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We Americans love remaking British TV. Must the UK remake our odious politicians? | Dave Schilling

by Evelyn Reynolds 28 September 2025, 13:00

I’ve always wanted to visit the UK. This might sound absurd to you, considering I’m from California – home of sunshine, half-naked bodies and the studio where they film Jeopardy. What could possibly pull me to the cold, damp, gray shores of England? The oppressively brown food? The dodgy colonialist history? Tesco? No, it was the glowing box that vibrated with whatever passed for culture in my small town: television.British TV was an obsession in my house, via those purveyors of affordable, exotic entertainment at PBS. We’d get classy fare through the Masterpiece Theatre series, but also more downmarket comedies like Are You Being Served? (a variety of sexually obsessed retail clerks trip over each other) or Keeping Up Appearances (lower-middle-class oafs desperately wish they were posh). I had no concept of what people were saying in their thick accents or most of the jokes meant, especially the double entendres.But even the dumb shows seemed smart. I learned more about European history from Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s Blackadder series than I ever did in school. British television, especially the comedies, assumed a certain futility to life. It probably won’t get better. In fact, it might get worse. Often. This is a tradition that carried over to other classic sitcoms such as I’m Alan Partridge and The Office, which I discovered in college. If it’s a small-town crime drama or a half-hour comedy, British TV is usually going to express something close to misery by the time the credits roll. In America’s land of good cheer and opportunity, this was like a salve of reality.My obsession with all things British (even the food) carried on into adulthood, but despite that abiding interest, I had never visited the UK until this year. I seemed to have picked the worst year imaginable. Or maybe the best. The country is in the midst of a political upheaval. Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party is on the march, commanding the polls. Obviously, the first thing I did when I arrived was turn on the television to see how it compared to American media, which feels at all times like Jurassic Park after the electricity went out.In the US, we are obsessed with remaking British TV shows – The Office, Steptoe and Son, Absolutely Fabulous. But the British would rather remake our politicians. They’re just not as good at it.Farage is the English Trump, but only in the sense that he is dangerously unqualified for leadership and therefore believes he is actually qualified. He recently claimed that migrants were “eating swans” in parks. I can imagine a TV executive angrily shaking their fist at the ham-handed adaptation of Trump’s infamous dog comment. “Who would actually eat a swan? You don’t even get it!”Nigel Farage is just not the showman that Trump is, any more than Doctor Who is as flashy as Star Wars or Star Trek. British news is less single-mindedly fixated on him than we are with Trump. Because Farage is so tacky and second rate, it’s been easier for the UK media to shoo him away like a fly up until now. When I was in London this summer, it was the opposite of the wall-to-wall Trumpathon that is America. Maybe that’s why I found ITV’s Good Morning Britain so relaxing to watch. The noticeable lack of screaming or partisan rancor. The reassuring presence of former Labour politician and ex-Strictly Come Dancing competitor Ed Balls. Whatever it is, I came to love my daily dose of dry toast in TV form. One recent GMB episode featured a segment on an app designed to identify and catalog butterflies around the UK. It was sweet, until the presenter reminded the audience that this is important because butterflies are dying off due to the climate crisis. Even cheerful news segments need to remind you that life is a series of tiny hells.I did a few things besides watch TV, though. The Tate Modern is easily the best contemporary art museum I’ve ever been to. I think reading a newspaper in a pub at 11am is as civilized as life gets. I can’t tell if Waitrose is posh or a Trader Joe’s equivalent, but they had everything I needed, plus delicious cheeses I’ve never heard of. The Barbican Estate, where I stayed, is an architectural marvel that could never exist in a place like California. It’s purposefully difficult to get around, has an art gallery and a movie theater, and people crush bottles of wine openly in the courtyard long past bedtime. I found that people took tube etiquette so seriously that I wondered if not giving up your seat for an elderly person was now punishable by stoning. I’m sure there’s plenty of horrendous behavior in London, but I was so eager to enjoy myself that I didn’t even notice. And almost no one I met in London asked me, the dumb American, about Donald Trump. Almost.My one conversation about Trump took place in Whitechapel, a neighborhood known for a series of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper that is now home to a significant immigrant population – particularly people from Bangladesh. A sign was added to the Whitechapel tube station in Bengali, which upset Elon Musk (who is definitely not British) and assorted rightwing politicians obsessed with fighting multiculturalism. I was eager to have a proper British curry experience before flying back to LA and was given a recommendation for a restaurant in Whitechapel by my friend and co-creator of The Inbetweeners, Iain Morris (who is definitely British). I was asked very specifically not to name the restaurant, lest it become discovered by more brutish American tourists like myself. That’s what Dishoom is for, after all.After settling the bill for my meal, the waiter/proprietor asked me what I thought of “him.” The movie had not come out yet, so I realized “him” meant Trump. I said I was generally not a fan, that he would not be fond of a place like the restaurant we were in, and that I definitely did not vote for him. He chuckled, as though I had read him a joke written on a popsicle stick. “Every time an American comes in here and I ask if they voted for him, they say no,” he responded. I surmised that that’s because the people who did vote for him aren’t stopping into a curry house in Whitechapel on their UK vacation.The British and American political dilemmas can sometimes look eerily similar. Trump and Farage have both stuck around far longer than anyone expected. Anti-immigrant and anti-trans sentiment animate the right wings of both nations. The “unite the kingdom” rally feels like a hyper-charged Maga gathering. But, like the quality of our respective cheeses, we couldn’t be more different. Nihilism and a crazed impulse to start over from scratch animates both of our cultural schisms, but while in the US the face of populism is the frozen scowl of Trump, in Britain, it’s the vacuous grin of Farage. A recent feature in the New Yorker described the mood of the Reform party conference as jubilant. Farage is always smiling, which is either comforting to his sympathizers or terrifying for his detractors. Regardless, Reform is capturing Britain’s imagination precisely because of that smile.Labour and the Tories bumble around desperate to prove that they are the most serious, when what the nation seems to want is someone who admits that things aren’t great, but that the country (and the world) have a future. The future Reform offers is a terrifying one that looks a lot more like the worst aspects of modern America, but it’s a vision nonetheless. What afflicts both the US and the UK is a feeling of emptiness, of futility, and a growing realization that we’re all stuck. Technology, grand economic forces we don’t understand, and a dwindling social safety net have left the average citizen in a state of abandonment and isolation. The Democratic party and the Labour party just want things to go back to a mythical state of normalcy, hopelessly nostalgic and out of touch. This has pushed the dreamers, the malcontents and the futurists to the fringes. Maga and Reform seem nostalgic, but what they offer is not a return to anything, but a radical reshaping and perversion of the system that keeps our society functioning.When faced with the grim reality of British TV every day on my trip, I yearned for a bit of good ol’ Yankee razzle-dazzle – a dose of mindless optimism. I think maybe the most potent similarity between our two countries is that we could both use some of that right now.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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Trump has dragged the US to the abyss and Nigel Farage would do the same to Britain. Here’s how to stop him
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 16:02
The march towards the darkness is becoming a sprint. In the US, warnings about the autocratic ambitions of Donald Trump that were once dismissed as hyperbole and hysteria now seem, if anything, too mild. Faster than most imagined, he has moved to weaken institutional checks on his power – whether the courts, the universities, the civil service or the press – and now has set to work gagging his critics, even, it seems, to outlaw large swathes of the opposition.This week saw the suspension by a major broadcasting network, Disney-owned ABC, of a late-night talkshow, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, following remarks Kimmel had made about the killing of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel did not criticise Kirk himself – an act now considered all but blasphemous in the US – but rather Republicans’ reaction to his murder, especially their eagerness to “score political points from it”.That was enough to prompt Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission – the body that grants, or revokes, licences to broadcast – to come on like a wannabe Tony Soprano, all but cracking his knuckles as he said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” The threat worked: Kimmel is off the air.Of course, this is no one-off. Trump is also trying to cow the US’s biggest newspaper, filing a $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times, accusing it of “spreading false and defamatory content”. The NYT has the resources to resist, but smaller US papers will have got the message. They could hardly be blamed if they now pull their journalistic punches, if only because they do not have the money to pay for a protracted legal battle against a billionaire president.But the Trump administration is not confining its assault to the media. The Kirk killing has handed it an opportunity to crack down on dissent itself. Witness the promise Trump aide Stephen Miller made this week – on the Charlie Kirk podcast – to take on those left-of-centre organisations whose “messaging” is “designed to trigger and incite violence”. It is hardly a stretch to assume that Miller will define that category very broadly, so that it sweeps up most of those who express opposition to Trump. If that seems alarmist, recall that, even before Kirk was killed, Miller was calling the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation”.View image in fullscreenIn the UK, we like to think we can watch all this with, if not smug distance, then a measure of relief. It’s true that we are a long way from the precipice to which Trump has taken the US. But last week between 110,000 and 150,000 Britons took to the streets of London, heeding the summons of the rightwing agitator and serial convict who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson.It’s worth stressing that this was not a Reform or Conservative rally that was hijacked by Robinson. This was his event. Britons know who Robinson is and what he represents – and yet up to 150,000 of them marched behind him. They were undeterred by those who had labelled it a far-right protest and, indeed, by the racist rhetoric that came from the platform. Britain has an admirable history of confining the far right to the margins, ensuring that it had not, until now, demonstrated this kind of strength in numbers. So last Saturday should be understood as a watershed.Not least because of one speech in particular. Elon Musk, via video link, told the crowd “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” He added that the Labour government, democratically elected a year ago, needed to be brought down. This was one of the most powerful men in the world issuing a call that may not have broken the law but which seemed to give approval in advance for rightwing political violence in Britain.And yet the British prime minister did not rush to condemn this incendiary intrusion into our politics. Indeed, Downing Street said nothing at all until prompted by reporters’ questions, and MPs’ demands, the following day. We often fault those guilty of overreaction. But, at a moment like this, underreaction is the greater sin.The polls are telling a very stark story. Absent a dramatic shift, a party of nationalist populism is on course to beat both Labour and the Conservatives at the next election, and very probably form the next government. Nigel Farage may be no fan of Tommy Robinson, but he is Trump’s loudest UK cheerleader; he does not condemn the current US gallop towards authoritarianism but rather stands alongside those responsible for it. If we want to prevent Farage doing to Britain what Trump is doing to the US, we need to halt the advance of Reform.The first move in that effort is to puncture Farage’s core claim: that he somehow speaks for the British people, that his views reflect the “commonsense” views of the silent majority. It’s not true. On issue after issue, including those that define him, Farage is an outlier, articulating the positions of a noisy but often small minority.He was the chief advocate of Brexit, a decision so calamitous that only 31% now say it was the right move. Indeed, a healthy majority, 56%, favour its reversal and want to rejoin the EU. Farage is on the wrong side of that number.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has long banged the drum for leaving the European convention on human rights. If you read the rightwing papers, you would assume that is now a majority view. Wrong. Support for staying in the ECHR is close to 60% and has actually increased as the subject has been debated. Farage is out of step with the British people.But surely on the issue he has made his own, immigration, he is in tune with the public? After all, Labour seems to have built its entire political strategy on that assumption. And yet, the numbers tell a different story. While 81% of Reform voters believe migrants have undermined Britain’s culture, only 31% of Britons in general believe that. Ask about the effect of migrants on the economy and you get a similar picture. It’s Reform that is badly out of touch.You can keep doing this – and Labour must, pointing out that Farage speaks for the fringes not the centre. Britons don’t support handing Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, as Farage advocates. They do not agree that Britain has become North Korea – and they don’t regard as a patriot someone who sits in Washington and tells a committee of American politicians that we have. They don’t reply to the question, “Which world leader do you most admire?”, with the words “Vladimir Putin”, as Farage did. And nor do they think that the Liz Truss measures that sent the UK economy spiralling represented “the best Conservative budget since 1986”, to quote Nigel Farage.Reform’s opponents need to expose every one of these gaps between Farage and the electorate, recasting Farage as a figure of the fringes. But this can’t be a task for Labour or the Liberal Democrats alone. Any party that claims to value democracy, including what remains of the Conservatives, and that sees how swiftly nationalist populism leads to authoritarianism, needs to engage in the same effort and fast. We all do. As Americans are learning to their cost, you cannot delay – otherwise the freedoms you thought would last for ever can vanish, in the blink of an eye.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. His new nonfiction book, The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them (£25), is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £22 More
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How huge London far-right march lifted the lid on a toxic transatlantic soup
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 September 2025, 17:00
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A young man in a suit made of union jacks held up a framed photograph of their hero above his head. The crowd loudly chanted the name. The focus of this acclamation was not Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, the organiser of the so-called “free speech” march in central London last Saturday.They were instead shouting themselves hoarse for Charlie Kirk, the murdered political activist from Cook County in the US state of Illinois.It is unlikely that many of the 110,000 to 150,000 protesters estimated to have been on the streets last weekend, at what turned out to be the largest rally of its type in British history, knew much about Kirk before his death at the hands of a gunman at Utah Valley University.The UK version of Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which claims to be the “largest Conservative student movement” in the US, has never really taken off in Britain.But they were moved to cheer him on Saturday. Clips of an almost entirely white and predominantly male crowd of Britons chanting the first name of the murdered 31-year-old were lapped up on social media accounts said to be US-based, as was the minute’s silence afterwards.View image in fullscreen“Thousands of British patriots just fell silent in honor of Charlie Kirk in London,” tweeted Eric Daugherty, an assistant news director at the conservative Florida’s Voice website (“Honest political reporting to Florida, minus the mainstream talking points.”)It is said that when America coughs, Britain catches a cold.The reality with this strain of politics is that there is something of a feedback loop between the US and the UK that is proving mutually beneficial to both sides, said Prof Paul Jackson, author of Pride in Prejudice: Understanding Britain’s Extreme Right.Kirk may not have been a household name in the UK but his murder offered validation for a view that a certain outlook on life is under threat. In turn, the scenes on Saturday provided evidence of the righteousness of the cause back in the US.There is history to this mutually enforcing exchange of ideas on the extreme right, said Jackson.A certain type of US political thought has never travelled well across the Atlantic, notably the Ku Klux Klan, which grew after the civil war in the late 1860s, said Jackson.But other ideas have thrived in the past as they do today, including those contained in Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, which influenced some European white supremacists, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew.It has not all been one way. The Blood & Honour movement, founded by British neo-Nazi and white power music pioneer Ian Stuart Donaldson in 1987, led to the birth of Blood & Honour American Division and Blood & Honour Council US.That was the analogue age, though.In the digital era, particularly in the so-called “counter-jihad” space that now dominates what is loosely termed the far right, the mutual reinforcement of messages is done in real time. Stories of social conflict or moral panic in one country are used to boost a political claim in another.Kirk himself was one of those who picked up on the case of Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old English woman –married to a Conservative councillor – who was sentenced to 31 months in prison for calling for hotels that were housing asylum seekers to be burned down during last summer’s riots. (She was released in August after serving less than half her sentence.)View image in fullscreen“Every day people say: ‘Well someone should go kill Charlie Kirk.’ I don’t like it, but that is protected speech,” he told GB News. “In America, we care what you do and not what you say.”It was of a piece with the general claim that free speech is under threat in the UK, confirmed in the mind of the likes of JD Vance by the UK’s Online Safety Act, aimed at preventing young people from encountering harmful content, which the US vice-president claims has put Britain on a “very dark path”.The amplification of certain causes, the repetition of choice phrases, cannot be said to be highly organised, but it is nonetheless powerful.The Infowars website, founded by the prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, promoted Robinson’s content about the rally on Saturday, but also that of a series of obscure accounts on X, said to be based in both the UK and the US.“Breaking: London falls silent for fallen hero Charlie Kirk,” said one such account with 335,700 followers that described itself as a defender of western values and culture. “The British media hated him. The British people certainly didn’t.”View image in fullscreenAnother account promoted by Jones’s site was that of Naomi Seibt, a US-based German political influencer linked to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, who is known for her climate change denial and promotion of “great replacement theory” tropes.She tweeted images from the rally to her 436,700 followers that included the words: “White children will grow up as patriots from now on. White guilt is over.”Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the anti-Muslim movement Act for America, which claims to have 1,000 local chapters across the US, posted on X: “Don’t let the media downplay how massive this is. Millions of patriots in the UK are standing up for free speech.”Then there is Elon Musk, who appeared via videolink at Saturday’s rally. It would be difficult to overplay the importance to Robinson of the support of one of the world’s richest men, according to analysts including the Hope Not Hate anti-extremist organisation.View image in fullscreenIn lifting the ban on Robinson’s content on X and through his own misleading posts framing him as a free speech warrior persecuted by the state, Musk gave the activist a vital leg-up, it is argued.Robinson, a former member of the racist British National party, who has a string of convictions to his name including for assault, using a fake passport, mortgage fraud and contempt of court, is said to have been able to build upon his profile in the US, stir up protests outside hotels accommodating asylum seekers while pushing anti-immigrant messages that circle around a supposed threat of Islamisation to the UK.“When you hear people talk about the special relationship between America and Great Britain, this is the special relationship that you’re seeing here,” Robinson said at the rally.“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” Musk told the crowd, in turn.Musk is not yet believed to have directly funded anyone in the UK, although he reportedly flirted with offering money to Reform, the rising political party on the right that is led by Nigel Farage. But such transatlantic relationships do exist, albeit they tend to remain below the radar. It is a murky soup – but some of the chunkier players can be made out.One is the US tech billionaire Robert Shillman, known as Dr Bob, who in 2018 financed a fellowship that helped pay for Robinson to be employed by the rightwing Canadian media website, Rebel Media, now called Rebel News, on a salary of about £5,000 a month.View image in fullscreenOther Shillman fellows have included Katie Hopkins, the English former reality TV star who compared migrants to cockroaches, and Laura Loomer, the American conspiracy theorist referred to by some as the president’s “de facto national security adviser”.The rightwing Middle East Forum thinktank, led by the neoconservative academic Daniel Pipes, has paid for foreign speakers to attend Robinson rallies in the past, in addition to funding the activist’s legal defence.There are laws against foreign donations in both the US and the UK but the far-right echo chamber is also clearly a useful tool for those seeking electoral success on both sides of the Atlantic.Trump has had no qualms about bouncing off certain British causes, sometimes unadvisedly. He said he was prepared to apologise in 2018 when he retweeted posts from Britain First, an offshoot of the BNP. But he is notably cautious about certain characters.Trump, who will be in the UK for a state visit this week, did not comment on social media about Saturday’s rally. He appears to prefer his outriders to do the work at times, including his son.When the rightwing activist Kurt Schlichter claimed – falsely – on X that Robinson had been arrested for reporting on a court case in May 2018, Donald Trump Jr retweeted it, writing: “Reason #1776 for the original #brexit. Don’t let America follow in those footsteps.”In the UK, Farage, who successfully fought for decades for the UK to leave the European Union and is today riding high in the polls with his anti-immigration populism, has sought to keep a sterile gap between himself and Robinson, who he fears is beyond the pale for much of the British public.He steps carefully in the digital space, seeking support but without getting too close to the most strident actors, including those in the US. He is notably quite loth to associate himself too much with Trump these days when he is at home in the UK, given the US president’s poor approval ratings among the British public.View image in fullscreenBut his long-standing ties to the Make America Great Again movement remain financially advantageous. This week, Farage apologised for breaching parliamentary rules by failing to register a trip to Florida to headline a fundraising event for Trump. He had been the main speaker at the $500-a-head Republican party dinner in Tallahassee in March.Farage hopes to benefit from the promotion of anti-immigrant themes in the digital world, including from US commentators, without putting off those with more mainstream outlooks, say insiders. It will be a difficult trick to get away with – as Musk’s criticism of Farage at the start of the year over his lack of support for Robinson illustrated.“British people are kind of looking for an international source of inspiration,” said Jackson. “[Then] some of the reason why somebody like Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson might be of particular interest in the US is because they’ve had a lot of success in their own terms.“Tommy Robinson’s social media profile of the last few years has been highly impactful, even more so since [Musk] reversing his ban from Twitter. Nigel Farage’s impact on Britain shortly before Trump’s first presidency can be seen as perhaps providing some blueprints about how to have impact.”Gawain Towler, who was Farage’s long-standing press adviser until he left Reform earlier this year, said he believed the American interest in shaping British politics was also instinctive.“Trump sees the UK as the spiritual home of the US,” he said. “He sees our traditional political and legal traditions as the spiritual background to America’s right.“Musk certainly feels that way. He sees the UK as the spiritual homeland of the concepts of the American Declaration of Independence and its bill of rights and all the rest of it. This is where freedom was born, right? It’s like losing a great-uncle if it falls.” More
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Nigel Farage clashes with Democrat members over free speech – video
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 September 2025, 09:28
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Judge sides with Harvard and orders Trump to reverse billions in funding cuts – US politics live
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 September 2025, 21:29
A federal judge in Boston has sided with Harvard university in its court battle with the Trump administration, ordering that the federal government reverse funding cuts, the AP reports.The Trump administration had cut more than $2.6bn in research grants to the school as part of the president’s aggressive attacks on academic institutions.Judge Allison Burroughs ruled Wednesday the cuts constituted illegal retaliation after Harvard had refused the White House’s demands to change its policies and governance, the AP reported.Harvard’s complaint, filed in July, said:
This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard. All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.
The NAACP has filed a lawsuit against the state of Missouri to block the red state’s special legislative session to redraw congressional maps and expand GOP representation.The civil rights group said in a press release that it was suing to “stop an unlawful attempt to convene a special legislative session aimed at redrawing political maps in ways that would diminish the voting power of Black Missourians”.The NAACP filed a similar lawsuit in Texas last month to block the state’s redistricting plan, which is expected to add five GOP seats to Congress.Derrick Johnson, NAACP president, said in a statement:
This case is about defending democracy and protecting the voice of every voter. The Missouri legislature’s attempt to force a rushed, unconstitutional redistricting process in a special session is a blatant effort to silence Black voters and strip them of their fundamental rights. We will not stand by while elected officials manipulate the system to weaken our power and representation.”
The redistricting effort pushed by Mike Kehoe, Missouri’s GOP governor, followed calls by Donald Trump for the state to redraw its maps so it could “elect an additional Maga Republican in the 2026 midterm elections”. States traditionally have only redrawn maps every ten years based on the US census, but Republican efforts to add seats this year, in the middle of the decade, have sparked a redistricting battle with Democrats.A federal judge in Boston has sided with Harvard university in its court battle with the Trump administration, ordering that the federal government reverse funding cuts, the AP reports.The Trump administration had cut more than $2.6bn in research grants to the school as part of the president’s aggressive attacks on academic institutions.Judge Allison Burroughs ruled Wednesday the cuts constituted illegal retaliation after Harvard had refused the White House’s demands to change its policies and governance, the AP reported.Harvard’s complaint, filed in July, said:
This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard. All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.
Hundreds of federal agents are arriving to the Chicago area for Donald Trump’s deployment, with some already “practicing crowd control with shields and flash-bang grenades”, according to a new report in the Chicago Sun-Times.Roughly 230 agents, some who work for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), are arriving from Los Angeles, the newspaper reported, with at least 30 of them training at a naval station near north Chicago.JB Pritzker, Illinois’ Democratic governor, has strongly condemned the deployment, which the president has claimed is meant to address crime. “Any kind of troops on the streets of an American city don’t belong unless there is an insurrection, unless there is truly an emergency. There is not,” the governor said on Sunday. “I’m going to do everything I can to stop him from taking away people’s rights and from using the military to invade states. I think it’s very important for us all to stand up.”More than 100 unmarked vehicles have been sent to the Navy training station, the Sun-Times reported.The deployment of troops and other federal agents in LA caused widespread outrage and protests. Some demonstrations were met with teargas and other munitions. Border patrol agents with CBP were also accused of injuring protesters in LA and were found to have made false statements about demonstrators they arrested.Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, said he backed the president’s threat to send federal troops to his state.“We will take President @realDonaldTrump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!” Landry said on social media, responding to a White House post that said Trump was determining whether to send federal forces to Chicago or New Orleans “where we have a great governor”.It’s unclear if Landry has formally requested that the president send in troops, and his office did not respond to questions from the Associated Press.New Orleans, like other cities attacked by Trump, has seen a sharp decline in crime. JP Morrell, president of the New Orleans city council, criticized Trump’s threats of deployment in a statement, saying:
It’s ridiculous to consider sending the National Guard into another American city that hasn’t asked for it. Guardsmen are not trained law enforcement. They can’t solve crimes, they can’t interview witnesses and they aren’t trained to constitutionally police.
Trump’s deployment of troops to US cities has been condemned as authoritarian, with scholars saying the president was increasingly acting like a dictator.Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has denied, sort of, having conversations with the Trump administration about him being given a government job in exchange for dropping his re-election campaign.The New York Times reported on Wednesday that advisers to Donald Trump “have discussed the possibility” of giving Adams a position, in an attempt to thwart Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic socialist who is currently the frontrunner to be elected mayor in November.According to the Times, “intermediaries” for Trump have spoken to “associates” of Adams about leaving the race. Adams, who has proved to be deeply unpopular among New York Democratic voters and is running as an independent candidate, is well behind Mamdani in the polls, and is draining support from Andrew Cuomo, another independent candidate.There is a suggestion that if Adams, a centrist Democrat, and the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, were to drop out of the race, Cuomo could consolidate enough support to challenge Mamdani. The Times reported that there have been talks in the Trump administration about also finding a job for Sliwa.Sliwa did not respond when asked about the Times story, but the Adams campaign did reply to the Guardian.“Mayor Adams has made it clear that he will not respond to every rumor that comes up,” said Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Adams.“He has had no discussions with, nor has he met with, President Donald Trump regarding the mayoral race. The Mayor is fully committed to winning this election, with millions of New Yorkers preparing to cast their votes. His record is clear: crime is down, jobs are up, and he has consistently stood up for working families. Mayor Adams is focused on building on that progress and earning four more years to continue delivering for the people of New York.”On Tuesday a poll found Adams with 9% of the vote in the election – Mamdani was at 42%, Cuomo 26%, and Sliwa 17%. It’s worth noting that the Times story did not claim that Adams himself had discussed leaving the race with Trump.Speaking in Mexico City, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warned that the US military would continue to target vessels belonging to alleged Venezuelan drug cartels.Arguing that previous interdiction efforts in Latin America have not worked, Rubio said: “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”“The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations,” Rubio said, adding that the strikes would continue, according to reporters covering the news conference. “It’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now.”Rubio’s visit to Mexico, his first since taking office, comes after the US military launched what the president said was a “a kinetic strike” on a “drug-carrying boat” in the Caribbean Sea. Trump said 11 drug traffickers were killed in the attack.Defending Tuesday’s military operation, Rubio said of the Venezuelan vessel: “This one was operating in international waters, headed towards the United States, to flood our nation with poison. And under President Trump those days are over.”A handful of House Republicans helped tank a motion to censure Democratic congresswoman LaMonica McIver of New Jersey stemming from her indictment by a federal grand jury earlier this year for allegedly assaulting law enforcement during an altercation at an immigration facility in her home state – charges she denies.The censure, brought by Republicans congressman Clay Higgins, was expected to succeed in the GOP-led chamber where the once-rare form of public disapproval is now increasingly common. The House voted 215-207 to set aside the censure resolution, which would have stripped her of her position on the homeland security committee, a role the resolution claimed represented a “significant conflict of interest”.Nearly a half-dozen Republicans sided with Democrats in voting to table the resolution.Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has crossed the pond and popped up at House judiciary committee, a guest of House Republicans.His testimony was met with scalding derision by Democrats on the panel, who accused the far-right leader of being a a “Putin-loving free speech impostor” working to “ingratiate yourself with tech bros”. At one point, Congressman Hank Johnson, asked Farage to confirm that Reform currently has four MPs.Farage, who missed prime minister’s questions to appear before the committee, testified to the “awful authoritarian” situation for free speech in the UK.Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio and hepatitis, the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, announced on Wednesday.In a speech announcing the move, Ladapo likened vaccine mandates to “slavery”.Ladapo, hand-picked for the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, is a long-time skeptic of the benefit of vaccines, and has previously been accused of peddling “scientific nonsense” by public health advocates.In his Wednesday speech he said that every state vaccine requirement would be repealed, and that he expected the move would receive the blessing “of God”.“All of them. All of them,” Ladapo said. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”In 2022, Ladapo altered data in a study about Covid-19 vaccines in an attempt to exaggerate the risk to young men who took one.The governors of California, Oregon and Washington announced on Wednesday the creation of a West Coast Health Alliance aimed at safeguarding access to vaccines, amid growing turmoil at the nation’s top public health agency under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy Jr.In a joint press release, governors Gavin Newsom of California, Tina Kotek of Oregon, and Bob Ferguson of Washington said the CDC had become a “political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science”.“President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists – and his blatant politicization of the agency – is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” the Democratic governors said in a joint statement, adding: “California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.”Speaking on Capitol Hill earlier, Chauntae Davies, one of Epstein’s victims, says the disgraced financier bragged often about his friendship with Trump.Epstein and Maxwell “were always very boastful about their friends – their famous or powerful friends”, she told reporters in Washington. “And his biggest brag forever was that he was very good friends with Donald Trump.”Davies added that Epstein kept an 8in x 10in framed photo of him and Trump on his desk. “They were very close,” she said.Vice-President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance have arrived in Minneapolis, where they will meet with the families of the victims of the Annunciation Catholic church shooting that killed two schoolchildren and injured nearly two dozen people last week.“They will hold a series of private meetings to convey condolences to the families of those affected by the tragedy,” the White House said in a statement.Trump’s attorneys are asking the US supreme court to reverse a $5m sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit against him in the civil lawsuit brought by E Jean Carroll, Bloomberg News has reported.According to a new filing, the president’s lawyers are asking the justices to extend the deadline for him to formally ask the court to toss out the verdict.In 2023, a civil jury trial concluded that Trump had sexually abused Carroll, a former magazine columnist, in the 1990s, before he embarked on his political career, and then defamed her in 2022 when he denied the allegations as a hoax and said that she was “not my type”. Carroll was awarded $5m in damages.The petition was due on 11 September, but Trump’s legal team has asked for an extension, until 10 November, Bloomberg wrote.Here’s a look back at what’s gone on today so far:
Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said only two more Republican signatures are needed for the success of a discharge petition to force a vote on legislation compelling the release of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Donald Trump slammed the push for the files’ release as a “Democrat hoax that never ends” and mulled deploying federal agents into New Orleans to fight crime.
Republican congressman Thomas Massie criticized how House GOP leaders handled the Epstein issue.
At a separate press conference outside the US Capitol, Epstein survivors detailed abuse they suffered at the disgraced financier’s hands.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that the US would carry out more strikes like the one that targeted a suspected drug trafficking boat and killed 11 people on Tuesday off the coast of Venezuela.
A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that Donald Trump unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans he alleged were part of a criminal gang.
Donald Trump teased the possibility of deploying federal resources into New Orleans to fight crime.“We’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana, and you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in about two weeks. It’ll take us two weeks,” the president said.New Orleans has a homicide rate that is among the highest in the nation, but lies in a Republican-governed state – unlike Los Angeles and Washington DC, where Trump deployed federal troops earlier this year.Trump also confirmed that he was still sending federal agents into Chicago, saying: “We could straighten out Chicago”.Asked at the White House about the push in Congress to release the Epstein files, Donald Trump again accused Democrats of orchestrating the controversy, and attempted to change the subject to his own purported accomplishments.“This is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” Trump said. Referring to the recent release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, he said: “Nobody’s ever satisfied.”“They’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” Trump said. He went on to claim credit for making Washington DC a “totally safe zone” with “no crime, no murders, no nothing” – though crime, including murders and robberies, have continued since he deployed the national guard and took control of its police department.Another boast from Trump: “I ended seven wars, nobody’s going to talk about it because they’re going to talk about the Epstein whatever.” It’s unclear which seven he is referring to, though his claims of having quelled recent fighting between Pakistan and India played a part in souring the relationship with New Delhi. He also has notably not ended the war in Ukraine – something he boasted, on the campaign trail, that he could do right after taking office.The White House has referred to signing the discharge petition to release the Epstein files as a “hostile act”, and discouraged Republicans from supporting it.Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman who introduced the petition and is one of four lawmakers from his party who signed it, replied:
I don’t know if that’s precedented in this country to have a president call legislators to say that they’re engaged in a hostile act, particularly when the so-called hostile act is trying to get justice for people who’ve been victims of sex crimes.
He also said that the fact that there was little new in the case documents released yesterday may spur more lawmakers to sign the petition:
What people are waking up and discovering right now is the folks who stayed up all night to go through the 34,000 individual pages have found that they’re so redacted as to be useless and that many of them were already available.
A reality check on the discharge petition that could force a vote in the House on legislation to release the Epstein files.The petition needs two more signatures – which will probably have to come from Republicans – to reach the majority threshold to compel the vote. But even if the petition receives that support and the bill passes the House, the legislation will still need to be approved by the Senate, where Republican majority leader John Thune has given no indication he will put it up for a vote.Should it pass the Senate, it faces another obstacle: Donald Trump. He’s condemned the furor over the Epstein files as a distraction created by the Democrats, and could veto the legislation. That would punt the issue back to Congress, where the bill would need two-thirds majority support to overcome his veto – a tall order.Marjorie Taylor Greene is among the most outspoken conservatives in Congress, but has made a rare pact with the Democrats by signing the discharge petition that could force a vote on legislation to release the Epstein files.“This is an issue that doesn’t have political boundaries. It’s an issue that Republicans and Democrats should never fight about. As a matter of fact, it’s such an important issue that it should bring us all together,” she said at the press conference convened by the petition’s sponsors outside the Capitol.“The truth needs to come out, and the government holds the truth. The cases that are sealed hold the truth. Jeffrey Epstein’s estate holds the truth. The FBI, the DoJ and the CIA holds the truth. And the truth we are demanding comes out on behalf of these women, but also as a strong message to every innocent child, teenager, woman and man that is being held captive in abuse. This should never happen in America, and it should never be a political issue that divides us.” More
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Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences face discrimination from advertisers, editors warn
by Evelyn Reynolds 31 August 2025, 06:00
Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ and other diverse audiences are facing “good old-fashioned discrimination” as advertisers avoid them after political attacks on diversity and inclusion campaigns, editors have said.Senior figures at publications aimed at the gay community and other minority groups said a previous “gold rush” to work with such titles was over.There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans.Tag Warner, the chief executive of Gay Times, said his publication, which had been growing digitally in the US, had lost 80% of its advertisers in the past year. It has also lost in excess of £5m in expected advertiser revenue.Warner, who has led the outlet since 2019, said his title’s growth had been accompanied by an enthusiasm from brands to embrace LGBTQ+ audiences. He blames an anti-DEI drive in the US for the dramatic shift.“I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway, but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes, they’re not nearly as impacted as we are,” he said. “This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.“We’re really experiencing the impact of what happens when voices that are pressuring organisations to give in to less inclusive perspectives start winning. Then it creates this massive behavioural shift in brands and organisations.”Nafisa Bakkar, the co-founder of Amaliah, a publication aimed at “amplifying the voices of Muslim women”, said there had been a “change in mood” among brands and advertisers. “There was this DNI [diversity and inclusion] gold rush,” she said. “It is, I would say, well and truly over.“We work with a lot of UK advertisers, but I would say that the US has a lot more emphasis on what they would call ‘brand safety’, which I think is a code word for ‘we don’t want to rock the boat’. I would say there is a lot more focus on this element.”Ibrahim Kamara, the founder of the youth platform GUAP, which has a large black and ethnically diverse audience, said he had detected a “relative difference” from 2020 in approaches from brands.He and others cited the economic pressures on advertisers generally in recent years. However, he said the “hype and the PR around wanting to support and connect with diverse audiences” had also subsided.“The thing that most people within these kind of spaces can probably agree on is that the energy and the PR is very different now,” he said. “It was almost a badge of honour to be able to say that you’re supporting certain communities. Now, I’ve seen that lots of the diversity and inclusion people that were hired around that period have probably lost their jobs. It doesn’t have the same PR effect any more.”Warner said the anti-DEI impact pre-dated the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Figures such as the conservative pundit Robby Starbuck have been engaged in a long-running anti-DEI campaign, pressuring firms to drop their diversity efforts. However, Warner said Trump’s arrival “gave everyone, I think, permission to be honest about it”.Not all publications in the sector have been hit in the same way as Gay Times. Companies with business models less reliant on US advertising, as well as some big players with long-established relationships, said they had managed to negotiate the changing political environment.“Brands are nervous, that’s for sure, or careful – or a combination of both,” said Darren Styles, the managing director of Stream Publishing, which publishes Attitude magazine. “They’re aware it can be a lightning rod for a vocal minority. But our experience is that most people are holding their ground, if not doubling down.”Styles also said he was not complacent, however, given the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK and its lack of historical support for the LGBTQ+ community.“I’m not incautious about the future,” he said. “Who knows what next year will bring, because that narrative is not going away. Obviously, there’s the rise of Reform in the polls.“[Farage] is quite clearly not an ally to our community and he’s expressed disdain in the past at the awards we’ve given out to people in the trans community. So it is a worry as political momentum gains around there. But I think broadly, consumers in the UK are a bit more capable of thinking for themselves.”Mark Berryhill, the chief executive of equalpride, which publishes prominent US titles like Out and The Advocate, said some brands and agencies “may have been a little bit more cautious than they have been in the past”. However, he said it had so far meant deals had taken longer to be completed, in a tough economic climate.He said the political headwinds made it more important to highlight that working with such titles was simply a sound business decision. “We’ve tried to do a better job in this political climate of just selling the importance of our buying power,” he said. “Everybody’s cautious and I don’t think it’s just LGBTQ. I think they’re cautious in general right now with their work with minority owned companies.“The one thing that maybe this whole controversy has helped us with a little bit is to really make brands realise it’s a business decision. It’s not just a charity or something you should do because you feel guilty.“You should do it because it’s the right thing to support LGBTQ journalism. We’re small. We need to get the word out. We have important stories to tell. But it’s also a good business decision. The more we show that side, certain brands will come along.” More
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The spirit of Liz Truss, ridiculous but relentless, still stalks British politics | Rafael Behr
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 June 2025, 05:00
We need to talk about Liz Truss, although there are reasons not to bother. The prime minister who failed faster than any previous holder of the office has much to say about her dismal record, but nothing insightful. She cuts a pitiful spectacle padding out the schedule at rightwing conferences, chasing attention and relevance with an addict’s fervour.Last week, Truss was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, sharing the big lesson she learned in government. It was that British institutions have been captured by a leftist doctrine and that they “hate western civilisation”. She couldn’t possibly counter this threat from No 10 because supposedly the real power was wielded by a well-financed “globalist network”, operating through such engines of anti-democratic subterfuge as the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization.Truss believes these nefarious forces authored her downfall. They taught her that gradual reform is impossible. Only a “Trump-style revolution” will do. This is her routine spiel. Indeed, it was the theme of her paranoid, self-pitying memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years to Save the West, published last year. Her disquisitions on the topic go unreported in her home country. She made more headlines last week from a two-month-old cameo appearance in a promotional video for a whiskey brand launched by a bare-knuckle fighter with a conviction for violent assault. (How that endorsement advances the restoration of western civilisation was unclear.) But a thorough summary of the CPAC speech was dutifully published by Tass, Russia’s main state news agency. Their report led with the claim that “globalists are trying to control the political process across Europe”.It is standard practice for Russian news channels to weave selective quotes from western politicians into tendentious propaganda, except there is no need to take Truss’s words out of context. She narrates the west’s slide into godless decadence without an edit. She provides the frothy conspiracy theories that Kremlin-friendly bots amplify on social media, and hallmarks them with the authority of a former prime minister.A British audience knows the caveats to that status: Truss was ousted within 50 days; a lettuce had more staying power. But the title stands. She really did rise to the top, and not through some freak system malfunction. She played and won the Westminster game by its rules. She had multiple ministerial briefs under three prime ministers. She persuaded a clear majority of members of Britain’s venerable establishment party to make her their leader.Colleagues who suspected (or knew from experience) that Truss was unhinged stayed silent or endorsed her candidacy once her momentum looked unstoppable. Client journalists who had benefited from her notorious indiscretion, and looked forward to ever greater intimacy with power, colluded in the fiction of her fitness to govern.Even now, when the former prime minister’s name is a byword for economic incompetence, Conservatives are euphemistic in contrition. When invited to apologise on behalf of her party for the disastrous mini-budget of September 2022, Kemi Badenoch has said only that she wants to “draw a line” under the episode.The obstacle is not a residue of loyalty but a continuity of belief. The dogmatic engine of Trussonomics – that tax cuts always pay for themselves by stimulating enterprise to generate growth – is still an axiom of mainstream Conservatism. So is Trussite suspicion of the public sector as a redoubt of bureaucratic socialism.Badenoch, like Truss, backs a Maga-style revolution to rip chunks out of the government apparatus. She has spoken enthusiastically about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, adding that Doge methods are not “radical enough” for the bloated British state.The fact that Musk’s purgative rampage through Washington has failed to produce the advertised cost savings doesn’t deter imitators. Nigel Farage has announced the creation of a mercenary Doge “unit” to hunt down waste in the councils that Reform UK won in last month’s local elections.This exercise serves a double function. First, Farage will scapegoat any local officials whose duties can be branded under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Second, he will overstate the expense of such schemes, generating improbable nationwide savings to justify tax cuts in a Reform manifesto. Trussonomics will be rehabilitated and rearmed with imported US culture war rhetoric.Farage was once a fan of Truss’s economic policy. He praised her fiscal farrago as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”. The year harked back to the heyday of Thatcherism. These days Farage has to be careful about fetishising the Iron Lady. His party’s electoral base lives in Labour’s former heartlands, so he is a convert to the cause of industrial nationalisation. He now shakes his magic money tree to the left as well as the right.The Tories lack such ideological elasticity. In any case, Badenoch doesn’t seem interested in economics. She is more animated by the crusade for free speech. This, like the demonisation of DEI, is a fixation borrowed from the US right. When JD Vance declared that European democracy was more imperilled by censorious liberals than by Russian military aggression, Badenoch admired the US vice-president’s deployment of “truth bombs”. Here, too, she is on the same page as Truss, who told last week’s CPAC audience that free-thinking dissidents from Keir Starmer’s Britain find refuge in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (Orbán is Europe’s foremost admirer of Vladimir Putin. He has suffocated independent media and political opposition.)It is hard to know how much of this derangement is conviction and how much is cupidity. There is money to be earned bad-mouthing Britain on the ultra-nationalist lecture circuit, but it is also easy to self-radicalise in that milieu.It is also hard to know how receptive a UK audience is to US conservative manias. Much of the UK right dwells in a US-coded online hallucination of Britain where criminal hordes of migrants have turned city centres into no-go areas and liberal thought police harass law-abiding white Christians.The danger is not that millions of voters will recognise the bleak dystopia as a factual representation of their country, but that it resonates as an allegory of national decline. It is not the complaint that Britain is in bad shape – dilapidation and economic strife are self-evident – but the cultivation of despair by projecting hard problems through a facile, conspiratorial lens. It is the insinuation that existing democratic institutions are not merely failing to make life better but maliciously orchestrating misery.This is the nihilistic cynicism that vaporises trust, corrodes civic culture and makes simple, authoritarian solutions attractive. It is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears and grist to his digital disinformation mills.Perhaps we should be grateful to Liz Truss for playing the archetype of unwitting accomplice to tyranny – the “useful idiot” of cold war parlance – so ineptly. She contaminates any cause she touches.That is why the British right shuns her. But social ostracism isn’t ideological repudiation. The current Tory and Reform leaders are embarrassed by association with Truss, not because they despise what she says but because she looks ridiculous. Her offence was not the grift, but its exposure in ways that might discredit more skilful practitioners. She is not too extreme, only artless in applying the camouflage. She is the crumpled, discarded packaging from a product that, rewrapped, could be delivered once again to Downing Street.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
One year of Labour, with Pippa Crerar, Rafael Behr and more
On 9 July, join Pippa Crerar, Raf Behr, Frances O’Grady and Salma Shah as they look back at one year of the Labour government and plans for the next four years More
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Whatever Donald Trump does next, this chaos will soon be shaping ordinary lives for the worse | Gaby Hinsliff
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 April 2025, 16:58
If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s black, fight back. If it’s white, say goodnight.The rhyme we learned hiking as a family through Yellowstone national park last summer is meant as a cheery reminder of how not to get eaten, if you meet a bear. Brown bears are best appeased by playing dead; black bears need to know this will hurt them more than it hurts you; and luckily there aren’t any polar bears in Yellowstone, because nothing deters them.Until this week the world remained unsure what kind of bear Donald Trump was. Keir Starmer treated him like a brown bear, dropping to the floor when threatened with tariffs and offering up a trade deal. China saw a black bear, to be met with maximum aggression. Though one day we may have to contemplate the prospect of a polar bear president – one who actually means what he said about invading his neighbours – for now what we actually seem to be facing is a crazy bear. There’s no discernible strategy or pattern here: just untrammelled ego, dragging the global financial system to the brink of meltdown and vaporising his own supporters’ retirement savings for no obvious reason beyond the pleasure of seeing impoverished allies desperately “kissing my ass”. And though this bear has lumbered back into the woods for now, seemingly spooked by a concerted revolt in the bond markets, the damage is done.What is still for the cheerfully news-avoidant just a faintly incomprehensible story about rising and plummeting stock markets will, in coming weeks, start shaping everyday lives for the worse. British businesses who have barely been able to work out if they’re coming or going for the last few weeks will pause big decisions while they try to calculate their losses. Our car and steel industries still face job-destroying higher tariffs, while Trump has talked ominously of new tariffs on pharmaceuticals to come (British drug companies rely heavily on US export markets). Along with all countries that did not retaliate against Trump, we remain saddled with a random 10% tariff on all exports, which could presumably still change on a whim. And if the US keeps up its self-harming tariff on China – now an eye-watering 145%, according to the White House, which is adding Wednesday’s 125% to the pre-existing 20% – then before long it won’t just be a case of prices rising for American shoppers but of trade between them breaking down completely, leaving American shelves empty. All this makes nervous consumers worldwide less inclined to spend and employers less likely to hire or invest, raising the risk of recessions – one reason that on Thursday, the markets fell again. There’s no security for working people in any of this, and vanishingly little prospect of growth. For a Labour government elected to deliver both, that is an existential challenge.You can either be the disrupter or the disrupted, Starmer warned his cabinet in February, rather startlingly for someone whose watchword was caution. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has however concluded that the new political divide isn’t left v right but “smash the system” v “look like the system and get smashed”. The obvious disruptive influence then was Nigel Farage’s resurgent Reform UK party, not a trade war, but one may now feed the other.Farage has gone very quiet lately about his now toxic friendship with Trump, but his local election message to England’s post-industrial heartlands is a blatantly Trumpian one about the glory days of manufacturing. This week he went to the pub with workers from British Steel’s endangered Scunthorpe plant – though it was Labour ministers who put in the unsung hours on a deal to save jobs there – before visiting a long-closed colliery to explain that he always thought the miners were betrayed. (Let’s just say that must have been an unusual view in the City, where at the time of the miners’ strike, Farage was working as a commodities trader.) It’s preposterous – Reform’s blend of tax cuts for the rich and dead-end nostalgia for everyone else would do nothing to revive former coal and steel communities – but Trump posing as the rust belt’s saviour seemed preposterous once, too. Farage knows where the electoral sweet spot is, in the seats where Reform is nipping at Labour heels: tacking right on issues such as immigration but left on economics. And while Starmer’s government is quick to compete with Reform on the former, it is more wary of the latter, even though ageing “red wall” voters now complain in focus groups of markets being rigged against them in ways that uncannily echo the disenchanted, Green-leaning southern young.But if Trump is really killing growth, meaning there will be no generous rising tide to lift public services and living standards, the only remaining options are either redistribution or accepting inexorable decline. Time, in short, to pick some enemies; to disrupt something before getting disrupted.Which markets genuinely are stacked against consumers? Who is making profits that can’t be justified? If Trump really has broken the old model, could it be built back better? This can’t mean uncosted, utopian leftwing populism but serious-minded, rigorous reforms that demonstrably put money back in ordinary pockets.What voters seem to want, the American data scientist David Shor and the writer Ezra Klein argued recently in a podcast on the confused desires underpinning American politics, is an “angry moderate”: someone who sounds as furious as they are about the state of things without seeming too frighteningly radical. There is plenty a British angry moderate could attack: from the ongoing debacle of Thames Water to the bafflingly opaque “surge pricing” now operated by everyone from concert-ticket vendors to pubs and hotels; from inequities in the tax system, or the way linking electricity prices to gas keeps them frustratingly high, to the outsourcing of social services that has left private equity firms running children’s homes and nursing homes for profit. (Not entirely alien territory to Rachel Reeves, who once told me that investigating the collapse of the outsourcing company Carillion as a backbencher changed her politics, and who has long embraced the idea of an activist state working to make life less precarious.) But whatever form it takes, offering people “shelter … from the storm”, as Starmer rightly has this week, should mean more than corporate bailouts. If not, anger with Trump could easily morph into anger with domestic governments’ inability to protect their own people from the fallout.He won’t be president for ever. But the mess he’ll leave behind, the jobs lost, the dreams smashed, the neighbourhoods spiralling downwards? That’s the polar bear, the thing that really eats governments. Fight, or say goodnight.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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Farage reportedly met Cummings for ‘friendly chat about the general scene’
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 March 2025, 12:46
Nigel Farage has reportedly met Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s adviser turned nemesis, after the Vote Leave founder suggested voters should back Reform UK at the local elections.Cummings, who was once a sworn enemy of Farage during the EU referendum as he battled to keep control of the leave campaign, is reported to have met the Reform leader to discuss Whitehall changes, which allies said was the strongest sign yet that Farage was taking seriously the idea of becoming prime minister.Cummings and Farage were at odds for years in the run-up to the referendum and during Cummings’s time at No 10, with Farage calling him a “horrible, nasty little man”. Cummings’s Vote Leave won the official campaign designation during the referendum.According to the Sunday Times, the pair met recently for a “friendly chat about the general scene” including subjects such as US politics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as well as “how No 10 and the Cabinet Office really work, about the catastrophe of the Tory party and about what Reform has to do to replace the Tories”. A Reform spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.Cummings was said to be in advanced talks to launch his own new party – the Start-Up party – but in February he posted on X that he believed voters should now back Reform UK.Asked by one X user on Sunday who he would vote for at the next general election, Cummings wrote: “Dunno yet but obviously everyone should vote Reform this spring … No downsides, just upsides.”In a post on his Substack, Cummings claimed Britain needed a significant political realignment including a merger of the Conservatives with Reform. He wrote: “Shove out Kemi [Badenoch] ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a third force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 … break the coalition supporting [Keir] Starmer, take over No 10, do regime change.”Farage’s party is on course for a number of gains at the local elections in May, including potentially winning control of eight local councils, according to Electoral Calculus.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNevertheless, Reform has been in turmoil for the past fortnight due to a significant rift between Farage and Rupert Lowe, one of his former MPs who has been thrown out of the party in a battle over bullying allegations and referred to the police. Lowe had criticised Farage in a Daily Mail interview and since claimed he had been censored by the party on immigration issues. More

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