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    Keir Starmer lays down Ukraine peace demand ahead of Trump talks

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    Keir Starmer has raised the stakes before a crucial meeting in Washington with the US president, Donald Trump this week, by insisting that Ukraine must be “at the heart of any negotiations” on a peace deal with Russia.The prime minister made the remarks – which run directly contrary to comments by the US president last week – in a phone call on Saturdaywith Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he also said that “safeguarding Ukraine’s sovereignty was essential to deter future aggression from Russia”.Downing Street made clear that the prime minister would carry the same tough messages into his meeting with Trump in the White House on Thursday.Starmer is likely to tell the US president that the UK will raise its defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product, in line with Labour’s election manifesto commitment.The prime minister is also expected to extend an invitation to Trump from King Charles for a second state visit to the UK.But the meeting is also expected to represent the biggest test of Starmer’s diplomatic and negotiating skills in his prime ministership by far, as he tries to retain good relations with Trump while making clear the UK and Europe’s red lines on Ukraine and Russia.View image in fullscreenSources said Starmer may speak to Emmanuel Macron on Sunday before the French president’s talks with Trump on Monday. The aim would be to agree a broad European position on the Trump-led effort to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.Starmer also spoke yesterday to the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, and agreed that Europe must “step up” to ensure Ukraine’s security.Starmer’s meeting with Trump is being described in Westminster as possibly career-defining for the prime minister. Former UK foreign secretary William Hague said it was the most important first bilateral between a prime minister and a president since the start of the second world war.After a week of extraordinary anti-Zelenskyy and pro-Russian rhetoric from Trump and his team, the US president issued another dismissive assault on Zelenskyy’s leadership and relevance to a peace deal on Friday, saying: “I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you. When Zelenskyy said: ‘Oh, he wasn’t invited to a meeting,’ I mean, it wasn’t a priority because he did such a bad job in negotiating so far.”View image in fullscreenAs well as dismissing the democratically elected Zelenskyy as a dictator, the White House has been pressuring Ukraine’s president to sign a $500bn minerals deal in which he would give the US half of his country’s mineral resources. The Trump administration says this is “payback” for earlier US military assistance.Zelenskyy has so far refused to sign, arguing that the agreement lacks clear US security guarantees.Reuters reported that the US was also threatening to disconnect Ukraine from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system if Zelenskyy does not accept the Trump administration’s sweeping terms.Ukrainian officials characterised the threat as “blackmail”, saying to do so would have a catastrophic impact on the ability of frontline Ukrainian combat units to contain Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe news agency said the US envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, raised the possibility of a shut-off during talks on Thursday with Zelenskyy in Kyiv. An under-pressure Zelenskyy has signalled his willingness to accommodate Washington’s demand, but he has stressed he cannot “sell out” his country.Ukrainian officials are scrambling to find alternatives to Starlink in the event that Trump’s threat is carried out. Ukraine’s armed forces depend on the system to provide real-time video drone footage of the battlefield and to conduct accurate strikes against Russian targets.The Russian military uses Starlink too. Ukrainian commanders are now contemplating a nightmare scenario, in which Musk’s SpaceX company switches off Ukrainian access while continuing to offer it to the Russians – with the White House in effect helping Moscow to win the war.A senior Ukrainian official said his country’s armed forces need American satellite intelligence data. If intelligence sharing were to stop, Ukraine would struggle to continue its successful campaign of long-range strikes against targets deep inside Russia, he said.Asked if the US threat to turn off Starlink was blackmail, he replied: “Yes. If it happens, it’s going to be pretty bad. Of that we can be sure.” Frontline troops used the internet system continuously and it was fitted on advanced naval drones used to sink Russian ships in the Black Sea, he noted.Speaking on Friday, Trump rowed back on some of his earlier comments, which included a false claim that Zelenskyy was deeply unpopular, with a “4%” rating. Trump told Fox News that Russia did invade Ukraine but said Zelenskyy and the then US president Joe Biden should have averted it. “They shouldn’t have let him [Putin] attack,” he declared.Trump’s aggressive remarks have consolidated support for Zelenskyy among Ukrainians, with 63% now approving of him, according to the latest opinion poll before the third anniversary on Monday of Russia’s full-scale invasion.An Opinium poll for the Observer finds more than three times as many UK voters (56%) disapprove of the Trump’s administration handling of Ukraine as approve (17%).About 55% think it likely the UK will need to participate in a large military conflict over the next five years, compared with a fifth (20%) who think it unlikely. A majority (60%) of people believe the UK should increase defence spending. More

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      Polling has turned the US election into a game. We need to take a reality check | Peter Pomerantsev

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      In Washington DC, I measure out my life in polls and heart palpitations. The polls are relentless, nail-biting, maddeningly contradictory. There are national polls, swing state polls, polls from tiny counties that predict a whole election, partisan polls designed to demoralise the other side.There are polls on whether a candidate inspires confidence, compassion, leadership. I’ve noticed how, after a bad poll, I start looking for another that tells me numbers I like. I’ve also noticed how, after a good one, I will look for a bad poll to bring me down, as if I’m trying to prick the balloon of self-confidence and remind myself of “reality”.But the polls never do quite take you to reality. Instead, they shape it. It’s not just what the polls are saying, or even how they were put together, that’s the great problem here – it’s how the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport of feuding personalities. Who’s up? Who’s down? What tactics have they used to get one over on each other? What does it say about their personality? Words are seen as weapons with which politicians show off their ability to subvert or scare the opposition – not as substantive statements about what they intend to do.And what sort of politician will thrive in this world where political speech is just a game? A candidate such as Donald Trump.It was the communications professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella who first noticed the connection between describing politics as a series of strategies and a growing cynicism among voters.This was back in the mid-1990s, when the media was constantly analysing the rivalry between US president Bill Clinton and speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, the early iteration of today’s identity-based partisanship. Jamieson and Cappella found the media was focusing less on the issues the two were debating – often around health reform – and more on how they were competing.The coverage fixated on who was winning, utilised the language of games and war, emphasised the performance and perception of politicians, put a new weight on polls.This sort of coverage activated people’s cynicism about politics – the sense that it’s just a game between self-serving schemers – and then made them more cynical about the media.Decades later, this “spiral of cynicism” is all around us: from the exploding popcorn of polls to the headlines. After Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly compared him to a fascist last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Harris uses ex-Trump chief of staff’s remarks to paint him as unfit for office”.The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not was reduced to highlighting a rhetorical tactic. The idea that all politics is just a cynical game, and that the “mainstream media” is not really looking out for the cares of the voter, has become so pervasive it has helped pave the way for politicians who stand on sweeping away the whole edifice of democracy as we know it.It’s no coincidence that this turn began in the 1990s, when the cold war had finished and the big philosophical debates about policy seemed to be over. Instead, politics became about entertaining performance – the era of Blair, Clinton, Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin. And the media began overgenerating coverage that replaced ideological debate with personality and tactics.The 1990s were also when the reality show emerged as the dominant entertainment format. It initially grew out of observational documentaries seeking to understand society better by ceaselessly filming ordinary people in their homes in such a way that they would forget about the cameras and be more themselves.It quickly became the opposite: a circus where all behaviour was for the cameras. Contestants learned to say and do the most vile things just to engineer scandal and generate attention for themselves.American political TV debates started to imitate the same logic. In a busy primary debate, candidates only get a little sliver of airtime. The way to get more is to attack another candidate in the meanest and most personal way possible, and thus provoke them to attack you back. If you are attacked, then you are allowed more time to respond.So you quickly got debates where supremely clever candidates sling personal abuse at each other to get more attention. The debate stage was set for reality show host Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe design of most social media has followed the same incentives: rewarding taking the most extreme and often nasty statements to generate attention. And Trump has flourished on that as well.The 1990s is when World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) boomed, with its cabaret wrestlers pulling obviously fake fighting moves, where violence is theatre. Trump was always an aficionado of WWE, even taking part in mock fights, and a member of its hall of fame.This year the 1990s wrestling star Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention; Trump enters his own rallies to the theme tune of the Undertaker, who, at the height of WWE, was the “evil” foil to Hogan’s all-American “goodie”. Many of Trump’s followers apply the cultural logic of WWE to his statements. Sure, the argument goes, Trump might say some very authoritarian-sounding things – but it’s just a game.So can we ever find a way back to reality? To issues rather than strategies? We can, and we can even use polling to do so. When pollsters recently gave voters a choice of policies, rather than personalities, to choose from in this election, the majority, including Trump supporters, preferred Kamala Harris’s.Partisan polarisation dissolves when we change how we cover politics. We can also develop different TV political debates, which preserve the excitement of competition but repurpose them to reward collaboration instead of abuse.Imagine a debate format where candidates had to solve a real policy problem, and show how they would work with each other and with the opposition party to achieve it. We could also scale social media platforms that algorithmically detect the commonalities in political disagreements to generate common policy solutions. Such platforms are already being used in Taiwan.Of course, there’s appeal in fleeing from reality to the grotesque circus of politics. But if we can’t face facts, others will force us. This month, at the Wilson Center in DC, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute and Sam Cranny-Evans of the Open Source Centre presented a chilling analysis of Russian weapons manufacturing and supply chains.The slideshow featured satellite photos of munitions factories where freshly cleared tracts of land are being readied to produce more weapons. Vladimir Putin is preparing for a vast war. China’s arms production is on a wartime footing. They are not playing. More

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      Trump one week, Biden the next: what do presidential polls teach us?

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      In recent months, polling has generally showed President Joe Biden running behind his Republican challenger, Donald Trump, by a small margin, particularly in swing states like Georgia and Arizona. But election polling began to fluctuate after Biden’s State of the Union speech last month.The question is how much meaning observers should ascribe to polls in April, seven months ahead of the election.“We’re pretty well beyond the point where it starts becoming meaningful,” said Dave Wasserman, editor at the election-analysis newsletter the Cook Political Report. “We’re seeing a lot of variation in polls, which is not new.”Most political partisans have long made up their minds about their preferred candidate. But large numbers of voters aren’t really paying attention to the election campaigns yet.“The polling has a lot of noise because of polarization,” said Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist, campaign strategist and author of Hit ’Em Where It Hurts. “The polling is measuring latent partisanship. … But, you know, at the end of the day, it is going to be a 50-50 race coming into election day. I don’t know why folks are having a hard time accepting that.”The discipline of political polling comes under perennial challenge every election cycle, occasionally metastasizing into cancerous error like “unskewed polls”. Pollsters try to focus on building a demographic model of the electorate that’s accurate, to weight the results of a poll correctly. If a pollster under- or overestimates the proportion of, say, Latino voters or college-educated voters or young voters on election day, a poll will reflect that error.But pollsters also treat their formulae for weighting polls like a trade secret akin to the recipe for Coca-Cola, said Louis Perron, a political strategist and author of Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections. That lack of transparency contributes to polling error, he said.“Polls have been considerably off for many cycles. Now, after every election cycle, pollsters claim to have learned their lesson, just to be wrong again,” Perron said.“Now, in their defense, primary polling seems to be OK. Let’s wait for the general election. I mean, Trump has been seriously underestimated in many polls, as have Trump voters. So, maybe the simple reason why he’s now ahead is because he’s no longer underestimated. Maybe they have adapted the polling, and that’s why he’s now doing better than ever.”Even the most precise polling leaves room for questions. If the margin of error on a poll is 3%, that means the poll has a 95% chance to be within three points of the population surveyed. The margin of error in a poll varies inversely by the square root of the sample size. A poll of 100 voters may vary by as much as 10% from the views of a group. Polls of 1,000 people have an error rate closer to 3%.Several polls in recent months have suggested Trump is winning as much as 20% of Black voters. Most of those estimates are based on samples within larger polls that are too small to be accurate, said BlackPAC executive director Adrianne Shropshire.“It’s not reflected in our own polling,” she said. Her group polls between 600 and 1,000 Black voters at a time. “There’s nothing close to a historic shift in Black voters’ intentions.”Consider news reports about a New York Times/Siena poll last month showing Trump with 23% support among Black voters: only 119 of the respondents were Black. An Economist/YouGov poll suggested about 12% of Black voters support Trump; there, only 168 respondents were Black. A Marquette University poll cited by the Washington Post showing “at least 20 percent” Black support for Trump surveyed only 92 Black voters.A substantial decline in voters’ responsiveness to the phone calls and internet entreaties of pollsters is adding to polling challenges, Wasserman said. Fewer than 1% of pollsters’ attempts to contact voters for a poll are now successful. Those who do pick up a phone might have stronger political views than those who ignore the call.“It’s a fraction of what it used to be because respondents can screen their calls. They are getting far more spam than they used to,” he said. “Response rates are really, really low, and that creates the bigger possibility for a systemic polling error of the kind that we saw in 2016 or 2020.”But despite the gaps, polls historically trend in the right direction. Polling was fairly accurate in 2018 and 2022 – years without presidential contests, Wasserman noted.“The question is: in ’24, is there a similar hidden Trump vote? Or are polls roughly on the mark? Or is there a hidden Biden vote because Democrats are less enthusiastic about Biden than Republicans are about Trump?”Polls especially have a place in understanding where the electorate is at a point in time.“What the polls tell us is that voters aren’t necessarily enamored with Republicans. But they’re very down about Biden’s management of foreign policy, the economy, immigration – and not by small margins, by very large margins. And that’s contributing to his status as an underdog in this race.”For now, many voters are tuned out of presidential politics, particularly the “double haters” – those who dislike both Biden and Trump. And those are the voters likely to decide the election in close states.“In terms of the general public, they’re both deeply flawed general-election candidates,” Perron said. “Double haters will decide the election. Those who actually have a negative opinion about both candidates will ultimately decide the election by choosing what appears to them to be the lesser evil.” More

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      ‘The worst in modern history’: Super Tuesday won’t hold surprises but warnings abound for Trump and Biden

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      Microphone in hand, Nikki Haley was delivering a well-rehearsed stump speech when a primal cry came from the audience. “He cannot win a general election!” yelled a man, referring to Donald Trump and the ex-president’s chance against Joe Biden. “It is madness!”Haley supporters at a campaign rally in a tiny Washington hotel on Friday signaled their agreement. But they are in a distinct minority within the Republican party as the biggest day of this year’s primary election campaign approaches.Fifteen states and one territory will vote in contests known as Super Tuesday, when more than a third of delegates will be assigned to July’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee. Past results and opinion polls suggest that, by Tuesday night, Trump will have in effect wrapped up the Republican nomination against Haley, his sole remaining challenger.On the Democratic side, incumbent Biden has swept aside token challenges by Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help author Marianne Williamson and is cruising to the nomination. The lopsided contests and lack of suspense are making Super Tuesday, one of the most celebrated rituals of the American election season, look not so super this time.Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said: “It never mattered less. I don’t know any political event that’s got more attention for being less relevant. The decision has been made. The choice is clear. You know who the two nominees are and 70% of Americans would rather it not be so.”Trump is poised to take the latest giant stride in a dramatic political comeback. He was written off by many after his 2020 election defeat, the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and the barrage of 91 criminal charges against him. Yet he has seen off a dozen challengers and easily won the first eight Republican nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the US Virgin Islands, South Carolina, Michigan, Missouri and Idaho.The former Republican president has done it despite – or perhaps because of – a campaign based on retribution against his enemies and the promise of a second term even more radically rightwing than his first. Trump’s scattergun rhetoric, promising to be a dictator on “day one” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, has been rewarded with primary win after primary win.View image in fullscreenCharlie Sykes, a contributor and columnist for the MSNBC network, said: “We’ve learned once again that the Republican party just can’t quit Donald Trump, that there is no red line, that there’s no going back. Nikki Haley and earlier Chris Christie gave speeches that would have been well within the mainstream of the Republican party as recently as 2015 but now they sound like they’re being beamed in from another country.“Part of the reason that so many people take crazy pills is you look at Donald Trump and he has become more extreme, more deranged and more unhinged and yet nothing seems to matter. His authoritarian agenda couldn’t be clearer and yet Republicans who once thought of themselves as the party of liberty and the constitutional order are just falling into line behind him.”Still, there have also been warning signs for Trump. The 77-year-old has repeatedly won less convincingly than opinion polls suggested he would. In the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, the Associated Press’s AP VoteCast found that college graduates backed former South Carolina governor Haley over Trump. She has been running him close in the suburbs, a perennial weakness for the former president.Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Trump is supposed to win all these races, is supposed to be the dominant figure in the party. The fact that, depending on the state and the day, there’s still 20, 30, 40% Republicans who are saying no, I’m going to pass on this, and independent voters who are coming out to cast a vote against him, is not the unified-Republican-party theory of the case that there will be absolute fealty to him.“I’m not saying that any of them in the race could have put together a sufficient coalition against him but, if you don’t go after him, you’ll never get it. If you don’t speak truth about him, you’ll never defeat him.”Anti-Trump sentiment was palpable at Haley’s rally of more than a hundred people in Washington, the capital, an overwhelmingly Democratic city where there are only about 23,000 registered Republicans. The former South Carolina governor argued for a return to normality after the Trump and Biden years, which she asserted had emboldened foreign foes, run up trillions of dollars in debt and left the American dream in jeopardy.Wearing a grey Nike tracksuit sweater with I Pick Nikki and I Voted stickers, Joe Neal, 28, said: “I’m not going to support a seditionist. I’m not going to support someone who supported terrorism, as far as I’m concerned. I certainly agree with some of the former president’s policies but he cannot get my vote this time around.”Asked whether Haley is likely to drop out after Super Tuesday, Neal, an e-commerce business owner, added: “Typically, yes, but this is not a typical year. You’re running against someone who, quite frankly, could be in prison one day and that’s just the reality.”Haley has taken in significant campaign money, including $12m last month, and vowed to fight on. But she has seen some of her financial support waver recently. The organisation Americans for Prosperity, backed by the Koch brothers, announced it would stop spending on her behalf after she lost her home state of South Carolina.Donors could be tempted to pull the plug after Super Tuesday, where the map heavily favours Trump. Polls show him to be an overwhelming favourite in California and Texas, as well as in states such as Alabama, Maine and Minnesota. His campaign projects that he will win at least 773 delegates on the night and formally clinch the nomination a week or two later.Biden, for his part, is assured of the Democratic nomination when party loyalists vote for delegates to August’s Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the 81-year-old also has plenty of political headaches. Polls show deep voter concerns about his age as well as rising prices and an influx of people crossing the southern border.Some Democrats are unhappy with his steadfast support of Israel in its conflict with Hamas in Gaza. An organised attempt to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary to protest Biden’s handling of the war garnered more than 100,000 votes, a significant protest, although the 13% share was only slightly higher than that option got in the last primary under a Democratic president.Last week, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Biden trailing Trump in seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin – when voters were asked who they would support in a hypothetical general election. On average, Trump was leading by 48% to 43%. On Saturday, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that the share of voters who strongly disapprove of Biden was at its highest in his presidency, at 47%.Luntz, who had a long track record of advising Republican campaigns before Trump seized control of the party, said: “With every passing week, Joe Biden gets weaker and weaker as more and more voters come to decide that he’s simply too darn old. And so you see this gap between Trump and Biden widening.“The gap is widening because Biden is collapsing. With the economy getting stronger and conditions on the ground getting better, Joe Biden is still getting weaker. That’s a three-alarm fire in America. The lights are flashing, the people are screaming but Joe Biden doesn’t hear them.”Super Tuesday is not only about the presidential election. Among the most notable down-ballot races is the one in California to succeed the late Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein. Vying to replace her are Democratic representatives Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, a former baseball star.Most pundits will be studying the results for clues about a presidential race that is sure to be close and decided in a handful of swing states.Asked what he had learned from the primaries so far, Luntz said: “That Donald Trump has lost suburban women that used to vote Republican, that Joe Biden has lost Latinos and a fair number of union members that used to vote Democrat, that there is going to be some serious and significant shifting of certain demographic and geographic voters. And that this election is going to be the worst in modern history.” More