well? it might do. jeffrey, a last word from you. i think that talking about australia, new zealand, even canada, they are really marginal, they are small economies. they are not going to

affect the uk economy. the big deal is the one that has to be negotiated with the european union. i think all the focus needs to be on that right now. we have less than a fortnight before everything changes. either we go without a deal or we have a deal. borisjohnson needs a deal. his prime ministership is rocky. the coronavirus vaccine has helped. he needs to show he can put this country on a stable course. thank you all very much. that's it for this week. next week we will look back at the year that's been, and i will be with you in a fortnight to look ahead to the start of 2021. however you are celebrating the festive season, have a good one.

hello, sunday is set to be a day of sunshine and showers, the shower is widespread and heaviest across western areas. the odd flash of lightning and the odd rumble of thunder. further east, not as many showers and were generally the showers and were generally the showers will thin out through the afternoon. more dry weather. another band of heavy downpours will push into northern ireland and the far west of scotland where it will also be pretty windy, gusts of up to 50 mph ora be pretty windy, gusts of up to 50 mph or a touch more in the most exposed bots. temperatures between eight and 11 degrees through sunday night we see the showers and longer spells of rain, in the far north of england and at the same time cloud and rain gathering in the south of england, wales and up into the midlands. turning mile through the night across the south, chilly and

the north, a real split in temperatures on monday, a chilly day in northern areas, much milder further south with some rain at times, turning dry through the coming week but colder in for christmas.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. millions in england and wales are told to stay at home, as tough new coronavirus restrictions come into force. we do not know how long these measures will be placed. it may be for some time, until we can get the vaccine going. similar restrictions will follow in scotland — swathes of the country will be placed under the toughest restrictions from boxing day. last night's tier 4 announcement prompted a rush to london's stations — footage on social media shows large crowds trying to board trains — the transport secretary says extra police officers will be deployed to enforce the rules it makes me want to cry, as i'm sure listening to it will make many of you want to cry. because i know how harsh this sounds.