Suzanne Moore writes: If you had told me a few months back I would be encouraging people to sign a petition to prevent embarrassment being caused to the Queen, I would have laughed. Petitions are so overused these days that they can seem meaningless – and surely there are bigger issues at stake than the feelings of the monarch. But that was before Donald Trump and his decency-shredding goons were in power, before this shameful Muslim ban. These are not normal times – despite our government and much of our press pretending that they are. It is good to see that Trump is being fought on every level from huge marches, to spontaneous demonstrations to legal challenges. This petition is another small front. It is not an attempt to ban Trump, it simply asks that he does not make a state visit, that the red carpet is not rolled out for him. It says a state visit could cause the Queen “embarrassment”.
This is a smart move because Trump does care about pomp, ceremony and hierarchy. Symbolism matters more to him than reality. Never accepted socially in the upper echelons of American society, it matters hugely that he is now seen with those his supporters recognise as important. He kept the menu from his dinner with Theresa May remember, as a reminder that he’d “had lunch with the British prime minister”.
Embracing him with the royal flummery would signal to his base that this country held him in high regard, that he was head of a respected government. Both these things are untrue. May’s embarrassing renewal of the vows of the special relationship didn’t even amount to a one-night stand. As soon as she had got on the plane he was signing this vile executive order. The ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries is a domestic policy to play to his racist base. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but some of those who would support it would also enjoy seeing him all puffed up hanging out with the Queen. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: President Trump began a new era of diplomacy with Russia on Saturday as he and President Vladimir V. Putin conducted an hourlong telephone call, and vowed to repair relations between the countries after nearly three years of conflict that threatened a new Cold War between East and West.
The two leaders discussed fighting terrorism and expanding economic ties, but barely mentioned the wedge that has been driven between Washington and Moscow since Russia annexed Crimea and sponsored a separatist war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Still, although Mr. Trump had previously expressed a willingness to lift sanctions against Russia, the issue did not come up, according to officials on both sides.
The tone of the conversation was reported to be warm, indicating a drastic shift after relations had broken down between Mr. Putin and former President Barack Obama. “The positive call was a significant start to improving the relationship between the United States and Russia that is in need of repair,” the Trump administration said in a statement. “Both President Trump and President Putin are hopeful that after today’s call, the two sides can move quickly to tackle terrorism and other important issues of mutual concern.”
In its statement, the Kremlin said: “Donald Trump asked to convey a desire for happiness and prosperity for the Russian people, noting that the people in America relate with sympathy to Russia and its citizens.” Mr. Putin answered that Russians feel the same way about Americans, the statement said. Neither side mentioned the Russian hacking of the American election in their statements.
Over the past two days, Mr. Trump has also had a series of conversations with the United States’ traditional European allies, but those calls were seemingly not as congenial. After a meeting on Friday with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, in which she warned against removing sanctions on Russia, Mr. Trump had on Saturday what appeared to be a businesslike call with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and a testier call with President François Hollande of France.
Mr. Hollande’s office said the French president pressed Mr. Trump not to lift sanctions against Russia and to respect the nuclear agreement with Iran. He asserted the importance of the Paris climate change pact, warned of the consequences of protectionism, and added that democratic values included welcoming refugees — all in reaction to Mr. Trump’s first week of policy moves. Mr. Hollande also emphasized the importance of NATO and the United Nations, both of which Mr. Trump has disparaged. [Continue reading…]
Corbyn told the Guardian the summer visit should be called off if Trump’s indefinite ban on Syrian refugees remains in place, even if time-limited restrictions put in place have lapsed by then.
“Donald Trump should not be welcomed to Britain while he abuses our shared values with his shameful Muslim ban and attacks on refugees’ and women’s rights,” he said.
“Theresa May would be failing the British people if she does not postpone the state visit and condemn Trump’s actions in the clearest terms. That’s what Britain expects and deserves.”
With Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, also calling for the visit to be cancelled, May was under pressure on Sunday to make a stronger condemnation of Trump’s ban, which has brought global condemnation and prompted travel and legal chaos within the US. [Continue reading…]
BBC political correspondent, Susana Mendonca, writes: Before all the hand holding and pally smiles, Theresa May promised the world she would not be afraid to tell Donald Trump what she thought when she disagreed with him. It didn’t take long for her to stumble at the first hurdle.
Downing Street later said the prime minister didn’t agree with Mr Trump’s approach. And her Chief Secretary to the Treasury also said she was not the kind of politician to “shoot from the hip”.
But this tougher stance only came after wide criticism of her failure to condemn the president in the first place.
Iraqi-born MP Nadhim Zahawi said he would also be banned from the US; fellow Conservative Heidi Allen said she didn’t care how “special” the relationship was, some lines shouldn’t be crossed.
And that’s the trouble for Theresa May. Donald Trump is bound to cross yet more lines, and if she doesn’t criticise him she’ll look like the weak partner obeying the powerful one.
The real question for her will be whether keeping Mr Trump sweet in the interests of getting a good trade deal for Britain is worth the backlash she’ll get for not being candid enough when she and Britain disagrees with him.
Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said he was pleased the prime minister “has now said she and the government do not agree” with the policy – which Mr Khan described as “shameful”.
“As a nation that, like the USA, values tolerance, diversity and freedom, we cannot just shrug our shoulders and say: ‘It’s not our problem’.”
Labour’s former deputy leader Harriet Harman told the BBC: “I was horrified when he announced this ban on people from Muslim countries.
“And three times – once, twice, three times – [Mrs May] said: ‘Oh it’s nothing to do with me.’ Well, it is to do with us, as we all know. And she obviously has to be careful as prime minister – but she needs to be strong as well. So I was really disappointed – I hope she’s learnt some lessons.”
Meanwhile, an appeal to raise funds for a Glasgow vet caught up in the American flight ban has raised enough to pay for her tickets home just a few hours after being launched. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Hamaseh Tayari, a UK resident who holds an Iranian passport, has been on holiday in Costa Rica with her boyfriend for the last week. She was due to fly back to Glasgow, where she works as a vet, this morning but was denied entry onto the flight because her flight went via New York and she would need a transit visa, which was revoked.
Tayari, who grew up in Italy, has never experienced anything like this. She says: “This has really shocked me. We just discovered [what Trump did] at the airport when we went to check in. I want people to know that this is not just happening to refugees. I am a graduate and I have a PhD. It has happened to a person who is working and who pays tax.”
Tayari and her boyfriend are trying to find an alternative route home. A flight to Madrid on the 30 January will cost them £2,000 and they’ll still have to find a way from there to Glasgow. “We had been saving for months for this holiday and it will cost me a month’s salary just to get home,” she said.
“I am destroyed. I did not know that I could cry for so long. It feels like the beginning of the end. How this is possible? I am really afraid about what is going on.”
British Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi, who was born in Iraq, interviewed on the BBC:
Sadly, it’s a bit late in the day for Zahawi to have recognized the importance of freedom of movement. Last March, sounding very much like Trump, the MP tweeted in support of Brexit:
Freedom of movement makes it harder to monitor those who might represent a danger to the UK, safer to #VoteLeavehttps://t.co/FZ1vMu4sCt
The Telegraph reports: Sir Mo Farah, the British Olympic hero, has attacked Donald Trump and said he fears he may now be separated from his family because of the American president’s immigration crackdown.
The four-times Olympic gold medal winner said the Queen had made him a knight, but Mr Trump had apparently now made him an ‘alien’
The long distance runner said he would be forced to tell his children “that Daddy may not be able to come home” because of the ban preventing any citizen of seven mostly-Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days. The ban extends to those with dual British nationality.
In a damning statement, the long distance runner who was knighted last month said Mr Trump’s new policy was “from a place of ignorance and prejudice.” [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Prime Minister Theresa May said on Saturday Britain did not agree with U.S. President Donald Trump’s curbs on immigration after facing criticism from lawmakers in her own party for not condemning his executive order.
On a visit to Turkey, she was asked three times to comment on Trump’s move to put a four-month hold on allowing refugees into the United States and temporarily barring travelers from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries, which he said would protect Americans from violent Islamists.
She replied Washington was responsible for its policy on refugees.
But later, after her return to London, her spokesman said: “Immigration policy in the United States is a matter for the government of the United States, just the same as immigration policy for this country should be set by our government.
“But we do not agree with this kind of approach and it is not one we will be taking. We are studying this new executive order to see what it means and what the legal effects are, and in particular what the consequences are for UK nationals.” [Continue reading…]
The chorus of criticism came as passport holders from Arab countries were blocked on Saturday from passing through customs at US airports and others were prevented from boarding US-bound planes.
Trump on Friday signed an executive order that will curb immigration and the entry of refugees from some Muslim-majority countries. He separately said he wanted the US to give priority to Syrian Christians fleeing the civil war there.
The bans, though temporary, took effect immediately, causing havoc and confusion for would-be travelers with passports from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The United Nations refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration called on the Trump administration to continue offering asylum to people fleeing war and persecution, saying its resettlement programme was vital.
“The needs of refugees and migrants worldwide have never been greater and the US resettlement programme is one of the most important in the world,” the two Geneva-based agencies said in a joint statement on Saturday. [Continue reading…]
The Wall Street Journal reports: Citizens of the seven countries identified by President Donald Trump for a 90-day visa ban who hold dual nationality also will be barred from entering the United States, the U.S. State Department said in a statement Saturday.
In a statement that the State Department is due to release, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the 90-day visa moratorium extends beyond just citizens of Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
It also applies to people who originally hail from those countries but are traveling on a passport issued by any other nation, the statement notes. That means Iraqis seeking to enter the U.S. on a British passport, for instance, will be barred, according to a U.S. official. British citizens don’t normally require a visa to enter the U.S. [Continue reading…]
She was speaking just a day after meeting the new President in Washington, where the pair pledged their commitment to the “special relationship” between Britain and the US.
After agreeing a controversial £100 million fighter jet deal amid wide-ranging purges and security crackdowns following an attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ms May held a joint press conference with Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım.
Their talks were overshadowed by global debate over Mr Trump’s executive order to ban Syrian refugees from entering the US indefinitely, halt all other asylum admissions for 120 days and suspend travel visas for citizens of “countries of particular concern”, including Syria, Iraq and other Muslim-majority nations.
Faisal Islam, the political editor of Sky News, asked Ms May whether she viewed it as an “action of the leader of the free world”.
The Prime Minister replied that she was “very pleased” to have met Mr Trump in Washington, before evading the question by hailing Turkey’s reception of millions of refugees and Britain’s support for its government and other nations surrounding Syria.
When pressed for a second time for her view by another British journalist, Ms May continued: “The United States is responsible for the United States’ policy on refugees, the United Kingdom is responsible for the United Kingdom’s policy on refugees.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: The rise of unthinking pacifism and kneejerk isolationism in Britain have dangerous consequences for the safety of people around the world, according to a report started by Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in June 2016.
The report, which was finished by Cox’s colleague and fellow MP Alison McGovern and Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, makes the case that doing nothing can have a greater cost than intervention.
The findings are to be launched by the former prime minister Gordon Brown and former Tory foreign secretary William Hague on Thursday, at an event for the Policy Exchange thinktank in London.
The paper was intended to be jointly published by Cox, a former aid worker, and Tugendhat, a former soldier, before the Batley and Spen MP was shot and stabbed by far-right terrorist Thomas Mair.
It points to a number of global conflicts where intervention has been deemed successful, including a no-fly zone in Iraq in 1991 to protect Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s air attacks, the 1999 intervention in Kosovo to save civilians from ethnic cleansing and the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 to help repel the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) advance. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: British Prime Minister Theresa May must give parliament a vote before she can formally start Britain’s exit from the European Union, the UK Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, giving lawmakers who oppose her Brexit plans a shot at amending them.
By a majority of eight to three, the UK’s highest judicial body decided May could not use executive powers known as “royal prerogative” to invoke Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty and so begin two years of divorce talks.
“The referendum is of great political significance, but the Act of Parliament which established it did not say what should happen as a result,” said David Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court.
“So any change in the law to give effect to the referendum must be made in the only way permitted by the UK constitution, namely by an Act of Parliament.”
However, the judges did remove one major potential obstacle for the British government, saying May did not need the approval of the UK’s devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland before triggering Brexit. [Continue reading…]
Rafael Behr writes: aybe the European Union is God’s way of teaching the British about Belgium. Specifically, it is a mechanism that forces UK politicians to confront the idea that Belgium matters. And not just Belgium but countries like it – the small countries.
This concept doesn’t come naturally to a nation that is neurotically worried about its greatness. Naming famous Belgians is a parlour game for British foreign secretaries. Cultivating small-state alliances feels like something less ambitious countries do. The UK struggles to see itself in perspective because it is richer and more powerful than most countries, yet so much less influential than it used to be.
We are not alone in suffering from post-imperial angst, but we have tied ourselves in uniquely existential knots where relations with our European neighbours are concerned. Theresa May understands the deep cultural and psychological attraction of Brexit as a great unpicking – a disentanglement from continental ties, the benefits of which feel obscure to much of the public.
Therein lies the emotional cleverness of the prime minister’s formulation of a “clean Brexit”, as laid out in her speech on Tuesday. Pro-Europeans probe the agonising detail of the negotiations to come without recruiting any more of the public to share their pain. If anything, the balance of opinion is swinging the other way. The prime minister’s message was tailored to the large segment of voters, including many ex-remainers, who see the big in/out question as settled and say they want the job done without any more palaver.
The effectiveness of May’s account of future relations with the EU – no “partial membership”, no messy overlaps with the past – is its simplicity. Her Europhile critics want to talk only about complexity, which is the least catchy tune in politics. May paints Britain with the crispness of its outline restored, its place in the world made clearer by the erasure of all those fiddly lines that connect London to Brussels and then to Paris, Berlin, Ljubljana, Tallinn and the rest. She offers liberation from the need to care about Belgians.
That obligation endures whether the prime minister wants it or not. Small states will have a say in the divorce contract terms that Britain signs with the EU. Their voice will be heard in the negotiations and in chambers where the deal must be ratified. It was opposition in Belgium’s Wallonian regional parliament that nearly scuppered a Canada-EU free trade agreement last year. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: The UK is leading a Europe-wide “race to the bottom” with Orwellian counter-terrorism measures that seriously threaten human rights, according to a comparative survey of security laws by Amnesty International.
In more than half the areas of concern highlighted by the report, the UK is judged to be at one end of the spectrum in relation to regulations on “mass surveillance”, use of “diplomatic assurances” to deport people where there is a risk of torture, stripping people of their nationality, controlling their movement and detaining without charge or sufficient legal process.
The Guardian reports: An Israeli embassy official who plotted to “take down” MPs regarded as hostile has also set up a number of political organisations in the UK that operated as though entirely independent.
Shai Masot was filmed covertly as he boasted about establishing several groups, at least one of which was intended to influence Labour party policy, while appearing to obscure their links to Israel.
The disclosure comes as Labour demanded the government launch an immediate inquiry into “improper interference in our democratic politics”. A former Tory government minister also called for an inquiry into the Israeli embassy’s links with two organisations, Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).
Meanwhile, Masot is being sent back to Israel in disgrace, and a civil servant and Conservative official who was also filmed discussing ways to discredit MPs has resigned from her post. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: An Israeli embassy official has been caught on camera in an undercover sting plotting to “take down” MPs regarded as hostile, including foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan, an outspoken supporter of a Palestinian state.
In an extraordinary breach of diplomatic protocol, Shai Masot, who describes himself as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces and is serving as a senior political officer at the London embassy, was recorded by an undercover reporter from al-Jazeera’s investigative unit speaking about a number of British MPs.
The Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev, apologised to Duncan on Friday. An Israeli spokesman said Regev made clear that “the embassy considered the remarks completely unacceptable”.
The Israeli embassy said Masot “will be ending his term of employment with the embassy shortly”. Masot declined to comment or to elaborate on what he meant when he said he wanted to “take down” a number of MPs. [Continue reading…]
Gary Younge writes: When there’s a cloud this large and foreboding no lining, silver or otherwise, will suffice. This was a year in which vulgarity, divisiveness and exclusion won – a triumph for dystopian visions of race, nation and ethnicity. Those thought dangerous and marginal are now not only mainstream, they have power. Immigrants and minorities are fearful, bigots are emboldened, discourse is coarsened. Progressive alternatives, while available, have yet to find a coherent electoral voice. You can polish this turd of a year all you like – it won’t stop it stinking to high heaven.
But while the prospects for hope are scarce there is, none the less, one thing from which we might draw solace. The right is emboldened but it is not in the ascendancy. The problem is that the centre has collapsed, and liberalism is in retreat. There is nothing to celebrate in the latter but there is much to ponder in the former. It suggests that this moment is less the product of some unstoppable force than the desperate choice of last resort.
Americans did not turn their backs on a bright new future but on a candidate offering more of the same at a time when the gap between rich and poor and black and white is growing. Nor did most of them vote for Donald Trump. Not only did he get fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but he got a lower proportion of the eligible vote than Mitt Romney in 2012, John McCain in 2008, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 – all of whom lost.
Britain did back Brexit – no sugarcoating that. But voters didn’t reject the case for the EU because it was never really made. Nor was it a rejection of the case for immigration, because that was never made either. I don’t know whether remain would have prevailed if those cases had been made. Probably not. But since they weren’t made they could hardly have been defeated. Instead people were fed a diet of fear of the unknown from a political class that has failed them and gagged.
The right did not win the arguments: they won electoral contests because their principal opponents were too arrogant, complacent or contemptuous (and sometimes all three) to make an argument beyond “at least we’re not them”.
We are not set for an ideological assault like the early 80s, when Thatcherism provided a sharper understanding of the forces shaping our society than the left did. On both sides of the Atlantic, the right is deeply divided, intellectually incoherent and set to fail on its own terms. [Continue reading…]
Judy Dempsey writes: Throughout 2016, Europe has lurched from one crisis to another. The British voted to leave the EU. Russia stepped up its interference in domestic politics in several European countries by planting false news stories and financing populist, right-wing movements. Terrorist attacks and the refugee and eurozone crises divided the EU’s 28 member states.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans elected Donald Trump as their next president on a ticket promising to make the United States great again. Trump professes little interest in what has kept the West together: the transatlantic relationship.
All the above crises have one thing in common. They are having a profound effect on Europe’s future. As 2016 draws to a close, the EU’s extreme vulnerability and growing instability are exposed.
The Brexit decision has weakened Europe. If they chose to do so, European leaders could mitigate the political fallout of Britain’s exit. But instead of using Brexit to push for further integration or a two-speed Europe — or even as a chance to get out of their bubble to explain why Europe matters — most leaders are engaged in petty institutional or domestic power games. As they do so, they seem to underestimate how the roles of Russia and the United States are planting the seeds of Europe’s destruction. [Continue reading…]
Lindsey Hilsum writes: Every few hours I check my WhatsApp feed from the doctors in East Aleppo. They post videos of injured children and a combination of eyewitness news and desperate messages: “Iran militia shot the convoy,” “The regime forces are still angry, I may die tens times now,” “Warplane with heavy machine gun attacking right now.”
Injured boys at a field hospital after airstrikes on the rebel held areas of Aleppo, Syria November 18, 2016.
It takes me back to April 1994, when I sat, terrified, in my house in Kigali listening to Rwandan friends who called to tell me about the slaughter in their neighbourhoods. Monica dictated to me her last words to pass onto her husband, Marcel, who was travelling. As it happened, she survived, but their five children, who were staying with their grandparents, were murdered. These are not easy memories.
A few years later, Samantha Power, then Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Governance, published a book called A Problem from Hell; America and the Age of Genocide. Her thesis, simply put, was that in the face of mass slaughter the USA has a moral and legal obligation to intervene. America did nothing when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in Halabja, nor during the genocide in Rwanda nor the massacre of 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in Bosnia the following year.
The New York Times reports: Artillery shelling resumed early Wednesday on besieged eastern neighborhoods of the Syrian city of Aleppo, delaying a promised evacuation of thousands of civilians and medical staff members who had been expecting to leave under the aegis of a deal announced at the United Nations.
Buses that were supposed to evacuate some of the last holdouts in the heavily bombed neighborhoods left, empty, after waiting for hours, the Lebanese television station Al Manar, which is affiliated with the militant Shiite group Hezbollah reported — a sign that the evacuation process might not happen on Wednesday as planned.
The Pan-Arab television network Al Mayadeen showed buses idling at a prearranged evacuation point, waiting to take 5,000 fighters and their families to Atareb, a town west of Aleppo.
The opposition says that Iran, one of the Syrian government’s main allies, and its Shiite militia proxies were obstructing the deal; witnesses said that the militias had prevented a convoy of about 70 wounded people — mostly fighters and their relatives — from departing, despite the supposed deal announced at the United Nations. The militias, observers said, insisted that they would not allow anyone out until rebel groups had ended their siege of Fouaa and Kfarya, two encircled Shiite enclaves in Idlib Province.
Osama Abu Zayd, a legal adviser to Syrian opposition factions, told The Associated Press that the evacuation deal was being resisted by Iran’s field commander in Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, said it believed that Iran — a major ally of the Syrian government — had balked at the deal, annoyed that Russia and Turkey had not consulted it.
But the Russian Defense Ministry blamed the rebels for the impasse, saying on Wednesday that they had “resumed the hostilities” at dawn, trying to break through Syrian government positions to the northwest.
The impasse could be the sign of a stalling tactic by Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. His government has often skillfully played its backers — Iran, Russia and others — off one another. The disagreement could provide cover for what the Syrian government has wanted to do all along: finish off the enclave with force. As one Syrian military officer told Reuters in Aleppo recently, rebels must “surrender or die.”
Malek, an activist who has repeatedly moved around eastern Aleppo for his safety, and who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear that he would soon find himself in government territory, said he had looked forward to the evacuation, but that “nothing happened.”
Interviewed over the messaging service WhatsApp, he added, using a mournful idiom, “We didn’t taste the flavor of life.”
Troubles carrying out the accord were not surprising, as there was no international monitoring — United Nations officials said the Syrian government refused their repeated pleas to observe the process — and no mechanism to enforce the agreement. That has been a problem with other deals reached during the conflict.
Within eastern Aleppo, residents were alarmed as Russian news agencies broadcast remarks from the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who said he expected the rebels to “stop their resistance within two, three days.” Those remarks alarmed observers, as the evacuation deal says rebels already agreed to stop fighting in exchange for being allowed to leave.
“They are planning to slaughter us all,” said Monther Etaky, a civilian activist who had been hoping to evacuate.
Salem, a dentist who had kept his clinic open until last week, and who finally moved to one of the last rebel neighborhoods when his own was taken by government forces, said he could hear heavy shelling.
“We slept a quiet night, but sadly the shelling is back,” he said Wednesday morning, asking to be identified only by his first name. “Please share my message: The cease-fire collapsed. The situation is bad again.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: British MPs are deceiving themselves if they believe they do not bear some of the responsibility for the “terrible tragedy” unfolding in Syria, the former chancellor, George Osborne, said on Tuesday during an often anguished emergency debate in the House of Commons on the carnage being inflicted in eastern Aleppo. In one of his first speeches in the Commons since losing office, Osborne said there had been “multiple opportunities to intervene” in Syria as he cited parliament’s decision in 2013 not to take military action after the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
“Let’s be clear now: if you do not shape the world, you will be shaped by it. We are beginning to see the price of not intervening,” Osborne said.
The Commons voted by a majority of 13 in 2013 to reject military action after Labour combined with Tory rebels to deliver David Cameron his single biggest Commons rebuff. [Continue reading…]
Janine di Giovanni writes: Depending on your personal view, Aleppo has now fallen, or been retaken, or been liberated. But my interest is not with any political side. It’s with victims of state terror, and all the civilians whose lives have been shattered by a war that has been raging for more than five years. It is the most cynical conflict I have seen in 25 years of war reporting. Both the regime and opposition are guilty of war crimes, though one much more than the other.
What I’m considering now, from the comfort of my Paris home, is how a city falls. I am thinking of people cowering in basements and struggling with whether they flee from their city now, or wait. Who is coming to save them, or kill them? I know how that scenario goes. I lived through Sarajevo during the Bosnia war, and was in Grozny when it fell to (or was “liberated” by) Russian forces. I remember hiding in those basements waiting for the Russian tanks to come into the village, and wondering if I would be dead in a few hours.
I am thinking about the civilians – all of those people with whom I sat for hours while writing my book, or writing reports for the UN high commissioner for refugees – and what they are doing to survive. [Continue reading…]
Jim Killock writes: The Investigatory Powers Act will come into force at the start of 2017, and will cement ten years of illegal surveillance into law.
It includes state powers to intercept bulk communications and collect vast amounts of communications data and content. The security and law enforcement agencies – including government organisations such as HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) – can hack into devices of people in the UK.
Under this law, the intelligence agencies can use bulk hacking powers to hack devices and networks outside the UK. They can also access and analyse entire databases, whether they are held by private companies or public organisations – even though they have admitted that most people on them will not be suspected of any crimes.
One of the new and most intrusive powers is that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can be compelled to collect a record of our web browsing activity and this can be accessed by the police and 48 government departments, including the Food Standards Agency and the HMRC. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: More than 50,000 abusive and offensive tweets were sent celebrating Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder and lauding her killer, Thomas Mair, as a “hero” or “patriot” in the month following her death, prompting calls for the government to do more to tackle hate speech online.
According to researchers on the social media site, the tweets were sent from at least 25,000 individuals and have been interpreted by hate crime campaigners as a sign of an emboldened extreme rightwing support base.
On Wednesday, Mair, a white supremacist who resented immigration, was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life for the murder of Cox on 16 June during the lead-up to the EU referendum.
Academics examined more than 53,000 tweets sent over the month after the MP’s murder and found that among the top 20 words used to describe Mair and Jo Cox were the terms “hero”, “patriot”, “white power”, “rapists” and “traitor”. [Continue reading…]
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