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      The Uber campaign: how ex-Obama aides helped sell firm to world

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      The Uber campaign: how ex-Obama aides helped sell firm to worldUber sought access to leaders, officials and diplomats through David Plouffe and Jim Messina, leak shows

      Uber broke laws, duped police and built secret lobbying operation, leak reveals
      It was a Sunday afternoon in early November 2015 when David Plouffe emailed his fellow former Barack Obama campaigner Matthew Barzun, typing “Mr ambassador” in the subject line.Plouffe was working for Uber, and Barzun had been rewarded for his fundraising efforts for the US president with the plum job of American ambassador to the UK.“Hope you and your family are well. I will be in London Dec 9 and 10. Any chance you could host the event you kindly suggested with influencers one of those days? Uber, Trump, Clinton etc lots to discuss … David.”Barzun obliged. “What fun!” the ambassador pinged back. Few people turned down Plouffe when he called in favours. It was just one example of how Uber leveraged Plouffe’s reputation and his access to the Obama network to promote its agenda across Europe and the Middle East, according to documents in the leaked Uber files.The embassy staff organised an event in December built around Plouffe giving a talk on the gig economy, and they invited the business minister Anna Soubry, the shadow business minister Kevin Brennan, influential MPs, government officials, journalists and business people. More

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      The BBC’s flat Earth policy should be roundly condemned | Letters

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      The BBC’s flat Earth policy should be roundly condemnedHelen Johnson, Bob Ward, Dr Richard Milne and Piers Burnett on the BBC’s director of editorial policy and his pursuit of impartiality It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the BBC’s latest pronouncement rejecting cancel culture, when the example given is the willingness to give a fair hearing to flat-Earthers (BBC does not subscribe to ‘cancel culture’, says director of editorial policy, 11 January). It’s nothing new for the BBC to give a platform to fantasists, of course; but there did seem to be an acknowledgment post-Brexit that it had perhaps been wrong to give equal weighting to fact and delusion. And there must be someone at the national broadcaster who regrets affording quite so many opportunities to Nigel Lawson to deny climate change reality on the airwaves.Which other minority beliefs can we now expect to be expounded in the 8.10am interview on the Today programme? It’s surely time we looked seriously at the view that the Covid vaccine is connecting us to a vast AI network, and that upstate New York was once inhabited by giants. There are also apparently people who still believe that Boris Johnson is a great prime minister, though finding a government minister to represent that view this week may be beyond even the bending-over-backwards, non-cancelling capacity of the BBC.Helen JohnsonSedbergh, Cumbria It was disappointing to read that David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, told a House of Lords committee that “if a lot of people believed in flat Earth we’d need to address it more” in order to ensure impartiality. He appears to have forgotten that the BBC’s editorial guidelines also state that the broadcaster is “committed to achieving due accuracy in all its output”. Or perhaps he is genuinely unaware that for the past couple of millennia the shape of the Earth has not been just a matter of opinion, but instead has been established as a verifiable scientific fact.Either way, let us hope that the BBC’s new action plan on impartiality and editorial standards does not lead the broadcaster to promote more of the daft and dangerous views of those who believe that Covid-19 vaccines do not work or greenhouse gas emissions are not heating Earth.Bob WardPolicy and communications director, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment The BBC’s stated policy to “represent all points of view” is worrying on two levels. First, where does the policy stop? There are people out there who think the value of a person depends upon their gender or skin tone – should those views be represented? What about Holocaust deniers? And those who think homosexuality, or marrying the wrong person, should be punished by death?Second, one of the BBC’s worst failures this century has been to present ill-informed opinion as being equal in value to professional expertise – most notably on climate change. At the absolute minimum, it needs to make crystal clear who is and who is not an expert. A lot of misinformation originates from well-funded pressure groups, which need no help getting their message across. So if we must hear ill-informed opinions, let it be from a person on the street – then at least the defence of representing public opinion would have some merit.Dr Richard MilneEdinburgh According to your report, David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, told a Lords committee that the corporation does not subscribe to “cancel culture” and that everyone should have their views represented by the BBC, even if they believe Earth is flat, adding that “flat-Earthers are not going to get as much space as people who believe the Earth is round … And if a lot of people believed in flat Earth we’d need to address it more.”I understand that many Americans fervently believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory and most of the Republican party believes that Donald Trump won the last presidential election – and here in the UK there are substantial numbers of anti-vaxxers. I assume that Mr Jordan will now ensure that the views of these groups are given airtime on the BBC’s channels commensurate with their numbers.In fact, it appears that Mr Jordan has no genuine editorial policy – which would require him to make judgments based on facts and values – only a desperate anxiety to appease the cultural warriors on the right of the Conservative party.Piers BurnettSinnington, North YorkshireTopicsBBCHouse of LordsConservativesClimate crisisCoronavirusBrexitQAnonlettersReuse this content More

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      Has Britain Achieved a Post-Racial Politics?

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      The most closely guarded secrets of the British government are currently being reviewed by Priti Patel, the home secretary, or minister of the interior, as she would be described in most countries. It is her duty to receive the reports of the secret services: MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Patel has to take those most difficult of decisions: which threats from Britain’s enemies to act on and which to ignore.

      The Far Right and the Politics of Feeling

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      Rishi Sunak holds the economic future of the country in his hands through his control of the Treasury as chancellor of the exchequer. Kwasi Kwarteng is Sunak’s deputy, as secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy. Sajid Javid is in charge of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

      Facing them across the House of Commons sits David Lammy, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary. Rosena Allin-Khan is Labour’s minister of mental health, and the woman charged with getting her party from the opposition into government is Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s national campaign coordinator.

      Minority Representation

      These men and women have little in common politically. Some are passionate capitalists, others fervent socialists. But all are members of Britain’s ethnic minorities. Some have family backgrounds in the Indian subcontinent. Others — an admittedly smaller number — can trace their roots to Africa. It is a little commented-upon fact that in Britain today, ethnic minorities are almost numerically represented in Parliament. Some 14% of the British population has an ethnic minority background, and 10% of MPs elected at the last general election in 2019 are black or Asian.

      The key point is not simply the numbers, but rather that they are as likely to be found on in the governing Conservative Party as they are in the opposition Labour Party. Back in 1987, the situation was very different. Four ethnic minority MPs were elected that year: Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz. All were Labour members.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As the House of Commons Library points out, “Their number has increased at each general election since then — most notably from 2010 onwards … But if the ethnic make-up of the House of Commons reflected that of the UK population, there would be about 93 Members from ethnic minority backgrounds … Of the 65 ethnic minority Members, 41 (63%) are Labour and 22 are Conservatives (34%). There are two Liberal Democrat MPs from an ethnic minority background.” These MPs have not languished in obscurity. They have been promoted to the highest political offices of the land, by both major political parties.

      The policies they would pursue could hardly be more different. Priti Patel has been roundly criticized by Labour for her virulent hostility to unrestricted migration and her determination to crack down on smuggling refugees over the English Channel from France. Her plans for “pushbacks” using the navy to deter migrants have been described as “inhumane, unconscionable and extremely reckless.”

      Patel’s background — her family came to Britain in the 1960s before dictator Idi Amin’s mass expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 — appears to have had little influence on her opinions or policies. Little wonder that she is a favorite of the Conservative right and a potential successor to Boris Johnson as prime minister.

      Zero Tolerance

      The significance of the rise of Britain’s ethnic minorities through the ranks is that neither of the two main parties that dominate the country’s politics can any longer tolerate the kind of overt racism that was once a regular part of British culture. Patel and Allin-Khan may be poles apart politically, but neither would accept policies of the kind that once were espoused by the likes of the Enoch Powell.

      His notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968, in which he warned against the impact not just of immigration but also of a bill before Parliament designed to fight racism, was widely welcomed. The Conservative right hailed him as a champion, and Labour-supporting London dockers marched to Parliament to show their support.

      Does this imply that racism in Britain is a thing of the past? Emphatically not. But given Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it means that only fringe parties, with little chance of winning seats in Parliament, are likely to take up the issue.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      Overt racism is still nurtured by a section of British society. The Brexit referendum in 2016 brought out the worst in some communities. The attacks on Poles were particularly disgraceful, given the bravery of their pilots, over 8,000 of whom fought in the critical Battle of Britain over the skies of England during World War II. No fewer than five neo-Nazi groups are banned in the UK, with Patel condemning “evil white supremacist groups, who target vulnerable people across the world.” A third of all terror plots uncovered in Britain emanate from the far right.

      None of this should be ignored. It is not inconceivable that overtly racist politics will rear its head once more in Britain, but neither the Conservative Party nor Labour is likely to support it. Only in extreme circumstances are they likely to flourish. As such, it may be that British politics can today be considered post-racial.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Yesterday’s war: why Raab did not foresee Afghanistan catastrophe

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      Dominic RaabYesterday’s war: why Raab did not foresee Afghanistan catastropheAnalysis: minister’s call log shows he had little interest in Afghanistan, prioritising India and south-east Asia Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editorFri 3 Sep 2021 10.38 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 11.58 EDTDominic Raab has been reluctant to criticise Joe Biden, who has faced an unprecedented wave of criticism over the US exit from Afghanistan, partly because he always saw the decision as inevitable, and partly because in principle he instinctively sympathises with it.The foreign secretary is trying to position the UK as close as possible to the Biden administration, even though the criticism of the US president continues unabated from former British diplomats, politicians, security chiefs and military figures.Raab’s instinctive sense that Afghanistan was yesterday’s war, unlikely to flare up as a first order issue until next year, may also explain why he deputed the issue to a minister. There is surprise, for instance, that Raab took credit at the foreign affairs select committee for overseeing backchannel talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan over the last year. The talks were built on the personal initiative of the chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Nick Carter, and depended on his relationship with the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and Pakistan’s army chief of staff, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa.Dominic Raab seems to contradict PM by saying Taliban takeover was surpriseRead moreSenior sources in Pakistan said Bajwa had great respect for Carter but had never met Raab.Raab’s priority was great power competition, not terrorism, so his itinerary and call log reflects a deep interest in India and south-east Asia. That did not include Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan, explaining his previous failure to contact the Pakistani foreign minister.Indeed he told a select committee in October 2020 that he specifically excluded Pakistan from his definition of the Indo-Pacific.Raab explained this week that he and the UK ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce, had concluded from presidential campaign rhetoric that the August troop withdrawal timeline was “baked in”. Biden had been a key sceptic of the US troop surge under Barack Obama. He had secretly visited Afghanistan and Pakistan at Obama’s instructions in January 2009, when he had furious discussions with both the Afghan and Pakistani presidents over the war. He had been accompanied on his trip by his now secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who like Biden saw nothing but muddled goals.The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) was historically more invested in the war, and according to one former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, incurably optimistic. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, tried hardest at Nato defence and foreign affairs meetings in the spring to see if support for a continued Nato mission in Afghanistan was possible without US involvement.That in part explains the briefing war between the Foreign Office, the MoD and others in the Cabinet Office. It was not just about the grip of the Foreign Office in rescuing those stranded in Afghanistan. The MoD believed in the mission, though Raab less so.Raab has not fully articulated his views on the 20-year war, possibly waiting in vain for a definitive lead from the prime minister. But he hinted at them at the select committee this week. He said: “From 2001 there are questions about what was the mission, how it adapted, have we at every stage reconciled our means and our ends, and what the exit looked like in a strategic way. There are lessons to be learned about the way a campaign primarily morphed from counter-terrorism into something more akin to nation building. We have to recognise the support domestically for these kinds of interventions has fallen away.”Raab has said he is sure the US will bounce back, but other senior diplomats, including many in Europe, are less sanguine. In the wave of relief at Donald Trump’s departure, there was collective misreading of Biden and his promise that the US was back. For Britain, the end of the honeymoon is especially acute.The former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson describes it as “a crass surrender”. The former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt sees a dangerous split in the transatlantic alliance, highlighting decisions imposed on the UK. The former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill condemned “a bad policy badly implemented”. The former No 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher said: “We expected empathy, strategy and wisdom from Biden. His messaging targeted Trump’s base, not the rest of the world, and not allies, past or (we’ll need them) future.”The former UK ambassador to Washington Kim Darroch perceived a defeat and a humiliation. Another said: “The G7 looks like the G1. When the rest of the G7 asked for a few days’ delay, and even went public, Biden gave us nothing.”In Europe there is similar dismay. “We must strengthen Europe so that we will never have to let the Americans do it again,” exclaimed Armin Laschet, the CDU candidate for the German chancellorship.Not surprisingly, there is now return of fire in the US from the many supporters of Biden’s decision. Emma Ashford, a leading advocate of a new grand strategy of US restraint, said: “If this episode pushes America’s European partners to improve their own military capabilities for this kind of thing, I’ll be thrilled.” Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard, writes in Foreign Policy that he is “mystified” by “the anguish of Europeans, which sometimes borders on hysteria”, and irritated by their lessons on “moral responsibility”.Senior diplomats say the US relationship has been through these squalls before, and now that “over the horizon” terrorist spotting is becoming the new order, they believe the need for intelligence cooperation only grows in significance.But it is a sobering moment and may yet require Biden to explain himself at the UN general assembly this autumn.John Casson, a former foreign policy private secretary in No 10, recently checklisted what his five personal objectives in diplomacy had been, admitting disarmingly that it was a chastening list of failure. The goals were: “Stay and lead in the EU; help young Arabs get free of authoritarians; the Foreign Office innovative and impactful, not timid and transactional; be a development superpower; leave Afghanistan well.”At least he can now claim the set is complete.TopicsDominic RaabForeign policyUS politicsJoe BidenBiden administrationAfghanistanPakistananalysisReuse this content More

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      The Guardian view on post-Covid recovery: powered by the state not the market | Editorial

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      OpinionCoronavirusThe Guardian view on post-Covid recovery: powered by the state not the marketEditorialThe Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party desires a restoration of ideas whose time has come and gone Mon 9 Aug 2021 14.02 EDTLast modified on Mon 9 Aug 2021 15.35 EDTThe Conservative party hooked British capitalism to the state’s life support system for the past 18 months. So it takes chutzpah to think, as business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng does, of putting the free market at the heart of a post-Covid recovery. Yet lengthening NHS waiting lists, hiking consumer energy bills and welfare cuts when poverty is rising all betray a mindset that regards the re-legitimation of state intervention as threatening a way of life rather than securing it.What the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party desires is a restoration. For them this is an opportunity to go back to 1979 and use tried-and-tested ways to stabilise prices, crush labour and discipline poorer nations. These rightwingers yearn for higher interest rates, to prioritise financial returns on assets and the use of creditor power to squeeze the global south.Such ideologues are likely, in part, to be disappointed. The US president, Joe Biden, does not see the world their way, saying this April that “trickle-down economics”, associated with Ronald Reagan, didn’t work. The president aims to show that the state can do good, and the early results are promising. His Covid-related aid boost will push the share of Americans in poverty to the lowest level on record. Mr Biden’s treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, professes a “free market” scepticism. She has promoted the social benefits of running the economy “hot” by maximising the use of all available resources. Her inspiration is the economist Arthur Okun, who in 1973 argued that governments increasing employment would foster “a process of ladder climbing” in the job market that would reduce inequality and stimulate productivity growth. Ms Yellen has stuck to this playbook in office.Perhaps the greatest pushback against the return of laissez-faire dominance in economics comes from China. Beijing has surpassed the US in some key technologies. Mr Biden’s economic team is blunt about needing to use the state for more “targeted efforts to try to build domestic industrial strength … when we’re dealing with competitors like China that are not operating on market-based terms”.The state is, clearly, not powerless against global capital. During Covid it paid for millions of workers without breaking a sweat. Contrary to conventional thinking there was no threat from rising deficits to interest rates. Thatcherism was defined by Nigel Lawson as “increasing freedom for markets to work within a framework of firm monetary and fiscal discipline”. This saw the state put in service of business interests rather than mediating between labour and capital. It also left Britain woefully unprepared, and ill-equipped, for the pandemic. A Thatcherite approach will not produce a fairer distribution of growth. It will militate against support during downturns and plans to “level up” the regions. Ministers ought to outline a new role for the state rather than relying on failed ideas about what the market can do.TopicsCoronavirusOpinionConservativesMargaret ThatcherEconomicsJoe BidenUS politicsRonald ReaganeditorialsReuse this content More

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      The Guardian view on UK-US relations: rebuilding with Biden | Editorial

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      In British politics, everyone now loves President Joe Biden. That the UK opposition parties are foundation members of the Biden appreciation club is not surprising. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all identify most naturally with the Democrats and thus with the new administration in Washington. But the changing of the guard at the White House this week has won strikingly broad support across the entire political spectrum too.Many Conservatives now take an enthusiastic view of Mr Biden as well. In some cases this is hard to believe – or forgive. Not long ago, many of the same Tory politicians who now enthuse about Mr Biden tried to bet the house on Donald Trump. Theresa May rushed to Washington to court him. Michael Gove conducted a gushing interview. Boris Johnson said he should get the Nobel peace prize. A US trade deal was obsessively talked up. Today, these same politicians are all friends of Joe and behave as if they barely knew Mr Trump.Even so, the resetting of the dial with America is welcome. But if it is not to be merely opportunistic, it must be accompanied by more honesty, humility and clarity. Mr Trump was never the ally that the last two prime ministers imagined. He was never going to agree a good trade deal. He was always an embarrassment. And he was always a threat to the democratic and liberal values that Britain and the United States once stood for and which went absent without leave after 2016.Over decades, British leaders have often tended to exaggerate Britain’s importance to the US. Mr Johnson, an inveterate truth stretcher, is the same. The necessary modesty about what is realistically possible in the post-Trump era will not come naturally to him. The security relationship undoubtedly remains strong and important. But the new starting point should be the recognition that, in different ways, Britain and America are emerging from unprecedentedly difficult eras internally and in their international relations, for which they themselves bear responsibility.In any event, there can and should be no instant return to some of the US-UK relationships of the recent past. The two countries are not cold war allies, because there is no cold war. They are not military interventionist allies either, because there is no appetite in either country for such projects after Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither Mr Biden nor Mr Johnson is proposing some new grand strategic project.This ought to be a phase of rebuilding in US-UK relations. After the past four years, neither country is in a position to preach to others about democratic institutions and values. The US has just survived a potential coup, supported by a significant proportion of its citizens, to overthrow an election result. Britain has just backed down from a threat to get its way in relations with Europe by breaking international law. It has needlessly damaged relations with Ireland, our nearest neighbour, from which Mr Biden proudly traces his origins. It has now started a petulant row over the EU’s diplomatic status.This is not the way to win friends and influence people. Britain needs allies in the wake of Brexit and amid the rise of Asia and the waning of American global hegemony. Values and interests such as democracy and the rule of law matter in those alliances. To that end, Britain must make more and better use of soft power assets like the BBC, its universities and the aid budget. Mr Biden’s arrival in office opens up new international possibilities on issues like Covid, climate and internet freedom. But we need to be realistic. Britain must treat partnership seriously, not pick fights we do not deserve to win or make claims we can never hope to fulfil without allies. More

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      The left is accused of authoritarianism – but it's the right that gets away with it | Andy Beckett

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      For a wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945 claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.The tactic is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden, a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy … Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”The fact that no western democracy has ever been turned into a police state by the left hasn’t completely neutralised this argument. Because there have been so few elected socialist governments in the west, and even fewer that have enacted much of their programmes, the left hasn’t had many opportunities to prove that it’s not interested in ruling by authoritarian methods. Instead, the allegation has lingered.On rightwing websites such as Spiked and Guido Fawkes, which often provide anti-Labour attack lines to the Tory press and politicians, Keir Starmer is already being described as an authoritarian, despite his history as a human rights lawyer. No doubt tabloid picture researchers are scouring the archives for any photos of him wearing a Russian hat. Corbyn had to waste some of his leadership denying that his favourite cap was a tribute to Lenin’s; the Times told readers he rode a “Chairman Mao-style bicycle”. Besides smearing the left and putting it on the defensive, these red scares have another important but less noticed effect. They serve as a political distraction.Over the past 40 years, while the right has continued to warn about hypothetical leftwing dictatorships in the west, actual authoritarianism has become a growing feature of rightwing government in Britain and the US. The change has been incomplete and gradual. Authoritarianism is often a tendency, an official inclination, rather than an absolute political state. And this autocratic turn has gone largely undeclared: countries that won the second world war and the cold war like to think they have no time for despots. But the outcome has been a great strengthening of government against the governed.In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher politicised the police as strike-breakers, and demonised her opponents as “the enemy within”. In the 2000s, the George W Bush administration argued that the president’s powers should be almost unlimited, and established the brutal detention camp at Guantánamo. Both premiers were criticised for their draconian tendencies, but both were comfortably re-elected, unrepentant.Yet even Bush has been shocked by the Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s intolerance of press criticism and peaceful protest, threats to jail political opponents, and contempt for the electoral process have arguably made the United States more of an autocracy than a democracy. Meanwhile, similar impulses have been at work in Boris Johnson’s premiership, with its illegal suspension of parliament, illegal Brexit legislation and fury at the few remaining checks on its authority, such as “activist lawyers”.As with Bush and Thatcher, the breaking of democratic norms by Trump and Johnson has been accepted and sometimes welcomed by many voters. Over 10m more people chose Trump this month than at the 2016 election. Last year, Johnson won the first big Tory majority since 1987.In increasingly impatient, divided societies, frustration with the compromises and deadlocks produced by previous, more consensual governments has left voters open to more aggressive alternatives. Shortly before the 2019 election, a prophetic survey by the Hansard Society found that 54% of Britons felt the country “needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”, and 42% believed that Britain’s problems could be dealt with better “if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament”.Even people appalled by the transgressions of Trump and Johnson can be reluctant to consider their implications. For the first few days after this month’s US election, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was widely seen as just a tantrum – rather than a rejection of democracy and, in effect, a demand to head a one-party state. If you’ve grown up with the idea that the US is a strong democracy, or that British prime ministers respect the law, it’s frightening to face up to the possibility that neither may be the case.It may also be frightening to realise that the Anglo-American right has a double standard on authoritarian governments. That double standard used to be applied mainly to other countries. During the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an influential adviser to the Republican president Ronald Reagan, argued that rightwing police states were “less repressive” than leftwing, “totalitarian” ones, and should be supported by the US when there were, from a conservative perspective, no better alternatives. At the time, the consequences of her thinking were felt by people living under rightwing foreign dictatorships, from the Philippines to Argentina, that the US helped sustain in power. But with the Trump presidency you could say that a version of her doctrine has been applied at home.The US and Britain’s authoritarian experiments may now be coming to an end. The sacked Dominic Cummings was the source of much of the Johnson government’s autocratic thinking. Trump, for all his manoeuvring, will almost certainly have to step down when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. The democratic and constitutional pressures against him staying on are probably too great.Yet the conditions remain that made the experiments possible. In the US, after Trump’s attacks on the election, many voters are disillusioned with democracy. And the ground has been prepared for his party to refuse to accept future electoral outcomes it doesn’t like – possibly starting with January’s crucial Senate races in Georgia. In Britain, the government still contains deeply illiberal figures, such as the home secretary, Priti Patel. And Johnson himself, like Trump, has a dislike of being held accountable that’s so strong, he’s arguably not a democratic politician in any sense beyond the winning of elections. As with Trump, the fact that he lacks the focus and diligence to be a dictator is not that reassuring. A more functional rightwing strongman could come along.And the scale of what has already happened during Trump and Johnson’s premierships shouldn’t be played down, as just another stage in conservatism’s evolution. In two of the world’s supposedly most stable political systems, the right have bent democracy out of shape. In future, it would be good to have a bit less self-righteous talk from them about dictatorships of the left.• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Rudy Giuliani and Death in Venice | Brief letters

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      Re your report (Proportion of students in England awarded first-class degrees soars, 19 November), I got my BA degree from Nottingham University in 1970. When we began our final year we were told that there would be no first-class degrees for politics students that year. “We mark on the bell curve,” they said. “And we get one first per 30 students. There are only 15 students each year for politics, and a student got a first last year. So none of you lot can get one.”Stephen ReesVancouver, Canada
      • To while away the time during this lockdown, we are going through over 40 years of photographic slides. To save space, we are digitising the slides and discarding the originals. We now have a large number of empty yellow plastic boxes. Suggestions, please, for alternative uses – like 35mm film canisters, they must be useful for something!Elizabeth and Les BrettWelling, London
      • “Unintentional” bullying surely implies a lack of empathy, compassion and self-awareness (Bullying inquiry ‘found evidence Priti Patel broke ministerial code’, 19 November). Strange characteristics for a British home secretary, especially in the aftermath of the Windrush fiasco.Sandy DerbyshireLondon
      • What a metaphor. Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye running down his face (Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan, 19 November) reminded me of the closing scenes of Death in Venice.Angela BogleBakewell, Derbyshire
      • Your editorial (18 November) rightly condemns the cronyism displayed by the Tories in their procurement of PPE, but let’s give it its proper name: looting.Deirdre BurrellMortimer, Berkshire More