time actioner it out here we're going underground three years to the day alleged spy and u.k. protected diplomat dozens of iraq cliff was arrested attack run airports coming out of the show as nato turns seventy is it time for it to be retired we ask a former top nato official and the pinochet of ukraine after losing the first round of elections will the cia backed petro poroshenko use military action against russia to stay in power plus while brags that threatens to topple dres i'm a absolute poverty it's fourteen million to four point one million children in the fifth wealthiest nation on earth dollars more coming up in today's going underground or first to more of the north atlantic treaty organization turn seventy one people for nine hundred forty nine. between now luxembourg. the united kingdom norway denmark it will lead portugal iceland canada and the

united states. to keep within the letter and spirit of the united nations charter yes nato and the un charter but if one discounts this information propaganda and the sabotage of workers movements nato is first a military action didn't start until after the fall of the berlin wall and they violated that un charter his non-drug ski using work praised by u.s. authorities to deconstruct the nato with ology of the european war in yugoslavia he says the bombing of serbia was not undertaken out of concern for the plight of the customer of maintenance jobs he goes on to allege may join yugoslavia was a neo liberal design even the much criticized mainstream media at the time tried to explain to nato publics that nato was more important than the un in a sense the un is sidelined in all of this so nato bombed without u.n. authorization it even went on to bomb china's embassy in yugoslavia leading to accusations that nato has near liberal desire. we're now attacking

a developing world on the rise splits in nato emerge after action in afghanistan many afghans are angry about the latest killing of civilians by u.s. troops and after gaddafi threatened nato near liberalism with the creation of an african petro currency threaten the dollar libya it has been ten days since mr obama ordered u.s. forces into combat in libya. nearly two hundred tomahawk cruise missiles more beijing and moscow angrily denounced nato which are nial eight of africa's richest by capita country catalyzing the worst refugee crisis since world war two in europe by the time america first donald trump was president nature was under attack from washington let alone london the wider issue is that the e.u. has got very close to nato nato has been pushing very hard to expand eastwards inevitably russia is going to get very nervous if nato sets up places all around its borders and with that man odds on favorite to be the next british prime

minister and nato's days numbered the head of the alliance is seventieth anniversary joining me now is michael stopford who used to be a nato deputy assistant secretary general he was also washington director of the u.n. and today he is now managing director of international consulting firm oxford analytical michael welcome to going underground so you don't have to be trump yesterday with stoltenberg to ask what exactly tomorrow we celebrating when they turn seventy anniversaries a strange things i don't know whether one would say celebrating but at least taking stock about thinking what the alliance is all about i was in charge of communications at nato when the we had the sixtieth anniversary and it was of course a different time and i must say that relations between for example russia and the alliance were a lot better and more hopeful at that time because some would be surprised to realize that it may have started maybe there was no military bombardment of another country until kind of the berlin wall fell the idea is that stop. words of nato

are about bringing together countries for democracy individual rights and the rule of law so it's as much values based as a military alliance i'd say you mentioned law. you know that most of the world has criticised me through. doing things against the law there was no un security council council resolution for the yugoslav bombing which is their first aerial bombardment campaign back in one thousand ninety one i know before you having to do communications with the organization i was with the un actually i don't know whether that's that's right i mean the relationship between the un and nato at that time were very close and it was kind of an introductory to integrated campaign if you would it was it legal. i don't know about that i mean i think one would have to go back and discuss exactly how that worked together and i must say that when i think of my un. one of the problems with the un is you know that it lacked a lot of in forstmann procedures which in principle are available to nato ok well i

might go back to law in a secular you mention the word security which is a word used again and again in britain a lunar five hundred thousand dead from cancer axis cancer deaths because of the bankers grace is going to learn through ten thousand suicides regionals like so i mean isn't the real danger in the outside powers or anyone i guess what you're talking about there really is expenditure on defense and expenditure on important domestic pressing issues i mean is you know president trump is trying to get up to people to contribute up to two percent of their budgets well i think they have in the u.k. but in most other countries they've not two percent we're not talking you know huge amount of the national budget of course if your prime minister you want to look after people's internal security you want to look after. and health care and i guess that for a lot of people defense comes fairly low on their list of priorities so it is indeed a bit of a tradeoff between how you how you manage national expenditures. but then when it

comes to what you're saying about why countries may not be coming to the two percent you don't think it's because it's perceived even by nato nations to be an organization that acts outside the law no i don't think that i think it's the lady in libya came later obviously i mean why do people vote in certain ways it's quite true that you know with all this talk about immigration and refugees that seems to be having a political impact all over all over west or west hollywood because of libya yeah exactly particularly we have nato in the libya campaign so it was it just in between is really everything that was after but when i was at the sixtieth anniversary we certainly had to make clear to people why it was worthwhile belonging to this organization because it was not their top priority so we had to say you take peace and security for granted until it doesn't exist anymore but it's not that different from the e.u. not that different from and from the u.n. in cetera ok but it always is the u.n. abides by the law because if i were i would it breaks the law of rule international

whereas libya there was no u.n. security council resolution that mandated major remembers to bomb and destroy africa's riches but capital nation if you want have discussion on international law i mean as you know international laws such as it is is is a general assembly resolutions and then they may or may not be enforced by the security council and they may or may not go to the international court of justice the problem with international law as a whole is that it lacks any because on this program quite a bit about so nato one of the same time perceiving the threat to come from russia and china has a situation where germany is pursuing nordstrom to which donald trump has said it shouldn't because it endangered security italy is recognizing built in the road from china. these the dangers is italy and germany endangering nato by making alliances with the countries that own that you know you're insulting bug countries

perceive his enemy i don't think you put is black and white and i said i would like to talk enemies and i'm certainly in favor and i was in my time and nato in favor of dialogue and cooperation including with no member countries not like to use the word enemies we worked very closely with russia on anti-terrorist programs programs then in terms of nato russia council for example i mean i was active the nato russia council of course it's been pretty much on ice for a few years the partnership for peace etc and of course and lots of your writing has not put it in that cove right racial context but then things have changed so dramatically since you were there at nato ukraine this cripple incident here i mean now we have a defense secretary actively saying things about russia going away and of course talking about the lethality of weaponry i would not say that this is you know deft definitively. a sort of ultimately confrontational situation there are many i

was always in favor of dialogue i mean you can say that by mean some people might have criticized me for being naive or overoptimistic or whatever but we had some really good relationships including with russia on some really key programs and of course you know with this discussion about the i.n.f. treaty not being you know continued but the start treaty is coming up again for discussion in a year or two i mean these are issues that are far too important to let sort of everything be viewed for a confrontational prism i think things are more in a state of flux than being definitively at a kind of very negative point do you think of the trump election in the first place and some of the words coming out of washington terrified the men in brussels i mean president trump is known for speaking his mind in no uncertain terms right and you get some very strong remarks and cetera what i recall from. when he came to nato the first time was his big push about expenditures and saying it isn't right that the u.s.

should bad this amount whereas nobody else is coming up to that two percent only for four or five countries and i think that secretarial stoltenberg congratulated him on putting pressure on people to up their security expenditures and therefore contributions to nato i don't believe that since that time president trump has been particularly critical of nato if you go back to the days of sort of eyes and heart and truman when nato was founded they had very different views on the how this logic relationship going to develop maybe reading eisenhower and saying yeah this military industrial complex is the last thing well we need ok the military does do this or we. have i totally agree the military industrial complex has a lot to answer for because it has to be said that obviously we have the odds on favorite to be prime minister in this country jerry corbett a long time critic who's called previously only abolition of nato i think now labor policy is not to not to say that as i said it's a lead considering. its position reserving nato spanish qualities since the

financial crisis we've had a whole religion was being difference and and political approaches to security and it depends of course a little bit if you're on the more on the left side on the right side but i mean if you're talking about mr corbett and his positions i mean what about his position the e.u. how is that evolving people's positions evolve and change depending on what they see as the need at the current time and again you can also view nato in different ways but as you view it is a foundation that helps to keep the peace after all there's been no what peace exactly. the afghanistan the war continues to this day libya is a disaster in ruins major lost in syria obviously the nato originally somehow or other for all those years of the cold war. we succeeded in not having anything worse than the cold war put it like that and that's not thanks to nato necessarily it's a. also thanks to great russian leaders and i mean i know that's not so popular to mention these names on our t.v. but i mean i'm sure that mr gorbachev is as much to be to be credited and praised

for avoiding a nasty end to the cold war as anybody on the nato side but somehow or other this did succeed and it's not a view shared by many russians the mechanisms in place managed to avoid a nuclear confrontation which certainly when i was in the un in the night and early one nine hundred eighty s. and we were seriously afraid of that i remember writing speeches against confrontation with the secretary general at the time michael steele for thank you thank you after the break with us back to petro poroshenko defeated in the first round of ukrainian elections we investigate allegations of increase. with ukraine's secret service on this week's biggest stories of.

seem wrong wrong just don't call. me. yet to seep out. and it. equals betrayal. when something find themselves worlds apart we look for common ground. welcome back joins me now to go through some of the week's top stories as lecturer in practical sociology at middlesex university in rubble of naga dr lisa mckenzie

lisa thanks for going back on me and we don't for ages so the media obsession with bricks suddenly rising the break up of a big order does b.w.c. k.b. of. that's a young the big thing bricks that you've chosen something from the mirror what we're actually chose in the big story d.w. child poverty figures is a national standard all reaches four point one million so we've now got four point one million children living in poverty in this country not only child poverty what we found out this week from the report was we've got increase in private pension a property particularly women we see in the rise of pension aged women living in obsolete poverty again homelessness is rising child poverty is rising not only that the same time the mortality rate for working class people is dropping is plummeted now this is the story or the age of. you know this becoming mores

where we do say to you you know this is a relative poverty it's only three point seven million in absolute poverty which i suppose of the cave like existed at that is the serious point they would make that it's only that and of course labor destroyed the economy yeah for now people are in employment but obviously wages of dobbin rising no one's buying anymore nobody is buying that anymore we cannot have this you know ten years ago this happened this is up salut lies at the door of a stereotypic it's absolutely lies at the door of nick clegg and david cameron most of your charity was kicked off by the labor party obviously way was the acceleration of austerity and of the way that the courts of the courts of absolutely. they fell on the poorest people and then at the same time we've got these big organizations and companies moving in sort of vulture like into those

communities and i'll name some of the mamas. sports direct boohoo we all know them and this is historically not as napoleonic or the risk in this going to wage stagnation is the figure in westminster this did make something of a hit i don't know whether it was in yeah well growth or tower cancer causing chemicals and all the toxins found on balconies an inside of place i mean this the worst place in britain was i mean it's not surprising really i mean anyone that comports who went to together would say that if the heat that came out of this building and the plastics that were involved in and the materials that were involved were melting and we all saw that then of course there's going to be toxins we're a close element here in the sense that this isn't a very rich port of town is the poorest area one of the batteries in europe but they're one of the richest bar again in the world would the rich in houses down the

road from here be caring about cancer causing chemicals well you would even they would address that in the know or you would think so wouldn't you i mean you know i mean we go back or hundred years in. and when we are airborne diseases you know the rich start to move out of london and who knows what's going to happen in another five ten years they're going to this from the say well they will be soon developers accused of segregating children at london prater and right where do we even start i did a year long picket outside what we called the poor dogs in east a few years ago something similar was how and explain what poor do is they they are development where there are sort two types of tenants is one part and it's like family like this. what this vigil but this is for children we're taking this a step further the problem is is the people that live all the people have paid for

their own houses or pay privately for their rent don't always want to live side by side in cheek by jowl with people who live in social housing so developers are coming up with all kinds of schemes and sort of little quirks to make sure that the . private tenants don't have to come in contact with the social tenants and now what we're seeing is a further development with this because this is happening to children so the children a demographic time bomb that all these generations of children will grow up knowing they're less than yeah the children of the rich yeah i mean it undoubtedly this is going to have a psychological effect on children of course if you are told that you can't go to this place you have no right to be a not place because you are not the same as though you know that is absolutely apartheid these sorts of developments are not just over the river they are all of europe the european union in fact property interests crucial to the european yeah you've written in this school of economics paper here about what we should all give

you are you focusing on bricks rather than the processes down the road at westminster march to stop march to safer and. the other remain as all the people who wanted a second river and here i wrote this. they remain march because what i want them to do is i want them to start to think about not the details of bricks and what's going to happen and what does the buck stop mean and you know will their kids be able to go on an erasmus trip what i want them to think about is where how we got here in the first place will you ask the question why is it that we didn't see a million people on the streets. just yet. another issue in this case i suppose because it's very easy and us and i don't always blame the people. martin that when we live in a very individualized society where we've created individuals if you are living in

poverty or if your children are living in poverty or if you have no house then or if your housing is too expensive and you get kicked out of it in an individualized society that shortfall what they're not what they're doing here in their marches they're collectively thinking about what they don't want which is bracks it but they're not collectively thinking about the way that they would like britain so look we need to accept the the parliamentary system is absolutely broken the party political system is absolutely broken parliamentarians that we've got are not fit for purpose the parliament is not fit for purpose it's literally dropping down. and actually we've got we could have a more interest in at this point in british history and british politics we could actually have a much more interesting debate about what we want to be as a country and people dr lisa mckenzie thank you well it's no joke over in ukraine comedian volodymyr selenski has beaten us back to petro poroshenko at the first

round of ukrainian elections but after allegations of increased cia involvement on the ground in ukraine will either candidate be independent joining me now is the sylvia chan lee professor of peace studies or nonviolence of rhode island former soviet union election monitor nicholai and petro thanks so much to live for coming on so some we know from leaked obama administration officials are who is engineered by washington in the ukraine take it up to twenty nineteen how on earth is a comedian actor and it up looking like he's going to lead europe's largest nation it seems to be rejection overall rejection of the political system and the political elite in ukraine he has the added advantage of running not as him self but as his character you know very popular television serial called. servant of the people where he gets to mark everyone and to make himself look good at the same time yet referring to that comedy series the character he portrays

is quite clear in his disdain for the international monetary fund you've written about a pinochet candidate for washington. as as far shanker is is he the antidote to a pinochet character someone who collaborated with the i.m.f. in ukraine we will have to see the ukraine is in a bind its indebtedness will have to be paid out over the next twenty years and to the more prosperous ukraine is the more it will have to pay to the people who have and institutions that have lended it money. the more us birth it is the more it has to pay. that's right because it's basically the system the repayment schedule involves our person

a group higher percentage of the g.d.p. as the g.d.p. rises until the end of french core but i thought you said the m.f. was changing not as much as some people would like i guess joe biden is in the news in the united states for his twenty twenty attempt at beating donald trump and his detractors are centered on the fact that there is now video evidence of him literally dragging manipulate ukraine with u.s. taxpayer dollars we have victoria nuland admission of five billion dollars of u.s. taxpayer money going to propaganda the soros company international renee's was foundation hundred eighty million dollars from one nine hundred ninety in those days what is the extent of u.s. manipulation of what's going on in ukraine today most political analysts in ukraine assume it is extensive. and that only it's probably exaggerated and i see little interest the united states would have

little interest in arguing that it is not that influential because the very hint that this or that candidate has the alleged support of the united states is a nuff to sway. dissuade how people vote how people respond so there's little incentive to deny this although perhaps the war in the east could be used by a candidate for electoral advantage we don't have much news really from dawn better than the easter thing is for sanko will try and use the threat from russia more vociferously ahead of april twenty first i don't think he can be much more will sit for us than he has been his position on the bus region is very clear namely that there has to be

a military victory against russia or or something that can be sold effectively as a as a defeat of russia. in order to. retrieve a reabsorb those regions and there should and there will be no need to go she ations as he puts it on on their knees with ukrainians on their knees. zielinski has said that he by contrast is willing to work with anyone and is willing to negotiate for peace in the bus so those are rather starkly different approaches to the east and to russia we know have a purported evidence from the former the whinging in secret service an operative on the other hand be a vessel. of claiming the cia to plant sabotage in eastern ukraine do you

think the united states is is there or let alone the i.m.f. obviously. and that it has to be very very careful so it's not visible in kiev or a little known in the donbass or other areas of these i think it is part of the. proper function of intelligence agencies no matter what. country they belong to to gather information. accurate information about the country that they are observing and if no matter what the country then they're doing their job properly and i assume that that is happening i have no knowledge of such such events but i certainly wouldn't be surprised and i would assume that they're not the only intelligence agency in that and other conflict regions trying to gain information and perhaps with additional assignments to

influence events in one direction or another so if a leader does come to power in ukraine on the twenty first and once the negotiations over donbass with mutual talks with the moscow's people what do you think washington the reaction would be to that that has washington we now to talk about to washington's arguably trump and those not so keen on his reproach of all in mosco i'm not sure or i can see advisers to the administration being torn on the one hand you can't argue for a continuation of the war because that would be warmongering on the other hand you have to argue that the peace can only be under certain conditions that are notably advantageous to ukraine and punishing to russia

those two aspirations may not be reconcilable in which case. the new president would have to make a decision as to whether he is pursuing ukraine's interests first or washington's address first. thank you and that's of the show will be back and they would raise i'm a could no longer be u.k. prime minister. will media see on top that. a comedian has won the first round of ukraine's presidential election. doesn't have strong policy positions maybe that was his greatest appeal though he made it clear corruption is ukraine's biggest challenge fixing ukraine's are very serious problems this is no laughing matter. for

a single purpose. they have a supermoon. training very young. eight months of intensive schooling. rats. and they save lives. the general is cheered in the u.s. congress as he talks of countering threats including from russia. and spain struggles as the number of migrants arriving by sea smuggling gangs are cashing in on the refugee crisis an investigative journalist shows with a grab interview with one of the human traffickers involved. over. two thousand two thousand fractal four thousand. the totality fifty plus one book into.

the phone. and industrial port town in the south of france is suffering from severe pollution with locals registering above average rates of cancer and other analysts .