Boris Johnson

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Boris Johnson will return from US energised despite achieving little

      by

      Foreign policyBoris Johnson will return from US energised despite achieving littleAnalysis: tangible gains were hard to come by but PM will have enjoyed the up close and personal politics Heather Stewart Political editorThu 23 Sep 2021 03.27 EDTLast modified on Thu 23 Sep 2021 03.28 EDTBoris Johnson has flown back to the UK after his transatlantic jaunt reassured about his personal relationship with Joe Biden after the pair sought to put the chaos of the Kabul airlift behind them with face-to-face talks in the Oval Office.The warm personal rapport that characterised Johnson’s relationship with Donald Trump – who called him “Britain Trump” – was not obviously on display as he and Biden briefly addressed the press before retiring for private talks. Biden told an involved anecdote about travelling more than a million miles on Amtrak, which US reporters revealed he has wheeled out on several other occasions.Once the press had been forcefully ushered out by White House media handlers, however, witnesses said the pair held constructive talks. They discussed expanding the Aukus pact – announced last week – into a broader alliance that could cover other areas of shared interest, including safeguarding human rights, technology and expanding open markets.And on Capitol Hill, Johnson took the opportunity to try to soothe concerns about the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol, saying he remained committed to the Good Friday agreement.But news that the UK has all but abandoned hopes of a bilateral free trade agreement with the US underlined the fact that to bond with Biden, Johnson has had to trim his ambitions to fit the president’s agenda.The arch dealmaker Trump used to boast about the prospects for a trade agreement with the UK, but Biden has a packed legislative agenda at home that will take precedence over trying to win congressional backing for a complex set of trade negotiations.As well as taking on China – essentially the purpose of the Aukus pact – the two countries are both committed to tackling the climate crisis, and in doing so, creating more green jobs in their own economies.Johnson’s hopes of securing a successful outcome to the Cop26 climate summit in November that keeps 1.5C of warming within reach took a significant step forward when Biden doubled the US’s contribution to climate finance. When the prime minister met Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, they were able to agree that the $11.2bn US climate pledge made it, as Johnson put it, “a great day for the world”.Other tangible gains from the visit were harder to come by: Johnson said he had won the backing of the president to lift the ban on British lamb exports, though consultations are ongoing and no formal decision has yet been announced.No 10 was also keen to claim credit for the lifting of the US travel ban, claiming a bilateral “travel taskforce” that has been operating since the summer had helped to change the Americans’ minds. But the changes apply equally to scores of countries.The UK government appeared to have had little warning that the decision would be announced on Monday morning, and was left scrambling to establish the details, including whether AstraZeneca jabs would be accepted under the new system.But Downing Street will be happy to bank the intangible benefits of a closer rapport with the US – and Johnson, no fan of Zoom calls, returns to the UK energised by three days of the kind of politics he likes best: up close and personal.TopicsForeign policyBoris JohnsonJoe BidenUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

    • 188 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Watch in full: Biden, Johnson and Morrison announce Aukus and nuclear-powered submarine deal – video

      by

      The US, the UK and Australia have announced they are setting up a trilateral security partnership aimed at confronting China, which will include helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines. US President Joe Biden, UK prime minister Boris Johnson and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced the deal together virtually

      US, UK and Australia forge military alliance to counter China
      Australia nuclear submarine deal: defence pact with US and UK means $90bn contract with France will be scrapped
      Australia news live: government agrees to nuclear-powered submarine deal with US and UK – live updates More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on an Atlantic charter: new rules for new threats | Editorial

      by

      Before the second world war, states acted as they wished in international affairs, limited only by their resources and power. These circumstances began to change in August 1941, before America joined the allied cause. On a battleship off the coast of Newfoundland, the US president Franklin Roosevelt and the British prime minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic charter at a time when Nazi Germany appeared to be decisively winning the European war. A few months later, America, Britain, the Soviet Union and 23 other governments declared in the name of “United Nations” an intention to regulate the postwar world based on three revolutionary principles: free trade, non-aggression and democracy.Eighty years later, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson have signed a new Atlantic charter, to reflect a world of different threats and one in which the UK is a much diminished power. Mr Biden looks out and sees an increasingly dangerous world. In some ways the vista resembles the 1930s – with populists, nationalists and demagogues on the rise, European powers divided, and democracy vulnerable to foreign manipulation. There’s no mention of China in the 604-word charter, but it is the undeclared target of many of the policies regarding debt transparency, freedom of navigation and protecting the west’s “innovative edge”.There is much to agree with in the text, especially the focus on the climate crisis and promoting sustainable global development. It also calls for both countries to adhere to “the rules-based international order”, a welcome snub to the Trumpian idea that this was a threat to US power. However, the 2021 text is a pale imitation of its 1941 forerunner. There’s nothing remotely as bold as a new international law on governing relations between states.The original document’s genius was the realisation that the time to think and plan is not at the end of a crisis, but as it unfolds. For the past 15 months, Covid-19 shut down large swathes of the planet amid what was initially a chaotic me-first approach. The pandemic has accelerated trends already in progress and will usher in a new geopolitical era. As the grip of the pathogen loosens, the world will need new principles to address the deeper issues that led to a decline in international cooperation, creeping illiberalism, and a shift in the balance of power away from democracies.Mr Biden is looking for allies in his mission to ensure that the world remains conducive to a liberal, democratic way of life. Mr Johnson is looking for a role for Britain outside of the EU, and London almost always dances to Washington’s tune. But Mr Johnson’s inability to stick to the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit deal he negotiated saw the US issue a reprimand this week. Washington bluntly told Mr Johnson to come to a “negotiated settlement” with Brussels and accept, if needed, “unpopular compromises” – even if that means London temporarily aligning with EU rules on agriculture and slowing progress on a future UK-US trade deal. Mr Biden understands that allies will not begin to forge a better future by falling out with one another.Nations need international agreements to promote and protect their own interests. Cooperation between states requires rules. Attempts to abandon the idea of international restraint and go it alone usually end badly. There’s nothing in the new charter that other members of the G7, or the EU, could not sign up to. The world does not govern itself, and leading powers cannot abdicate their role in shaping international institutions – and mobilising others to defend them. If the world’s democracies were to turn away, then either others would step in or the world risks a descent into chaos as it did in the 1930s. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Covid relief: ideologies matter in democracies | Editorial

      by

      When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      No 10 takes relaxed view as Biden removes Churchill bust from Oval Office

      by

      Downing Street has said it is up to Joe Biden how he decorates the Oval Office, after it was reported that a bust of Winston Churchill, lent by the UK government, has been removed.
      “The Oval Office is the president’s private office, and it’s up to the president to decorate it as he wishes,” Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said, adding: “We’re in no doubt about the importance President Biden places on the UK-US relationship, and the prime minister looks forward to having that close relationship with him.”
      Johnson’s relaxed attitude is in marked contrast to his criticism of Barack Obama, when the former president moved the Churchill bust aside.
      Writing in the Sun in 2016, Johnson, then London mayor, and the author of a Churchill biography, called Obama’s decision a “snub,” suggesting it may have been because of “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
      A bust of Mexican American labour rights leader Cesar Chavez was visible in pictures of Biden signing executive orders on Wednesday.
      The prime minister, who was referred to by Donald Trump when he was president as “Britain Trump”, is keen to strike up a strong working relationship with the socially liberal Biden, who the government hopes will attend the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June.
      Johnson’s spokesman was forced to field a string of questions about whether Johnson is “woke”, after the shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, described Biden as a “woke guy,” referring to his support for Black Lives Matter and trans rights.
      Asked about her comments on Wednesday, Johnson appeared uncomfortable, before remarking that there was, “nothing wrong with being woke”.
      When the prime minister’s spokesman was asked whether Johnson would consider himself “woke”, he said: “You would have to define that, but you’ve got the PM’s views on what he believes, and specifically on his agenda to level up across the country, and ensure that everybody has the opportunity to succeed.”
      The Conservatives believe publicly rejecting socially liberal policies such as the removal of historic statues with colonial connections will help them to score points over Labour.
      The communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, has said he will legislate to prevent historic statues being removed, “at the hand of the flash mob” or by a “cultural committee of town hall militants and woke worthies”.
      Graphic
      Johnson’s remarks about Obama, made during the buildup to the Brexit referendum, caused a furore. It subsequently emerged that Obama had simply moved the bust of the wartime leader – a loan from the UK government – to a spot in his personal residence.
      When Theresa May rushed to Washington in early 2017 to be the first world leader to visit Trump in the White House, he swept her into the Oval Office to show that Churchill had been restored to prominence. More

    • 213 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      As Johnson finally condemns Trump, Britain should examine its own shift to the right | Nesrine Malik

      by

      The writer Alistair Cooke once observed: “As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.” That is a kind way of saying that the British are always a few years behind the Americans, emulating them and then pretending that we came up with whatever it is we are mimicking, or coming up with a uniquely British version of it.For example, Britain’s allegedly evidence-based involvement in the Iraq war was largely – as President George W Bush wrote in an internal memo months before military action – a matter of it following the US’s lead. So much of the special relationship between the two countries hinges on this keeping up of appearances, where the British political classes – who like to maintain their nation is the superior of the two, the original superpower – can admire and obey while holding on to the fiction that the UK is a more restrained country, less prone to the excesses of the other.Margaret Thatcher hit both of these notes, fawning over the US president, Ronald Reagan, when she said that they both “had almost identical beliefs” even though they were from “very different backgrounds”. And on her first visit to the White House, she said that the two countries were “inextricably entwined” because George Washington himself “was a British subject until well after his 40th birthday”.But then Donald Trump became president and upset this taut balance of adulation and snootiness. He publicly flaunted the influence over Britain that had always been wielded in secret, humiliated Theresa May, insulted London mayor Sadiq Khan, and took a swipe at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. He flourished the power and vulgarity of the US without any of its refining rhetoric or protocol. And the country he presided over became not just one of inelegant indulgence but a darker place where white supremacists, backed by the White House itself, marched in the streets.With that erosion of reputation, Trump’s America has gained a new utility for the British: it is not a place that Britain secretly looks up to, but a place that Britain is unlike; a place that demonstrates why things over here are not to be compared with how bad it is over there. A country that is struggling with its demons, and which we observe from a safe distance while lamenting its decline.Whether it’s the US’s culture wars, its race crisis or its succumbing to far-right politics and white supremacy, these are things that do not map neatly on to Britain’s faultlines. Poor America, the country we no longer share beliefs or an inextricably entwined history with.The distancing began in earnest in the summer of Black Lives Matter, but the storming of the Capitol was the final dividing line. Boris Johnson was appalled at the “disgraceful scenes” and “unreservedly” condemned Trump’s incitement of the crowd, even though he had little to say when Trump was building momentum for the insurrection in the preceding weeks.The prime minister’s transition from spectating to actively condemning was in part because the scenes in Washington DC were simply too shocking to be silent on. But the more important factor is that Trump is on the way out. He can be repudiated with no risk of blowback or diplomatic crisis. Had the events at the Capitol happened in the middle of Trump’s term in office, I would wager that much of the scrambling to denounce, from Twitter to Johnson, would have been absent.And so again, circumstances help the UK to distance itself, pretend it was not complicit in Trump’s ascendancy, that there was no aiding and abetting of the president and his extremist supporters (despite refusing to condemn his Muslim flight ban, and rolling out “the reddest of red carpets” for him). The scenes at the Capitol serve a useful purpose, which is to overshadow the path that led to the steps of the building: with images so vivid and rich, and with so many colourful characters, we become preoccupied with their detail and fail to see all the arteries that nourished them.The insurrection was just one point on a continuum that involves not just Trump and the Republican party, but an entire hinterland of conservative politics. It includes those in Congress who didn’t quite disavow Trump, and respectable conservative pundits who, even if they repudiated the president’s most extreme acts, still played on his themes, such as the conspiring leftwing elite who hate the “real America”. The connective tissue between Trump and the white supremacist on the street is much more fibrous than it serves many to admit.In the UK we are prone to the same impulses of denial – using the high-octane events of the past few weeks to claim that a difference in degree means all the difference in the world. The reality is that, even though our parliament wasn’t stormed, British members of parliament were jostled and abused on their way to work by hardcore Brexit supporters. One of those MPs was assassinated by a far-right nationalist. Another almost was.Britain’s culture war is so potent that we have our own mobs scuffling with the police, responding to the dog whistles of our own government. We have respectable sections in the media who pump out conspiratorial theories about the woke and the elite, and now preach against mask-wearing and lockdowns. When the far right spills out on to the streets, claiming lives and attacking democracies, it’s the result of a million compounded complicities and complacencies. Like a jigsaw, when these details come together they create a larger image. Today that image is Donald Trump. When he is gone, the jigsaw will be broken up again and both the US and the UK will choose not to see what together those pieces can create. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Oh see how the Tories now run from Donald Trump | Stewart Lee

      by

      In 2019, Jeremy Hunt, who once hid behind a tree to avoid the press on the way to a party, said politicians boycotting Donald Trump’s state visit were exhibiting “virtue signalling of the worst kind”. Was Hunt also virtue signalling last week, then, when he conceded that Trump “shames American democracy”? Or have the goalposts, already too narrow for even the slender Hunt to hide behind convincingly, moved?Trump himself once called our prime minister, Boris Turds Johnson, “Britain Trump”, with characteristically unpunctuated precision. In the light of Trump’s inevitable immolation of American democracy, Turds’s handlers now seek to distance our prime minister from his admirer, every white supremacist’s favourite reality TV host. Last week, the Times ran an article, headlined “Johnson is not Trump’s transatlantic twin”, by the Spectator’s James Forsyth, whose wife, Allegra Stratton, is Downing Street’s press secretary and whose principles are above question. Once the journal of record, it seems the Times is now the journal of whatever Downing Street’s press secretary wants the record to say. And there are efforts afoot to rewrite that record.Celebrities’ photo albums have long been cleansed of pictures of lighthearted moments shared at charity fun runs with Jimmy Savile. And I have destroyed both the Super-8 films and the doodles of the woeful 36 hours I and the Australian standup comedian Greg Fleet spent in the Flinders mountains, north of Adelaide, in 1997, feasting with regret on the flesh of the tragic victims of a light aircraft crash that we alone had survived.But our politicians’ historic fondness for President Exploding Tangerine Hitler will be harder to forget. There’s no need to deploy the deep fake technology or distorting social media of the Tories’ last election campaign to find a photo of America’s self-styled Mr Brexit posing in his Liberace’s lavatory lift with a clearly engorged Nigel Farage and his Ukip, Breitbart and Leave.EU colleagues. It’s there as plain as the nostrils on Michael Gove’s nose. But Farage’s friends weren’t alone in bending Trump’s brain farts to their own agendas and appeasing his own special brand of home-fried fascism.Farage’s friends weren’t alone in bending Trump’s brain farts to their own agendasIn January 2017, a delighted Michael Gove became the first British journalist to visit the “warm and charismatic” new American president. Gove was even accompanied by Rupert Murdoch, a fact he chose to hide in his subsequent BBC interview and newspaper article, where he propagated Trump’s Nato lies unchecked. Gove described ascending the phallocratic Trump Tower in a golden lift, “operated by an immensely dignified African American attendant kitted out in frock coat and white gloves. It was as though the Great Glass Elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had been restyled by Donatella Versace, then staffed by the casting director for Gone With the Wind.” Charlie and the smooth glass surfaces, working as a team!Two-faced Gove’s frivolous tone, suffused nonetheless with a strange strain of snobbery, attempts to socially distance himself from Trump’s lowbrow idea of luxury, while simultaneously revelling in the proximity of such immense wealth, however garish its elevator, however dignified its African American. But Gove emerged from the summit holding in his hand a piece of paper promising Trump would facilitate Brexit by doing “a trade deal with the UK absolutely, very quickly”. Gove is the Neville Chamberlain of nowhere. Where is your chlorinated chicken now, Brexiter? For I have in my hand Joe Biden’s souvenir Irish shillelagh, a confiscated lorry driver’s ham and cheese sandwich and a space where some M&S Percy Pigs should have been.I wonder if Gove recalled the enjoyable afternoon he spent squatting on top of Trump’s enormous golden shaft of power when watching another immensely dignified African American, this time a government security guard, being chased up the stairwell of the Senate by a mob of Confederate-flag-waving Trump supporters wearing T-shirts celebrating the Holocaust with the Nazi death camp motto “Work brings freedom”. As Gove might have written, it was as though the Singin’ in the Rain scene from A Clockwork Orange had been restyled by Charles Manson then staffed by the casting director of The Hills Have Eyes. Oh! The charisma!!!Turds got off to a better start than Gove in his approach to Trump, declaring in 2015 that the pussy-grabbing humanity-tumour was “clearly out of his mind” and a man of “quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States”. Back then, Turds, who has no actual discernible values beyond steamy ambition and refrigerated cowardice, was mayor of London. And Mayor Turds was playing to the focaccia gallery of the Trump-loathing London liberal elite, who fell one by one for his cheeky Have I Got News For You persona like a succession of statues of slavers in a Bristol dock. Once Trump was president, Turds simply tried on a new opinion, discarding the conviction-filled prophylactic of his spaffed beliefs like the condoms he obviously never wears.By January 2017, Turds, who himself compared the EU trading block to the Nazis innumerable times in print, condemned critics of his new “friend and partner” for “trivialising the Holocaust” by comparing Trump to Hitler, subsequently saying that the president deserved the Nobel peace prize. But the trajectory of Trump’s rise to date mirrors that of Hitler’s, albeit a bright-orange Hitler with an undying fondness for disco hits. And Johnson himself has not been above weaponising fabricated culture wars, from the Proms to slavers’ statues while ridiculing “Romanian vampires” and “tank-topped bumboys”, to court the support of the worst people in Britain. Turds’s apparent ignorance of Hitler’s rise is inexcusable, especially as most cable channels are devoted entirely to endless loops of documentaries about him. Maybe Turds needs to brush up on how a populist leader could dehumanise minorities and liberals to gain power. But, worryingly, I suspect Turds already did that a few years ago.King Rocker, a film about the Birmingham post-punk band the Nightingales, by Stewart Lee and Michael Cumming, premiers on free to air Sky Arts on Saturday 6 February at 9pm. Watch the trailer here More