around the world from the uk, and bbc expertise. i'm geeta guru—murthy. this week, with nations around the world facing tough questions on how to pay for the pandemic, many are talking about a green recovery. there was little evidence of that in this week's budget here in the uk — was it a missed opportunity? britain is ahead of the eu on vaccines, so are the europeans getting their house in order? no sign of that in the royal household, as everyone braces for that interview with harry and meghan. what will they reveal about the inner workings of the royal family? is their timing disrespectful with the duke of edinburgh still in hospital? and what role does race play in this whole sorry saga? with me is thomas kielinger, long—time correspondent at die welt, and steve richards, writer and broadcaster. and here in the studio, at a safe social distance, the bbc�*s chief environment correspondentjustin rowlatt. thanks to you all forjoining me and a very warm welcome. two reports here have criticised the government on its plan to meet climate change targets. the cop26 summit is due to be held in november in scotland, but this week's budget didn't bring much in terms of a green recovery. is government going to pay companies and individuals to do more to switch to electric cars and public transport, to use heat pumps instead of gas boilers, and insulate our leaky homes? how is the uk faring compared with its global neighbours? justin, the government says both reports out this week are inaccurate and unfair. is it possible to get a sense of how committed they are to the green agenda? publicly, very committed. last year boris produced a ten point green plan, he described it as a green industrial revolution. a huge increase in wind turbines, switching to electric vehicles, that kind of thing. so the government rhetoric is very strong on the green issue but this budget was very short on headline green initiatives. we saw an infrastructure bank, £12 billion to fund new green developments. a commitment that the bank of england take into account the net zero pledge when it makes policy. but they froze fuel duty, 11 years in a row it has been frozen. in effect, that is an opportunity for a carbon tax foregone. and the effort you mentioned to green our homes. a quarter of carbon emissions come from heating homes. switching from gas heating that most british homes have, with heat pumps, that kind of thing, is going to cost a huge amount of money. the climate change committee says £4 billion per year. they had an initiative for green homes, tiny take up, campaigners have said it is the worst administered green scheme ever. and yet no more money for that, no suggestion it would be reorganised in the budget. campaigners at the public accounts committee saying there is no plan to achieve, no articulated plan anyway, to be fair, to achieve this zero ambition by 2050. steve, is that because the government is still too focused onjobs, the balance between austerity and spending, and itjust hasn't got the capacity at the moment to do more on the green agenda? or is it that they will do more in the coming months? i think it's a combination of the two. and another factor as well. the other factor is important. nearly everybody in politics is in theory committed to a green revolution, almost. you have the conservative leadership, the labour leadership and so on. but the test is always, are you willing to implement policies that might at least in the short—term involve voters thinking what the heck are they doing with this? a good example being increasing fuel duty. and they avoid it. more generally with the budget, i think it was partly a product, lockdown in the uk, we are still in lockdown even though there is hopefully light around the corner. so it was partly to deal with the ongoing consequences of lockdown. and then it became a more sort of george osborne austerity—type budget coming up in the near future. but beyond that it didn't do very much. as well as the green dimension, there was no real reference to social care, which is a huge issue in the united kingdom. and with the nhs, another big issue, one of the sort of controversies arising from the budget was a very tiny pay rise for nhs workers. so it avoided some of the huge issues whirling around the uk and other areas, of course, with the green issue. and it focused more on the pandemic and the aftermath in quite narrow ways. thomas, in germany of course, green politics has had more of a voice, partly because of the political system there. what was your sense looking at the budget here this week? the conservatives got a poll bounce, but as steve mentioned, criticism over spending on the help front and criticism also on the lack of green policy that came out of the government, not only this week but in recent weeks. i have a lot of sympathy| for what steve just said, there is a problem with - the government as a whole and the financial situation. we have to do first things first. - as the poll was sympathetic to what was put forward - by rishi sunak, it shows i people are more interested at the moment in immediate respite from the problems, i that is to say that the - furlough has to be extended, self—employed people, as it were, injection . of more money. so all sorts of immediate i problems are staring people in the face. some of the green issue unfortunately has to bel postponed. there is going to be . a review in september, in the autumn. i trust something will give. 0n the other hand, you know, there is a bit of a silver- lining when it comes to - the ecology and green policies. i am talking about the freeport east hydrogen hub which has i been given a green light, which will continue - with decarbonisation projects, wind farms and so forth, - with zero technologies, - and hydrogen as a future fuel. so that is beginning| to come to the fore. 0ther than that, i agree this was not the time to go- wholeheartedly into the green project. l justin, in the last few years in this country, some of the measures on this has come through this. it has come through higher bills on the energy front, that is how we have seen change. is it the private sector where change has to come? if you look at wind turbines, the prime minister has made a huge amendment to increase in wind energy because the private sector sees an opportunity and is willing to pourfinance in. the same with electric vehicles. the government committed to phasing out petrol and diesel cars by 2030 with some exceptions for hybrids. companies now committing to switch over to electric vehicles far faster because they recognise that technology is changing and they need to get in there quickly to seize the market. ford, general motors, volkswagen all committing to switch to electric vehicles. so there you see the private sector taking the lead because they see a huge opportunity. heating homes is a very difficult issue. gas central heating is very efficient. the electric heat pumps, which most people regard as the alternative, they don't deliver the ready heat that gas does. they are less easy, they are expensive as well, so they are hard to persuade consumers to take on. therefore there is an argument that we need to encourage subsidies to get consumers to switch over. we haven't seen the government come up with a plan that works or enough money to persuade 30 million homes in britain to switch over, the scale of switch—over that we need. so in some areas there does need to be subsidy and we are not seeing the chancellor coming forward and offering that money. steve, is that a surprise, we know for example that boris johnson's fiancee carrie symonds is interested in the whole green agenda, zac goldsmith also part of the conservative party, very committed to this agenda. is it something the government has to deliver on? are there not many votes in this? as i said in my earlier answer, theoretically virtually everyone you meet in politics is interested and committed to this agenda. the issue is how? in the end, i suspect it does have to be government driven. there is quite a debate about the nature of this government. is it more status than recent tory governments or not? particularly with the chancellor rishi sunak, who on the whole is perceived as a more sort of orthodox thatcherite, rather than a statist. borisjohnson thinks he is like roosevelt, a big spender, on the model of the new deal. but there is no evidence yet of the scale of the demand for the climate change issues. insulation is a very interesting example. i am sitting in a room, i am freezing, it is like being in siberia. but in a way, the motive has to be driven by the government to get these things sorted out, i suspect. it takes tough spending decisions, tough tax decisions, and on the whole these have tended to be avoided so far. steve, thanks for now. the eu has vaccinated about one tenth of its population, compared with a third here. what does that mean for its huge summer tourism season? can we travel even if we haven't been vaccinated? and why has the rollout been so slow? thomas, what's gone wrong with the famed german efficiency? famed indeed! it is now more a case of- the famed german inefficiency. it is a bureaucratic- problem to begin with, we are a country of 17 - governments, one in berlin and 16 regional governments, i and they couldn't agree among themselves how to distribute the vaccine in the first place. j secondly, there was this l unfortunate aspersion cast against astrazeneca, - of which we have quite a lot of doses waiting - to be administered. and from emmanuel macron in france, and others - in my country, they began to say, this is not safe - and efficient for the over—65s. so 85% of our doses - of astrazeneca, until early this week, they lay around unused, and probably- were destroyed - or became useless. only this week how - the government officially declared this particular - vaccination safe for over—65s. when britain had vaccinated 20j million people, germans began to push for astrazeneca. it is quite true, to use - boris johnson's language, you can say that germany vacillates while britain i vaccinates. and he who vaccinates . quickly,can lift lockdown restrictions more quickly too. so we are lagging - behind unfortunately. but we are trying to catch up. we are johnny—come—latelys when i it comes to speedy vaccination. i does this vindicate the brexiteers who some have said, look, britain has ploughed on much faster as an independent nation than the eu, which has come unstuck with this joint approach? no, i think brexit is a red herring on this issue. the uk was technically, because it was the transitional year when the uk government ordered these vaccines, and individual governments had the space to do it. and indeed some eu members are now operating individually and getting vaccines in from various different sources. so it wasn't really to do with brexit and the eu. it is interesting to see which member countries, and indeed britain, have flourished in different areas of this response to the nightmare. britain was hopeless early on, germany was fairly successful at keeping the death rate low. why? in terms of vaccines, obviously the government did the right thing in commissioning loads of vaccines in advance. interesting what thomas was saying, in many ways the way germany is structured is often cited as a model for delivery. in this case, having the national health service as a way of distributing the vaccine in a co—ordinated way has proven to be highly successful. so some things have worked here, other things have failed catastrophically. learning the lessons of both will be part, i think, of owning the future politically when the whole sort of perspective is acquired over what's happened here and in the rest of europe. and justin, of course, you were a south asia correspondent based in india. india has been delivering vaccines to africa and south asia in general. and the rate of distribution in many parts of the world is very different and it's going to cause problems in future, isn't it? it is going to cause problems because in order to have a successful global response we need people vaccinated as soon as possible to minimize the chance of variants developing. there are global institutions that have been set up to distribute vaccines. i think inevitably, the richer countries that did these deals with pharmaceutical companies early are likely to get the vaccine first. inevitably, they will vaccinate their population first, but the good news is there is a huge vaccine surplus, if you add up the vaccines around the world, they are much more effective than we expected. we tend to forget that. earlier on people didn't predict they would be anywhere near this good. so we are in quite a good position globally, but it will take a while to vaccinate the world. we will be following that across our output. if you're in need of some distraction from all this, the british royal family are doing their bit to entertain you. when the duke and duchess of sussex gave up their royal duties, it was both the culmination of a briefing war and the start of a new one. of bullying by meghan, and harry says his fear of the destructive press intrusion that plagued his mother is now being repeated with his wife, and is partly what drove him to leave the uk. where is the right and wrong in this family saga? and what does it tell us about the nature of modern monarchy, and racism in the uk? steve, how worried should the royal family be about bombshell revelations with this oprah winfrey interview? well, they are evidently worried, because elements of the institution have been briefing intensively against the duo who have given the interview. so, clearly there is a capacity here for further storms in the way there was during the, sort of, diana era, when she started speaking out in quite extraordinary ways. so they are obviously concerned. it's so interesting, the nature of celebrity and fame. i've always been intrigued by the degree to which the royal family themselves attract this fascination, given that we hardly know them. they are caricatures, really. and now this couple, who aren't really part of it anymore, are even more famous, curiously. so it is interesting in that sense. clearly the british press have it in for the duo. and that — my sympathies are wholly with them, the duo. well, why do you think the british press have got it in for them? partly because they've taken on newspapers in ways that i think are wholly legitimate. i know there's an issue where they use the newspapers to promote themselves, but that doesn't actually mean the newspapers have the right to then hammerthem at every moment. i think there are echoes there, and he clearly feels it, with diana and what happened to her. i don't think the british newspapers should have the right to destroy people or appear to destroy them. so, in that sense i think they have every right to feel aggrieved. to express themselves. it is up to us if we watch it and get excited by it. i promise you, i love celebrity, i'm not excited by it, but i know there will be global hysteria over it, which in itself is quite interesting. will you be watching it, thomas? i will be, but i'm slightly dissenting from steve, l because the duchess - in particular more than harry is playing with fire. she has no idea aboutl the cultural differences there are between when you join the royal family and when you i are an independent californian woman. j she keeps talking about how her independence _ she keeps talking about how her independence was— she keeps talking about how her independence was curtailed - she keeps talking about how heri independence was curtailed when she joined — independence was curtailed when she joined the _ independence was curtailed when she joined the royal— independence was curtailed when she joined the royal family. - what did she think she would get? i could she set up an independent news line with herself— as a reigning monarch of news as it were? i now, she keeps on talking i about how she was curtailed and infringed - upon and so forth. now she says she is liberated. there is a great degree of naivete on her part. i she overplays the defiance she is now putting forward| of being able to stand up for herself, by forgetting that she should have been more modest as she entered - the royal family, and playedj by the rules for a time longer rather than immediately wanting out. _ and now playing the, - as it were, the adversary of the royal culture. someone the other day called her the duchessl of malibu, she doesn't - really belong in any sense in the traditional context of what the royal familyl and the place she would have to occupy within it. _ and that's more to the pity, because it continues this . unholy row which the queen herself must be terribly- upset about. because it does a disservice to her own prestige. - but in the end the royal couple down in california will rue - the day when they. played up their own plight quite so publicly and constantly that - some of the viewing public in britain are feeling, - 'when are we going to be| liberated from these two, who put their own qualms so much to centre stage l of world publicity?�* they were a couple that wanted privacy in california, _ but did everything to promote the publicity of their case. - there is a lot of hypocrisy- involved, and more to the pity. everyone's wanting to jump in, because everyone has a view. justin, the question of race has been raised. younger people identify more with harry and meghan. she is the first modern royal family who identifies as biracial, and she has been vilified in parts of the press, hasn't she? yeah, i'm not sure whether it is because of her race or not. and remember, at her wedding which celebrated her heritage, it was welcomed and really enjoyed by the british people. it was one of the features. everybody said this is a breath of fresh air, a modern monarchy, remember. so i don't think it's clear—cut that race was the issue. and then just coming back to what thomas said, i think what is really interesting is the palace's response, suddenly producing these allegations of bullying. i think it's really odd that they want to go in fighting like this. i mean, obviously, �*harry is a troubled young man', they feel upset by the way they have been treated by the royal family. but wouldn't the dignified thing be to say, �*we love harry', �*meghan is a wonderful woman'? it is really odd that the palace are going in fighting. that could be the most damaging thing for the royal family. we all know that in conflicts like this, no one comes out, you know, looking betterfrom it. so it seems odd they are ramping up the conflict. you haven't watched the crown, have you? i've watched a little bit of it! in that, the queen defines her role as not having a personality and that's how she thinks the monarchy�*s succeeded over the years, by whitewashing any personality and just being a bland figurehead. the approach they are taking to harry and meghan is not part of that. and steve, briefly, do you think race is a factor in the way meghan has been treated in particular? i think it's more to do with the fact they are shaking up this institution, which is, ithink, perfectly healthy as far as it is of any great significance. it's an institution which occasionally does need challenging from within. although, my understanding is it's no longer from within. they are in america, they have been sort of formally excluded. so, they're kind of speaking for themselves. the layers of hypocrisy are many. i mean, the british public have just heard this disapproval, disapproving of them doing interviews, but they will sit there watching the interview. and thomas, the duke of edinburgh is still in hospital. and many will feel the timing, obviously they couldn't control that, but should they have pulled the interview out of respect for the queen? it's unfortunate that it is i a coincidence with the duke of edinburgh being ill in hospital. - it's very hard to suggest that anyone who has put so much into preparing this interview would cancel it on account l of the duke's health status. this may continue for quite i a while, well beyond his 100th birthday. so, will you ever be barred l from giving your own version of your own qualms i and complaints, owing to the figurehead being unwell? i think in this case, - i am with the young couple, go ahead with it, philip. is a redoubtable survivor who we hope will see more than his 100th birthday. . this is an investment - in the hope, the interview going forward, that everything will be ok for the time - being with prince| philip in hospital. and justin, it does raise questions in a serious way about the future of the royal family. the queen is held in respect. i think, universally. but other members of the family have had lots of questions raised about prince andrew. as steve says, this is a modernising moment like diana's death. we could see a new, more open monarchy come from it. but i come back to the point, that part of the role of the monarchy is to be bland and just exist quietly in the background. full of you know, events... pageantry, palaces, at the centre of what they do for britain. and i think this kind of conflict cannot be good for them. 0k. thank you so much forjoining us today. much more next week. shaun ley is here next week. from me, for now, goodbye. hello there. high pressure has brought largely fine and settled conditions to the uk during the weekend. it looks like this settled weather is going to last through monday and tuesday, but then it's all change. midweek, it's going to turn very windy with the possibility of severe gales developing through wednesday night into thursday. we'll also have some heavy rain as well, so some big changes to the weather as we move deeper on into this week. in the short term, though, we still have higher pressure to south of the uk, some weather fronts to the north of the uk, so monday is a north—south divide. it's a cold, frosty start across the midlands, wales, southern england, with some sunshine. clouds may tend to increase at times and further north, we will see some showery bursts of rain, some of thatjust pushing into eastern england as well into the afternoon. but there will be some sunshine as well across central and northern scotland, and i think temperatures will be a degree or so higher than what we've had in recent days, 8—10 celsius. now, through monday night, many central and eastern areas will turn dry with clear spells but we will have this weak front pushing into the western parts of the uk, so that will produce some showery rain. a bit more of a breeze here as well, so temperatures holding around 4—6 celsius. some chilly spots, though, further east under those clear skies. by tuesday, we start to lose this area of high pressure. it declines and starts to allow this first area of low pressure to hurtle in off the atlantic, which will affect north—western parts of the uk later on tuesday. for tuesday itself, then, it's a chilly start. central eastern areas, that weather front will fizzle out. in fact, for much of scotland, england and wales, it should be dry with some sunshine, but clouds will tend to build up further west later in the day with a few showers, and the breeze will pick up as well. we could see temperatures reaching 11 or 12 celsius in the sunshine further east. now, the jet stream is really powering up across the north atlantic by the middle part of the week and that will spin off some deep areas of low pressure. that's tuesday's low. this is wednesday and thursday's low, which could be even deeper. so for wednesday, we could see a spell of wet and windy weather spread across the country, and then it will be interspersed with some brighter, sunnier, showery weather before the centre of this low arrives across western areas later on wednesday to bring even stronger winds and some heavy rain. there will still be some fairly mild air in the mix, but it might not feel like that because of the strength of the winds. and then through wednesday night into thursday, this is where we could see the strongest of the winds — potentially severe gale force — which could lead to some disruption, so do stay tuned to the forecast. this is bbc news. welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. i'm james reynolds. our top stories. the duke and duchess of sussex tell all in a deeply personal interview on us television — meghan says her treatment by the royal family and british press led to suicidal thoughts. across two hours of revelations as they talk to oprah winfrey — the couple allege people in the palace even had conversations about how dark their unborn son's skin would be. the pope's historic trip to iraq draws to a close. francis says the country will remain in his heart. equatorial guinea appeals for international help — after a munitions dump blows up — killing at least fifteen people and injuring hundreds more. and nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe — the british—iranian woman jailed in iran on spying charges — ends her sentence, but she's now facing a new court case.