This week, alongside partners Canada, France and Norway, the UK government announced expanded sanctions against 6 entities and one individual enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank. The government has also strengthened its business risk guidance to make clear that British citizens and businesses should not conduct any economic or financial activities in Israel's illegal settlements. As noted by Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Calum Miller in Parliament on Tuesday, the new measures - though welcome - are extremely overdue, with the Dutch Government having issued a similar discouragement notice 20 years ago. Moreover, the notice remains purely advisory ...
The Independent reports that the UK asylum appeals backlog has hit a new record high, with new figures revealing it is now more than seven times the level it was a decade ago. The paper says that data released by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) shows 87,450 cases were awaiting resolution at the end of March, marking a 72 per cent increase from 50,976 just a year prior. The figure was 11,660 in the same period of 2016, when current records began: Between January and March this year, 40 per cent of appeals were successful, a slight decrease from 43 ...
"Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?" I asked when writing about The Exorcism. To an extent, they have. Because here are the first eight minutes of a 1964 television production of Brecht's play Galileo, and it begins with a shot of the cast arriving with a microphone boom and its operator purposely in shot. This production was shown on BBC1 on Wednesday 29 April 1964 and the translation of the play is by Charles Laughton. It's a shame that only this short section of this production is to be found online, because Leo McKern's performance looks very promising. The boy ...
An alarming shift has been taking place within the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party over the last few months. Spearheaded by MPs such as Munira Wilson, Danny Chambers, and, most alarmingly for me, Vikki Slade, we are apparently now back to advocating for a ban on social media for children and supporting a ban on images depicting nudity being stored on their devices. I am very worried that the Party has not thought about how this could plausibly be implemented. I fear that once this dam breaks, once we move past a "think of the children" argument over a moral panic, ...
One of the big problems with Labour's Representation of the People Bill is the number of loopholes it leaves for big political donations to unduly influence British politics. I've talked before about how the plans would not even stop Donald Trump pouring in money. There are some useful improvements that could be made – and hopefully will be made – to the Bill to improve its financial defences. But fundamentally such patch and mend only gets you so far up against those armed with imaginative lawyers and expert accountants. The key missing protection is an across-the-board donation cap. Byline Times ...
Lib Dem Conference this September will be back in Brighton on 19th to 22nd September. In addition, on Friday 18th there will be a training conference. I have signed up for both. All I have to do now is book a hotel.
Another triumph for Reform UK's vetting of its candidates. NN Journal reports: The Reform UK chairman of North Northamptonshire Council has today stood down in response to an NN Journal investigation into his social media activity. Cllr Maurice Eglin, who was appointed as chairman last month, has resigned this morning ahead of our investigation being published, saying he had in the past been guilty of being a "keyboard warrior". He has also apologised for his posts and said the language he used was "wrong". We had uncovered a series of offensive tweets which include Islamphobia, support for far right groups ...
My recent prediction that Lindsay Atkinson would be the Reform candidate for the High Fell by-election in Gateshead turned out to be spot on. Mr Atkinson stood in my ward in the local elections last month. He came fifth, about 600 votes behind Jonathan Mohammed, my ward colleague. Jonathan was elected as the 3rd councillor in Whickham South and Sunniside. (Marilynn Ord was first and I was second.
A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism - created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson - has been driving White Lives Matter propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, reports Nafeez Ahmed. "In a decisive summer for government, you can view the 'doubling' agenda as microcosm of the wider story. Some big decisions have been made and some vital groundwork put in place. Ministers now need to build on this with bolder, faster action if the impact is to be visible by the ...
A rare sight indeed! The Conservatives barely exist in Gateshead but unexpected electoral contests can produce some surprising outcomes. High Fell ward is host to a completely unnecessary council by-election. The cause of this return to the polls is a Reform councillor who managed 11 days in the post before chucking in the towel. The Conservatives have chosen a candidate. Good luck (he'll
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day award with the tale from the West Somerset Railway. The judges have declined to sign petitions calling for the banning of cider and trains.
William Hague wrote in The Times this week that the key new phrase in politics is "recursive self-improvement" — AI systems that autonomously design their own successors. He is right that politics must catch up. He is wrong to imply it hasn't started yet. In some quarters it has. The Liberal Democrats, if we are paying attention, have the intellectual architecture already in place. There are three arguments. Each has prior form in Lib Dem thinking. Each has been transformed by AI into something urgent rather than merely desirable. Universal Basic Income is no longer a utopian gesture. When I ...
Thu 11th
08:55
The chaos dividend: Why the ultra-rich thrive on an unstable world, and why that's rational in the s...
The richest people in the world have more to lose from disorder than anyone. They have the most property, the most complex legal structures protecting it, the deepest interest in enforceable contracts and functioning courts. By any straightforward logic, they should be the most committed defenders of stable institutions and predictable governance. They are not. The reason isn't greed, or not primarily. It is something both more mundane and more intractable: it is how the system is built. Extreme wealth, at the levels we are discussing, is not really a quantity. It is a capability: the capability to move fast, ...
This week is all about red lines. Labour already ditched one of their manifesto pledges when they increased empoyer's national insurance contributions. Despite that they are adamant that the commonsense step of rejoining the single market is a step too far. Now Chancellor Reeves is starting to lay down the ground work for tax increases. a necessary breach of her party's manifesto promises. The Times reports that she has warned that the government will have to consider further tax rises to help fund defence in future because "borrowing can't be the only answer", thus raising the prospect of further tax ...