Officially, the Boris Johnson government, in a post-Brexit world sees Global Britain punching way above its weight as it has traditionally done in the past. The gov.uk website makes this quite clear. “ Global Britain is about reinvesting in our …
The post Missing in Action – Boris Johnson’s ‘Global Britain’ in a Post-Brexit World appeared first on Global Research .
2020-02-24 04:02 | English, Boris Johnson, brexit | GlobalResearch
Author: Sun, 2020-02-23 23:06 LONDON: Among Britain’s digital app-based banks that are attracting moneyed urban millennials is Monese, which also courts customers neglected by the country’s established lenders.
In early 2000, Estonia-born entrepreneur Norris Koppel arrived in Britain and spotted a major gap in UK banking for newly arrived foreigners who had trouble opening traditional accounts.
Koppel was snubbed by
2020-02-23 20:02 | News | ArabNews
“In Defence of Democracy” Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar
American democracy is in trouble as never before. In the past, there have been moments when democratic process and democratic guarantees have been suspended — Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II, the McCarthy hearings with their extralegal destruction of lives and careers — and we have lived through tragic errors in judgment, as in the Vietnam War
2020-02-23 14:02 | Book Review, andrzej duda, authoritarian leaders | TruthDig
Sun, 2020-02-23 00:19 In the strong family business circles of the Middle East, the question of succession is often a fraught one.
DAMAC Properties, the real estate developer founded and run for nearly two decades by Hussain Sajwani, seems to have plenty of options in the matter.
His four children all play a role in DAMAC, but Ali — the 28-year-old eldest son — looks to be the
2020-02-22 21:02 | News | ArabNews
Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, folks, because the neoliberal Resistance is back, and this time they’re not playing around. No more impeachments and investigations. It’s time to go mano-a-mano with Trump, and they’ve finally got just the bad hombre to do it. No, not Bernie Sanders, you commies. A battle-hardened Resistance fighter. El Caballo Pequeño! El Jefe Mínimo! Subcomandante Michael Bloomberg! Yes, that’s right, Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire Republicrat oligarch, has mobilized a guerilla army of overpaid PR professionals, Wall
2020-02-22 04:02 | Bernie Sanders, Elections, Media | DissidentVoice
Dominic Cummings used Tetlock's research to justify the hiring of Andrew Sabisky. What does Tetlock himself make of it?
Dominic Cummings was asked, as he left for work on Tuesday morning, if he regretted giving the first of his “weirdo” jobs to Andrew Sabisky, a self-proclaimed “superforecaster” whose previous comments to the media included highly controversial views on eugenics and giving
2020-02-21 22:02 | News | NewStatesman
You Brexit, You Bought It (February 6th)
Rich man’s club. Free market trade bloc. Undemocratic distant decision-making bureaucracy. All describe the EU, and yet the comfort these truths provide in the face of the UK withdrawal from the union is bittersweet. Growing up in it, an international identity of a positive nature developed, whether accidental or planned, as perhaps seen in the age skewing of the referendum result . Freedom of movement and elections and other characteristics
2020-02-21 21:02 | Climate Change, Democrats, EU | DissidentVoice
In recent years the British Labour party has grown rapidly to become one of the largest political movement in Europe, numbering more than half a million members, many of them young people who had previously turned their backs on national politics. The reason was simple: a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had shown that it was possible to rise to the top of a major party without being forced to sacrifice one’s principles along the way and become just
2020-02-21 16:02 | Anti-semitism, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Boris Johnson | DissidentVoice
Dear Prime Minister, This week has been dominated by flooding. Every morning we
have seen stories of lives being turned upside down by the relentless rainfall,
roads becoming streams, and family homes being abandoned. Despite your absence – your failure to visit any of the
sites effected, your failure to convene a COBRA meeting to declare an emergency
– I am certain you are aware of the ongoing crisis. It would be easy for
2020-02-21 13:02 | Green Politics, Climate Change, flood defences | LeftFootForward
Book Club: With Brexit and new heights of Islamophobia in the UK, The New Arab speaks to some of the contributors about what they have learnt since the book's release. There are not many books that can pinpoint the exact feeling shared by many whilst at the same time being a baton for multiple voices and perspectives. There's even less for Muslim women, especially British Muslim women, who are part of global diasporas and communities across the world.
2020-02-21 12:02 | Society | Al-Araby
Since Donald Trump’s election, political commentators have bemoaned how polarized American politics has become—how angry, how uncivil, how tribal . A few years ago, NYU business professor Jonathan Haidt began seeing a sort of hardwired clannishness in college students. “A funny thing happens when you take young human beings … and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions,” he said. “You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle.” Yale law professor Amy Chua has
2020-02-21 11:02 | Magazine, March 2020, Politics | NewRepublic
As well as plans for the phasing out of domestic coal fires and the end of fuel and diesel cars, it’s heavily rumoured that the Budget will include the first increase in fuel duty in ten years.
Keep those home fires… off. Coal fires will become a thing of the past by 2023 under proposals unveiled by the government to phase out the
2020-02-21 10:02 | News | NewStatesman
The tech giants are not waiting for trade deals to be signed to make sweeping decisions about your data.
As EU and UK negotiators spend the next ten months thrashing out the terms of their future trading relationship, separate discussions will take place to determine if Britain will be granted "data adequacy" – the legal right
2020-02-20 17:02 | News | NewStatesman
The former prime minister warns that “retreating into a narrow part of the left has always ended in defeat ”.
I thought hard about taking stock on the Labour Party’s 120 th anniversary. It’s not as if my advice is particularly welcome to today’s party. But then it occurred to me that there are only two people born
2020-02-20 12:02 | News | NewStatesman
In August last year, the British estate agency the Modern House featured an interview with the author Rachel Cusk and her husband on its website. Accompanying the dreamy, washed-out photographs of their enviable “self-designed house on the Norfolk coast” are disjointed paragraphs in which Cusk’s husband discusses experimental stone cladding and Cusk reflects on what the creation of a home really means. “I remember when I was at school and somehow I’d been given a part
2020-02-20 11:02 | Magazine, March 2020, Culture | NewRepublic
Author: Reuters ID: Thu, 2020-02-20 05:00 BRUSSELS: European Union leaders will clash this week over the EU’s 2021-2027 budget as Britain’s exit leaves a 75 billion euro ($81 billion) hole in the bloc’s finances just as it faces costly challenges such as becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The budget is the most tangible expression of key areas
2020-02-20 03:02 | News | ArabNews
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Truthout .
The ghost of George Orwell has never been far from President Donald Trump’s misleading rhetoric, outright lies, dehumanizing invective and punitive policies. All of the latter were on full display in Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address . Trump’s speech moved between the kind of absolutes one expects from demagogues, including comments that ranged from how great America is (overlooking how millions live in poverty and
2020-02-20 01:02 | adolf hitler, authoritarianism, breitbart | TruthDig
Wed, 2020-02-19 23:54 LONDON: Britain will prioritize access for high-skilled workers from around the world in its post-Brexit points-based immigration system, the government said on Tuesday, setting out its plans to put an end to a reliance on “cheap labor from Europe.”
Concern over the impact of high levels of immigration from the EU was one of the key drivers behind Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the bloc and the government
2020-02-19 20:02 | News | ArabNews
Julia Conley, staff writer Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon condemned the United Kingdom's new post-Brexit border policy after it was released Wednesday, saying new rules barring people designated as "unskilled" and those who don't speak English would devastate a number of Scotland's industries and worsen the country's depopulation crisis.
2020-02-19 17:02 | News | CommonDreams
A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
Ailbhe Rea writes that there is a misunderstanding between Sinn Féin and its voters: that the party sees no discontinuity with its IRA past, while the voters have decided that there is (Observations,
2020-02-19 17:02 | News | NewStatesman
This film about anti-depressive plants has an atmosphere of horticultural dread.
In Jessica Hausner’s period drama Amour Fou , a young woman experiences a fleeting terror of flowers, though it turns out to be only one symptom of her consuming melancholia. But in Little Joe , this Austrian director’s fifth film and her first in English, there is every
2020-02-19 16:02 | News | NewStatesman
Some of the biggest policy blunders of the past 250 years can be blamed on Whitehall’s dominant department.
“You cannot have such people in government,” sniffs the Guardian of Andrew Sabisky, the 27-year-old hired as a Downing Street adviser. Sabisky resigned after the emergence of his claims in 2014 that “the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly –
2020-02-19 16:02 | News | NewStatesman
The Tax Justice Network (TJN) has accused the UK government of wanting to use Brexit to cut regulations in order to attract dirty money. After the European Union added the Cayman Islands, a UK overseas territory, to its list of tax havens, TJN chief executive Alex Cobham said: “The UK government is threatening not ‘Singapore on Thames’ but ‘Cayman on steroids’ – a reckless race to the bottom on tax and financial regulation, in pursuit
2020-02-19 13:02 | Left Foot Forward | LeftFootForward
The government has some very big ideas, but its purpose is the re-establishment of democracy and the creation of the common good.
This magazine last week (14 February) carried two pieces attacking Boris Johnson’s government from opposite directions. Stephen Bush accused the Prime Minister of timidity and a lack of big ideas; Adrian Pabst said No 10 is revolutionary, bent on
2020-02-19 13:02 | News | NewStatesman
Progressives need to transform their intellectual and political strategy as radically as the Tory right has done.
Boris Johnson is running a corrupt and racist government. If you baulk at the word corrupt, ask this: why is it still unclear who paid for Johnson’s Christmas holiday in Mustique, and how? Why is this most Atlanticist of prime ministers
2020-02-19 13:02 | News | NewStatesman
I was glad of the huge bowls of crisps provided at a reception hosted in parliament by Amnesty International (in partnership with Love Equality and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ Rights) to celebrate Northern Ireland’s first same-sex marriage on 11 February. I had promised ceremonies would start by Valentine’s Day – and we delivered. Six months after a free vote on this and other social issues during the passage of the Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions
2020-02-19 12:02 | News | NewStatesman
Contrary to public perception, Rishi Sunak is not Johnson’s second choice for chancellor, but his third.
Although he has been an MP for only five years, Rishi Sunak has managed to embody the dream of not one but two Conservative leaderships. Under David Cameron, Sunak seemed almost purpose-built for the party Cameron wanted to create. Here was a politician whose biography
2020-02-19 12:02 | News | NewStatesman
In 2016, Americans who hoped to make sense of Donald Trump’s election could have done worse than turn to a book released earlier that year: Dark Money by Jane Mayer. In this extraordinary—and extraordinarily disturbing—work of nonfiction, Mayer, a veteran investigative journalist, laid bare the tremendous political influence of a handful of far-right billionaires: banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, chemical industry magnate John M. Olin, electronics barons Harry and Lynde Bradley, and,
2020-02-19 11:02 | Magazine, March 2020, Politics | NewRepublic
The proposed points-based system will depend on continual tinkering by ministers.
The government has unveiled its first detailed and in-depth statement about how its proposed points-based immigration system will work after the UK formally leaves the institutional structures of the European Union on 31 December.
The story that the government wants to tell
2020-02-19 10:02 | News | NewStatesman
Author: AFP ID: Wed, 2020-02-19 10:18 LONDON: British annual inflation surged to 1.8 percent in January from 1.3 percent one month earlier, official data showed Wednesday, boosting the pound. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) 12-month rate jumped more than expected on higher energy bills, the Office for National Statistics said in a statement. Analysts’
2020-02-19 10:02 | News | ArabNews
Only a few days after the United Kingdom retreated into Little England via Brexit, the last surviving major part of its imperial corporate presence announced a retreat to its own little Hong Kong home. HSBC announced massive impending cuts to its operations in Europe and the US, cutting 35,000 jobs over the next three years, as well as the further slimming of its already sub-par investment banking and equity trading operations, and the folding of its private banking arm
2020-02-19 10:02 | News | AsiaSentinel
Comment: The 2015 'refugee crisis' put the EU's inhumane anti-refugee policies on full display. A repeat of that could be about to happen, writes Sam Hamad. Assad and his backers are closing in on the people of Idlib . Almost 1 million have been cleansed in a matter of 10 weeks, and there is now nowhere left for them to run.
Turkey says it simply can't absorb the potentially 3 million more refugees from Idlib,
2020-02-19 02:02 | Comment | Al-Araby
Unite has berated the Tory government for ignoring the needs of lorry drivers amid the launch of a new system meant to deal with transport disruption at Dover post-Brexit transition period. A Unite spokesperson told Left Foot Forward that the union has been seeking answers for over a year to drivers’ concerns about the lack of welfare provisions – from toilets to refreshments – if there is major disruption on the roads leading to Dover.
2020-02-18 17:02 | Brexit & Foreign Policy, Movement Politics, borders | LeftFootForward
The presence of the foreign policy expert in the contest will bring a new worldliness to the country’s political debates.
Norbert Röttgen is not a household name in Germany, let alone beyond it, but today he became one of the most significant figures in the country’s - and perhaps even Europe’s - politics. The independent-minded head of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs
2020-02-18 16:02 | News | NewStatesman
Extremists do not share a viewpoint or an approach, but they do share a mindset.
Responding to the revelation that Extinction Rebellion (XR) had been identified as extremists by counterterrorism police, Sara Khan, the government’s chief adviser on extremism, called for a clearer definition of extremism. Khan was quoted as saying that a clearer definition would “help build a whole-society
2020-02-18 16:02 | News | NewStatesman
Government negotiator David Frost’s vision for future UK-EU trade looks like a set-up for No Deal on 31 December 2020 when the Brexit transition period ends. The civil servant, policy adviser and career diplomat told an audience in Belgium at ULB Brussels University on 17 February, in a speech larded with rhetoric and obfuscation, that the Tory stance on independence and sovereignty post-transition is non-negotiable. “It is central to our vision that
we must
2020-02-18 16:02 | Brexit & Foreign Policy, Brexit, Brexit transition | LeftFootForward
Their biggest impact was in forcing Labour to change its Brexit policy.
A year ago today, seven Labour MPs announced that they were leaving the Labour party in protest over Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of antisemitism in the party’s ranks and the Labour party’s pro-Brexit political position, to form a new political grouping, the Independent Group. They were joined over the following
2020-02-18 11:02 | News | NewStatesman
The distance between the British government and Europe may prove too great to overcome by the end of the year.
The government’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, has laid out his – and by extension the British government’s – thinking on the next stage of the Brexit talks and what they want in a speech at ULB Brussels
2020-02-18 11:02 | News | NewStatesman
Photograph Source: Ardfern – CC BY-SA 3.0
The victory by Ireland’s leftwing Sinn Fein Party in the Republic’s recent election has not only overturned some 90 years of domination by the island’s two center-right parties, it suddenly puts the issue of Irish reunification on the agenda. While the campaign was fought over bread and butter issues like housing, the collapsing health care system, and homelessness, a united Ireland has long been Sinn Fein’s raison d’être .
2020-02-18 08:02 | articles 2015 | CounterPunch
A leading academic has claimed that an independent Scotland would be moved into the “fast-track line” to join the European Union. James Ker-Lindsay, professor at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, told the Herald that Scotland would “almost certainly be moved to the fast track line.” He added: “Assuming the paperwork is all in order and there haven’t been many or significant divergences, one would expect it
2020-02-17 15:02 | Brexit & Foreign Policy, Brexit, EU | LeftFootForward
“People wanted to kick the government and Sinn Fein provided the shoe to do the kicking,” says Christy Parker, a journalist from the beautiful but de-industrialised town of Youghal in county Cork. He speaks of the “chasm” between the elite benefiting from Ireland’s impressive economic progress and the large part of the population that has been left behind. Youghal never recovered from the loss of its carpet and textile factories that flourished when I grew up there in the 1950s
2020-02-17 08:02 | articles 2015, Leading Article | CounterPunch
The defense industry cooperation between Turkey and the United Kingdom will continue unaffected from Brexit, says businessman Osman Okyay, the head of Turkey-UK Business Council, adding that cooperation in the field can grow as the U.K. stand very interested to work with Turkey.
2020-02-16 23:02 | Turkey | Hurriyet
Israel has asked the UK to include illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the free trade deal being discussed between the two sides, Israel Hayom reported on Thursday.
According to the Israeli newspaper, Israeli Economy Minister Eli Cohen had written to his British counterpart, Conor Burns, informing him: “Most of Israel’s free trade agreements, such as the agreement with the United States, apply to the State of Israel, which is
2020-02-15 11:02 | Big Slide, Europe & Russia, Israel | MiddleEastMonitor
If there is one issue that denotes the terminal decline of Labour as a force for change – desperately needed social, economic and environmental change – it is not Brexit. It is the constant furor over an “antisemitism crisis” supposedly plaguing the party for the past five years.
The imminent departure of Jeremy Corbyn as leader will not end the damage that has been done to Labour by such claims. Soon Brexit will become a messy fait
2020-02-14 18:02 | Articles, Commentary, antisemitism | PalestineChronicle
In his 1787 farewell speech, George Washington warned, “… foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Washington’s compatriots were more specific. Later in the same year, John Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson sharing his apprehension “of foreign Interference, Intrigue and Influence.” Adams posited that foreign meddling correlates with election cycles. “As often as Elections happen,” Adams wrote, “the danger of foreign Influence recurs.”
The Founding Fathers’ premonition did not come out of
2020-02-14 17:02 | Articles, Commentary, Bernie Sanders | PalestineChronicle
Boris Johnson’s reshuffle leaves no doubt over his intention to reduce constitutional protections and judicial independence.
A constitution is the legal soul of a nation. It distills its values through a system of government, a vision of society and, most importantly, by setting down the rights of every citizen. For this reason, constitutions should be deliberated upon, negotiated and
2020-02-14 16:02 | News | NewStatesman
The UK economy is stagnant. Wages are depressed,
and the number of workers living in poverty has risen for third consecutive year. Some 14 million Brits
are in poverty
– more than one in five of the population, including four million children and two
million pensioners. The
government’s response is not to end wage freezes, control rents and
profiteering, restore local authority cuts or shackle tax avoidance by
corporations and the rich. It has instead opted for deregulation
2020-02-14 15:02 | Left Foot Forward, Public Services, corporations | LeftFootForward