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      Angry Tory MPs reject Joe Biden's comments on UK-EU Brexit talks

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      Conservative MPs have reacted angrily to an intervention by Joe Biden, the US Democratic presidential candidate, in the UK Brexit talks, accusing him of ignorance of the Northern Ireland peace process.In a tweet on Wednesday, Biden warned the UK there would be no US-UK free trade agreement if the Brexit talks ended with the Good Friday agreement being undermined. He tweeted: “We can’t allow the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit.“Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”His intervention was welcomed by Richard Neal, the chairman of Congress’s ways and means committee.The backlash was led by the former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, who told the Times: “We don’t need lectures on the Northern Ireland peace deal from Mr Biden. If I were him I would worry more about the need for a peace deal in the US to stop the killing and rioting before lecturing other sovereign nations.”Donald Trump has made law and order a key theme of his re-election campaign after months of unrest triggered by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, said: “Perhaps Mr Biden should talk to the EU since the only threat of an invisible border in Ireland would be if they insisted on levying tariffs.”Biden spoke out after the UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, met the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in Washington in a bid to reassure her that the British government was not seeking a hard border on the island of Ireland via measures in its internal market bill, a move that is seen by the US pro-Irish lobby as potentially fatal to the peace process.Q&AWhat is the UK internal market bill?ShowThe internal market bill aims to enforce compatible rules and regulations regarding trade in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.Some rules, for example around food safety or air quality,  which were formerly set by EU agreements, will now be controlled by the devolved administrations or Westminster. The internal market bill insists that devolved administrations  have to accept goods and services from all the nations of the UK – even if their standards differ locally.This, says the government, is in part to ensure international traders have access to the UK as a whole, confident that standards and rules are consistent.The Scottish government has criticised it as a Westminster “power grab”, and the Welsh government has expressed fears it will lead to a race to the bottom. If one of the countries that makes up the UK lowers their standards, over the importation of chlorinated chicken, for example, the other three nations will have to accept chlorinated chicken too.It has become even more controversial because one of its main aims is to empower ministers to pass regulations even if they are contrary to the withdrawal agreement reached with the EU under the Northern Ireland protocol.The text does not disguise its intention, stating that powers contained in the bill “have effect notwithstanding any relevant international or domestic law with which they may be incompatible or inconsistent”.Martin Belam and Owen BowcottRaab has argued that the measures in the UK internal market bill are proportionate, precautionary and necessary due to the EU’s politicising of the stuttering talks on a trade deal between the UK and the EU.However, the EU hit back on Thursday, saying an agreement on a trade and security deal remained conditional on the government pulling the contentious clauses in the internal market bill.The European commission’s vice-president for the economy, Valdis Dombrovskis, said: “If the UK does not comply with the exit agreement, there will no longer be a basis for a free trade agreement between the EU and the UK. The UK government must correct this before we continue to negotiate our political and economic relations.”The dispute between Biden and Downing Street poses a broader threat to UK interests if Biden, a pro-EU and pro-Ireland politician, decides to turn against Boris Johnson, who has made a virtue of his close relations with the Trump administration.The former UK trade minister Conor Burns tweeted: “Hey JoeBiden would you like to discuss the Good Friday agreement? It is also called the Belfast agreement so it doesn’t offend both traditions. Did you actually know that? I was born in NI and I’m a Catholic and a Unionist. Here if you need help.”The Conservative MP for Beaconsfield, Joy Morrissey, replied that “Biden is shamelessly pandering to the American Irish vote while refusing to engage with the UK government or UK diplomatic channels. Nice.”She later deleted her tweet, but added: “Clearly it’s all about the Irish American vote.”Burns added: “The error those of us who supported Brexit was to assume the EU would behave rationally in seeking a free trade agreement with a large trading partner like the UK..”Alexander Stafford, the Conservative MP for Rother Valley, tweeted: “Is this the same JoeBiden who once described Britain’s position in Northern Ireland as ‘absolutely outrageous’. And who hit the headlines in the 1980s for his stand against the deportation of IRA suspects from the US to Britain?”John Redwood, a leading Brexiter, said: “Trade deals are nice to have but not essential. We did not have a trade deal with the US when we were in the EU. Getting back full control of our laws, our money and our borders is essential.”Theresa May’s former chief of staff Nick Timothy rejected the frenzy, dismissing “the sudden discovery that Democrats don’t like Brexit and prefer the Irish”.Other Tory MPs including Stewart Jackson tweeted articles claiming that two of the representatives criticising the UK over the Good Friday agreement were overt IRA sympathisers, and a third was a supporter of Martin McGuinness, the now deceased former deputy first minister for Northern Ireland.The shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, said: “This shows the scale of the damage the government have done to Britain’s standing in the world. They’ve lost trust and undermined cooperation at the moment we most need it – and all to tear up an agreement they negotiated. Reckless, incompetent and utterly self-defeating.”Daniel Mulhall, the Irish ambassador to the US, has been working the corridors in Washington for the past fortnight, lobbying to lessen the threat the Irish perceive to the Good Friday agreement posed by the British proposals. He has been tweeting his gratitude to those representatives issuing support for the Good Friday agreement.No free trade deal between the UK and the US can be agreed unless it is supported by two-thirds of Congress.In a sign of Trump administration concern about the row, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former acting chief of staff, will shortly make his first trip to the the UK in his new role as the US special envoy for Northern Ireland.The Foreign Office, criticised by some for failing to anticipate the likely US backlash, will argue Raab’s visit to Washington may have drawn a predictable reaction from some corners, but was necessary to reassure and counter Irish propaganda.But UK diplomats will be anxious that the UK is not seen to adopt a partisan stance in the US elections, especially since Biden currently holds a fragile poll lead. More

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      in US Politics

      The right's culture war is no longer a sideshow to our politics – it is our politics | Nesrine Malik

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      It is hard to pick out one highlight from last week’s bizarre Republican national convention. But the Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz managed to distil into one chilling sentence the essence of rightwing politics today. Joe Biden, Gaetz explained, “would empty the prisons, lock you in your homes, and invite MS-13 to live next door. And the defunded police aren’t on their way.”There’s a wish for Britain to be a precious damsel in distress rather than a country impoverished by misruleThe only mercy in this grotesque US election – which will only get uglier – is that the fearmongering is totally naked. It’s not about “making America great again” again, or the plight of the little guy. It is about order. The threats to order are always present, and always held at bay, just barely, by conservative leaders valiantly fighting the imminent deluge. This authoritarian populist strategy is founded on an essential fiction: the pretence of powerlessness among politicians, and their voters, who are very much in charge. The weak and the marginalised, and especially their fragile movements for racial and economic equality, are cast as a terrifying force, influential and deeply embedded – a shadow regime that will bloom into tyranny the instant the Democrats are elected.In Britain, we watch this American political horror from behind our fingers, with the bewildered bemusement of a country far from this madness. But we are there too. The right in the UK now is following the same playbook. The approach is just as calculated, but the presentation is slightly less crude, and therefore more difficult to challenge.Over here, fearmongering is altogether more refined. Instead of hyped-up nonsense about emptying prisons and killer migrant gangs, there are subtle and insidious threats to British values. Consider the latest attack on our national pride: thinly sourced reports that Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory might be axed from “BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’”. Much like Biden’s secret plot to set criminals loose, the Proms scandal isn’t true: there was no demand that the songs be dropped. There will be an orchestral version online this year because there’s a pandemic on, and there will be no audience to sing along. A vocal version is “fully expected to return next year”.This dubious tale wasn’t invented by a Fox News-style propaganda network: it was carried by the Sunday Times and the Times and followed up by all the other papers. But it wasn’t an innocent misunderstanding: it was the result of a desire to exaggerate the threat to “our culture” from the unnamed vandals set on destroying it.Once it was out there, the whole of the British media ran with the story. Even the BBC itself rang to ask me to come on for a debate on “the importance of our traditions” – amplifying fears and threats even as its own news site hosted a report explaining that the decision was pandemic-related, and nothing to do with subverting tradition.There’s nothing new about these concoctions. Two years ago, the Daily Telegraph frightened its readers with a front page falsely reporting that Cambridge was being “forced to drop white authors” by a single black student – the publication of whose picture on the front page brought her abuse and harassment, even as the newspaper soon retracted its story. But there is something new and significant about the fake Proms scandal. It is a fabrication in plain sight, a trick performed by lazy magicians who don’t bother with sleight of hand because they know how badly the audience wants to believe the illusion.Before long, the story was given the imprimatur of truth by the prime minister – who supposedly defied the restraint of his own minders to speak out against the dangerous “wetness” stalking the land. By the end of the week, parts of the public had been whipped into a frenzy, as seen in several polls helpfully asking how they felt about the BBC’s craven surrender to rampant wokeness. Land of Hope and Glory raced up the charts as a rebuke to the imaginary censors.The reason that these made-up stories preoccupy journalists, politicians and the public is that culture-war skirmishes are no longer a sideshow to our politics – they are the politics. They are how rightwing electoral prospects are now advanced; not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure and British is constantly at risk of extinction. What our most successful politicians understand is the insatiable public appetite for these falsehoods, the wish for these lies to be true – for Britain to be a precious damsel in distress rather than a battered country impoverished by the misrule of its governing class.For all the clear appetite and motivation for concocting and believing these lies, we are terrible at defending against them. Either we accept their premise, and start debating the pros and cons of cancelling the lyrics, or we think it’s clever to rise above them and not give the right the culture war that it wants. Either way we fall into the trap of promoting fake culture-war stories by engaging in them, or allowing them to grow unchallenged because there is more serious real politics to attend to. This is the serious real politics. It is winning elections. It is fostering a siege mentality that can be easily converted, as Gaetz did, into fear of the other lot getting in and establishing an anarchic regime that vandalises history, opens the borders and embraces the thugs and vandals of Black Lives Matter.The main challenge that faces any progressive forces over the next few years isn’t in convincing the electorate of the mendacity or incompetence of the Conservative party, it’s exposing the vast complex of lies that it is being sold every day, and those who sell them. We can either do that, or we can continue to stumble, out of credulity or cowardice, into culture-war traps as they pave the way to the next rightwing election victory.• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist and the author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent More

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      in US Politics

      Lies, suspicion and silence in the Tory party | Letters

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      In your admirably concise analysis of the government’s failings over the past week, there are two flaws: one of them delusional, the other an omission (The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s government: an omnishambles week, 20 August).First the delusion: “Much depends on Conservatives with consciences” may have made sense until 12 months ago. Then MPs who dared to challenge the leadership on a range of topics, not just Brexit, but crucially the unlawful prorogation of parliament, were thrown out of their party. Others who shared those opinions decided not to seek re-election, and as a consequence the Conservative parliamentary party can now easily be passed off as a slightly more media-friendly version of Farage’s Brexit party. If any are left who have the conscience necessary to challenge “the New Tory party”, they will be fearful of showing themselves until such time as things are much worse and they have no alternative.The omission: aside from citing one opinion poll that suggests Labour is beginning to eat into the Tory lead, the opposition does not feature.I hope that MPs from all other parties are hatching plans to harry ministers at every turn, challenge every decision and use the full force of parliamentary procedure to expose the lies and to investigate the growing suspicion that public money is being misused to feather friends’ nests.Les BrightExeter, Devon• Martin Kettle quite rightly sees Boris Johnson as a threat to parliamentary democracy (Johnson vowed to strengthen parliament. Yet he and Cummings are silencing it, 19 August). But we should not be surprised. “Johnson talked about how MPs didn’t count, they were just marriage-guidance counsellors on a Friday,” Tony Benn wrote about a radio discussion between the two in 1997. “I just went for him. I shouldn’t lose my temper, but actually it was quite good.” And good too if a few more people now lose their temper about what Kettle chillingly identifies as already almost amounting to “a quiet coup”.David KynastonNew Malden, London• What an amazing speech by Barack Obama to the Democratic national convention. Perhaps Theresa May could download it, replace the words Donald Trump with Boris Johnson, president with prime minister and America with the United Kingdom, and then deliver it in the Commons. If only parliament was sitting.Elizabeth BrettWelling, Kent• Join the conversation – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters More

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      Pressure from Trump led to 5G ban, Britain tells Huawei

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      The British government privately told the Chinese technology giant Huawei that it was being banned from Britain’s 5G telecoms network partly for “geopolitical” reasons following huge pressure from President Donald Trump, the Observer has learned.In the days leading up to the controversial announcement on Tuesday last week, intensive discussions were held and confidential communications exchanged between the government and Whitehall officials on one side and Huawei executives on the other.As part of the high-level behind-the-scenes contacts, Huawei was told that geopolitics had played a part, and was given the impression that it was possible the decision could be revisited in future, perhaps if Trump failed to win a second term and the anti-China stance in Washington eased.Senior Huawei executives have gone public since Tuesday’s decision saying that they hope the British government will rethink, apparently encouraged by the results of back-channel contacts.The government’s private admissions are out of kilter with public statements last week by ministers, who said Huawei had been banned because of new security concerns raised by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ.In the Commons, Oliver Dowden, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said new sanctions forbidding the sale of US-produced components to Huawei – meaning the Chinese company will have to source them from elsewhere – had changed the balance of security risk.“The new US measures restrict Huawei’s ability to produce important products using US technology or software,” he said. “The National Cyber Security Centre has reviewed the consequences of the US’s actions …“The NCSC has now reported to ministers that they have significantly changed their security assessment of Huawei’s presence in the UK 5G network. Given the uncertainty this creates around Huawei’s supply chain, the UK can no longer be confident it will be able to guarantee the security of future Huawei 5G equipment affected by the change in the US foreign direct product rules.” More

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      Move on from lies and arrogance? No, let’s reflect | Letters

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      Move on from lies and arrogance? No, let’s reflect Garth Groombridge says this government is all about elitism, selfishness and power, Dr Jim Ford thinks Boris Johnson should stand aside again while he fully recovers, Natalie Cohen says the press should be free to ask uncomfortable questions, while Francis Blake wonders what Mary Wakefield was […] More

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      in US Politics

      The right cannot resist a culture war against the 'liberal elite', even now | Nick Cohen

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      The right cannot resist a culture war against the ‘liberal elite’, even now Nick Cohen The highest rates of Covid-19 casualties are in countries run by know-nothing populists Coronavirus – latest global updates See all our coronavirus coverage A woman holds up a placard at an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, anti-5G and pro-freedom protest in London, on […] More