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      Derek Draper death: Kate Garraway’s husband dies after devastating Covid battle, aged 56

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      Sir Tony Blair has led tributes to Derek Draper, who has died aged 56 after a heartbreaking battle with long Covid. Draper, a political lobbyist who later became a psychotherapist, was perhaps best known as the husband of TV presenter Kate Garraway.Mr Blair described the Labour adviser as a ruthless political operative and “an important part of the New Labour story”.Draper, who contracted the illness during the early stages of the pandemic, was rushed to hospital on Sunday 17 December after suffering a cardiac arrest that left him fighting for his life.Garraway announced the death of “my darling husband” in a statement on Instagram on Friday 5 January. “I’m sad to have to tell you all that my darling husband Derek has passed away,” she wrote. “As some of you may know he has been critically ill following a cardiac arrest in early December which, because of the damage inflicted by Covid in March 2020, led to further complications.“Derek was surrounded by his family in his final days and I was by his side holding his hand throughout the last long hours and when he passed. Sending so much love and thanks to all of you who have so generously given our family so much support. Rest gently and peacefully now Derek, my love, I was so lucky to have you in my life,” she wrote. Replying to her post, Sir Elton John wrote: “So sorry to hear of this news, Kate. Love and thoughts to you and your family.”Garraway and Draper, who got married in 2005, attended the singer’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour at the 02 Arena in London last April. Mr Blair was among the New Labour era heavyweights leading tributes to Mr Draper, who worked for Peter Mandelson and set up the Progress organisation with Liam Byrne, who went on to become an MP.Mr Blair said: “It is extraordinary and remarkable that Derek survived so long after the ravages of Covid. And that was in large measure due to the love Derek had for his family and they for him. This also says something very special about Derek.Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime VideoSign up now for a 30-day free trialSign upAccess unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime VideoSign up now for a 30-day free trialSign up“He was a tough, sometimes ruthless political operative, a brilliant adviser and someone you always wanted on your side. But underneath that tough exterior he was a loving, kind, generous and good-natured man you wanted as a friend.”He added: “He was an important part of the New Labour story, at the centre of things right at the beginning. But most important of all, he was a good colleague and great friend. And we will miss him deeply.”Another former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, wrote: “I will remember him as brilliant, creative and multitalented, and our thoughts are with Kate, Darcey and Billy.”Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell described Draper as “a huge character”.Lorraine Kelly described her ITV colleague as “strong and brave” in a statement shared on Instagram. She wrote: “This is just so sad. Our friend Kate Garraway has been so strong and brave. Thoughts with her and her children and family. She was right by his side until the end and did him proud. An astonishing woman.”Born on 15 August 1967 in Chorley, Lancashire, Draper went to Southlands High School until 1984. He then attended Runshaw College in Leyland before studying at the University of Manchester.His political career began in 1990, when he was appointed constituency secretary to Nick Brown, now a Labour Party veteran, who went on to serve as chief whip. He quit the job two years later and went to work as a researcher for Peter Mandelson. In 1996, Draper was made director of lobbying firm GPC Market Access, where he remained until early 1999. During his career, he became involved in a scandal now known as “Lobbygate”, when he and Labour political organiser Jonathan Mendelsohn were caught on tape boasting that they could sell access to government ministers to create tax breaks for their clients. Derek Draper watches as his wife Kate Garraway collects her MBE from Prince WilliamAfter quitting politics, he went back to university and retrained as a psychotherapist, obtaining an MA in clinical psychology. Garraway spent nearly four years caring for Draper after he was diagnosed with Covid in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic. During the course of the illness, he was hospitalised and placed in a medically induced coma.Draper was discharged from hospital more than a year after he was first admitted, returning home to Garraway and the couple’s two children, daughter Darcey and son Billy. He was readmitted on several occasions.He developed sepsis in February 2022. This led to another prolonged stint in hospital, during which Garraway said he had taken an “unexpected and frightening turn for the worse” and that he was “fighting for his life”. Seven months later, the TV presenter shared another update about her husband’s health, revealing that he had again developed sepsis that “threatened his life”.Garraway was awarded an MBE by the Prince of Wales in recognition for her services to journalism, broadcasting and charity, during an investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle in July last year. She captured the devastating and permanent impact long Covid can have in the incredibly moving documentary Finding Derek.She said Draper had been the sickest person in the UK to survive Covid, adding that “unless you are up close to it, you don’t know what it’s like”. In the film, she narrated the story of the ordeal Derek and her family had endured since he became ill, as she reflected on what the future could hold for them. Draper is survived by Garraway and their two children. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Floored’ union leader called AOC new Springsteen after shock primary win, book says

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      Donald Trump memorably compared the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón, the Argentinian first lady known as Evita. But a new book reveals that when the young Latino leftwinger burst on to the US political scene in 2018, one US labour leader made perhaps a more telling comparison – to Bruce Springsteen.“I was floored,” Michael Podhorzer, then political director of the AFL-CIO, told the author Joshua Green. “The best comparison I can make is to the famous Jon Landau line: ‘I’ve seen rock’n’roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’”Landau is a journalist who became Springsteen’s manager and producer. He passed his famous judgment in May 1974, after seeing Springsteen play at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then 25, Springsteen went on to sell records by the million and win Grammys by the sackful, becoming widely known as the Boss but maintaining his image as a blue-collar hero, true to his New Jersey roots.In Democratic politics, Ocasio-Cortez – widely known as AOC – has built her own star power while maintaining working-class credentials.In 2018, she was a 28-year-old bartender when she scored a historic upset primary win over Joe Crowley, then 56 and a member of Democratic US House leadership, in a New York City district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx.In a campaign ad, Ocasio-Cortez depicted herself as an ordinary New Yorker, hustling to work on the subway.She described Crowley, in contrast, as “a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air”.Green, previously the author of Devil’s Bargain, on Trump’s rise to power, reports Podhorzer’s response in his new book, The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics.A look at three stars of the modern Democratic left, the book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Podhorzer, Green says, is a union official “who spends his waking hours trying to get voters to care about working people”. Among working people who might appreciate his comparison of Ocasio-Cortez to Springsteen is none other than Crowley, now senior policy director for Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.At a party event on election night in 2018, as he digested the sudden end of his 20-year congressional career, Crowley picked up a guitar and took the stage with a band.“This is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said, launching a cover of Springsteen’s Born to Run.In his epilogue, Green considers a common question: was Ocasio-Cortez born to run for president?Noting how AOC, Warren and Sanders have pushed Democrats left, as evidenced by Joe Biden’s record in office, he writes that Ocasio-Cortez “still gets covered mainly through the lens of ‘the Squad’” – a group of mostly female representatives of color who have achieved prominence on Capitol Hill.“But among the rising generation of Democratic staffers and strategists who will soon run the party, she’s come to be seen as a significant figure in her own right.”Speaking anonymously, a Warren adviser adds: “You can see [AOC] pointing a path toward the future in a way that none of the other Squad members are doing. She’s the one really marking the future of the left in the post-Biden era.” More

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      in US Politics

      Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion by David Keen review – Trumpism’s lifeblood

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      Imagine a white, working-class American, most likely a man, from Louisiana or Alabama, perhaps, standing in a long line that represents his life’s journey. The man has been sold the American “bootstrap myth”, which states that his great country is a place where anyone can rise from the humblest of origins to become a billionaire or a president, and at the end of the line he expects to find a little part of that dividend for himself. But things aren’t panning out as he had hoped. For a start, the line stretches to the horizon, and even as he stands in it, he suffers: his pay packet is shrinking, the industry he works in is moving overseas, and the cost of everything from food to gas to healthcare is through the roof. Worse still, he can see people cutting into the line ahead, beneficiaries of “affirmative action” – black people, women, immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s racist or misogynist, but that’s what they call him when he objects. He is doubly shamed: privately, by his failure to live up to the myth; publicly, by liberal society.This is the so-called deep story of the American right. We don’t have to accept the man’s worldview, just believe that this might be how he perceives it.Now a new figure enters the scenario, an orange-haired tycoon: we’ll call him Donald. Donald seems instinctively to understand the man’s shame. In fact, he’s a shame expert. He has a long history of transgression, and people have been trying to shame him for much of his life. But Donald has found a way around it: he has become shame-less. He demonstrates his shamelessness almost daily by producing a stream of shameful remarks – about Mexicans, say, or Muslims, or the sitting president, who happens to be black. Although people shout “Shame!” at him, each condemnation inflates Donald a little more in the eyes of his tribe, including the man in the line, who holds him up as a sort of shame messiah. By refusing his own shame, Donald absolves them, too.This, more or less, is the analysis of Trumpism offered by David Keen in his fascinating, occasionally frustrating book. We are living through a sort of shame golden age, Keen observes, with the words “shame” and “shameless” in greater vogue than at any time since the mid-19th century. We have developed a “habit of instant condemnation”, which is “choking off curiosity and narrowing the space for understanding of others”. It is also having a terrible effect on our politics.It’s not hard to see where our shame culture originates. Every keyboard jockey now holds the power of a witch-finder general, while the phones in our pockets vibrate with the merry-go-round of digital finger-pointing, body-shaming and moral high-handedness that constitutes much of social media. Of course, shame isn’t always a negative thing – what would #MeToo or #BLM be without it? But too often the effect of shaming is to drive the shamed into an angrier, more shameless place. Oddly, despite the huge seam of public shaming that Twitter/X, Instagram and Facebook provide daily, Keen doesn’t spend any time on them. Instead, he draws on his expertise as professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics to embark on a series of case studies, including the Holocaust, the civil war in Sierra Leone, the Brexit vote and Trump’s election.His analysis of the violence in Sierra Leone is compelling, his chapter on the Nazis less so, but it is Trumpism that lies at the heart of the book, and his arguments here are highly plausible. Might a shame analysis even explain the great paradox of modern politics, in which one individual can be mobbed for the slightest indiscretion, while another can brag, as Trump once did, that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote? Does the shame/shameless diptych explain not only Trump, but the whole crew of latter-day demagogues, from Johnson to Modi, Meloni to Bolsanaro, and now Javier Milei in Argentina?I think it could, but I’m not wholly convinced, absent a deeper dive into the driving mechanism of modern shame: technology.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      in US Politics

      Revisited: why do Republicans hate the Barbie movie? – podcast

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      The Politics Weekly America team are taking a break. So for the next two weeks, we’re looking back at a couple of our favourite episodes of the year.
      From August: Jonathan Freedland and Amanda Marcotte try to figure it out why rightwing politicians and pundits took such a disliking to Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster. They look at what the outrage can tell us about how the Republicans will campaign in 2024

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      in US Politics

      Our Little Amal has travelled thousands of miles – but there is still far to go

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      We were theatre people gathered from the UK, the US, Palestine, South Africa, Syria, Taiwan, Eritrea, Italy and France. Our idea was for Amal, a 12ft puppet of a Syrian child, to travel along one of the routes across Turkey and Europe that refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and many other countries follow as they flee war, violence and persecution. We imagined Amal as one of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and her journey as, simply, a search for her mother.In 70 towns and cities along her 5,000-mile route – Gaziantep to Manchester – we invited artists and arts organisations to welcome her. “A refugee child will arrive. She’ll be tired, hungry, frightened. How will you welcome her? With a dance? With a meal typical of your region? With an orchestral concert?”And we invited figures of “power” to welcome her – in a Turkish mountain village the mayor, in Rome the pope, in London the speaker of the House of Commons …Between July and November 2021, Amal travelled along the south Turkish coast, crossed to the island of Chios in Greece, walked through Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, sailed from Dunkirk to Dover all the while leading perhaps the biggest community art project ever staged, a rolling festival of art and hope. In Arabic Amal means “hope”.Through the genius of her creators, Handspring Puppet Company, the skill of her puppeteers and social media, she quickly became a global symbol of human rights. She met something like a million people on the street, tens of millions more online. Her education pack was downloaded from walkwithamal.org all over the world. In the welcoming crowds, we’d hear kids explain to their parents: “She was born in Aleppo, we learned about her in school …”Almost as soon as she set out, she received invitations to places – Stockholm, Adelaide, Seoul – not within the logic of her route but, once her first journey was complete, she was free. She could go anywhere. In 2022 at the invitation of the mayor of Lviv she visited Ukraine as well as shelters set up across the border in Poland to receive refugees from the war zone. She toured the UK, visiting Stonehenge and appearing alongside Elbow at Glastonbury. She led a group of mayors from many major cities through the streets of Amsterdam to the Anne Frank House.In New York she was welcomed by the Metropolitan Opera on her arrival at JFK airport and by artists and audiences at 50 sites across all five boroughs. Thousands of children holding bird puppets streamed behind her across Brooklyn Bridge. We saw all this, and visits early this year to Toronto and Trondheim, as preparation for her second very long journey.On 7 September she arrived in Boston harbour in a clipper. Later that day she was serenaded by students in Harvard Yard and at night was played to sleep among other homeless people by Yo Yo Ma. On 10 September members of the Nipmuc nation canoed across Lake Ashfield to sing to her in welcome. The mayor of Hartford, Connecticut was the first of many mayors to declare the day of her visit “Little Amal Day”. In Washington a brass band played as she strode down Pennsylvania Avenue to be welcomed to the Capitol by congressmen and women, then she paraded down Black Lives Matter Plaza.She went north to the “rustbelt” – Detroit, Dearborn, Flint. She gazed at the rush of cars thrusting down into the tunnel under the Detroit River that emerges in Canada, the first of three river borders on her 12-week, 60-city US/Mexico journey. In Memphis, Tennessee, she stood outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. In Birmingham, Alabama, she marched from the 16th Street Baptist Church hand in hand with a veteran of the 1960s civil rights “foot soldiers”, the crowd singing “Ain’t nobody gonna turn me around, turn me around …” On a glittering New Orleans night, accompanied by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, she made her way through the revellers on Bourbon Street.From El Paso, Texas she crossed briefly into Mexico. Beneath the massive blood-red X-shaped tower that expresses Ciudad Juárez as a crossing point and a meeting place, she was cheered by young people in Mexican national dress and a Mariachi band. Later, standing on the south bank of the Rio Grande (the second river border of her journey), she came across a group of families with young children from Venezuela who, having waded through the chest-high water, were on US soil but blocked from going further by the barbed-wire crested 20-foot wall …Back in the US, she was welcomed by some of the hundreds, maybe thousands, young and old, who run organisations in villages and towns along the border to support migrants and refugees who have made it across. Tiffany runs a shelter where new arrivals can make a phone call, eat, shower and rest while a bus is summoned to ferry them to Tucson where they’ll hand themselves over to the authorities and apply to stay. Father Mike offers his church hall to new arrivals to pause and take stock of the new world they’re in. Outside on the street a youngster from Honduras is interviewed by a local journalist.“What does Amal mean to you?”“She gives me hope …”One late October day, west of Nogales, Arizona, the elderly chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation guided Amal to the fence between his hereditary territory and Mexico. Overnight, perhaps 2,000 people had crossed and were gathered in a hard mud clearing under the blazing sun awaiting the arrival of police to “process” them. “We will never allow a wall to be built on this land which we cherish,” said the Chairman gazing up at Amal. “If they try, we will fight them, won’t we, my girl.”In the Inglewood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, she had a starring role in a vibrant Vegas-style dance of welcome choreographed by Debbie Allen, performed by hundreds of students. On the jam-packed Jerry Moss Plaza of the downtown Music Center bands played, soap bubbles glimmered in the night air as a jubilant crowd serenaded Amal.From San Diego, she crossed into Mexico through the turnstile on foot and was greeted by the governor of the state of Baja California and the mayor of Tijuana, both making speeches about how deeply they as mothers felt their responsibilities for the wellbeing of migrant children. On Tijuana Playa the metal border wall juts into the sea. As Amal strolled along the beach accompanied by well-wishers and a mariachi band, I thought: “But the wall doesn’t jut out that far, why don’t people swim round it?” The currents are too strong.Will the strong flow of migrants ever cease? No one sets out on these perilous journeys unless there’s no other way to escape war, organised crime, extreme poverty. In Mexico, as in Turkey, it seemed to us that, at the official level but also on the streets, there’s an understanding that “the problem” is not refugees and asylum seekers. The people are innocent. The problem is the situation. Deal with the political, social and economic crises or people will keep coming.In the Centro Comunitario San Bernabé in Monterrey she played soccer with teams of boisterous kids. In the Tonalá neighbourhood of Guadalajara something like 40,000 people crowded the streets. “Amal, Amal, Amal!” In Zapopan perhaps 20,000 yelled as she entered the Basilica of Our Lady, was sung to by priests and then escorted back out into the blazing sunshine by yet another mariachi band.In Mexico City she was formally welcomed by the presidents of the Senate and of the Congress. In Los Pinos Park the minister of culture brandished her cowboy hat and sang to her. “You are warriors,” she told us, “warriors for peace.” On the central square, the Zócalo, she was welcomed by the mayor and by a dance choreographed for her by Raúl Tamez. Tens of thousands marched behind her through the working-class district Iztapalapa brandishing signs “We love Amal, Ser Migrante es un acto de Valor”.Outside the church at Xochimilco, near the vast canal system built by the Aztecs on which Amal went for a twilight cruise, Unicef and UNHCR officials asked if she would keep heading south into Guatemala, San Salvador and Honduras: “This work you do is very important to us. You draw attention to the level of the crisis, to the needs of the children. No doubt about it, she should keep going.”At Mexico’s southernmost tip, Ciudad Hidalgo, the river border with Guatemala is a gently sloping bank strengthened by sandbags leading down to a row of wooden rafts. Armed police stand about but seem unengaged by the constant, apparently casual, flow of people punting to and fro in both directions. The Guatemalan quetzal is stronger than the Mexican peso so Guatemalans hop aboard the rafts and float across to do their shopping. But Amal has no need to shop. She climbs aboard a raft, lays her head on her hands, stretches out and floats gently along, at rest at last.As she travelled, Amal raised just shy of $1,000,000 (£800,000) which will be distributed to organisations that support refugees by our charity partner Choose Love. There are two further, briefer, Amal journeys planned for 2024.
      David Lan was artistic director of the Young Vic from 2000 to 2018. With Tracey Seaward he is producer of The Walk.
      This article was amended on 12 December. Philadelphia Avenue has been corrected to Pennsylvania Avenue; and the spelling of choreographer Raúl Tamez’s name has been corrected. More

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      in US Politics

      Oath and Honor review: Liz Cheney spells out the threat from Trump

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      Donald Trump stands ready to knife US democracy. A year ago, he called for terminating the constitution. He has since announced that if re-elected, he wants to weaponize federal law enforcement against his political enemies. He has suggested that Gen Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs, be executed for fulfilling his duty.This is a man who reportedly kept a bound copy of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, very nearly managed to overturn an election, and certainly basked in the mayhem of the January 6 insurrection. He said Mike Pence, his vice-president who ultimately stood against him, “deserved” to be hanged for so doing.This week, Trump said he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second term. All bets are off. Take him literally and seriously.The New York Times and the Atlantic report that Trump aims to make the executive branch his fiefdom, loyalty the primary if not only test. If he returns to power, the independence of the justice department and FBI will be things of the past. He is the “most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office”, Liz Cheney writes in her memoir.“This is the story of when American democracy began to unravel,” the former congresswoman adds. “It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize.”Cheney, formerly the No 3 House Republican, was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee. She has witnessed power wielded – not always wisely. Dick Cheney, her father, was George W Bush’s vice-president and pushed the Iraq war. Before that he was secretary of defense to Bush’s father and, like his daughter, represented Wyoming in the House.Liz Cheney delivers a frightening narrative. Her recollections are first-hand, her prose dry, terse and informed. On January 6, she witnessed Trump’s minions invade the Capitol first-hand.Subtitled “A Memoir and a Warning Oath”, her book is well-timed. The presidential primaries draw near. The Iowa caucus is next month. Trump laps the Republican pack. No one comes close. Ron DeSantis is in retrograde, his campaign encased in a dunghill of its own making. Nikki Haley has momentum of a sort but remains a long way behind.Cheney’s book will discomfit many. Mike Johnson, the new House speaker, is shown as a needy and servile fraud. Kevin McCarthy, his predecessor, is a bottomless pit of self-abasement. Jim Jordan, the hard-right judiciary chair from Ohio, is ham-handed and insincere.Johnson misled colleagues about the authorship of a legal brief filed in support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, as well as its contents and his own credentials. He played a game of “bait and switch”, Cheney says. Johnson, she writes, was neither the author of the brief nor a “constitutional law expert”, despite advising colleagues that he was.In reality, Johnson was dean of Judge Paul Pressler School of Law, a small Baptist institution that never opened its doors. Constitutional scholar? Nope. Pro-Trump lawyers wrote the pro-Trump brief, not Johnson, Cheney says.At a recent gathering of Christian legislators, Johnson referred to himself as a modern-day Moses.McCarthy, meanwhile, is vividly portrayed in all his gutless glory. First taking a pass on Johnson’s amicus brief, he then predictably caved. Anything to sit at the cool kids’ table. His tenure as speaker, which followed, will be remembered for its brevity and desperation. His trip to see Trump in Florida, shortly after the election, left Cheney incredulous.“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?”“They’re really worried,” McCarthy said. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”Trump not eating. Let that claim sink in.This year, at his arraignment in Fulton county, Georgia, on charges relating to election subversion there, the former president self-reported as 6ft 3in and 215lb – almost 30lb lighter than at his last White House physical.OK.Turning to Jordan, Cheney recalls his performance on January 6. She rightly feared for her safety and remains unamused.“Jim Jordan approached me,” she recalls.“‘We need to get the ladies off the aisle,’ he said, and put out his hand. ‘Let me help you.’”“I swatted his hand away. ‘Get away from me. You fucking did this.’”Jordan’s spokesperson denies the incident.Cheney writes: “Most Republicans currently in Congress will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is. I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our republic.”Mitt Romney has announced his retirement as a senator from Utah. Patrick McHenry, the former acting House speaker from North Carolina, has also decided to quit. Both men voted to certify Joe Biden’s win in 2020. In a Trump-centric Republican party, that is a big problem. In plain English, Congress is a hellscape. The cold civil war grows hot.Cheney briefly mentions Kash Patel, a former staffer to Devin Nunes, a congressman now in charge of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. In the waning days of the Trump administration, Patel was chief of staff at the Pentagon. In a recent interview with Steve Bannon, Patel made clear that in a second Trump term, bureaucrats and the press will be targets.“We will find the conspirators in government … and the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media … we are putting you all on notice.”Trump is a would-be Commodus, a debauched emperor, enamored with power, grievance and his own reflection. Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning epic, remains a movie for our times.“As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term,” Cheney writes. “But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our constitution.” Promoting her book, she added that the US is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”.Trump leads Biden in the polls.
      Oath and Honor is published in the US by Hachette More

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      in US Politics

      US senators introduce ‘fans first’ live-event ticketing reform bill

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      Six US senators have introduced a new “Fans First Act” to address flaws in the live event ticketing system by increasing transparency in ticket sales, protecting consumers from fake or overpriced tickets, and building accountability measures for bad actors.The bipartisan bill, brought to Congress by three Republicans (John Cornyn of Texas, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Roger Wicker of Mississippi) and three Democrats (Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Peter Welch of Vermont and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico), is the latest effort by Congress to combat high and exploitative ticket pricing for concerts and other live events.The heated situation with online ticket sellers – predominantly by Ticketmaster, by far the largest of retailers – reached a boiling point in 2022, when demand for tickets to see Taylor Swift’s and Bruce Springsteen’s tours, respectively, crashed the site and sent prices soaring.Several Swift fans went on to sue Ticketmaster for “fraud, price-fixing and antitrust violations”, alleging that “intentional deception” allowed scalpers to buy the majority of tickets, to be resold at a mark-up; within hours of the Eras tour sale, tickets were being resold on secondary seller sites for as much as $22,000 (£18,000).“Because no other venue can hold half as many people as the stadiums and venues working through Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift and other popular musicians have no choice but to work through Ticketmaster,” the suit alleged. The controversy led to congressional hearings with Ticketmaster executives. Though started before the Swift debacle, the US justice department launched an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, over whether it abused its power in the multibillion-dollar live entertainment industry.According to an announcement signed by the six senators, the Fans First Act seeks to improve pricing transparency by requiring all live event ticket sellers and resellers to disclose the total cost of the ticket, including fees, when the fan initially selects a ticket for purchase; a breakdown of the ticket cost; clear terms and conditions of purchase; which seat or section they are selling in order to avoid ticket misrepresentation; and whether or not they are the original seller.The act would also strengthen the Better Online Ticket Sales (Bots) Act, signed into law in 2016, to further prohibit the use of bots to purchase tickets online, and would impose civil penalties on resellers engaging in illegal ticket sale practices. The bill would create a reporting website for fans to file complaints, to be enforced and monitored by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general. And it seeks to stop bad actors by prohibiting the sale of “spec” tickets which resellers do not yet possess, prevents the use of deceptive websites and bad actors masquerading as legitimate sellers, and requires reporting of Bots Act violations from ticketing companies to the FTC.“The current ticketing system is riddled with problems and doesn’t serve the needs of fans, teams, artists or venues,” said Cornyn in the announcement. “This legislation would rebuild trust in the ticketing system by cracking down on bots and others who take advantage of consumers through price gouging and other predatory practices and increase price transparency for ticket purchasers.”Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster, applauded the new bill: “We support the Fans First Act and welcome legislation that brings positive reform to live event ticketing. We believe it’s critical Congress acts to protect fans and artists from predatory resale practices, and have long supported a federal all-in pricing mandate, banning speculative ticketing and deceptive websites, as well as other measures. We look forward to our continued work with policymakers to advocate for even stronger reforms and enforcement.” More

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      Longstreet: the Confederate general who switched sides on race

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      On 14 September 1874, less than a decade after the end of the US civil war, the former Confederate general James Longstreet was back in arms. This time, he was seeking to prevent an insurrection: a white supremacist bid to take over New Orleans.Once seen by northerners as among the three most notorious Confederates – with his commander, Robert E Lee, and president, Jefferson Davis – Longstreet now led state militia and city police. His troops were Black and white, reflecting an unlikely commitment to post-war civil rights that would waver in later years. His complex life is the subject of a new biography, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, by Elizabeth R Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia, currently the visiting Harmsworth professor of history at Oxford.“This turnabout is so fascinating,” Varon marvels. “I pitched the book as the story of the most remarkable political about-face in American history.”An enslaver, Longstreet directed Confederate forces to capture Black people and take them south to slavery or imprisonment. He fought until the surrender at Appomattox, then allied himself with those who had brought about his defeat: Ulysses S Grant and the Republican party.“He was not the only one,” Varon says of white southern Republicans who made such moves, “but [he was] the highest-ranking Confederate. He was a lightning rod for critics.”Prominent figures such as Lee were honored with monuments, some of which have recently been pulled down. Longstreet never had this problem, because you’d be hard-pressed to find such tributes to him.“It’s quite astounding,” Varon reflects. “Longstreet endorses Reconstruction at a time when the vast majority of white southern former Confederates pledged themselves to resist at all costs.”The author is interested in such dissenters. A previous book chronicled Elizabeth Van Lew, a resident of the Confederate capital, Richmond, who spied for the Union. Varon hopes a future scholar will write about another dissenter, Longstreet’s much younger second wife, Helen Longstreet, née Dortch, who outlived her husband by 58 years. By the 20th century, she was also an outspoken voice for civil rights in the south.Dissent characterized Longstreet’s war years as much as his later life did. The 1993 film Gettysburg dramatizes his dispute with Lee at that famous battle. Longstreet argued for a defensive approach. Lee took the offense and the result was a disaster, a turning point in the war. Transferred west, Longstreet led an assault credited for the victory at Chickamauga, then lambasted his new commander, Braxton Bragg, for his failure to capitalize. Longstreet would later suffer for daring to criticize Lee.Although Varon addresses Longstreet’s war years, she is more interested in his postwar career, which stretched for nearly four decades and included leadership positions in Louisiana and Georgia. He even became the US minister to the Ottoman empire, where he met Sultan Abdul Hamid II and defended American missionaries.He owed much of his success to an improbable allegiance to the abolitionist Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and a lasting friendship with Grant.Varon details an unconventional but unsuccessful peace initiative involving the Grant and Longstreet families near the end of the civil war. (The war years had been hard for Longstreet and his first wife, Louise Longstreet. They lost three children to scarlet fever in 1862, and two years later, the general was grievously wounded by his own men.) At Appomattox, Longstreet was impressed by Grant’s lenient terms, which helped convince him it was time to change. He explained his stance in a series of 1867 letters that were poorly received by many.As Varon explains: “Longstreet said, ‘Yes, let’s give the Republican party a chance, try to make this work, we appealed to arms and the sword to arbitrate the political conflict with the north, they won, now it … requires me to try to make the best of it.’”She adds: “He was absolutely thrown back on his heels by the backlash by ex-Confederates. For his willingness to work with the Republicans, he was called anathema, a Judas, Lucifer, Benedict Arnold, they wished he’d died during the war.”A new battle began, a war of words with fellow former commanders such as Jubal Early, over who was responsible for the defeat. Yet Longstreet was committed to Reconstruction and the Republicans and to his postwar home, New Orleans, a racially diverse city where he held political positions following Grant’s election as president in 1868, beginning at the customs house. Through such positions, which extended to militia and police leadership, Longstreet advocated some degree of civil rights. Allies included PBS Pinchback, who in 1872 became the first sworn-in Black governor of a US state.In addition to Longstreet’s personal life and recognition of the flawed rebel war effort, Varon identifies “the last element” in his turnaround as “New Orleans itself – a unique political environment”. She cites the city’s Afro-Creole male leadership class, many of whom served as officers in the Union army.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They were politically savvy, assertive men,” Varon says, “really pushing for votes and full civil, economic and social rights for Blacks in Louisiana.” Regarding Longstreet, she notes: “I don’t think it would have turned out the same if [he] was somewhere else in the postwar south. This particular setting was uniquely positioned to change his views on race.”By 1874, that change was profound. On George Washington’s birthday, Longstreet participated in a review of interracial troops. Racist white discontent was simmering, in part over a disputed election two years earlier: after the Republicans were declared to have won, Democrats set up a rival government, followed by a takeover attempt and a massacre of Black people at Colfax. Another slaughter of Black people followed, in Coushatta in the summer of 1874. That fall, a group called the White League led a march on New Orleans.The insurrectionists targeted government property and overwhelmed authorities. Longstreet was wounded in the so-called Battle of Liberty Place, which ended with the rioters in control of the city. Their three-day takeover ceased with the approach of federal forces but the riot spelled doom for Reconstruction in Louisiana, presaging the demise of the policy throughout the southern states.Longstreet’s subsequent life brought something of a retrenchment on civil rights. Relocating to Georgia, he maintained ties to the Republican party but focused on cultivating white support. He also pursued two significant projects – restoring national bonds ruptured in the civil war, and defending his Confederate career, in part through a near 700-page autobiography.“He focuses on setting the record straight and answering charges as he gets older,” Varon says. “He claws back some of his lost popularity among white southerners. He reinvents himself as a herald of reconciliation. Both sides are going to have to make concessions.”As a US marshal, Longstreet did prosecute white supremacists and continue to back voting rights for all eligible citizens.“He remains kind of enigmatic,” Varon reflects. “In the last years of his life, he tries to reconcile his Confederate and Republican identities. It was not possible to ever fully do that.”
      Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More