had the impression that we were just eating up the manual of each other's houses. property values are the cornerstone of the englishmen pice idea of wealth. then taking out bank loans, on the inflated values, then on the basis of the bank loan buying more expensive properties, helping keep up the price of property. i am not an expert economist, but all i can say is i had the feeling that something was rotten but i could not put my finger on what. it is becoming clearer now. >> back in 2005 he wrote a column in "the times of london." "i think it is half past 4:00. for america, 2005 iraq.

think of britain. 1899. ever heavier burdens are being loaded on a mission -- on a nation whose hegemony is being taunted and his sense of world mission may be faltering. overcommits? is the whisper. that is five years ago. >> that was a column of as much about united states as about britain, but i have a very strong sense that we reached the apparent pique of our imperial power quite a long time after a basis in terms of economic strength and in terms of military strength, the basis of that peak had begun to fade. so there is a sort of overhang, in a way, putting britain on the map. the british empire was at its largest in the 1930's. but you could see by then that there was no way that we can maintain all the spirit we were

becoming top-heavy. during a period of reckoning which is really comprised most of the last half of the last century and continues. if it continues, the same thing will be true of the united states. >> what do you do for a living? >> don't quite asks that. i tell people i am a writer and broadcaster. i like to see journalists because people know what the term means. but the truth is, economist is not a journalist. i think a journalist is a reporter. i admire the people that go out with tape recorders and notebooks. that is when i called journalism. anybody can sit back in their office and pen a few thoughts on their opinion. that is what i do. i'm paid to do lots of people do in britain from the top of a

bus. >> how long have you lived in the united kingdom? >> i am really a colonial boy. i was born in south africa. my parents immigrated to south africa. after the second world war. they could not find a home in england. they did not like the apartheid or the racial stuff. they came back with me. they found england to cold after south africa and so they went to southern rhodesia where i was mostly raised. i went to school in swaziland and then my family was posted in jamaica and in spain. at the age of 18, i came back to england as a young man to go to university, and talked with a very british accent, but does not really understand or know the united kingdom very well. i feel completely british because i belong to a generation of home serving was a british -- for whom serving was

an entirely british thing to do. i feel entirely british, but i did not know england very well. i have been learning ever since. >> winded to serve in parliament as a member of the house of commons? >> i was elected, the third youngest, at the age of 29 in 1979. i served for seven years before resigning my seat between elections to take a job in television and doing what you do now. my job bombed to >> why did it -- belong? but not so well, i may say. my job bombed. >> why did bomb? >> in british television, you need to be a little bit of a and all of those people who anybody have heard of it that description. they may be bright, i was bright enough. they may be articulate,i was articulate enough and bright and

tough, but there is something memorable about them. i let my program to an early grave. >> larry king has been on our television screens for years and is about to beat retired, he is about to be replaced by pierce morgan. >> that is what appears is going to do. profile that i just described. he is a sensitive man, but he pretends to be a bit of a loudmouth. he says all kinds of things that sound wondering and careless. people love it. there has to be intelligence behind the apparent stupidity and for a popular tv presenter, that is what you want. people feel they can relate to you, but underneath, you need intelligence. >> what do we expect to see when he comes on the former larry king show next year?

>> it will be next year? he likes people talking about themselves and being a little emotional. i would not: oprah winfrey. -- i would not call it oprah winfrey, but it is that sort of area. he got prime minister to cry a while ago. he asked questions that you are not expecting. he is not afraid to go deeply personal. >> and when you were in the house of commons, what did you learn about that institution? and the houses of parliament are right behind you. what did you learn about that institution? >> i never entirely found my feet. i failed in a lot of jobs in my life and i say that is one of them. one thing about the house of commons is that it is a team game. there is a place for maverick

individuals, one or two, but only one or two. generally speaking, you get along personally and advance your own career and also to achieve things politically and nationally as part of the team. if you do not have the idea of team work, if you do not have the idea of occasionally biting your lips turning a blind eye, then you do not prosper. the other thing that i learned, and i do not think that american politics are all that different, is that it is a mistake to think that politics is about principle an argument. principal is not entirely absent. argument is important.

rationality, when flaunted to obviously and for too long,it will always cause to difficulties, but in the end, in politics in britain, you are representing an interest and there are a group of people whose interest you are representing. if it is the conservative party,you may care because you are a compassionate person. but the poor is not the interest you are representing. you are representing the lower middle class and middle-class as much as the upper classes. never forget that. you can flout them a little bit, you can tweak them a little bit, but in the end, if they feel that you are not their man any longer, then you are done for. that may sound like a cynical view, but there is actually a principled defense of this kind of politics. as long as the house of commons and the house of lords have representatives of all interest

within it, then fine, let them clash. >> let the best argument win. europe-let the best argument win. leave it to other advocates to have the other argument. there is a principal argument for doing politics like that. rather than everybody just bleeding about their own consciences all the time. >> this is a frivolous thing that i want to ask you about. maybe you do not think it is a frivolous. some time ago, you jump in the water out here and swam across. when did you do that? why did you do that? and how old are you?

>> i did that on the 28th of february, 1978. i would have been 27 or 28. it was just down there on the side of the river. there is a building that used to be the local government headquarters of london and i was working for margaret thatcher as her correspondence clark. it was about 10:00 p.m. and i walked towards the station to take a train home. i saw a girl standing there crying and i asked her what was wrong and they said they took their dog out for a walk before bed and it climbed onto the stone parapet and had fallen in the water and because it is high tide, he cannot find the steps underneath the water. it was dark. it was high tide. it was winter. it was waves, it was windy.

this is not courage, it was stupidity. i had no idea the river was so cold. i saw the head of the dog going around in circles. this was not courage, it was stupidity. i did not have any idea that the river was so cold. i nearly drowned. just as my strength began to depart my body, after about three minutes in the water, i have gotten close enough to the steps for a hand to reach out and pull me out. margaret thatcher gave me an award for bravery a couple of months later. without that award and the publicity that surrounded it, i would never have been selected as a conservative candidate for ec. -- for a safe tory defeat. >> but then you swam the river. >> that was at the age of 61. i guess my career was founded on the river. the river has always had a strange allure for me. i have a flat on the river looking across, further down. ever since i moved in 15 years

ago, i said that i was going to swim across that river. you cannot live by the river and a swim to the other side. -- and never have swum to the other side. i kept telling people that i would then it became a joke. one evening, i suddenly thought that now was the night. i waited until what i thought was high tide. i did not realize that high tide is given in greenwich mean time. this was the british summer time. i got the time of the tide it wrong. of course, you want to swim at slack tide when there is no current. swam an hour before the tide turned and a friend came with me. we did not have lifejackets or a boat. there have to be a risk that you would die or it would not be real. we were swept a mile upstream by the thames.

>> you got criticism for that? was that fair criticism? >> completely fair. the harbor master had to write to my newspaper, and he did, saying this is a dangerous and irresponsible thing to do. do not try it at home, and indeed i said the same. but i am pleased that i did it, and i would do it again. >> if you look at great britain from the united states, you cannot figure out what is really going on with all the cuts. you refer to cutbacks as just plain cut. can you explain to us how severe the economic cutbacks are here? >> they have not yet bitten, but they're going to bite and people are not able to see where. to explain how severe the cuts will need to be? -- one has to give an impression of the bloated us and profligacy

of the british government over the past 10 years or so. we have almost doubled our expenditure on our health care, on our national health service. nobody doubts that the service has gotten better, but it has not gone twice as good. we have gone up from about 4% of our gross domestic product to something like 8%. other gdp. i think you americans are closer to the 10%, but we have virtually doubled it. everywhere you go, schools, school buildings, welfare, claims for benefit, which is to say the way the state helps you when you are unemployed have soared in capacity benefit, where you say that you are unable to work due to backache or whatever it may be. it may be serious but it may not, and the non-serious, the malingering claims, i think have grown. expenditures have grown up by

five%, up 10%, 15%, but 40%, 50%, 60%. the proportion spent by the state on health has climbed around 50 -- brown to about 50%. these things have got to be cut. >> on health care, if you live here, how much of your check do you pay to health care every month? >> i do not know because nobody tells you. it is part of the treasury's general coffers raced through taxation. -- raised through taxation, and the most energetic trout breeding -- waiting by the medical profession. >> let me ask you about the taxes. as a taxpayer, where do you start? we hear about this thing called vat, and we do not have it.

there is no national sales tax. explain the vat. >> we do not have a state system in the way that you do, so we do not really have smaller units of government within the overall state that is capable of organizing their own budgets. almost all of the expenditure is raised by the central state and spent by the central state. a value added tax, it is a mega- sales tax. it is value added so that each individual along the chain, from the production of an item to the final sale of an item pays tax on the proportion of value that has been added while it was in their hands. from the point of view of the ordinary citizen, all you know is that the price, when quoted, you add 17.5%.

although most retailers would at that automatically. now that is going up to 20% very soon in deep. >> so everything will have it 20% tax? >> everything except food, children's clothing, newspapers, magazines, charities, there are a few exempted items. >> to you have a property tax? >> not really. we have transfers of property, so whenever you transfer of property, you pay a portion. -- you pay a proportion of that. that is at the lower percentages of a tax. we have domestic rates. it used to be called domestic rates coming out is called a council tax. this is for your local authority, your town hall or whatever. you pay a tax according to the value of your property. but all these are very small

compared to the big one, the vat. >> and go to the council tax. what percentage of your property do you pay per year? >> i think that i pay about 1,500 pounds a year. i have a high-valued property. >> semin like $2,500 -- >> something like $2,500? >> $2,500. on a property that is $2 million, it is not enormous. >> in the united states, you pay somewhere near $15,000 for something like that. what other types of tax? how much of this will go up beside your vat tax? >> the other big ones are excise taxes on tobacco, alcohol and fuel. we pay a huge amount of tax on fuel. i think more than half the cost of a gallon or a teacher is tax.

-- or a liter of fuel is now the tax. >> a leader is three or four liter to a gallon? how much is a liter of gas here? >> it is more than two pounds. nearly $4 a liter. >> just for a liter. our gas was about three or $4 a gallon. yours is more expensive? >> the governor -- the government raises a huge amount of revenue. >> the greatest part of a bottle of wine is the excise duty. those taxes are causing difficulty for the government. on the other side of the english channel in the european union, they do not pay anything like that amount of tax on alcohol or tobacco. we are all in this together and people are getting onto the ferry and crossing the channel with trucks and coming back

loaded with beer and cigarettes. the exchequer is being deprived. of quite a lot of revenue. so there is a sort of automatic balancing, leveling, equalizing of taxation is going on across the european union caused by the fact that if one country charges more tax, people will go to the other country to get it. >> in january, we will have a republican house of representatives and a democratic senate. and a democrat in the white house. david cameron is the prime minister and he has proposed all of these cuts. will you automatically get these cuts? in the united states, you're not sure until congress passes it. >> pretty automatically. people who follow british politics may think that they are broadly to terrible, the british -- broadly comparable,

the british and of the united states. your president is like our prime minister in that you have your parliament and we have to of hours. our prime minister has more power. the house of lords has very limited power. it has no power over anything that raises money. it has no power in the revenue department. they only have the power to delay. they can keep sending bills back that it does not like until a year has passed. and then the thing will go through anyway. the house of lords is not democratically elected, it is appointed. there are plans to reform that. whether that will come about, nobody knows. it has no democratic legitimacy. it has expertise. so it has not been set up to become a soda speak, in

opposition to the house of commons. when the british look across your system, it looks like you have two arms of government to oppose each other. and to slow the possibilities of making any big change fast. >> if our president selects the before congress and has to be approved. hear, who decided who would be the chancellor of the exchequer? >> the prime minister. it would not have mattered if the whole of the conservative party and the nation were against it, the prime minister appoints his cabinet. >> you have a coalition government for the first time since when? >> there was a coalition government in the 1930's of a kind. then of course, during the second world war. during the 1970's, we had an arrangement between parties.

they have been weak kneed things. or a government in trouble woods needing to be propped up by another party. no one has any real experience with a willing coalition between to quite strong parties, when double it -- two quite strong parties, when joined together, when their forces are joined, they more or less agree with each other on policy. this is a healthy coalition. it has within itself the seeds ofthey can not only carry on for five years, but also the next election. >> i am a member of the conservative party. i stand for what? can you delineate between the conservatives and liberals and

the labor party? >> if you were to draw a continuous spectrum from what you might call the left to the right, the conservative party tends to occupy the right hand third of that spectrum although they are extremists. -- there are extremists to the right that are not in the conservative party. the liberal party is in the middle third -- that would be wrong. there are some level will mps. -- there are some liberal mp's to the right of the conservatives. they are liberal in the old sense of the word. liberal means belief in individual freedom, a belief in

individual liberty. >> like a libertarian? >> you can be a libertarian, but there are low tax liberals as well. belief in freedom. >> let's say that you have the correct or for the afghan war. -- the iraq war, or the afghan war. if you're conservative, what is your position? >> if you are a conservative, it ranges from being against the war all along to being a really enthusiastic person in favor of it. this would be the characterization of most conservatives. you have the feeling that these are rather typical policy adventures where we have the duty to support the united states even if we had doubts. liberals are almost all against both wars. >> we saw tony blair as the head of the labor party.

what is the labor party position on the war? >> they got themselves in government supporting the americans. tony blair tended to support the americans because he was sure it was the right thing to do. he wants to do it even if he was on his own, if he had the troops. the rest of the labor party was not persuaded of that. most of them took the view britain as an engine partner of -- as an agent partner the united states, has to support united states. >> if you are a conservative member of parliament, where you stand on the vat tax. do you want to increase it from 17.5% to 20%? >> they are in favor of the vat. it is a regressive form of taxation, and that it hits the poor and rich almost as hard. tories do not like capital gains

taxes because they are a business minded party. they are not that keen on income tax because they represent a lot of people that pay income tax. value-added tax is seen as a verifiable way -- as a very reliable way of paying what margaret thatcher -- without hitting when margaret thatcher called "are people." >> what about the liberal party members? are they for the vat tax? >> they have been for and against it at different times. >> what about the labor party? >> anybody that is in government or wants to be in government has to have a sneaking regard for the vat tax because it is an easy way of raising money and is a very difficult tax to avoid. >> if you live here, when will all of these new cuts come along and if they do come along, when will we see change if you live here? >> generally speaking, new money will not be allocated to people who were expecting it or think that they wanted. the cuts will bite with

progressive ferocity. not immediately. we are not going to see cancellation of a great many huge government projects. the government is trying to keep infrastructure reasonably preserved from the cuts. what we're going to see from the health service, the coalition has said that there will be no cuts to health care. internal inflation within any health system is always higher than retail price inflation nationally. the health service is going to be there. -- the health service is going to be crimped. waiting lists may get a little longer. education, which was supposed to be protected, already a new school building program has had to be canceled. the biggest one will be local

governments that is to say all the town halls and the county council's all across the country. they rely on most of their income from central government. this is going to be considerably diminished. they will have to lose a lot of their staff, which they will do through natural wastage. >> this country of 60 million people, 500,000 public jobs will be eliminated? >> yes. it is important to point out that half a million people are going to be sacked tomorrow. over a space of about four or five years, the payroll will be reduced by half a million. it will be done by not hiring new people and old people retire.

there will be cases where people will have to be made redundant. the hope is that the private sector will take up the slack. it may be an optimist koop, who -- an optimistic hope, who knows? >> here is a paragraph from a column that you wrote. you say that it was at miami airport on august 17, 2004, as i stood musing for two hours in the alien's queue for fingerprints. what does that mean? where were you? >> i was traveling from europe to south america. the common way to go is using one of the american airlines to miami and changing in miami. i understand that the situation has improved. so i must not reduce the miami airport authority. every time i have tried to use

that airport, it has been extremely difficult. most airports across the world, immigration. you wait in a transit lounge, you get onto the next plane. in miami, you have to go through the whole thing. you have to formally enter the united states and half an hour later, leave the united states. horrendous. this is something people from europe do often notice on the whole. the american service culture is admired in europe as being a culture where the customer is well treated. people say have a nice day, they smile at you, they ask you if you like another coca-cola or whatever. but this is a much more russian type of culture that appears to apply. people are quite severe and quite rude to the public and quite bossy. the insolence of office does seem to creep into u.s.

officialdom in a way it does not in your consumer culture. the consumer culture is held up to the world as good customer service. >> can you give me an example of where you see the public officials being rude to the american people? >> a woman that i was travelling with waited in queue for about three-quarters of an hour. that was the waiting time. in order to step over a line, walked up to a desk, and have an interview with an immigration officer. she jumped the gun and move forward across the line before it was her turn, thus standing in the prohibited zone between the line and the officer's desk. the officer, another woman, shouted at her to get back and then told her to go to the back of the queue and start again as a punishment for having stepped over the line. you would never get that in britain. you do not get officials handing out summary justice and punishments to people in queue.

>> what is happening with television here and the bbc? one of the things that seems to be under way is the bbc moving from london up to manchester. that is costing $1 billion and maybe more than $1 billion. then you hear about firings coming along, cuts made to the bbc and changes to pay for the world service. bring us up-to-date on that. >> there are trying to devolve the bbc from too heavy a concentration on london and that has been going on for about 40 years. this is one of the boldest moves, but it is part of the philosophy that the corporation has adopted from the start. it needs to be the british broadcasting corporation. it should not be the london broadcasting corporation. i present a program that is produced from bristol.

>> where is crystal? >> it is about 150 kilometers to two hundred kilometers to the west of london. i never go to bristol. i interview them in london, but it is produced in bristol. unfortunately, and their arguments to be made for doing this, if you're going to have a state broadcasting corporation, let it spread itself widely around the state. there are times when the bbc is under severe pressure. they will not be able to increase the license fee. >> how much does the average brit pay for a television license a year? >> i have forgotten, but it was about 150 pounds to 250 pounds.

>> about two hundred $50? -- about $275? >> yes. i think it is more than that now. for the poor people, it is bad. if the bbc is under a lot of pressure financially, they are also under a lot of political pressure. salaries at the top of the corporation have gone completely crazy. the director general gets nearly 500,000 pounds which is approaching approaching $750 million a year. they sign contracts that appear to be absolutely lunar.

in their financial reach. >> how about your on-air people? in the united states, one of our anchors makes $15 million a year. is there anything like that at the bbc? >> if you are a big name, jonathan ross is one of our big names. there was a lot of fuss about how much he was being paid. if you are a big name, you do really well. the others are not that that well-paid. this has unfortunately coincided with a squeeze on the corporation's revenue. it is extremely ambitious, andit is an expensive plan to devolve the corporation. i would not like to be director general of the bbc. >> i read that several people quit the bbc when they announced the move. i guess the move has been known for a couple of years, but they

announced the move to manchester. a sports announcer and others just quit. manchester. how extensive is that? >> it is quite extensive. some people will commute by train. >> how long does it take? >> it takes about 2 1/4 hours. it is a tilting train that tilts when it goes around corners. to an american audience, one needs to explain because you have a larger country. you do not have one huge center of gravity. a lot of british people think this about america. they think that new york is the united states as london is to the united kingdom. not so.

i get in trouble if this is being broadcast in the united kingdom. a lot of the tile that there is, -- a lot of the talent that there is, culturally, socially, it gravitates to london. almost every big corporation would feel the need to have its headquarters in london. the civil service is in london. the legislature is in london. we are not a very big country and we are hugely centralized country. for the better part of a century, labor of the government to try to devolve talent across the regions. but you're kind of kicking against gravity all the time. >> for years, the bbc world service which can be heard all across the united states was headed by the office here in great britain. i understand that it is supposed to be funded by the bbc itself. is that true? what impact will that have? >> i remember when the world service was funded by the bbc and then it was decided that it

would be funded by the foreign office instead. by the government of the day. everyone thought this would be a disaster for the world service. it with his become an arm of british foreign policy and they would starve it of money and try to direct its operation. that did not happen. it has prospered under the wing of the foreign office. i do not see why it should not prosper under the wing of the bbc. the bbc has much bigger global reach, not in terms of the world service, but in terms of other activities and its marketing and its books and its videos. i think that the bbc is a conscious of the world. -- is perfectly conscious of the importance of the world and the world market. >> out independent is bbc and -- how independent is the bbc and the fact that it gets its

money from the government. has that worked in your opinion? >> if i was arguing before an american audience, i would say that it is extraordinary how independent the bbc is. do not think that this is a state broadcasting corporation like the russian one. or, to some degree, radio liberty. it is not. it is really independent. it does what it likes and often falls out of favor with government and it criticizes government all the time. if i am arguing with a british audience, we are a bit smug about the bbc. we say the bbc is fantastic, completely independent. i would argue that it has got a pretty good degree of independence, but if you are the state broadcasting corporation, you darn well are the state broadcasting corporation. there are things that you do not do. there are things that you do not say. there are programs that you do not make. there is a sense of propriety about the corporation, andthis

does not apply to the leaner rivals that the bbc competes with. >> you were a conservative member of parliament. are you still a conservative? what would you define your politics to be today? what you feel strongest about? >> i am still completely and deeply conservative. i was a conservative as a student, as an undergraduate. i have never wavered. i am a conservative partly because i agree with many of the aims of the computer service party -- of the conservative party, and partly because i hate socialism. i hate collectivism. i saw what a creeping collectivism was beginning to do to the united kingdom and any party that is going to resist the collective approach to human

culture and autonomy is gore to be my party. i have always been a liberal conservative. i have always believed in a degree of compassion for the poor. i have always believed in individual liberty, which some of the right are a bit chary about. except when the liberties coincide with their own tastes. so i like the coalition between the conservative party and the liberal democrats. i think it has a civilized influence on the conservative party and i think it has a growing up influence on liberal democrats. now they have to think about where the money is coming from. i think that the role and strength and the potential schilling of the culture of the state depends on how much money it has to spend and how much money it gets from the taxpayer. the battle to push back the

frontiers of the state in the -- and the battle to push back the amount of money battles to push back the amount of money that the state is claiming from the individual i think is the absolutely central battle in the first half of the 20th century. and leave the coalition is on the right side in that battle. i often say we when i should say they. >> have you ever talk about the percentage of your income that goes to tax? >> yes. i have not made a total calculation. i do not need to. it is something approaching 60% of my income -- it would be in something more like 70% if you take the excise duties, the income tax, the capital gains tax and another one that we have not even mentioned called national insurance. that is supposed to be payment to the welfare state pension system, that has become an

adjunct to income tax now. i reckon that for every 100 pounds that i earn, i would be lucky if i get to spend more than 40 pounds and it may even be less than that. >> how do people make it here with that kind of tax? >> well, i suppose incomes are higher because they are not worth as much after tax. people that get benched for people near the bottom and near the top. the lower middle classes try to survive on a joint income of 40,000 pounds. which is way above the national average. and that $65,000. >> $65,000, and they pay 30,000 pounds of that back. >> if you get sick, you can go into any hospital and get treated? >> that is true.

you will not pay for health care for your education. for everything else, you pay. >> you have been openly gay and a member of the conservative wing of politics in this country. if you were in the united states, that might not be easy. why have you been so open about it? >> it might not be easy, but on the other hand, you could find a range of people on the right in america to basically give exactly the same story that i am giving which is to believe in homosexual law reform and believe that gay people are equal citizens and that relationships between people of the same sex are not anti- social, dangerous, or personally damaging. is not inconsistent with being a conservative, with being a fiscal conservative,they believe

in a small state. the state should not travel over people's private lives. believing in individual freedom of conscience, freedom of speech. these are things that conservatives ought to be able to support. dr. andrew sullivan in the united states and you will get the same story from him that you will for me. millions of other conservatives. >> how long have you been with his partner? >> i have been with my partner -- we met and grew closer about 15 years ago. we got a civil partnership ceremony about four years ago when those things became available. >> you say that ageism has settled in. you have been admitting to getting older. what do you think of that? >> a lot of older gentleman say that you are as old as you feel. i am not afraid of old age, but i do not like old age. i do not -- i am not afraid of the end of the summer holidays, but i do not like the end of the

summer holidays. afraid of death, i am not at all afraid of pain, but i do not want to die. i love life. i want to go on forever. i want to be mentally sharp forever. it happens to all of us at different ages. i know that i am not as sharp in my brain as i used to be. i find myself sometimes struggling to keep a with very quick fire conversations for the tiny things explained to me more carefully. i forget words, phrases, as everybody does. i can see that we are all degenerating all through our lives, but it begins to accelerate after 60 and i do not like it. i really do not like it. >> and your partner is considerably younger. >> he is about 20 years younger than me. i think actually won, not just

in civil partnerships and marriage, one has a very much younger than one's self so that they can have another partner and another life later. the cruel thing is to marry someone 10 years younger than yourself. then it will be too late. >> does he write? >> he writes the occasional editorial. when he writes the editorial, he writes according to the papers policy. he writes a column in which he raises the standard for the coalition. he is one of the few guardian columnist. who supports the coalition. >> why would he support the coalition? >> he is a little democrat. -- he used to be a liberal democrat. i do not think he belongs to any party, now. he is moving to the right of me

in his own opinion. but that does not stop you working at "the guardian." in some ways, is more fun to be out of kilter with the majority view at your newspaper. you need voices that will understand, are sympathetic to, and will explain the coalition. >> you mentioned education. he said that you do not pay for education here. i heard on the radio the other day that students were demonstrating on the government's increasing the cost of university. if you go to a college -- one of the hard things we have trouble understanding,private education, here, is public and public education is private? >> we have endless confusion over this. over this use of language. public school in britain --in

the old days, on the whole, rich people would have their children educated by a tutor. quite a lot of rich people and middle-class people decided to set up schools where you pay. the recall public schools. -- they were called public schools. the fact that they were paid did not make them not public schools. then, much later, in the 19th century, toward the end of the 19th century, free state education was set up. we ended up with schools call public schools which are actually private and state schools which are free. >> i heard a young lady on the radio talking to a liberal democrat who was a member of the coalition and she was so unhappy. she kept saying that you lied to me. i voted for you because you said you would not touch our cost of education and now you are upping the cost of

education. explain why she was so upset. >> she was upset about tuition fees. you americans will not find anything remotely surprising in the idea that the university might charge students a fee. over the course of university. we have not had that in the past in britain. it has all been paid for by the government. the labor government, having promised that it would not introduce tuition fees, did, but limited them to $4,500 a year. they brought in a system of loans, where students could get a loan from the government if they did not have the money to pay those fees and the money would be payable back at a zero rate of interest. what this government is now doing is raising the ceiling to $25,000 or more.

that universities can charge for tuition fees. they are slightly changing the loan system so that after you have left the university, the more you can turn your degree into money, the more you get paid, the more you pay back. the liberal democrats, because they are a party that does very well in university terms have been against this and they were unwise enough and realized that it was a mistake and they were unwilling enough to get all of their candidates to sign a pledge saying that liberal democrats would never raise tuition fees. now, they are part of a tuition fees. gents the anchor. -- hence the anger.

>> there are 650 something members in parliament? >> the conservative party is the majority. that would be about 350 or 340 or something like that. in the liberal democrats, add another 80 to that and they get the overall majority. >> we are about over-out of -- we are about time. -- we are about out of time. if someone wants to read the body of information that you what is the easiest way to get it? >> i have started an archive of my work, but a lot of it is copyrighted. to "the times" newspaper. a great bit of my -- i think you have to pay. -- to "the times" and "the

spectator" magazine. there are better reasons for scaling the wall of news international. >> you can go in there and find most of your stuff. >> i write a weekly diary and a column every saturday. >> the last question or so, what do you think is in store for this country over the next five to 10 years. >> i slightly misinformed you when i gave you the number of conservatives which is closer to 319 or 320. they do not have a majority. the first question is, can the conservatives and the liberal democratic coalition come together until the next general election which they say they will have an 2015. i think that it can. the arithmetic is all there. i do not think you will see a weak government.

nevertheless, everything depends on the economy. the happiness of the coalition goes to the economy. if the economy goes flat, the liberal democrats will still -- will feel like they have been drawn into a much unfortunate experiment. if the economy crashes, whoever is the opposition will win the next election. if the economy goes well, people will think the coalition for making the cuts and making us leaner and healthier. they will crews back to an easy victory at the next election. >> what is your guess about the future? are you optimistic? >> i am guardedly optimistic. unless the world economy crashes, in which we would all be dragged down, i think the british economy is in good hands. i will see a low growth for the next three or four years but i expect to see the cuts not hurting quite as much as everybody thought.

i expect people to feel in four years' time thatthese are changes that have to be made and we need to approach the next decade in a more fighting condition. >> matthew parris, thank you very much. >> it has been a pleasure. >> for a dvd copy of this program call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available as as c-span podcasts.

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c-span network. now available in more than 100 million homes. created by cable, provided as a public service.>> this morning,s talked about the proposed tax deal and the president's opposition to it. then devon chaffee from human rights first talks about barring the use of funding to transfer gtmo detainees. later, john gannon from the financial industry regulatory authority detailing a state-by- state survey of financial literacy. "washington journal" is next. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010] host: the senate will hold a key test vote on the tax-cut deal. many democrats saying over the