Category Archives: United Kingdom

West must confront Russia over Aleppo, British MPs to be told

The Guardian reports: Western air forces must be willing to confront Russian military jets over the skies of Syria to enforce a no-fly zone and protect the citizens of eastern Aleppo from a bombardment akin to the attack on Guernica during the Spanish civil war, UK MPs will be told by a former cabinet minister in an emergency three-hour Commons debate on Tuesday.

The intervention by Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, and the granting of the debate itself, will force the UK’s Foreign Office to set out how it intends to respond after Russia’s veto of a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in eastern Aleppo. The west has been criticised for lacking any leverage over Russia in Syria.

Britain has criticised Russia but set out no clear plan on how to respond to the growing threat posed by Moscow not just in the Middle East, but across eastern Europe. Mitchell argues the whole post-cold war international diplomatic architecture is being torn down by Russian actions. [Continue reading…]

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‘Hard Brexit’ could cost 66 billion pounds a year

Reuters reports: The United Kingdom could lose up to 66 billion pounds a year under a “hard Brexit”, The Times reported citing leaked government papers.

GDP could fall by as much 9.5 percent if Britain leaves the European Union compared with if it stays within the union, The Times reported.

The 66-billion-pound figure was in a draft cabinet committee paper which was seen by The Times. [Continue reading…]

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Polish workers, Indian students and Italian politicians voice fears over Brexit effect on British culture

The Observer reports: Two young Polish women on the train from Gatwick into London are chattering away, bags at their feet. Off the flight from Kraków after five days at home with family, they followed the news, and the speeches, from Britain all week. “You have to – so as to get an idea of how long before we will be driven out of England. I’m sure it will happen,” said Angela, who is the manager of a gastropub near Oxford.

“It’s sad this is the way things are going because I was pleased to have a woman prime minister, but my boss said to me it will be bad. He’s angry because he wants to choose staff for how good they are, not their nationality. He says it will be hard to replace me, which is nice to hear,” she said.

Angela and her friend, Martina, are among the 600,000 people who will not have been in the UK for five years – giving, under present rules, permanent residency rights – by the time the UK leaves the EU in 2019. Now she and her friend are alarmed by the tone of the rhetoric that emerged from last week’s Tory conference. They are among thousands across Europe and beyond who fear that life for people hoping to settle in Britain may be about to become more difficult.

Of the 2.1 million EU nationals employed in the UK, Poles are the biggest group. Of EU nationals in the UK, Poles number 916,000, Irish 332,000, Romanians 233,000 and Portuguese 219,000, according to latest figures from the Office of National Statistics.

“My cousin is a priest here, he would rather be in Poland, close to his old mother, but he came where there is a shortage [of priests] and to be where he is needed. Britain does need workers,” Angela said. “In Poland people are worried, shocked. They say Britain is now dangerous and tell stories in the newspaper of race attacks and murders. People are scared if their children are living here,” she added. [Continue reading…]

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Nearly half the adults in Britain and elsewhere in Europe hold extremist views

BuzzFeed reports: Almost half of the adults in 12 European countries now hold anti-immigrant, nationalist views, according to major new research that reveals the spread of fringe political views into the mainstream.

BuzzFeed News has been given exclusive access to new data from YouGov, which polled more than 12,000 people across the continent to measure the extent of what it termed “authoritarian populist” opinions – a combination of anti-immigration sentiments, strong foreign policy views, and opposition to human rights laws, EU institutions, and European integration policies.

The YouGov findings are the first to capture the political attitudes that are both fuelling, and being fuelled by, upheaval across Europe and beyond – from the continent’s refugee crisis and the Brexit vote in Britain, to the burkini ban in France, to the rise of Donald Trump and the radical “alternative right” in the US.

In Britain, the poll found authoritarian populist attitudes were shared by 48% of adults, despite less than 20% of the population identifying itself as right-wing. Three months on from the EU referendum, prime minister Theresa May has responded this week by appealing directly to disaffected working-class voters with a promise to crackdown on immigration and reassert British sovereignty. [Continue reading…]

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Xenophobia inside British government: Foreign experts are now barred from offering advice on Brexit

The Guardian reports: Leading foreign academics acting as expert advisers to the UK government have been told they will not be asked to contribute to any government analysis and reports on Brexit because they are not British nationals.

“It is utterly baffling that the government is turning down expert, independent advice on Brexit simply because someone is from another country,” said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ EU spokesman.

“This is yet more evidence of the Conservatives’ alarming embrace of petty chauvinism over rational policymaking.”

Sara Hagemann, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics who specialises in EU policymaking processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments and the consequences of EU enlargements, said she had been told her services would not be required. [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May walks into a Brexit trap

Gideon Rachman writes: Theresa May has one great advantage as a politician. She looks serious and responsible. But appearances can be deceptive. If you examine how the UK prime minister is handling Brexit, a different sort of politician emerges.

By announcing that she will start the formal negotiations for Britain to leave the EU by March 2017, the prime minister has walked into a trap. She has given away what little leverage Britain has in the negotiations — without receiving any of the assurances that she needs to achieve a successful outcome.

The announcement of the decision about when the UK will trigger Article 50 — the process by which Britain gives formal notice that it intends to leave the EU — was made in a statesmanlike fashion. But the actual content of the decision is reckless and driven by politics, rather than Britain’s national interest.

Once Mrs May triggers Article 50, she has precisely two years to negotiate a new deal with the EU. Senior civil servants have told the prime minister that it is highly unlikely that the UK will be able to negotiate both the terms of its divorce and a new trade deal with the EU within the two-year deadline. As a result, they warned the prime minister that she must have assurances on what an interim trade agreement with the EU would look like in the long period between the UK leaving the bloc and a definitive new deal being put into place.

Mrs May has chosen to ignore this advice. In doing so, she has knowingly placed Britain at a massive disadvantage in the forthcoming negotiations. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit: What will happen now timescale for article 50 has been revealed?

The Guardian reports: As the man who drafted it has said, the EU’s divorce clause was never meant to be triggered: article 50 was inserted into the Lisbon treaty purely to silence British complaints that there was no official way out of the union.

So there is a certain irony in Britain now becoming the first European Union member state to formally begin the two-year leaving process, after Theresa May said Brexit would finally start by the end of March 2017.

With the start date now known, albeit approximately, British efforts will redouble to open informal talks before official negotiations begin – despite Brussels’s repeated insistence on “no negotiation without notification”.

David Davis’s Brexit ministry, expected soon to number as many as 500 staff, and the government’s legal department will bear the brunt of extracting Britain from the bloc and defining its future relationship. The key question they must resolve – and still a source of conflict within the government – remains whether the UK will push for enhanced access to the single market.

That, Brussels and other EU capitals have repeatedly insisted, can only come at the price of free movement for European migrant workers, an acceptance of the single market’s rules and regulations, and a contribution to Brussels’s budget.

DExEU, Davis’s department, will model different “soft” and “hard” Brexit scenarios and their impact on dozens of sectors of the UK economy, help define the cabinet’s preferred Brexit target, and draw up negotiating priorities: what does Britain want, what can it not do without, what might it be prepared to sacrifice.

Both DExEU and the government’s legal department will also now begin work on the act that will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act – the law that binds EU law to the British statute book – and new legislation to transpose EU legislation into British law in its entirety.

The bill, announced by May on Saturday night, will be brought forward in the next parliamentary session. It will take effect on the day Britain leaves the EU, now set at no later than the end of March 2019, with future governments able to unpick EU-derived laws as desired. [Continue reading…]

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UK heading for hard Brexit, say European diplomats

The Guardian reports: European diplomats are increasingly convinced the UK will sever economic ties with the continent when it leaves the European Union, as hopes of a special partnership languish.

As the European commission’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, prepares to start work on Saturday, the dominant mood among senior diplomats is that the UK is on the path to “hard Brexit”, namely giving up membership of the EU single market, as well as the customs union that allows free circulation of goods.

Under this clean-break scenario, London-based banks would lose the passports that allow them to operate across the continent, while Britain’s trade would be governed by a new agreement yet to be defined. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian activist barred from travel after UK seizes passport at Assad’s request

The Guardian reports: British authorities have confiscated the passport of a prominent Syrian critic of Bashar al-Assad at the request of the government in Damascus, effectively preventing her from travelling and blocking her work as an activist.

Zaina Erhaim, an award-winning journalist and campaigner based in Turkey, had her passport taken away by UK border officials when she landed at Heathrow airport. After more than an hour of questioning, they told her that the document had been reported stolen.

The complaint came from the government she has been campaigning against for years. “I expect to be harassed inside my country,’ Erhaim told the Observer. “I know that if I went home I would be killed, but now I find that Assad’s arm can even reach to the UK. This is a dictator pursuing a journalist.”

A receipt that Erhaim was given for the passport states: “Document reported as stolen.” Erhaim, who is travelling to the UK for an event with the BBC’s Kate Adie at the Kew literary festival, said it contained her name, photograph and fingerprint. Erhaim had previously used the passport without problems to travel to the UK in April, when she collected the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Journalism award for her work. She had also travelled on it without any problems across Europe. [Continue reading…]

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UK accused of blocking UN inquiry into claim of war crimes in Yemen

The Observer reports: Britain has blocked European Union efforts to establish an independent international inquiry into the war in Yemen, prompting dismay among human rights groups.

The Netherlands had hoped to garner broad support for its proposal that the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva set up an inquiry to examine civilian deaths in Yemen, where the Saudi Arabia-led coalition is accused of committing war crimes.

Instead, with the UK refusing to give its backing, the Netherlands’ proposal for an international inquiry – submitted on Friday by Slovakia on behalf of the EU – was replaced with a much weaker one that the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) dispatch a mission “with assistance from relevant experts, to monitor and report on the situation … in Yemen”. This falls far short of what human rights groups and the OHCHR had wanted. [Continue reading…]

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Rising toll on civilians in Yemen raises alarm

The New York Times reports: United Nations human rights officials expressed alarm on Friday at a sharp rise in civilian casualties in Yemen since peace talks collapsed last month, the great majority of them inflicted in airstrikes by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

At least 329 civilians have been killed, and at least 426 have been injured since the beginning of August. Fighting resumed after Aug. 6, when talks collapsed between the Saudi-led coalition supporting Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and forces aligned with Houthi rebels supported by Iran who control the capital and large portions of the country.

The toll was reported as Saudi Arabia and Arab allies waged a diplomatic campaign at the United Nations Human Rights Council to stave off an international investigation into the conduct of hostilities and possible war crimes.

Heavy Saudi pressure on Western governments and businesses succeeded in stalling a similar initiative in the Council last year; diplomats say the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, has again lobbied against an independent international inquiry. They add that growing awareness of the bloodshed has made it harder for the United States and Britain, Saudi Arabia’s major suppliers of arms and munitions, to look away. [Continue reading…]

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England’s forgotten Muslim history

Jerry Brotton writes: Britain is divided as never before. The country has turned its back on Europe, and its female ruler has her sights set on trade with the East. As much as this sounds like Britain today, it also describes the country in the 16th century, during the golden age of its most famous monarch, Queen Elizabeth I.

One of the more surprising aspects of Elizabethan England is that its foreign and economic policy was driven by a close alliance with the Islamic world, a fact conveniently ignored today by those pushing the populist rhetoric of national sovereignty.

From the moment of her accession to the throne in 1558, Elizabeth began seeking diplomatic, commercial and military ties with Muslim rulers in Iran, Turkey and Morocco — and with good reasons. In 1570, when it became clear that Protestant England would not return to the Catholic faith, the pope excommunicated Elizabeth and called for her to be stripped of her crown. Soon, the might of Catholic Spain was against her, an invasion imminent. English merchants were prohibited from trading with the rich markets of the Spanish Netherlands. Economic and political isolation threatened to destroy the newly Protestant country.

Elizabeth responded by reaching out to the Islamic world. Spain’s only rival was the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Sultan Murad III, which stretched from North Africa through Eastern Europe to the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans had been fighting the Hapsburgs for decades, conquering parts of Hungary. Elizabeth hoped that an alliance with the sultan would provide much needed relief from Spanish military aggression, and enable her merchants to tap into the lucrative markets of the East. For good measure she also reached out to the Ottomans’ rivals, the shah of Persia and the ruler of Morocco. [Continue reading…]

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The EU’s message to Britain: We’re going to be just fine without you

In a review of Jean-Claude Juncker’s state of the European Union speech, Joris Luyendijk writes: “Never before have I seen so little common ground between our member states,” said Juncker, himself an EU veteran like few others. The EU is in greater danger than ever before, he continued, with greater levels of selfishness, nationalism and parochialism.

Yet Juncker also slipped in good news of the sort that somehow rarely reaches the mainstream British press. There had been one million jobs created in Spain over the past three years, and seven million more elsewhere. Public deficits are, on average, now below 2% across the eurozone, down from a terrifying 6.3% in 2009. Juncker might have added the eurozone’s healthy current account surplus, meaning it continues to export more than it imports. This is a stark contrast to the US and Britain, two nations that are becoming ever more indebted because they buy more from foreign countries than they sell.

Easily the most refreshing element in the speech, at least for those who have had to endure the Brexit “debate”, was Juncker’s emphasis on realism. Where Brexiteers continue to indulge in narcissistic fantasies about getting the best of all worlds from the EU while making Britain a world power again, Juncker struck a very different tone. Insisting that “solidarity is the glue that holds the union together” he pointed out that Europeans today make up 8% of the world population. In 2050 that will be down to 5%. “By then you would not see a single EU country among the top world economies,” Juncker went on. “But the EU together? We would still be topping the charts.”

To which he might have added: “And that is true with or without Britain.” [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May ‘likely’ to launch Brexit talks in early 2017, suggests Donald Tusk

The Guardian reports: The UK is expected to launch formal talks to leave the European Union in January or February next year, one of Europe’s top leaders said after a special summit without Britain, aimed at rallying the bloc battered by Brexit and the migration crisis.

The European council president, Donald Tusk, said British prime minister Theresa May had told him article 50 was “likely” to be triggered in January or February next year, dashing remain voters’ hopes of delaying the UK’s EU exit.

The British government was also sent a stark warning not to expect any compromise on the EU’s cherished principle of free movement of people, if it wants access to the single market.

Speaking of his meeting with May in London last week, Tusk said the prime minister had been “open and honest” about her difficulties in launching EU exit talks this year.

“She declared that it was almost impossible to trigger article 50 this year but it’s quite likely that they will be ready, maybe in January, maybe in February, next year.” He said the rest of the EU was ready to start negotiations tomorrow. [Continue reading…]

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Some British taxi drivers being trained to spy on passengers

Middle East Eye reports: Taxi drivers in the UK are being trained to become the “eyes and ears” of local authorities and police in the hunt for potential terrorists as part of safeguarding schemes being rolled out across the country.

Drivers in several British towns and cities are receiving Prevent counter-terrorism training as part of mandatory “knowledge” tests introduced by local councils.

One flagship scheme, run by Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire, northern England, was considered so successful that councillors discussed extending it to staff working in takeaway food outlets and bars.

Manchester City Council also incorporated Prevent awareness into a safeguarding handbook issued to taxi drivers last year, while Dartford Borough Council in Kent is among the latest to introduce Prevent training as part of its safeguarding requirements for taxi drivers.

But taxi industry organisations and trade unions have raised concerns about the training which they say is being introduced in a piecemeal and inconsistent way across the country and risks creating an “air of suspicion” within communities.

Critics of Prevent also questioned the legality of the training and accused the Government of seeking to turn the UK into a “counter-terrorism state” in which citizens were expected to spy on each other. [Continue reading…]

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British MPs deliver damning verdict on David Cameron’s Libya intervention

The Guardian reports: David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee.

The failures led to the country becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds.

The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron’s foreign policy legacy.

It concurs with Barack Obama’s assessment that the intervention was “a shitshow”, and repeats the US president’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. The findings are also likely to be seized on by Donald Trump, who has tried to undermine Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy credentials by repeatedly condemning her handling of the Libyan intervention in 2011, when she was US secretary of state. [Continue reading…]

Chris Stephen writes: When Nato went to war against Gaddafi in the revolution, the US took a back seat, with Britain and France sharing the leading role. But with the revolution over, Cameron walked away.

In London, few parliamentary debates on Libya were called by the government or the opposition, even though British bombing had done so much to create the country’s new order.

When last year the foreign affairs select committee called on Cameron to give evidence in its inquiry into British planning in Libya, he informed them he had no time in his schedule.

Meanwhile, diplomats insist that Libyan leaders of all persuasions have shut out offers of support. Memories of domination by outside powers leave Libyans suspicious of the motivations of foreigners, and offers to help build a modern state were spurned.

London finally woke up to Libya last year, with people smugglers taking advantage of the chaos to build a booming business – and with Islamic State on the march.

The UK, along with the US and Italy, is a prime mover behind the troubled government of national accord (GNA), created by a UN-chaired commission last December. Unelected and largely unloved, the GNA has failed to create a security force of its own, relying instead on militias that are also busy fighting each other.

The capture of key ports by the powerful eastern general Khalifa Haftar this week may have sealed the fate of this new government, now deprived of oil wealth.

All of which leaves Libya, in the words of Britain’s special envoy, Jonathan Powell – a veteran of Blair’s meeting with Gaddafi – veering towards becoming “Somalia on the Mediterranean”. [Continue reading…]

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For more than 100 years, Britain has been perpetually at war

Ian Cobain writes: For more than a hundred years, not a single year has passed when Britain’s armed forces have not been engaged in military operations somewhere in the world. The British are unique in this respect: the same could not be said of the Americans, the Russians, the French or any other nation.

Only the British are perpetually at war.

One reason that this is rarely acknowledged could be that in the years following the second world war, and before the period of national self-doubt that was provoked in 1956 by the Suez crisis, Britain engaged in so many end-of-empire scraps that military activity came to be regarded by the British public as the norm, and therefore unremarkable. Another is that since 1945, British forces have engaged in a series of small wars that were under-reported and now all but forgotten, or which were obscured, even as they were being fought, by more dramatic events elsewhere.

A great deal is known about some conflicts, such as the 1982 Falklands war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Britain’s role in the two world wars has become in many ways central to the national narrative. But other conflicts are remembered only dimly or have always remained largely hidden.

One strategically vital war, waged by Britain for more than a decade, was fought for most of that time in complete secrecy. In January 1972, readers of the Observer opened their newspaper to see a report headlined “UK fighting secret Gulf war?” On the same day, the Sunday Times ran a very similar article, asking: “Is Dhofar Britain’s hush-hush war?” British troops, the newspapers revealed, were engaged in the war that the sultan of Oman was fighting against guerrillas in the mountains of Dhofar in the south of the country.

Four years earlier, the devaluation crisis had forced Harold Wilson’s government to pledge that British forces would be withdrawn from all points east of Suez by December 1971 – the only exemption being a small force that was to remain in Hong Kong. Now the Observer article was demanding to know: “Has Britain really withdrawn all her forces from the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula? Or is the British government, like the Americans in Laos, waging a secret war without the full knowledge of parliament and public?” The Observer located one of the insurgency’s leaders, who told its reporter that the war had begun with an “explosion” in the country on 9 June 1965, triggered by what he described as poor local governance and “the oppression of the British”. By the time the Observer and Sunday Times were publishing their first, tentative reports, Britain had been at war in Oman for six-and-a-half years. [Continue reading…]

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Fatal beating of Polish man fuels bebate over xenophobia in Britain

The New York Times reports: Two Polish immigrants were eating takeout pizza against a brick wall on a muggy night in Harlow, a working-class town about 20 miles northeast of central London.

As they chatted in Polish, witnesses said, a group of young boys and girls attacked them. The group repeatedly pummeled and kicked one of the men, Arkadiusz Jozwik, 40, a meat factory worker, in the head. He died two days later from his injuries, in a killing that the police are investigating as a possible hate crime.

The second man, who was not identified by the police, was hospitalized with bruises and hand fractures.

Six boys from Harlow — five 15-year-olds and one 16-year-old — have been arrested on suspicion of murder in the attack, which occurred shortly before midnight on Saturday. All have been released on bail. The police have appealed for witnesses to come forward, and they said they were investigating reports that the attackers had hurled racist abuse at the victims.

The brutality of the killing and its apparent targeting of immigrants shocked many Britons and prompted soul-searching. It renewed alarm among Eastern European immigrants that the campaign leading to Britain’s decision in a June 23 referendum to leave the European Union, known as “Brexit,” has unleashed a wave of xenophobia. [Continue reading…]

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