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    International media asks if Partygate will ‘be enough’ to make the British public angry?

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    International media outlets have waded into the Partygate scandal that has hit the British headlines after the publication of an independent report into the illegal Downing Street parties.Prime minister Boris Johnson has been called on to resign after senior civil servant Sue Gray’s report laid bare the extent of the socialising during coronavirus lockdown, which was outlawed by the government itself.The vast majority of British media has focused on the hypocrisy, while a few right-leaning British newspapers have tried to downplay the scandal.This is how media around the world has reported on this story: Australia: ‘British public sick and tired of weasel words from leaders’The Sydney Morning Herald focuses on the absurdity of the 16 gatherings hosted by the officials that have been responsible for running the country and making the law.One of two articles published by the newspaper starts with: “Drunken gatherings, fisticuffs, vomiting, and red wine stains left on the walls. This was life inside Downing Street when the rest of Britain was under strict stay-at-home orders.“Things were so warped that even the senior figure responsible for ethics and propriety provided a karaoke machine for a party.”But, it points out, Mr Johnson may “survive” the scandal with “spin, distraction or indeed good political fortune” despite a YouGov poll suggesting that 59 per cent of people want him to resign.It goes on: “[The parties were] a deliberate attempt to flout and manipulate rules which had separated families from loved ones, forced them to see their grandparents die on FaceTime, miss the birth of grandchildren or attend zoom funerals of friends.“And that, ultimately, is what this scandal is all about. Whether the rules were extreme or misguided or an overreaction, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they were applied to some and not others. And that is the way it will be viewed by a grumpy public which is sick and tired of the weasel words from its leaders.”Canada: ‘Ukraine and inflation has shifted the public’s attention’The Globe and Mail reports Mr Johnson’s apology for the conduct of his staff at what the newspaper described as the “occasionally raucous” parties held at Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Like the Sydney Morning Herald, it says the findings of the Sue Gray report are “unlikely to trigger any immediate threat to Mr Johnson’s leadership”, and that he has “largely weathered the storm”.The war in Ukraine and inflation reaching its highest in 30 years “have shifted public attention,” it adds.France: ‘Would lockdown violations be enough to revive anger among British people?’Le Monde acknowledges that, during lockdown, people had made “heavy sacrifices” – as required by law. The newspaper goes on to state that the 40-page Sue Gray report details the “overwhelming” violations during the parties, including drinking, “vomiting, altercations, music, departure through back doors in the early morning and sometimes disrespect for security or maintenance agents.”The newspaper questions whether the report’s findings would be enough – “in absence of an election” – to “revive anger among the majority, or even demonstrate that the head of government lied to Parliament, which could precipitate his departure.”Spain: ‘PM and officials had violated the rules imposed on all citizens during the pandemic’News website El Espanol reported that Sue Gray discovered that there was an “altercation” between two people at one of the parties, drunkenness, and vomiting. It points out that those attending the parties were aware that they were doing something illegal because they were advised to “leave the building from the back”.The report says: “Since the scandal was uncovered, Johnson has faced criticism from opposition politicians and some in his own party to resign after it was revealed that both he and the officials had violated the rules imposed on all citizens because of the pandemic.”It ends with the line from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer: “There was a norm for them and a norm for everyone else.”US: ‘Sue Gray report does not look like fatal blow that many expected’A “scandal-scarred” PM has presided over a “disorderly workplace” where there had been “rampant violations” of coronavirus restrictions, the New York Times reports.Sue Gray’s findings were “studded” with accounts of “late-night, booze-fueled revelry” at Downing Street, it also said before going on to describe a scene of “scattered wine bottles, a thumping karaoke machine, a broken swing set, and senior officials who encouraged the socializing even as they privately fretted it could create a public relations problem.”But, like other media outlets, it pointed out that the published report “did not look like the fatal blow that many once warned it could be” even though Mr Johnson’s “political future has been hanging by a thread”. More

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      The working class is voting Tory. Why?

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      I didn’t believe it at first. It has taken a long time to absorb and understand it. It seems so contrary to everything we have always known about politics in Britain that it requires a big adjustment of our world view. The link between class and voting has been reversed. People are now more likely to vote Tory if they are working class than if they are middle class – and the other way round for Labour.It was not until the elections last week that this fact suddenly became a staple of political analysis. But when Hartlepool, a name that might as well mean “Always Labour” in ancient Norse, fell to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, everyone knew that something was up. And when Labour gained Chipping Norton in the local council elections on the same day, and the mayoralties of the West of England and of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, we knew that the world had been turned upside down. Realisation had been dawning for some time. When Labour won Canterbury and Kensington in 2017, it felt as if the ground was moving beneath our feet; and when it lost so many working-class seats in the north and Midlands in 2019. I knew that the association between class and voting had weakened since 2005. At each election since then the correlation declined, until it seemed to disappear altogether in 2019, with some pollsters such as YouGov suggesting it had gone into reverse. More

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      Murdering Marcia: Harold Wilson and the plot to kill his secretary

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      In the spring of 1975, three Downing Street officials wandered across the main square in Bonn, mulling over a plan to murder the British prime minister’s closest friend and confidante, Marcia Williams. Harold Wilson’s formidable and controversial secretary had helped him dominate British politics for 20 years. To the consternation of his critics, Wilson had ennobled her as Baroness Falkender the previous year but now the distinguished trio saw her as a toxic liability who threatened to destroy his health, premiership and legacy. Ever since Wilson’s recently hushed up heart scare, his personal physician and concerned friend Joseph Stone, had become obsessed by a disturbing notion: murdering Marcia might just be “in the national interest”. Dr Stone was flanked by Joe Haines, Wilson’s bruiser of a press secretary, and Bernard Donoughue, the head of the Downing Street policy unit. When Stone had first sounded them out by suggesting “it may be desirable to dispose of her. We’ve got to get this woman off his back,” and, “Perhaps, we should put her down,” he had been deadly serious. In Bonn, Stone again outlined how he could safely dispense with Marcia without arousing suspicion. As Lady Falkender’s doctor, he proposed to slip her a lethal quantity of her prescribed tranquilliser and then write up the death certificate as an accidental overdose. In Dr Stone, the trio may have had the means and opportunity of ridding Wilson of this “bothersome” woman, but it’s only by tracing the couple’s emotional co-dependency back over two decades that you can begin to understand the motive. More

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      The Hong Kong exodus is coming

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      Ted Hui recalls the moment he announced he would flee Hong Kong for the UK. “I burst into tears when I told my loved ones I was going into exile,” he says. In the closing months of 2020, the Democratic Party politician was issued with nine charges based on “totally fake stories” for his involvement in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. One charge was for “perverting the course of justice” and carried a maximum life sentence; another offence was ludicrously labelled “administering drugs and harmful substances” for dropping a stink bomb during a meeting of the city’s Legislative Council, and carried a four-year term. He also faced the prospect of a private trial with no jury. The Kafkaesque manner of the judiciary made him realise “there was no way to rely on this legal system for justice”. After months of sleepless nights, fearing dawn raids by armed police officers and being “stalked by intelligence agents”, he decided to leave Hong Kong, sparking the exodus of many others to the pandemic-stricken shores of Britain. Hui tells me: “There will definitely be a massive number of people arriving, and cities like London and Manchester could end up with the largest Hong Kong diasporas in the world.”On 30 June 2020 Beijing imposed its “national security law” on embattled Hong Kong to silence the pro-democracy demonstrations. State media outlet China Daily heralded it as the only way to stop “the overreactions of those rioters and their foreign backers”. The ranks of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement have varied aims, from those who want more autonomy to those who espouse full independence from China. The national security law prohibits freedom of expression and can be crookedly manipulated to silence dissent. What exactly infringes the new law is purposely vague so that it can be widely applied. Secession from China, subverting state authority and collusion with foreign powers are its main elements, all aimed at crushing democratic sentiment in the financial hub. More

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      Shapurji Saklatvala, the Labour firebrand who fought for racial equality in the 1920s

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      At the start of this century the House of Commons had 12 MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds. This had increased to 41 after the 2015 election, and currently stands at 65 across the main parties in Westminster.  As the protests last summer, against prevailing racism in society as well as the legacy of slavery and imperialism, showed, injustice and discrimination, or the anger it sparks, is still very much with us. And as the campaign for equality looks to the future, there is increased interest in those who had fought for equality in the past through the democratic mandate – often at great cost to themselves.MPs from non-white minority backgrounds were present in the Commons long before communities from the Empire moved here in numbers, some of them achieving positions denied to them in the countries of their birth by the colonial rulers.   More

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      UN torture official says persecution of Assange threatens journalists worldwide

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      Nils Melzer says a lot of very striking things. The UN special rapporteur on torture says the way that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his most famous source, Chelsea Manning, have been treated by the US and UK authorities amounts to just that – torture. What is more, this mistreatment is not by chance, not a simple, unanticipated byproduct of the authorities’ efforts to stop the leak and publication of their secrets. Rather, this mistreatment is intentional, intended not only to silence them, but to intimidate and threaten others too.This is why he says what has happened to the pair, as Washington seeks to punish and prosecute firstly Manning and now Assange, amounts to “persecution”.“When I say persecution I feel that the instrument of prosecution is being used for ulterior motives, for political motives, and that is what turns a prosecution into a persecution,” Melzer tells The Independent. “It is not used genuinely to prosecute a crime, but it’s used to intimidate journalists worldwide and publishers worldwide.” More

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      Britain is broken, can it be healed?

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      It was late evening of 31 January 2020, and there seemed just a chance, a remote chance, of a reluctant coming together. The fissure exposed by the Brexit vote – a fissure that had by now spread cracks all over the once reasonably United Kingdom – might yet be capable of being, if not bridged, then respectably papered over.I was in London’s Parliament Square that night – as were fewer people than you might have expected at what will be seen forever as a historic juncture: the UK’s official departure from the European Union. And some of us, at least – as I overheard from the Americans immediately behind me – were there for the history rather than the rejoicing, which was unexpectedly muted.Nigel Farage, by now of the Brexit Party, though with a reasonable claim to have been masterminded the whole Eurosceptic project, had hoped for a sparkling Leave Means Leave jamboree to see out the UK’s 47 years of EU  membership. One by one, though, most of the grandiose plans had been stripped away by a central government concerned not to inflame passions further and by a city government whose voters had massively supported Remain. More

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      Johnson and his government are too incompetent and ignorant to deliver radical change post Brexit

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      The departure of Britain from the European Union should be the moment when the country would at last be free to determine its own future and start to transform itself for the better. The damaging rupture with the world’s largest trading bloc – and the political traumas within the UK – can only be justified if the Brexiteer leadership has a cunning plan for significant change. The outlines of such a plan were vague to the point of invisibility at the height of the Brexit crisis, with little revealed beyond assurances from Boris Johnson that, once the shackles of the EU were cast aside,  the UK would have a splendid future.The wall-to-wall coverage of Brexit by the British media over the past four years was so fixated on the process of leaving, along with the political dramas this provoked, that there was astonishingly little focus on what Britain will do with its new-found freedom. This makes one ask if anything like a post-Brexit strategy really exists? Did the talk of Britain becoming a Singapore-on-Thames and shifting towards a low wage, light regulation economy, ever have any reality?  If no such secret strategy was in place, why on earth did the Conservative Party make such efforts to regain powers it never intended to use. The EU itself evidently suspects that there must be such a plan which would explain why it has shown adamantine determination to protect the single market. It has done so with some success, going by Johnson’s concession last weekend on maintaining fair competition between Britain and the EU. On the other hand, what is the shelf life of  a Johnson concession or promise, going by his trail of broken promises on the Irish border?Cynics may say that such a climb-down on EU/UK trade was inevitable, given the skewed balance of power against Britain and towards Brussels. Some 43 per cent of British exports go to the EU and 52 per cent of its imports come from there. At this stage, it looks unlikely that Brexit Britain is going to diverge significantly from the present status quo with the EU, so  jingoistic rhetoric to the contrary is simply a smokescreen designed for a domestic audience.
      It looks unlikely that Brexit Britain is going to diverge from the present status quo with the EU, so  jingoistic rhetoric to the contrary is simply a smokescreen designed for a domestic audienceThere are other cogent reasons why the broad-based pro-Brexit coalition would hesitate to shift sharply towards a smaller, less rule-based state. One is that such a leave-it-all-to the-market approach is totally against the spirit and experience of the age of Covid-19, when governments the world over are sparing no effort to prop up their economies. The 300,000 Americans killed by coronavirus, far more than anywhere else in the world, are evidence of the weakness of neo-liberalism when confronting a real crisis.Another factor hobbling a shift to the right in economic policy was evident last year: the successful pro-Brexit axis was made up of potent but contradictory forces. A former Ukip member in Newcastle, who had later become a pro-Brexit campaigner for the Conservative Party, explained to me last year that the Brexit activists he had met were largely ultra-Thatcherites seeking to create a neo-liberal Britain similar to the US. But the majority of Leave voters whom he had encountered in Essex and Kent, as well as the northeast, saw themselves as the victims of Thatcherism and wanted more rather than less state intervention. More

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      ‘We want to remain in the EU’: What will happen to Gibraltar after Brexit?

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      Standing at the summit of Gibraltar, looking down at the oil tankers and container ships crisscrossing the narrow straits below, you can see why this rocky promontory has always been so important. In past centuries, whoever controlled this rock controlled all the shipping that passed beneath it, between Europe and Africa, between the Atlantic and the Med.For the past 300 years the country that’s controlled the Rock of Gibraltar has been Britain, but as the end of the transition period draws near this crowded peninsular has become significant for an entirely different reason. For half a century, Gibraltar has prospered mightily through Britain’s membership of the European Union. But now Britain is leaving the EU and taking Gibraltar with it, even though Gibraltarians voted by a massive 96 per cent to 4 per cent to remain. So how will Gibraltar’s reluctant departure affect its relationship with Spain – and Britain? Last week, I went back to Gibraltar to find out.I first visited Gibraltar four years ago, a few months after the EU referendum. I was curious to see how the Gibraltarians felt about those Brexiteers back in Blighty who’d outvoted them. Gibraltar had voted to remain by a far greater margin than any region in mainland Britain. Would Brexit be the lever that tilted Gibraltarians away from Britain, towards Spain? More