thank you for your company, i will be back tomorrow. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk�*s review of 2021. welcome to a special year—ending edition of hardtalk with me, stephen sackur. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk�*s review of 2021. this is our chance and yours to look back at some of the drama, the passion, the emotion generated by our interviews in 2021. when the precedent is established against bad people, it then is used against good people. if afghanistan sinks into chaos, that will be a stinking spot in the conscience of the global community. if you want to sit behind a computer and write i terrible things to people, you're a coward. - this is hardtalk, right? your view of the american political system, i think, is not right. i think you're missing the elephant in the room. 2021 began with the world gripped by events in washington, dc. donald trump had lost his bid for re—election, but he didn't slip away quietly. he claimed without foundation that the election had been stolen. 0njanuary 6, a trump—supporting crowd — fired up by a defiant trump speech — invaded the us capitol. was trump guilty of inciting an assault on us democracy? democrats sought his impeachment for a second time, but one of the president's former legal advisers — himself a democrat — said they were wrong. if president trump had made the same speech and no—one had marched to the capitol, would it then be a crime? of course not. and the fact that people marched to the capitol is irrelevant in judging whether or not the speech itself is protected by the constitution. we should not be compromising free speech in the interests of ending a term four or five days earlier. it will stick with us forever and ever. this will be a horrible precedent, and mostly it will be used against the left. it will be used against radicals, it will be used against civil rights activists. it will be used against women and african—americans and others who are protesting for good things. remember, when the precedent is established against bad people, it then is used against good people. that's why i'm fighting for the first amendment. joe biden entered the white house promising a fresh start for america, but on one key policy, he followed a path set by his predecessor — a commitment to get all us troops out of afghanistan. no more american blood to be spilled fighting the taliban. it was time for afghans alone to step up and defend their freedom, mr biden said. it was a strategy based on wishful thinking. months before the us pull—out was complete, i spoke to afghanistan's first vice president, amrullah saleh. we will not stand in the way of the us government to withdraw its troops from afghanistan. it will be their legitimate sovereign right. we will not be able to stand in their way. they are a global power. but if afghanistan sinks into chaos, that will be a, uh... that will be a stinking spot in the conscience of the global community. we should not be denied peace. we should not be denied stability. we have suffered too much and we have suffered for global causes. so the world is not paying us charity. they owe us. the intention was never to be there forever. we have, over the last years, gradually reduced our presence from more than 100,000 in the combat operation to now ending the mission. but we are not ending our support for the afghans. we will continue to provide funding for the afghan security forces, which we have trained and built from almost nothing to now around 300,000 professional security forces. second, we will work on how we can provide out—of—country training for afghan forces. and, thirdly, we are looking into how we now can maintain critical infrastructure like the airport and also some medical facilities and other ways to support continued civilian presence in afghanistan. but there are risks, absolutely, and it's a very difficult situation in afghanistan. but to continue an open—ended mission in afghanistan would also have entailed risks for more fighting, more casualties and even a need for increased nato presence. us intelligence assessments that the government will i collapse in 6 to 12 months — what do you say to that? you know, assessments, for whatever reason, are assessments — they get published. but, you know, every time there has been predictions about afghanistan from the outside, they have turned out to be wrong. in 2014, over 100,000 foreign troops left afghanistan, and the assessments then were too that kabul will collapse. it didn't. the taliban are not reformed. they're not new. they have a view of the world out of sync with modern times. they're going to impose a lifestyle on the afghan people that i think is going to make us all sick to our stomach. but most importantly, they're going to give safe haven to al-qaeda, who has ambitions to drive us out of the mideast writ large and attack us because of our way of life. we will be going back into afghanistan as we went back into iraq and syria to the brink... hang on. you seriously think the united states will once again... we'll have to. ..in a foreseeable future... yes. ..put troops back into afghanistan? we'll have to. we'll have to, because the threat will go so...will be so large. i lived in afghanistan until 2004. - i was there - during the civil war. lwas there — during the civil war. during the taliban regime and i was a young girl. i remember the afternoon - when they came to afghanistan and the next morning - when i heard from the radio that i cannot go to school. and keep in mind, for a young girl, . for a young afghan girl- coming from a pashtun family, which the only hope| to the outside world is your education, because this is the key to your success. - this is the key to your future. this is your key to greatness. i and suddenly, one morning you wake up, it's taken from you. . and that's hard. and i remember, as a young girl, i i would wake up at - midnight and do prayers because ijust wanted i to wake up to a miracle that that reality- has changed for me. many of us hoped that 2021 would be the year that we put coronavirus behind us. here in london, life did get back to something closer to normal, but we also learned that covid is a global problem and it requires a global response. the successful roll—out of vaccines in the rich world left poorer countries vulnerable, and it gave the virus ample opportunity to mutate. science gave us the vaccine, but it didn't give us vaccine equity. when we made this plan of a fair allocation and equitable distribution, we knew there'll be limited supplies, and so we started prioritising the groups who should get it first. i mean, one group are clearly the health workers and frontline workers. you know, we've seen they were disproportionately affected by this pandemic. they need to be protected so they can take care of the sick and health systems don't collapse. and then come, of course, the elderly and others who are at high risk of infection and death. we are saying let's protect these people around the world first before we start scaling to beyond these priority groups. if you took the 2 billion doses that we've agreed to procure and you distributed them among the 50 highest income countries, you would reduce deaths around 31%. if you distributed it across countries equitably, you get to a little over 60% of death reduction. so there is no question that equitable access is the right way, and that's why we're leaning in to try to make that happen. we need to have - equitable distribution. we need to have access. we cannot wait until. uk vaccinates all of its population and then say, "well, then the vaccines| "could be made available to other countries." - when nobody is safe, nobody will be safe. i if covid—19 demanded an urgent global response in 2021, so too did a deeper, more existential challenge. that of man—made climate change. the world leaders gathered at the cop26 summit, made a bunch of new promises, but the window of opportunity to take the actions necessary to prevent catastrophic warming? well, that window is closing. 0ur planet as we know it is in peril, as i heard from the custodians of two of the great storehouses of biodiversity. do you fear a time when people, maybe only decades from now, might come to kew and might marvel at the diversity of plant life that we have destroyed and lost forever? and that is only now to be seen in a protected environment like this? sadly, that's already the case. we have plants in our collections here which are now extinct in the wild, some of which will never be recovered. for example, there's a cycad encephalartos woodii in the temperate house. the only known examples in the world are male. it will never reproduce sexually. other plants are known to now be extinct. there are no examples left anywhere in the world. we do our best through the work of the millennium seed bank to gather these seeds to store them. it's an insurance policy against extinction, but i think the picture you paint is very real and kew will do everything it can to end the biodiversity crisis and to minimise the further species that we're going to lose through habitat loss. if you think about us as a museum, our subject matter is planet earth and the life here on planet earth. but the challenge, and there is a problem, and i think the pandemic has brought this home really starkly to us, which is that that life is under threat. you know, we can look back through the fossil record. we know that life has been on earth for about 3.5 billion years, 3,500 million years. but over that time, there've been five mass extinction events. that's moments when almost all the life on earth has disappeared, and all the data is telling us we're heading for a sixth. but this one is different because all the data is telling us that this sixth potential mass extinction event, the first mass extinction event since we lost the dinosaurs over 60 million years ago — this one is caused by the actions of a single species, and that's us, humanity. some of it's climate change. some of it is actually land use — nearly a third of the world's land serves other things. and some of it's pollution. so, that's the challenge. and that is what the museum is out to try and fix. this is a big part- of our colonial legacy. think about it — - wildlife and conservation stemmed from the i hunting background, and during colonial days, the only people who were allowed to hunt legally. were the colonial overlords. when things changed - and hunting was banned, those same people - became the conservationists and them and their future generations| are all some of the most fierce conservationists. on the continent. but africans, - back in colonial days, were considered poachers, and until today, it seems. like that is still the picture or the image or the way people feel about it. . and so, telling peoplel that it's ok for africans to be conservationists, it means really bucking a trend and saying. _ "hang on a second. "it's notjust white people who do conservation, - "and doing conservation- isn't about going backwards." when i started, i was actually told by colleagues of mine . that they would fight for me in government— to prevent them from sending me to the bush to do research - because they thought - that was a very backward thing to do in those days. "we came from the bush. - why would you go back there?" so, there is a lot of change that has happened - in the last few decades, but we still have - quite a bit of work to do. we know that climate change threatens our way of life, but are we capable of making the changes necessary to avert disaster? that is the challenge facing all of us, and it's a question that will increasingly define our politics. as with covid, here's a global challenge that requires a global response. citizens all around the world are going to hold the politicians accountable. this is happening and people see what's happening. i mean, fires, floods, mudslides, droughts, extraordinary changes in climate right now. food production interruptions, 10 million people a year die because of the pollution that exists — every single year now. that is happening at a rate and pace where populations are rebelling. it's part of the anger people feel about government generally, and i believe it is only going to grow and we are going to see us move in this direction. will we get there in time, steve? i don't know the answer to that. that's what makes these next ten years absolutely critical, and we do have the opportunity because of glasgow. we now have the opportunity to make it happen. the question is, will we? who will pay for the fight against climate change? who will pay for the climate transition? i really think that the lowest wages will never pay for the climate transition, and we have to take into account this reality. we have to put on the table hundreds of billions of euros to finance renewable energies, to finance nuclear energies, maybe new nuclear plants. and on the other hand, there is a need to find the funding. and if you explain to the poorest people in the uk, or in france or in germany or in italy, that the poorest people will pay for the fight against climate change and will pay the climate transition, there will be new yellow vest movements everywhere in europe, and that's exactly what we want to avoid. in my home city, london, there is a constant cacophony of competing media voices. freedom of expression is taken for granted. that is not the story in many other countries. independentjournalism is criminalised and dissent, well, it can be deadly. in mexico, journalists faced threats and intimidation, and the list of countries where that is true is growing. one of the effects of impunity in mexico, after all this violence against journalists, in particular, not on human rights activists, it has a lot to do with the self—censorship. some of my colleagues, who i admire, that have survived violence and kidnapping and other crimes, theyjust stop investigating because they can't cope with it. it's not easy to do it. you really need a big network in order for you to feel safe and you need mental health and many things in order to survive this pressure. it's a lot of pressure. i survived many assassination attempts in pakistan, and i never got justice. i was involved in many fake cases, and the pakistani courts, they cleared me. i was involved in fake cases again and again. i was threatened again and again. so, i said that whenever a journalist is attacked in pakistan, there is no justice and the police and the law enforcement agencies, they always fail to identify the culprits. the organisation reporters without borders has clear evidence that the situation forjournalists in pakistan is much, much more dangerous than most other countries around the world. you're clearly finding the situation deteriorating rather than improving. what are you doing about it? i obviously would like to contest this claim again. the reason is that your question is without context. the situation in pakistan is not dangerous for journalists only. the situation in the past for pakistan was dangerous for every citizen because we were fighting this war on terrorism. and, yes, manyjournalists, especially the field journalists, have been killed in this war, but so are many other civilians. this year, the nobel peace prize recognised the bravery of independentjournalists confronting authoritarian power. i spoke to joint recipients maria ressa and dmitry muratov. it's existential. this is the moment. the last time a journalist won this, he — carl von 0ssietzky — languished in a concentration camp, a nazi concentration camp. it feels like the nobel committee, by spotlighting journalists, are recognising a similar historical moment thatjournalists are under attack in ways that we've never experienced before. in this world of massive, anxiety—inducing challenges, many of us find a refuge in sport. our love of sport has turned elite professional athletes into icons. we admire their physical prowess and their winning mentality. but this year we've seen that star sportspeople, just like the rest of us, are human, vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and discrimination. we've seen it in team sports like football and cricket, and also in individual sports like gymnastics. are you saying that throughout your amazing success as one of america's greatest gymnast 0lympians, you were driven by fear, you were competing out of fear? yes, absolutely. because i felt like nothing besides a gold medal... ..was enough, and i think that even sometimes the way that the pressure, even from the media, orjust our society, is that it's this fear of if i don't win, it doesn't matter, it's not good enough. so, i definitely did it out of fear because it's so much pressure and it's terrifying — the fear of letting people down. in football, no—one cared about the mental health. like, no—one cared. is that true of you in your career, you know, in italy, in manchester? all through my career, you need to deliver. we are like toys — product. you need to perform if you're not feeling well, but you have different manager. like i had, for example, sir alex ferguson, he will spot, right now, straight away if i'm not feeling well because you got some managers, they care about their players, but the club in general did not care about the mental health. if you're not good enough, they're going to buy another player. 0ne phenomenon that's more| contemporary is online abuse, and we've heard a great deal about that, of course, after. the euro finals injuly... which was really... i sat there watching that. i was in los angeles, and i sat there watching it. as soon as that ball didn't go in, i turned around and i said, "i really hope that they give security to these boys," and i really hope it's not going to happen, but i knew it was going to happen. what, the online racial abuse? the online racial abuse, yes. have you had any of that? of course. you've got 12 million i followers on instagram. many times. what kind of things - were said to you online? just like, you know, for me, if you want to sit behind a computer and write terrible things to people, you're a coward. i don't have time for you, and i'm not going to make you silence me. i'm not a coward. hardtalk is challenging, sometimes confrontational, but it can be inspiring, too. my greatest privilege in 2021 was to spend time with the influential scientist and environmentalist james lovelock as he prepared to celebrate his 102nd birthday. let me wish you a very happy new year and leave you with his life—enhancing words. your own mortality... ..colours your thoughts these days. you've described how being 100 has made you feel wonderful. yes. how do you cope with thoughts of mortality? one of the strangest things was that... ..before i reached 100, i was always kind of slightly depressed about the thought. "when i'm past that, well, i'm on the dust heap." finished. if this is a dust heap, it's certainly a very lovely one. but the reality was so much better... ..that it's been a period of considerable happiness. i think. i don't know whether i'm taking sandy's thoughts in vain... you're looking at your wife who's sitting off—camera. ..but it's been a period of great happiness, not less, and i pass that on to others who are in the same queue that i'm in. i'm well aware that either of us might get taken at some time in the not—too—distant future, but, well, that's... and in the meantime, you appear to be intent on still thinking, writing, having big thoughts about... ..us all and this planet we live on. yes, very much so. with a smile on your face, despite everything we've discussed. of course. i think we'll get by all right. hello again. for most people hoping for a white christmas, it has been a grey and damp one out there. bringing a new meaning to white christmas, the foam on some of the waves hitting parts of the coastline. but we have seen a sprinkling of snow in shetland, eastern scotland and higher parts of the pennines and the yorkshire dales for it to be officially declared a white christmas, but not widespread. it has been a very wet day in south—west england. this area of rain made it wet in northern ireland. it is on the move as we get into tonight and that is butting into cold air, and the peak district, pennines and southern uplands will see some snow. northern england and scotland will have a frost, and with the wind strength as it is over the pennines and the southern uplands, we will see this snow blowing around, affecting travel on the higher roytes. we may see snow on lower levels in central scotland for a time on sunday morning. northern scotland likely to stay dry with sunny spells. for the rest of england, wales and northern ireland, there will be another band of rain moving eastwards. not as windy to the south—west, but this brisk south—easterly wind will make it feel chilly in scotland and north—east england. elsewhere not quite as cold a feel to the day. sunny spells arriving into wales in the afternoon. sunny spells arriving into wales in the afternoon. as we get on into the evening, there is a lot of cloud and showers arriving and they push their way northwards, still a chance of hill snow in scotland. fog forms as we go into monday morning, rather a grey day for much of the uk and a chance of outbreaks of rain in south wales and southern england. it is a touch milder, especially in england and wales. also for northern ireland. that is a trend that continues as we go towards the end of the year. we will see several areas of low pressure coming our way with spells of wind and rain, drier and brighter in between, but all the while we will be pumping mild air northwards across the uk, and temperatures in south—east england for a time mid week may be approaching 17 celsius. but all areas will turn much milder, but wet at times, the mild weather continuing into the start of the new year. this is bbc news — these are the latest headlines in the uk and around the world. queen elizabeth speaks about her personal grief over the death of her husband, prince philip, in her christmas day message, saying there was "one familiar laugh missing", amid the continuing impact of the pandemic. that mischievous, inquiring twinkle was as bright at the end as when i first set eyes on him. but life, of course, consists of final partings, as well as first meetings. and as much as i and my family miss him, i know he would want us to enjoy christmas. a 19—year—old man has been arrested on suspicion of trespassing windsor castle grounds, the official residence of queen elizabeth. in his christmas message, pope francis highlighted the tragedies in yemen and syria, which he said are being

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