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    Labour Leader, Keir Starmer, Struggles to Emerge From Boris Johnson’s Shadow

    Competent but low on charisma, Keir Starmer has yet to give British voters a clear reason to support the main opposition party, critics say.LONDON — If Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to one extreme with his pithy 2019 election slogan — “get Brexit done” — the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, has gone to the other.Ahead of Labour’s annual conference, which began this weekend, Mr. Starmer penned a policy statement designed to showcase his beliefs that ran to more than 11,000 words. Despite that novella-like length, it is unlikely to compete with the best-sellers.Serious, competent but lacking charisma, Mr. Starmer is a mirror image of Mr. Johnson, a polarizing politician renowned for phrasemaking and showmanship rather than steadiness or a firm grip on policy.Yet when Mr. Starmer speaks to Labour members in the English seaside city of Brighton this week, he badly needs some pizazz — both to raise his profile and to explain the agenda of a party that suffered a crushing election defeat in 2019 under its previous, left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.“If you put Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson together they would be the ideal politician,” said Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at Nottingham University. But after a lackluster year, Professor Fielding said, Mr. Starmer “has got to communicate his sense of purpose and what the point of the Labour Party is under his leadership in post-Covid Britain.”“It’s an existential question he has to ask himself, to answer and then communicate,” Professor Fielding said.No one doubts the intelligence, seriousness or competence of Mr. Starmer, a former chief prosecutor who worked his way from a modest start in life to the highest echelons of the legal establishment.Critics say Mr. Starmer has failed to make his presence felt in a way that enhances Labour’s public standing.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut some think he is not savvy enough politically, while others accuse him of picking internal fights to underscore his opposition to the Corbynite left. Those include a dispute over changes to the voting system for future party leadership contests that would probably have stopped a left-winger from getting the top job again. That plan caused sufficient anger within the party that Mr. Starmer was forced to put forward a watered-down version instead.Yet the more telling complaint is that he has simply failed to make his presence felt in a way that showcases the party’s positions or enhances its standing with the public. Nor, critics say, has he exploited Mr. Johnson’s numerous setbacks.Elected last year following Labour’s catastrophic 2019 defeat, Mr. Starmer has spent much of his leadership detoxifying a party whose image was marred by persistent infighting over allegations of anti-Semitism. That culminated in the suspension of Mr. Corbyn, who remains excluded from Labour’s parliamentary group.That focus on interparty turmoil, along with the 80-seat majority that Mr. Johnson’s conservatives enjoy, has relegated Labour to the role of an onlooker in Parliament — so much so that Mr. Johnson brazenly broke a vow and raised taxes this month without fear that Mr. Starmer and his colleagues could do much to take advantage of it.Perhaps mindful of the need to confront the Conservatives more aggressively, Mr. Starmer stepped up his criticism this weekend, telling the BBC that there had been a “complete lack of planning” by the government over the shortage of truck drivers that has Britons anxious about the delivery of fuel and goods.In terms of election strategy, Labour faces a huge challenge. In 2019, it lost a clutch of parliamentary seats in its former strongholds — the middle and north of the country — as working-class voters warmed to Mr. Johnson, with his pro-Brexit agenda and willingness to wade into culture wars.That left Mr. Starmer with the unenviable task of winning back those traditional Labour voters behind the so-called “red wall” without alienating anti-Brexit supporters in big cities like London, where the party’s support is increasingly concentrated.His bad luck is that the pandemic has dominated the media agenda, keeping the government at center stage and giving it a megaphone to trumpet its leadership role, whether merited or not.During the early months of the Covid crisis, the prime minister floundered, initially resisting lockdowns then having to reverse course, and Mr. Starmer outperformed Mr. Johnson in their head-to-heads in Parliament. The government’s effective vaccine rollout revived the Conservatives’ fortunes, but that effect has now faded and Britain faces an uncertain winter, with the effects of the pandemic difficult to predict. Still, Mr. Johnson is polling reasonably well for an accident-prone leader in the middle of his term.Critics on the left say that Mr. Starmer’s camp has opted for platitudes and shied away from distinctive left-of-center policies to avoid offending any electoral group.“They thought that Starmer is Biden and Johnson is Trump, and that Johnson would self-destruct,” said James Schneider, a former spokesman for Mr. Corbyn. “The difference is that Biden is a hugely more appealing figure to the American public — he has an everyman appeal.”A Jeremy Corbyn mask at the Labour conference in Brighton on Saturday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Labour lost an election for a vacant parliamentary seat in northern England in May, Mr. Starmer suffered another self-inflicted setback with a botched reshuffle of his top team. He appeared to blame his deputy, Angela Rayner, for the defeat, stripping her of a key position, but he was forced to retreat in the face of a backlash and eventually gave her more responsibilities.A full-blown leadership crisis was averted when Labour unexpectedly went on to win an election in another northern constituency, Batley and Spen, in July.But there may be challenges to Mr. Starmer’s authority as he prepares to take on Mr. Johnson in a general election that must take place by 2024 but is expected a year earlier. One Labour member on the ascent is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, who has raised his profile during the pandemic.Others in the party are still committed to Mr. Corbyn’s hard-left agenda and remain angry about Mr. Starmer’s push to change the voting system. It also wants Mr. Corbyn reinstated to the parliamentary group.The worry for more moderate Labour supporters is that they may be seeing a repeat of the leadership of Ed Miliband, who, like Mr. Starmer, came from the “soft left” of the Labour Party, but who lost the 2015 general election.Tom Baldwin, a former spokesman for Mr. Miliband, said that he believed Mr. Starmer could win and that he could well be an effective prime minister. But he was also critical of his lack of a convincing message and his focus on internal battles, which he said “are not going to help us reconnect ourselves to voters.”“I would prefer if the Labour Party were having a conversation with the country about the country,” Mr. Baldwin said.Mr. Starmer’s supporters say voters will become disenchanted with Mr. Johnson in light of his broken promise not to raise taxes, and that the government will fail to deliver on his pledges to bring prosperity to neglected parts of the country.Anti-Brexit demonstrators in Brighton on Saturday. Mr. Starmer needs to avoid alienating such voters in big cities while trying to win back traditional Labour support elsewhere.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOnce “normal” politics resumes after the pandemic, voters will ultimately warm to Mr. Starmer, they argue. Though he prefers to talk about policy rather than personality, Mr. Starmer spoke movingly about his upbringing in a recent interview with Piers Morgan.Still, his personality is very different from that of Mr. Johnson, and most analysts believe his best tactic is to lean into his strengths, hoping that voters are drawn to a man who exudes stability after years of political turmoil.It is also critical, political analysts say, that Mr. Starmer give voters a clear reason to support the Labour Party.“He’s got to find a message, he’s got to be able to communicate that message and to be able to sell it, and he’s not done any of this so far,” Professor Fielding said. “Competence isn’t enough.” More

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    Labour's Kim Leadbeater Wins U.K. By-Election in Batley and Spen

    The election this week of the sister of Jo Cox, a lawmaker who was killed in 2016, was seen as a victory for Labour’s leader in a region where Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had made big inroads.LONDON — Britain’s opposition Labour Party on Friday scored an unexpected if narrow victory in a battle for an open Parliament seat that was widely seen as a critical test for the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, who has been under pressure for failing to revive the party’s fortunes.Many had expected that the Conservatives would take the seat, which Labour has held since 1997, because of the spoiler campaign of George Galloway. The victory will be a big relief for Mr. Starmer, who faced criticism in May when his party lost a by-election in Hartlepool, another former stronghold in the north of England.That result added weight to the idea that support for Labour had collapsed in the “red wall,” former industrial areas of England in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have been making big inroads.Results announced early Friday gave the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, a win of just 323 votes over her Conservative Party rival, Ryan Stephenson, after an acrimonious contest in Batley and Spen, one of Labour’s traditional heartland seats in northern England.Voting in the by-election took place on Thursday after a campaign marred by claims of intimidation, including one episode in which Ms. Leadbeater was heckled aggressively and another that led to the arrest of a man on suspicion of assault in connection with an attack on Labour supporters.Ms. Leadbeater acknowledged that it had been “a grueling few weeks” but added, “I am absolutely delighted that the people of Batley and Spen have rejected division and they voted for hope.”Labour fought hard to retain Batley and Spen, which was represented in Parliament by Ms. Leadbeater’s sister, Jo Cox, until she was murdered by a far-right fanatic in 2016.Ms. Leadbeater’s narrow path to victory was a complicated one. She was competing not only against the Conservative candidate, Mr. Stephenson, but also against Mr. Galloway, a former lawmaker and veteran left-wing campaigner who sought to divert support from Labour.Although Labour held off the challenge from Mr. Galloway, its share of the vote in Batley and Spen was lower than in the 2019 general election.Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded in winning over many of Labour’s core voters in working-class communities in the north and middle of England.Before the result in Batley and Spen, there had been news media speculation that Mr. Starmer would be vulnerable to a leadership challenge if Ms. Leadbeater lost, as many were expecting.Most analysts believed that Mr. Starmer would have been safe regardless of the result, because there is no credible alternative waiting in the wings. But the victory — narrow as it was — will be especially welcome news for the party leaders, because the contest could have been avoided.The by-election was triggered in May when the area’s former Labour lawmaker, Tracy Brabin, was elected to another job as West Yorkshire mayor, requiring her to step down from Parliament. Mr. Starmer was accused of mismanaging the situation and putting the seat at risk by allowing her to run for the mayoral position.Since he took the job of leader last year, Mr. Starmer, a former top prosecutor, has tried to unite the party after it was routed in 2019 parliamentary elections under the stewardship of Jeremy Corbyn, its left-wing leader at the time.Mr. Starmer’s critics have accused him of a lack of charisma and of failing to set out a convincing alternative policy agenda to that of the Conservatives.His defenders have appealed for patience and have contended that the pandemic has made it hard for the opposition to impress voters whose attention is focused on government efforts to bring Covid-19 restrictions to an end.In his election literature, Mr. Galloway had called on voters to abandon Labour to increase pressure on Mr. Starmer and force him out of his job.When the count was completed early Friday, Ms. Leadbeater won 13,296 votes, Mr. Stephenson was in second place with 12,973 and Mr. Galloway third with 8,264.Labour “won this election against the odds,” Mr. Starmer said. “And we did so by showing that when we are true to our values — decency, honesty, committed to improving lives — then Labour can win.” More

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    After Biden Meets Putin, U.S. Exposes Details of Russian Hacking Campaign

    The revelations, which dealt with a Russian espionage campaign, came after President Biden demanded that President Vladimir V. Putin rein in more destructive ransomware attacks.WASHINGTON — Two weeks after President Biden met President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he rein in ransomware attacks on U.S. targets, American and British intelligence agencies on Thursday exposed the details of what they called a global effort by Russia’s military intelligence organization to spy on government organizations, defense contractors, universities and media companies.The operation, described as crude but broad, is “almost certainly ongoing,” the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, known as GCHQ, said in a statement. They identified the Russian intelligence agency, or G.R.U., as the same group that hacked into the Democratic National Committee and released emails in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump.Thursday’s revelation is an attempt to expose Russian hacking techniques, rather than any new attacks, and it includes pages of technical detail to enable potential targets to identify that a breach is underway. Many of the actions by the G.R.U. — including an effort to retrieve data stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services — have already been documented by private cybersecurity companies.But the political significance of the statement is larger: It underscored the scope of hacking efforts out of Russia, which range from the kind of intelligence gathering engaged in by the G.R.U. and the intelligence agencies of many states to the harboring of criminal groups like the one that brought down Colonial Pipeline. The company provides much of the gasoline, jet fuel and diesel used on the East Coast, and when it was attacked, it shut down the pipeline for fear that the malicious code could spread to the operational controllers that run the pipeline.Ever since the pipeline attack, the Biden administration’s focus on cyberattacks shifted, homing in on the potential for disruption of key elements of the nation’s economic infrastructure. It has focused on Russia-based criminal groups like DarkSide, which took credit for the Colonial attack, but then announced it was shutting down operations after the United States put pressure on it. The F.B.I. later announced it had recovered some of the more than $4 million in ransom that Colonial paid the hackers to unlock the company’s records.Whether those ransomware attacks abate will be the first test of whether Mr. Biden’s message to Mr. Putin at the summit in Geneva sunk in. There, Mr. Biden handed him a list of 16 areas of “critical infrastructure” in the United States and said that it would not tolerate continued, disruptive Russian cyberattacks. But he also called for a general diminishment of breaches originating from Russian territory.“We’ll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order,” Mr. Biden said at the end of the meeting, only minutes after Mr. Putin declared that the United States, not Russia, was the largest source of cyberattacks around the world. Mr. Biden also repeatedly said that he was uncertain Mr. Putin would respond to the American warning or the series of related financial sanctions imposed on Moscow over the past five years.According to administration officials, the White House or intelligence agencies did not intend the advisory as a follow-up to the summit. Instead, they said, it was released as part of the National Security Agency’s routine warnings, said Charlie Stadtlander, an agency spokesman, “not in response to any recent international gatherings.”But that is unlikely to matter to Mr. Putin or the G.R.U., as they try to assess the steps the Biden administration is willing to take to curb their cybercampaigns — and in what order.For now, it is the ransomware attacks that have moved to the top of the administration’s agenda, because of their effects on ordinary Americans.Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said days after the summit that it might take months to determine whether the warning to Mr. Putin resulted in a change in behavior. “We set the measure at whether, over the next six to 12 months, attacks against our critical infrastructure actually decline coming out of Russia,” he said on CBS. “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so we will see over the course of months to come.”It was unclear from the data provided by the National Security Agency how many of the targets of the G.R.U. — also known as Fancy Bear or APT 28 — might be on the critical infrastructure list, which is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. At the time of the attacks on the election system in 2016, election systems — including voting machines and registration systems — were not on the list and were added in the last days of the Obama administration. American intelligence agencies later said Mr. Putin had directly approved the 2016 attacks.But the National Security Agency statement identified energy companies as a primary target, and Mr. Biden specifically cited them in his talks with Mr. Putin, noting the ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shut down in May, and interrupted the delivery of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel along the East Coast. That attack was not by the Russian government, Mr. Biden said at the time, but rather by a criminal gang operating from Russia.In recent years, the National Security Agency has more aggressively attributed cyberattacks to specific countries, particularly those by adversarial intelligence agencies. But in December, it was caught unaware by the most sophisticated attack on the United States in years, the SolarWinds hacking, which affected federal agencies and many of the nation’s largest companies. That attack, which the National Security Agency later said was conducted by the S.V.R., a competing Russian intelligence agency that was an offshoot of the K.G.B., successfully altered the code in popular network-management software, and thus in the computer networks of 18,000 companies and government agencies.There is nothing particularly unusual about the methods the United States says the Russian intelligence unit used. There is no bespoke malware or unknown exploits by the G.R.U. unit. Instead, the group uses common malware and the most basic techniques, like brute-force password spraying, which relies on passwords that have been stolen or leaked to gain access to accounts.The statement did not identify the targets of the G.R.U.’s recent attacks but said that they included government agencies, political consultants, party organizations, universities, and think tanks.The attacks appear to mostly be about gathering intelligence and information. The National Security Agency did not specify ways that the Russian hackers damaged systems.The recent wave of G.R.U. attacks has gone on for a relatively long time, beginning in 2019 and continuing through this year. Once inside, the G.R.U. hackers would gain access to protected data and email — as well as to cloud services used by the organization.The hackers were responsible for the primary breach of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 which resulted in the theft, and release, of documents meant to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton.On Thursday, the National Security Agency released a list of evasion and exfiltration techniques the G.R.U. used to help information technology managers identify — and stop — attacks by the hacking group.That lack of sophistication means fairly basic measures, like multifactor authentication, timeout locks and temporary disabling of accounts after incorrect passwords are entered, can effectively block brute force attacks. More

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    UK's Labour Party Reels After Panicked Response to Election Loss

    The party leader, Keir Starmer, was seen as scapegoating a key aide, causing more turmoil in an already divided party after a disappointing performance in local elections. LONDON — Sober, cerebral and with the poise of the top-shelf lawyer he once was, Keir Starmer promised competence rather than charisma when he became leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party last year, following its crushing general election defeat in 2019.But his panicky response to last week’s poor local election results and a clumsy reshuffle of his top team have left his party in turmoil, diminishing his authority and raising doubts about whether Labour has a credible path back to power.Mr. Starmer found himself embroiled in fierce recriminations over local election results that, with smoother communication, could have been explained away as disappointing, but instead pointed to a deeper crisis.“The one thing Keir Starmer was supposed to be was competent,” said Steven Fielding, professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “The election results were not good but they weren’t as bad as some people liked to present them. He completely messed up his reaction, and that highlights concerns about his ability to communicate.”Behind the latest setback lie profound structural changes in British politics, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson making deep inroads into former Labour heartlands in working class districts with a mixture of populist pro-Brexit politics and promises to bring jobs and prosperity.Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to Tony Blair, Labour’s last election-winning prime minister, believes that critics are “massively over-interpreting” the local election results, adding: “The number of times I’ve read about the end of the Labour Party is legion.” However, he said, the Conservatives, under Mr. Johnson, have effectively fused left-wing economic policy with a right-wing appeal on cultural issues. The Labour Party, deprived of its traditional appeal to so-called “red wall” voters in the north and middle of the country on economic issues, now relies on liberals in ethnically diverse metropolitan areas, like London and Manchester.That is too small a base to win a national election, he said, and squaring those voters with Labour’s vanishing “red wall” constituency will be difficult. “Labour is trying to hold together university-educated liberal voters with the old Labour party voters that they’ve lost to the Tories,” Mr. Powell said. “They can’t stand on two horses going in different directions at the same time.”The scale of the challenge became clear last Friday when Labour lost a parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, an economically struggling port town in the northeast of England. Labour had expected a defeat in this staunchly pro-Brexit region, because the seat would have been lost in the 2019 election had the Brexit Party not contested it and taken votes away from Mr. Johnson’s Tories.Prime Minister Boris Johnson with Jill Mortimer, who won the recent by-election in Hartlepool, once a Labour stronghold.Scott Heppell/Associated PressBut Labour recorded a lower vote than in 2019 and, grim faced, Mr. Starmer refused to comment as he left his London home on Friday morning. When he did surface later he gave an unconvincing, at times almost robotic, interview that took responsibility for the result but provided no detail on changes.The following day, just as a set of better results for Labour were being announced, news leaked out that Mr. Starmer was stripping his deputy, Angela Rayner, of key responsibilities.With an impressive personal story of succeeding against the odds, Ms. Rayner, who has said she left school at 16 while pregnant and with no qualifications, is not only a popular figure in the Labour Party but comes from the sort of community with which the party is trying to reconnect. So the backlash was swift and ferocious.“The scapegoat sacking of Angie Rayner contradicted everything Keir Starmer said only 48 hours ago about taking personal responsibility for election defeats and his promise a year ago that he would unite the party,” John McDonnell, the party’s former spokesman on the economy under its last leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said on Twitter.Some on the center and right of the Labour Party were unimpressed too, including the newly re-elected mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham. By late Sunday, Mr. Starmer had to beat an embarrassing retreat, ending up giving Ms. Rayner even more responsibilities, albeit away from campaigning.The humiliation seemed to encapsulate the disorientation of a Labour Party struggling to adapt to a world in which Mr. Johnson has not only stolen many of its traditional voters but also some of its redistributive, high-spending, political agenda.Unlike predecessors who presided over austerity, Mr. Johnson is promising to “level up” and bring jobs and prosperity to voters who feel ignored in the so-called red wall area that was once Labour’s electoral citadel.To many that may have sounded all the more attractive in the absence of a compelling message from Mr. Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions who often sounds as if he would be more at home in a courtroom than on a political stage.Following the 2019 general election defeat — Labour’s worst since 1935 — Mr. Starmer’s short-term strategy was to concentrate less on policy and more on detoxifying the party brand after its electoral disaster under his left-wing predecessor, Mr. Corbyn. Mr. Starmer has embraced the Jewish community, in contrast to Mr. Corbyn, whose leadership was dogged by allegations of anti-Semitism. Though he presents himself as a patriot, Mr. Starmer studiously avoids the culture-war issues that Mr. Johnson exploits, such as what to do with statues commemorating contested chapters in Britain’s history.Given that voters rarely care much about the policy platform of opposition parties until a general election is close, that looked like a sensible approach.Mr. Starmer at his office in London last week.Toby Melville/ReutersYet, while he should not have been expected to roll out a detailed policy agenda just 16 months after a general election, Mr. Powell said, Mr. Starmer “has to convince people he has a cause.” Mr. Blair did that effectively in the 1990s when he rebranded the party “New Labour,” embracing the free market and the European Union.Perhaps that did not seem urgent for Mr. Starmer, because voters normally use local elections and by-elections like those held last week to punish governments. His main campaign theme was to highlight claims Mr. Johnson broke electoral rules over the financing of a pricey refurbishment of his apartment.But Britons apparently ignored those goings on in Westminster, and with the country now emerging from Covid-19 restrictions seemed to reward politicians who controlled health policies. The ruling Scottish National Party in Scotland performed strongly, as did the governing Labour Party in Wales.In England, Mr. Johnson was forgiven for his chaotic early handling of the pandemic and rewarded for the country’s highly successful vaccination roll out.Not all is lost for Mr. Starmer, particularly when the entirety of last week’s results are taken into account. According to a BBC analysis projecting the local voting into a national vote share, Labour was seven points behind the Conservatives, hardly a good result but progress on the 12-point deficit recorded in the 2019 general election.With no credible challenger waiting in the wings, Mr. Starmer is unlikely to face any immediate threat to his leadership. Nonetheless, the speed with which critics attacked his reshuffle raises pressure on Mr. Starmer to at least identify a message that can appeal to two very different groups of Britons — the old working class stalwarts and the more youthful, liberal and better educated city dwellers.“Under Starmer it has been two steps forward and one step back,” said Mr. Fielding, “and he hasn’t addressed the problem of how you win back the red wall without losing metropolitan liberal voters.” More

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    U.K. Elections Likely to Favor Boris Johnson, and Scottish Separatists

    The prime minister’s Conservative Party stands to gain at the polls on Thursday, despite ethical accusations against him. But growth in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party could create turmoil.LONDON — For an ordinary politician, heading into midterm elections on an unsavory plume of scandal over cellphone contacts with billionaires and a suspiciously funded apartment makeover might seem like the recipe for a thumping. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain is not an ordinary politician.As voters in the country go to the polls on Thursday for regional and local elections that have been swollen by races postponed from last year because of the pandemic, Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party stands to make gains against a Labour Party that has struggled to make the ethical accusations against him stick.Far from humbling a wayward prime minister, the elections could extend a realignment in British politics that began in 2019 when the Conservative Party won a landslide general election victory. That would put the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the back foot and ratify Mr. Johnson’s status as a kind of political unicorn.“No politician in the democratic West can escape the consequences of political gravity forever, but Boris Johnson has shown a greater capacity to do it than most,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “People see his behavior as evidence of his authenticity.”Yet there is peril as well as promise for Mr. Johnson in the elections, which will decide thousands of seats, including that of London’s mayor, and which the British press has perhaps inevitably nicknamed “Super Thursday.”In Scotland, the Scottish National Party could win a clear majority in Scotland’s Parliament that the nationalists would brandish as a powerful mandate to demand another referendum on independence from the United Kingdom after an earlier one was defeated in 2014.Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, left, with a supporter in Edinburgh last week.Pool photo by Russell CheyneIn that event, Mr. Johnson could emerge in a stronger position in Westminster only to find that he will spend the next few years scrambling to avert a breakup of the union. That could make the tempest over his WhatsApp texting and who paid for the wallpaper in his Downing Street apartment look quaint.“The test of the Johnson premiership is going to be the integrity of the union — not Covid, not Brexit, not Europe, not sleaze,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst with the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.Whether the Scottish National Party wins an outright majority or is forced to enter a coalition with the pro-independence Scottish Greens, pollsters said, was still unclear. But the numbers are less important than the direction, which is expected to be emphatically behind a new campaign for Scottish independence.In the English elections, the big prize is Hartlepool, a struggling northern port city and Labour bastion where a new poll suggests that the Conservatives could win a bellwether seat in a parliamentary by-election. The Tories could make further inroads in other Labour cities and towns in the industrial Midlands and North, where they picked off dozens of seats in 2019, running on Mr. Johnson’s promise to “Get Brexit Done.”The prime minister did get Brexit done, as of last January. Yet while the split with the European Union brought predicted chaos in shipments of British seafood and higher customs fees on European goods, its effects have been eclipsed by the pandemic — a twist that ended up working to the government’s benefit.Although the pandemic began as a negative story for Mr. Johnson, with a dilatory response to the first wave of infections that left Britain with the highest death toll in Europe, it turned around with the nation’s rapid rollout of vaccines.Customers at a London pub after England began lifting pandemic lockdown restrictions last month.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAs new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have plunged, voters have rediscovered their affection for Mr. Johnson. His poll numbers rebounded from their lows last fall and show little damage from the charges and countercharges about his conduct, even though those have riveted London’s political circles.More important, Mr. Johnson’s message of “leveling up” the economically blighted Midlands and North with the more prosperous south still seems to resonate with people, including many who traditionally voted for Labour. And the government’s free-spending response to the pandemic has pulled the Conservative Party even further from its roots as the party of fiscal austerity.“The party of Margaret Thatcher is becoming the party of a big state and higher taxes, which can quite easily become the party of economic nationalism and ‘Buy British,’” said Mr. Travers, the London School of Economics professor.For Mr. Starmer, the Labour leader, this shape shifting has been confounding. A disciplined former prosecutor who lacks Mr. Johnson’s raffish manner, he has found it difficult to attack the government on its pandemic response, particularly the vaccine rollout, which is the largest peacetime mobilization in British history.Instead, Mr. Starmer has grilled Mr. Johnson in Parliament weekly about who picked up the initial bill for the upgrade of his apartment and why he was texting the billionaire James Dyson about the tax status of his employees, when the two were discussing a plan for Mr. Dyson’s company to manufacture ventilators.But there is little evidence that voters are particularly surprised or concerned that Mr. Johnson does not play by the rules. As political commentators have taken to saying this week, the prime minister’s behavior is “priced in.”The Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, has grilled the prime minister about ethical issues but has struggled to attack the government’s recent pandemic response.Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA, via ShutterstockThe same is not true of Scottish independence. Analysts say Mr. Johnson’s government is not prepared for the wall of pressure it will face if the Scottish National Party wins a majority. The last time the party achieved that, in 2011, Britain’s then-prime minister, David Cameron, yielded to demands for a referendum. In 2014, Scots voted against leaving Britain by 55 percent to 44 percent.Polls now put the split at roughly 50-50, after a stretch in which the pro-independence vote was solidly above 50 percent. Analysts attribute the slight softening of support to both the vaccine rollout, which showed the merits of staying in the union, as well as an ugly political dispute within Scottish nationalist ranks.Mr. Johnson holds a trump card of sorts. To be legally binding, an independence referendum would almost certainly have to gain the assent of the British government, so the prime minister can simply say no and hope the problem goes away. But that strategy can work for only so long before becoming untenable.“I don’t see any way in the world that Boris Johnson turns around the day after the election and says, ‘OK, you can have a referendum,’” said Nicola McEwen, a professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh.And yet the calls could only grow. “If they manage to peel off a single-party majority,” she said, “it does put pressure on the U.K. to answer the question, ‘If a democratic vote isn’t a mandate for independence, then what is?’” More

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    With Trump Presidency Winding Down, Push for Assange Pardon Ramps Up

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWith Trump Presidency Winding Down, Push for Assange Pardon Ramps UpSupporters of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have enlisted a lobbyist with connections to the president and filed a clemency petition with the White House.The effort comes at a delicate moment for Julian Assange; the Justice Department announced last week that it would appeal a British judge’s ruling blocking his extradition to the United States.Credit…Henry Nicholls/ReutersJan. 10, 2021, 6:53 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Allies of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have ramped up a push for a last-minute pardon from President Trump, enlisting a lobbyist with connections to the administration, trying to rally supporters across the political spectrum and filing a clemency petition with the White House.The effort comes at a delicate moment for Mr. Assange and during a period of tension between the United States and Britain over a case that his supporters say has substantial implications for press freedoms.The Justice Department announced last week that it would appeal a British judge’s ruling blocking the extradition of Mr. Assange to the United States to face trial on charges of violating the Espionage Act and conspiring to hack government computers. The charges stemmed from WikiLeaks’s publication in 2010 of classified documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Mr. Assange’s supporters had been optimistic about the prospects of a pardon from Mr. Trump, who has issued dozens of contentious clemency grants since losing his re-election bid. But they now worry that pressure over his supporters’ ransacking of the Capitol last week could derail plans for additional clemencies before he leaves office on Jan. 20.As unlikely as the prospect of a pardon from Mr. Trump might be, Mr. Assange’s supporters are eager to try before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.As vice president, Mr. Biden called the WikiLeaks founder a “high-tech terrorist.” Some of his top advisers blame Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks for helping Mr. Trump win the presidency in 2016 by publishing emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which U.S. officials say were stolen by Russian intelligence to damage her candidacy. Mr. Trump has long downplayed Russia’s role in the 2016 election.For Mr. Assange’s supporters and press freedom advocates, though, the issues at stake transcend him or politics.“This is so much bigger than Julian,” said Mark Davis, a former journalist who worked with Mr. Assange in Australia, where they are from. If Mr. Assange is prosecuted, “it will have a chilling effect on all national security journalism,” Mr. Davis said, adding: “If we can get Julian off, then the precedent hasn’t been set. If Julian goes down, then it’s bad for all of us.”Mr. Davis, who is now a lawyer specializing in national security and whistle-blower cases, is on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech, an Australia-based nonprofit group that advocates for press freedoms and whistle-blower protections. The group, which was started by Suelette Dreyfus, a former journalist who is an old friend and collaborator with Mr. Assange, signed a pro bono contract on Saturday with the lobbyist Robert Stryk to seek a pardon for Mr. Assange.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Stryk, who is well connected in Trump administration circles, has developed a lucrative business representing foreign clients in precarious geopolitical situations.He has worked for a jailed Saudi prince who had fallen out of favor with his country’s powerful de facto leader, as well as the administration of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, which the Trump administration considers illegitimate. Mr. Styrk also worked for Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars from a state oil company she once headed, as well as the government of the former Congolese president Joseph Kabila, which had faced American sanctions for human rights abuses and corruption.Mr. Stryk said that he was representing Blueprint for Free Speech to seek a pardon for Mr. Assange without pay because of his belief in free speech, and that he would continue pushing for the pardon in the Biden administration if Mr. Trump did not grant it.“This is not a partisan issue,” Mr. Stryk said.The contract, which he said he had disclosed to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, calls for his company, Stryk Global Diplomacy, to “facilitate meetings and interactions with the president and the president-elect’s administrations” to “obtain a full pardon” for Mr. Assange.Mr. Davis said Mr. Stryk had been chosen partly because of his entree into Mr. Trump’s administration, which the group sees as its best chance to secure a pardon.Mr. Davis noted that Mr. Assange, 49, was indicted during Mr. Trump’s presidency. “We are unabashedly reaching out to the Republican Party on this issue in the final weeks to correct something before it’s too late, and before it become part of Trump’s legacy,” Mr. Davis said.He said, “If Joe Biden is sympathetic, that’s well and good, and we certainly hope he is.” But, he added, “it’s a far simpler process for an outgoing president than an incoming president.”Mr. Assange’s cause has been taken up by a range of media freedom and human rights organizations, public officials and celebrities, including the actress Pamela Anderson.Blueprint for Free Speech is working to harness some of that support, including from Ms. Anderson, a friend of Mr. Assange, who said in an interview that she had been trying to connect with Mr. Trump to plead the case. “I just hate to see him deteriorate in jail right now,” she said of Mr. Assange, describing the pardon push as “a last-ditch effort for all of us who are Julian Assange supporters.”Asked about the effort by Blueprint, Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer representing Mr. Assange, said he “is encouraged by and supports efforts” by a variety of prominent supporters around the world.Mr. Davis stressed that Blueprint’s push was independent of parallel efforts by Mr. Assange’s family and his lawyers, though Mr. Stryk has been in contact with Barry J. Pollack, Mr. Assange’s Washington-based lawyer, who is representing him against the criminal charges.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Assange unlawfully obtained secret documents and put lives at risk by revealing the names of people who had provided information to the United States in war zones.Mr. Assange’s lawyers have framed the prosecution as a politically driven attack on press freedom.Last month, Mr. Pollack filed a petition for a pardon with the White House Counsel’s Office, which has been vetting clemency requests for Mr. Trump, arguing that Mr. Assange was “being prosecuted for his news gathering and publication of truthful information.”Mr. Pollack declined to comment on the petition, which was obtained by The New York Times, except to say that it was pending.The petition appears to be geared toward appealing to Mr. Trump, who has wielded the unchecked presidential clemency power to aid people with personal connections to him or whose causes resonate with him politically, including a handful of people ensnared in the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and ties to his campaign.The petition highlighted that the charges against Mr. Assange stemmed from WikiLeaks’s publication of material that “exposed misconduct committed in Iraq and Afghanistan during wars initiated by a prior administration.” And it notes that the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, which showed some in the party apparatus conspiring to sabotage the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont and Mrs. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, resulted in the resignations of party officials.The petition does not address the United States government’s findings about Russia’s role in the theft of the emails as part of its effort to undermine Mrs. Clinton, which has long been a sore spot for Mr. Trump.The petition notes that the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided the military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks that led to the charges against Mr. Assange, was commuted by President Barack Obama in the final days of his term.Like Mr. Assange’s lawyers in Britain, Mr. Pollack’s petition raises concerns about Mr. Assange’s health, noting that the prison in which he is being held has been under lockdown after a coronavirus outbreak.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Your Wednesday Briefing

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationU.S. Deaths Surpass 300,000F.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYour Wednesday BriefingPoorer nations struggle to access a coronavirus vaccine.Dec. 15, 2020, 10:06 p.m. ETGood morning.We’re covering the gulf between wealthy and poorer nations for access to a coronavirus vaccine, new laws against civil liberties in Hungary and Brazil’s chaotic vaccine plan.[embedded content] Pillay Jagambrun, a Care home worker, received the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at Croydon University Hospital in south London last week.Credit…Pool photo by Dan CharityRich countries are first in line for new virus vaccinesThe world’s wealthiest countries have laid claim to more than half of the doses of coronavirus vaccines coming on the market through 2021, as many poorer nations struggle to secure enough. If all those doses are fulfilled, the E.U. could inoculate its residents twice, Britain and the United States four times over and Canada six times over, according to our data analysis.In the developing world, some countries may be able to vaccinate, at most, 20 percent of their populations in 2021, with some reaching immunity as late as 2024.In many cases, the U.S. made its financial support for the vaccine’s development conditional on getting priority access. The country is heading toward authorizing another vaccine this week, from Moderna.By the numbers: Britain has claimed 357 million doses in total, with options to buy 152 million more, while the European Union has secured 1.3 billion, with as many as 660 million doses more if it chooses.Credit…The New York TimesHere are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.In other developments:A second wave has brought a new surge in infections to Sweden, leaving Stockholm’s emergency services overrun and forcing the authorities to recalibrate their approach.Russia has released additional results from a clinical trial of its leading coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, showing an efficacy rate of 91.4 percent. AstraZeneca opened talks this month about combining efforts.President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa announced new restrictions as the country entered a second coronavirus wave, with infections expected to rise over the festive season.The European Medicines Agency said in a statement that it would move forward a meeting to decide whether to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to Dec. 21 from Dec. 29.The new amendment would also effectively bar gay couples from adopting children in Hungary by defining a family as including a man as the father and a woman as the mother.Credit…Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNew laws in Hungary further erode civil libertiesThe Hungarian Parliament on Tuesday passed sweeping measures that curtailed the rights of gay citizens, relaxed oversight of the spending of public funds and made it more difficult for opposition parties to challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orban in future elections.The government justified its actions in a written explanation by saying that the Constitution “is a living framework which expresses the will of the nation, the manner in which we want to live.” Increasingly, “the will of the nation” is becoming indistinguishable from Mr. Orban’s own.Analysis: The new laws are cause for “grave concern,” said Agnes Kovacs, a legal expert. Over more than a decade in power, Mr. Orban has torn at the fabric of democratic institutions in pursuit of what he calls an “illiberal” state.Details: The legislation includes a constitutional amendment that would effectively bar gay couples from adopting children in Hungary by defining a family as including a man as the father and a woman as the mother. The amendment could also make it harder for single parents to adopt.Kenyan soldiers at their base in Tabda, inside Somalia, near the border with Kenya. As part of the African Union peacekeeping forces in Somalia, Kenya has more than 3,600 troops stationed in the country.Credit…Ben Curtis/Associated PressSomalia cuts diplomatic ties with KenyaSomalia severed diplomatic ties with Kenya on Tuesday, accusing the neighboring East African nation of meddling in its internal political affairs. The move came weeks before a crucial general election.“The federal government of Somalia reached this decision as an answer to the political violations and the Kenyan government’s continuous blatant interference recently in our country’s sovereignty,” said Osman Dubbe, the minister of information.Context: The move injects an additional note of instability into an already shaky region, after the U.S. announced plans to withdraw troops from Somalia — which some fear will motivate the Shabab militant group to escalate its offensive across Somalia and the Horn of Africa.If you have 5 minutes, this is worth itBrazil’s chaotic vaccine planCredit…Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesWith its top-notch immunization program and strong pharmaceutical industry, Brazil should be well-placed to curtail infections domestically. But political infighting, haphazard planning and a rising anti-vaccine movement have left the nation without a clear vaccination plan, our reporters found. Above, a vaccine trial in São Paulo this month.Brazilians now have no sense of when a vaccine will come. The coronavirus has brought the public health system to its knees and has crushed the economy. “They’re playing with lives,” one epidemiologist said. “It’s borderline criminal.”Here’s what else is happeningBig Tech: In a bid for tougher oversight of the technology industry, the authorities in the European Union and Britain introduced regulations to pressure the world’s biggest tech companies to take down harmful content and open themselves up to more competition.Uighurs: Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court will not investigate allegations that China committed genocide and crimes against humanity over the mass detention of ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, saying China is not a party to the court.The Coronavirus Outbreak More