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      From LA to Paris, the populist right hates cities – and it’s fuelled by a sense of bitter defeat | Andy Beckett

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      From Los Angeles to London, Istanbul to Warsaw, cities are making rightwing populists angry. Their liberal elites, immigrants, net zero policies, leftwing activists, globalised businesses, expensive transport infrastructure and outspoken municipal leaders – all are provocations to populist politicians whose support often comes from more conservative, less privileged places.Three years ago the founders of national conservatism, the transatlantic ideology on which much of modern rightwing populism is based, published a statement of principles. One of these, surprisingly little noticed at the time, declared with some menace: “In those [places] in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”This month, Donald Trump’s administration identified the first American city – and almost certainly not the last – to meet these ominously broad criteria. “Los Angeles has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens,” he said. It was “a city of criminals” and “socialists”, said his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. “Mob violence” was so disrupting the work of the federal government there, claimed his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that an “insurrection” was under way. Trump promised: “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”That this “liberation” involved an ongoing, expanding and legally contentious military occupation – almost unprecedented in American history – is one indicator of how deep the populist animosity towards liberal cities and their leaders runs. Another is the recent imprisonment of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a challenger to the authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the Turkish presidency. Another is the level of security required for London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which is similar to that for Keir Starmer and King Charles.The death threats, public abuse and state aggression endured by such municipal figures in supposedly free democracies – along with slightly more subtle anti-urban interventions, such as Nigel Farage’s complaint in 2014 that he could not “hear English” on an inner London train – reveal much about rightwing populism, its anxieties and fundamental values. Cities are where the future often starts, and populism is often about holding on to the past.While conservative populism reveres, or says it reveres, the nation state, the countryside, community, social continuity and the traditional family, cities are often places of more fluid loyalties. While populism presents politics as a simple battle between “the people” and their enemies, cities, by gathering so many interest groups in one place, show that politics is in fact a more complex process: involving competition but also cooperation, contests over space and resources, and many social forces, including class, gender, sexuality, local pride and race.More enraging and disorienting still for conservative populists, over the past 30 years many big cities have changed. Trump acknowledges this by describing Los Angeles as “once great”. As Mike Davis laid out in his pioneering histories of the city, for most of the 20th century Los Angeles was, behind its laid-back image, a highly conservative place: racially segregated, repressively policed, ruled by Republican mayors as much as Democrats. Immigration, radical activism, more progressive administrations and liberal gentrification gradually altered the city so that now, while still often shaped by inequalities, it is a stronghold of the centre left.A similar shift has happened since the 1990s in Paris, London and many other European and North American cities. For the right, the loss of these prestigious places has been a bitter defeat – hence their insistence that they have been ruined by liberals and the left. Khan’s centrist mayoralty in London has used its very limited powers to provide free meals for primary schoolchildren and give the capital cleaner air, yet is routinely described by the rightwing press as a dogmatic and disastrous experiment.Such caricatures of cities and their government are all the more unconvincing because they ignore the political complexity of these places. Forty percent of Londoners voted for Brexit, and many of the city’s immigrants are social conservatives. Some of its supposedly most rigid leftwing areas have, or have had, well-known rightwingers as residents: Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, the ferociously illiberal former Daily Mail editor, used to live in Islington, north London. Dominic Cummings still does. At a Turkish greengrocer in the borough, I sometimes see the Tory MP Nick Timothy – who recently told the House of Commons: “Diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge” – queueing seemingly quite happily as the shop hums with different languages, before returning to his home in the even more diverse borough of Hackney.For all the aspects of city life that infuriate those on the right, there are others you might expect to please them: the emphasis on work, the entrepreneurialism, huge importance of property and endless hierarchies. These priorities and divides could push cities back to the right. In the 1980s, much of London elected Tory MPs. Paris had a conservative mayor, Jacques Chirac, from 1977 to 1995.Yet a return to urban conservatism feels less likely with the right in populist mode. As the Economist magazine – not usually an ally of the municipal left – recently pointed out, city government needs “pragmatic politicos who keep … the roads free of potholes … [and] buses running on time”. The broad-brush, administratively chaotic politics of Trump, Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives don’t seem well suited to such tasks.Perhaps that doesn’t matter to the populists. They can go on attacking cities, in order to stir up their voters elsewhere, without actually having to run them. Meanwhile, liberal and leftwing municipal politicians keep key economic and tourism hubs functional, leaving populist national politicians such as Trump free to promote less practical policies. He may hate contemporary Los Angeles and California, but the state’s economy recently overtook Japan’s to become the world’s fourth largest – helpful for a president whose own economic plan is misfiring.Yet the urban resistance to rightwing populism shouldn’t be written off as just playing into the enemy’s hands, as some political pessimists have done during the protests in Los Angeles. Whether on the street or from a grand mayoral office, defying today’s intolerant, reactionary populists has a value – as an act in itself and as an encouragement to others. City life can be grim and disappointing. But one of its virtues is that while trends come and go fast, rebellions are rarely forgotten.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Attorney general warns UK joining war on Iran may be illegal

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      Britain’s attorney general has warned ministers that getting involved in Israel’s war against Iran could be illegal beyond offering defensive support, it has emerged.Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior legal officer, is reported to have raised concerns internally about the legality of joining a bombing campaign against Iran.An official who has seen Hermer’s official legal advice told the Spectator, which first reported the story, that “the AG has concerns about the UK playing any role in this except for defending our allies”.Keir Starmer is considering whether to provide the US with military support if Donald Trump decides to bomb Iran, and whether to approve the use of the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean for the attack. Hermer’s advice could limit the degree of UK support for the US.A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said: “By longstanding convention, reflected in the ministerial code, whether the law officers have been asked to provide legal advice and the content of any advice is not routinely disclosed.“The convention provides the fullest guarantee that government business will be conducted at all times in light of thorough and candid legal advice.”The prime minister chaired an emergency Cobra meeting on Wednesday to discuss a range of scenarios and ongoing diplomatic efforts. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is to meet his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, in Washington DC on Thursday as the US weighs up its options.Trump has yet to make a final decision on whether to launch strikes against Iran. The Guardian reported that the president had suggested to defence officials it would make sense to do so only if the so-called bunker buster bomb was guaranteed to destroy the country’s critical uranium enrichment facility, which is between 80 and 90 metres inside a mountain at Fordow.Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire for days after Israel launched airstrikes which it said were aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials claim the country’s nuclear programme is peaceful and that Israel has caused hundreds of civilian casualties.Taking Fordow offline – either diplomatically or militarily – is seen as central to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons after the International Atomic Energy Agency found the site had enriched uranium to 83.7% – close to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons.Miatta Fahnbulleh, an energy minister, said Starmer would take any decisions with a “cool, calm head” and be guided by international law.“Legal advice is for the prime minister, and I think that’s where it will stay – and you can understand why I won’t comment on that. But what I will say is that we have a prime minister who is a lawyer and a human rights lawyer, he will obviously do everything that is in accord with international law,” she told Times Radio.“No one wants an escalation. No one wants this to erupt into a major conflict in the region that is hugely destabilising for every country involved, and for us globally. So the most important role that the prime minister can play, and is playing, is to be that cool, calm head to urge all partners around the negotiating table and to find a diplomatic route out of this.”However, the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, said the UK could “hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis”.Asked if she believed Hermer was right to sound a warning, Patel told Times Radio: “I don’t think we can hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis and national security when we have to work alongside our biggest ally in the world, the United States, when they look to us for potentially … setting out operational activities through our own military bases.”The UK had not received a formal request from the US to use Diego Garcia in the south Indian Ocean or any of its other airbases to bomb Iran as of Wednesday night.Diego Garcia was recently the subject of a new 99-year lease agreement with Mauritius that left the UK in full operational control of the military base. In practice, Diego Garcia is mainly used by the US, but the fact that it is ultimately a British base means that Starmer would have to approve its use for an attack on Iran.The US is also thought likely to want to request the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for its air tankers, used to refuel B-2 bombers. The UK has deployed 14 Typhoon jets at Akrotiri to protect its bases and forces and to help regional allies, such as Cyprus and Oman, if they come under attack. More

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      What Elon Musk wore to the White House foreshadowed his downfall

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      In case you missed it, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have fallen out.For some – and in particular anyone looking at the tech billionaire’s White House wardrobe – this will come as little surprise. Long before anyone hit send on those inflammatory tweets, or tensions spilled out over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), Musk’s political downfall was written in the stitching.During his time in the White House, Musk shunned the sartorial rulebook of someone at the shoulder of a president, where suits and ties are the common code. He wore dark Maga baseball caps at the Oval Office and told a rally in New York: “I’m not just Maga, I’m dark gothic Maga.” Then there were the T-shirts with slogans such as “Occupy Mars”, “Tech Support” and “Dogefather”. At campaign rallies, commentators noted he looked “more like he belonged at a Magic: The Gathering tournament than a political event”, his dress sense the style equivalent of the k-holes that it is claimed Musk frequently disappeared into.The more casual styles of Musk and his Silicon Valley tech bros – where stiff collars are eschewed in favour or crewnecks, tailored jackets softly pushed out the door by padded gilets – are light years away from those of the suited-and-booted US Capitol.But if Musk’s clobber signalled a new DC power shift, it also spoke to different norms. “Disruption might be a badge of honour in the tech space,” says DC-based image coach and style strategist Lauren A Rothman, “but in politics, chaos has a much shorter runway. The White House has been around for a long time. We’re not going to stop wearing suits … This is the uniform.”View image in fullscreenAll of this dressing down, dressing objectively badly and dressing “inappropriately” has form. Consider, if you can bear to, the case of Dominic Cummings. The former Boris Johnson aide subjected Westminster to dishevelment, Joules gilets, beanies, Billabong T-shirts and tote bags advertising the 1983 gothic-inspired horror novel The Woman in Black. He wasn’t just a Tory, he was a gothic horror Tory.As Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, notes: “Dressing down is usually a power move in politics, just as it is in the boardroom: only the most powerful can get away with it.” That was, he says, the message Cummings sent “when he roamed Number 10 in a gilet: ‘You lot are worker bees who have to wear a uniform, whereas I’m so indispensable to the man at the top, I can wear what I like’.”It was the same with Musk, whose threads were a flipped bird to all those Oval Office stiffs in suits. As Rothman puts it: “His uniform of casual defiance stands in sharp contrast to that traditionally suited corridor of political power.” And that contrast screams out his different, special status.Before him, there was “Sloppy Steve” Bannon, a man never knowingly under-shirted. On this side of the Atlantic, Freedland points to former David Cameron adviser Steve Hilton and his penchant for turning up to meetings barefoot: “ditching the shoes was an instant way of signalling his membership of the inner circle”.It’s that age-old question: who has the privilege to be scruffy? As Freedland puts it: “Musk was happy to stand next to the Resolute desk of the president looking like he was dressed for a gamers’ convention. That was his way of reminding everyone of his superior wealth and unique status, outside conventional politics.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut what Cummings and Musk share in sartorial disorder, they also share in political trajectories. Scruffy Icaruses who flew too close to the sun; their clothes a foreshadowing of their fall. Trump might talk about draining the swamp, but his Brioni suits are very much swamp-coded – plus, while Johnson might have had strategically unruly hair and ill-fitting suits as crumpled as a chip wrapper, suits they still were.Ultimately, nobody likes a bragger. Because dressing in a way in which your privilege is omnipresent if not outright stated, is a surefire way to piss people off. Not least Trump, who noted that Musk had “some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him, actually”, in an interview on Fox in February.“The contrast between Musk’s garb and Trump’s cabinet,” according to Freedland, “made them look and seem inferior: servants of the president rather than his equal. It was one more reason why more than a few in Trumpworld are glad to see the (poorly tailored) back of Elon Musk.”To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday. More

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      The spirit of Liz Truss, ridiculous but relentless, still stalks British politics | Rafael Behr

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      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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      The Guardian view on UK military strategy: prepare for a US retreat – or be left gravely exposed | Editorial

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      With the prime minister’s Churchillian claims that “the front line is here”, the public might expect a military posture that meets the drama of the moment. Yet the promised rise in defence spending – from 2.3% to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027 – suggests something less than full-scale mobilisation. The strategic defence review is systematic and detailed, but it remains an exercise in tightly bounded ambition. It speaks of daily cyber-attacks and undersea sabotage, but proposes no systemic institutional overhaul or acute surge in resilience. Given the developing dangers, it is surprising not to spell out a robust home-front framework.Instead, it is a cautious budget hike in the costume of crisis – signalling emergency while deferring real commitment for military financing. The review suggests that the more ambitious spending target of 3% of GDP, still shy of Nato’s 3.5% goal, is delayed to the next parliament. The plan is not to revive Keynesianism in fatigues. It is a post-austerity military modernisation that is technocratic and geopolitically anxious. It borrows the urgency of the past without inheriting its economic boldness.The review marks a real shift: it warns of “multiple, direct threats” for the first time since the cold war and vows to reverse the “hollowing out” of Britain’s armed forces. But in an age of climate emergencies and democratic drift, UK leadership should rest on multilateralism, not pure militarism. Declaring Russian “nuclear coercion” the central challenge, and that the “future of strategic arms control … does not look promising”, while sinking £15bn into warheads, risks fuelling escalation instead of pursuing arms control.Given the war in Ukraine, there is an ominous warning about changing US “security priorities”. This calls into question the wisdom of being overly reliant on America, which is now internally unstable and dismantling global public goods – such as the atmospheric data that drones rely on for navigation. Left unsaid but clearly underlying the report is the idea that the old defence model is no longer sufficient – for example, when maritime adversaries can weaponise infrastructure by sabotaging undersea cables, or where critical data systems are in commercial hands. It cannot be right that Ukraine’s sovereignty depends on the goodwill of the world’s richest man. But the private satellite network Starlink keeps Ukrainian hospitals, bases and drones online, leaving Kyiv hostage to the whims of its volatile owner, Elon Musk.The menace of hybrid warfare – including disinformation, cyber-attacks, economic pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces – intensified in the last decade. This should see Britain forge deeper institutional ties with European partners, not just military but in infrastructure and information technologies. This would allow for a sovereign digital strategy for European nations to free them from dependency on mercurial actors.Though the review gestures toward greater societal involvement, it stops short of articulating a whole-of-society doctrine like Norway’s. This, when some analysts say the third world war has already begun with a slow, global breakdown of the post-1945 institutional order. The defence review should be about more than missiles and missions. It must also be about whether the country can keep the lights on, the gas flowing, the internet up and the truth intact. This review sees the threats, but not yet the system needed to confront them. In that gap lies the peril. More

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      The Guardian view on Britain’s new aid vision: less cash, more spin. The cost will be counted in lives | Editorial

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      Last week, the government justified cutting the UK’s development budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income – the lowest level in more than 25 years – by claiming Britain’s role is now to “share expertise”, not hand out cash. With a straight face, the minister responsible, Jenny Chapman, told MPs on the international development committee that the age of the UK as “a global charity” was over. But this isn’t reinvention – it’s abdication, wrapped in spin. No wonder Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who is chair of the committee, called Lady Chapman’s remarks “naive” and “disrespectful”. Behind the slogans lies a brutal truth: lives will be lost, and Britain no longer cares. Dressing that up as the “new normal” doesn’t make it less callous.Kevin Watkins of the London School of Economics analysed the cuts and found no soft-landing options. He suggests charting a sensible course through this wreckage, noting that harm from the cuts is inevitable but not beyond mitigation. Dr Watkins’ proposals – prioritising multilateralism, funding the global vaccine alliance (Gavi) and replenishing international lending facilities – would prevent some needless deaths. Ministers should adopt such an approach. The decision to raid the aid budget to fund increased defence spending was a shameful attempt to cosy up to Washington. The cuts were announced just before Sir Keir Starmer’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, with no long-term strategy behind them. It’s a deplorable trend: globally, aid levels could fall by $40bn this year.The gutting of USAID, the world’s biggest spender on international development, by Elon Musk, was less fiscal policy than culture-war theatre. Foreign beneficiaries don’t vote, and liberal-leaning aid contractors lack clout, so dismantling USAID shrinks “globalism” while “owning the establishment”. But the real casualties lie elsewhere. Memorably, Bill Gates said the idea of Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, “killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”. Countries that built health systems around USAID now face a reckoning. It wasn’t just cash – it sustained disease surveillance, logistics and delivery. Ironically, much of it never left American hands, absorbed by US private interests.In the UK, University of Portsmouth researchers say aid increasingly serves foreign policy, not development. It’s not just ineffective – it’s cynical. Aid should change lives, not wave flags. All this as poor nations’ debt crisis deepens. Without global reform, the Institute for Economic Justice warns, African nations face a cycle of distress blocking investment in basic needs. The UK recasts withdrawal as progress – holding up Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as model partners. But Georgetown University’s Ken Opalo makes a cutting point: in diplomacy, when the music stops, those who outsourced ambition get exposed. Aid dependency, he argues, has hollowed out local ownership. With little planning, many governments now face a choice: take over essential services or cling to a vanishing donor model.Politicians should choose their words carefully. The former Tory development secretary Andrew Mitchell rightly criticised Boris Johnson’s “giant cashpoint in the sky” remark for damaging public support for aid. Labour ministers are guilty, too. Britain has replaced moral leadership with metrics, and compassion with calculation. The policy’s defenders call it realism. But without vision, it’s just surrender – leaving the world’s poor to fend for themselves, forced to try to survive without the means to do so. More

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      Trump’s chief trade adviser says Britons will like chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef – US politics live

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      Peter Navarro, Trump’s chief trade adviser, just told reporters outside the White House that British consumers will like chicken and beef imported from the US despite the use of chlorine and hormones.“Let’s see what the market decides,” Navarro said when asked about longstanding concerns in the UK about the safety of chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef produced in the US.“Our position is and always has been”, he added, that sanitary standards are “simply a phony tool used to suppress what is very fine American agricultural product”.“So if more of that comes into the market and the British people don’t want to buy it, that’s one set of facts,” Navarro said. “We don’t believe that once they taste American beef and chicken that they would prefer not to have it.”One point of apparent disagreement between American and British officials seems to be whether the UK will have to drop its digital services tax, imposed on US tech companies like Amazon, Google and Meta.The tax, which is imposed by several European countries and is set at 2% by the UK on the revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplaces, was described recently by the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent as an “unfair tax on one of America’s great industries”.While the 10 Downing Street statement on the new trade deal agreed on Thursday says, “The Digital Services Tax remains unchanged as part of today’s deal”, Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters a short time ago, “we’re still in negotiations with that”.“That’s a very big deal to President Trump”, Navarro added. “The digital tax has spread like a bad virus around the world, but it started in Europe, and it basically targets American companies”.According to the UK prime minister’s office, instead of dropping that tax, “the two nations have agreed to work on a digital trade deal that will strip back paperwork for British firms trying to export to the US – opening the UK up to a huge market that will put rocket boosters on the UK economy.”In the House of Commons on Wednesday, the UK’s trade minister, Douglas Alexander, was asked if the digital services tax, and legal regulations to prevent “online harms”, are on the negotiating table. The tax, and those measures on online harms, he said, “remain undisturbed and unchanged by this agreement”.Peter Navarro, Trump’s chief trade adviser, just told reporters outside the White House that British consumers will like chicken and beef imported from the US despite the use of chlorine and hormones.“Let’s see what the market decides,” Navarro said when asked about longstanding concerns in the UK about the safety of chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef produced in the US.“Our position is and always has been”, he added, that sanitary standards are “simply a phony tool used to suppress what is very fine American agricultural product”.“So if more of that comes into the market and the British people don’t want to buy it, that’s one set of facts,” Navarro said. “We don’t believe that once they taste American beef and chicken that they would prefer not to have it.”Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and Donald Trump agreed on the need to quickly resolve trade disputes in a phone call on Thursday evening, Reuters reports that a German government spokesperson said.The two leaders also agreed on the need to closely cooperate with the aim of ending the war in Ukraine, the spokesperson said.“President Trump congratulated the Chancellor on taking office” earlier this week, the spokesperson said. “Chancellor Merz assured the American President that, 80 years after the end of the second world war, the United States remains an indispensable friend and partner of Germany.”On the day of his election earlier this week, Merz warned the US to “stay out” of his country’s politics after the far-right AfD received strong backing from allies of the US president, including Vice-President JD Vance and controversial tech billionaire Elon Musk.Merz condemned recent “absurd observations” from the US, without specifying particular statements, and said he “would like to encourage the American government … to largely stay out of” German domestic politics.

      The state department said a solution to be able to deliver food aid to Gaza was “steps away” and an announcement was coming shortly, although it fell short of detailing what the plan would entail, per Reuters. Gaza is on the brink of catastrophe after two months of a total blockade by Israel.

      Trump and British PM Keir Starmer announced some details of the framework for a future US-UK trade deal, most of which pertained to cars, steel and aluminum, and agriculture. The details have not been finalized, but what was announced today was that tariffs for UK cars imported into the US would be cut from 27.5% to 10% up to a maximum of 100,000 cars a year, while US tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminum would be dropped to zero. On agriculture, Starmer said there had been no compromise on food standards, while the deal would open exclusive access for UK beef farmers to the US. But it also includes £5bn worth of agricultural exports from the US to the UK, with ethanol and beef – of great concern to British farmers – the only products mentioned specifically. US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said the deal would “exponentially increase our beef exports” to the UK. While the White House fact sheet and later press release from the US commerce department alluded to “unprecedented access” to the UK market for other American agricultural products being on the table in the talks – which neither side talked about in their press conferences today – they appeared to actually be referring to areas where the US already exports to the UK, albeit in small amounts.

      Trump congratulated Pope Leo XIV on his election to head the Catholic Church on Thursday, writing on Truth Social that it “is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope”. Trump said he was looking forward to meeting Robert Francis Prevost, who is originally from Chicago. A quick glance at Prevost’s X account gives some indication to his possible views on the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Whether this might put him on a similar path to the late Pope Francis, who had a difficult relationship with the US president as a vocal critic of his most aggressive policies, remains to be seen.

      Bill Gates announced plans to shutter the Gates Foundation in 2045 and also strongly criticized Elon Musk for slashing funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing the Tesla CEO of “killing the world’s poorest children” in new interviews.

      Trump said he will nominate a new candidate to serve as Washington DC’s top federal prosecutor, after his first pick Ed Martin, who holds the job on an interim basis, failed to garner enough support to advance in the Senate. Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who sits on the Senate judiciary committee, appeared to deal Martin’s nomination a fatal blow when he told reporters he could not support him because of Martin’s past comments which downplayed the January 6, 2021 US Capitol attack.

      The Trump administration asked the supreme court to intervene in its bid to revoke the temporary legal status granted by Joe Biden to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the US.

      An Irish woman who was detained by US immigration authorities because of a criminal record dating back almost 20 years was released after 17 days in custody.
      Reuters reports that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was speaking to Donald Trump on Thursday evening (Ukrainian time), according to Zelenskyy’s spokesperson Serhiy Nikiforov.We’ll bring you more on this as we get it.The state department said a solution to be able to deliver food aid to Gaza was “steps away” and an announcement was coming shortly, although it fell short of detailing what the plan would entail, Reuters reports.Gaza is on the brink of catastrophe after two months of a total blockade by Israel, aid workers say, with many families down to one meal a day. Medical officials report rising cases of acute malnutrition, and community kitchens that served 1m meals a day are shutting down for lack of basic essentials. Aid agencies say they have distributed all remaining stocks of food. Dozens of bakeries that supplied vital free bread closed last month.I’ll bring you more on this as we get it.My colleague Peter Walker has this very helpful explainer from a UK perspective of the key points of the US-UK trade deal that was announced to be under discussion today.

      Tariffs for UK cars imported into the US will be cut from 27.5% to 10%, up to a maximum of 100,000 cars a year, close to total exports last year (after that the tariff will be 25%). This was, Starmer said, a “huge and important reduction” – even if it is capped, and still a tariff.

      Agriculture is the most potentially tricky area of the deal, not least due to concerns among UK voters – and farmers – about chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef. The result was hailed by Downing Street as “a win for both nations”. As ever, the devil could be in the detail. Government officials said there had been no compromise on food standards, while the deal would open exclusive access for UK beef farmers to the US. But, it also includes £5bn worth of agricultural exports from the US to the UK, with the US agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, saying the deal would “exponentially increase our beef exports” to the UK.
      Read Peter’s full piece here:Americans are celebrating after US cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, was announced as the next pope.“Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope. It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after the pope, who was born in Chicago, appeared on the Vatican balcony in Rome, Italy on Thursday.Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson quipped on X about Prevost’s appointment:
      Everything dope, including the Pope, comes from Chicago! Congratulations to the first American Pope Leo XIV! We hope to welcome you back home soon.
      The US Embassy to the Holy See also lauded the new pope on X:
      With joy we extend our heartfelt congratulations to the first Pope from the United States of America, His Holiness Robert Francis Prevost, as Pope Leo XIV, elected as the 267th Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church.
      As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council astutely notes on X, the new pope didn’t post on his X account at all in 2024, but in 2025 he has posted twice and reposted three times.Of his own posts, Robert Prevost – now Pope Leo XIV – posted an article criticizing vice-president JD Vance’s take on Jesus, and posted another article critiquing Vance’s statements on the administration’s deportation policies. Two of his reposts were to do with the health of the late Pope Francis, and his most recent repost was criticism of Donald Trump and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele’s laughter at Kilmar Ábrego García (who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration and whose reeturn to the US the supreme court has ordered the administration to facilitate).Earlier, Trump said he looked forward to meeting with the new pope, who he had “realised” was the first American to hold the position. How Pope Leo’s personal views will influence their relationship going forward will be interesting to see. Indeed, Trump had a difficult relationship with the late Pope Francis, a vocal critic of many of his policies – particularly his crackdown on immigration which, as recently as February this year, Francis called a “major crisis”.Donald Trump said he will nominate a new candidate to serve as Washington DC’s top federal prosecutor, after his first pick Ed Martin, who holds the job on an interim basis, failed to garner enough support to advance in the Senate.“I was disappointed. A lot of people were disappointed, but that’s the way it works sometimes,” Trump said in the Oval Office earlier. “We have somebody else that we’ll be announcing over the next two days who’s going to be great.” A spokesperson for Martin’s office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.A source close to the Senate judiciary committee earlier this week said the committee would not move forward with a vote before Martin’s interim term expires on 20 May.Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who sits on the committee, appeared to deal Martin’s nomination a fatal blow when he told reporters he could not support him because of Martin’s past comments which downplayed the January 6, 2021 US Capitol attack.Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the panel, said he was “relieved” that the nomination was withdrawn and that “Martin’s record made it clear that he does not have the temperament or judgment” for the top US law enforcement job for the nation’s capital.Per Politico: “Martin has spent the last few years advocating for January 6 defendants and helping organize their legal defense. He has embraced conspiracy theories about the attack and the results of the 2020 election and he has spoken favorably about some of the most egregious perpetrators of the riot.“He also has also drawn scrutiny for his evasive answers to the judiciary committee about his relationship with January 6 defendant Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who had been accused of openly anti-Semitic behavior, and omission of dozens of appearances on Russian state media in recent years.”It was unclear what is next for Martin. Trump said he would consider giving him another role in the administration, potentially in the department of justice.Donald Trump congratulated Pope Leo on his election to head the Catholic Church on Thursday, writing on Truth Social that it “is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope”.US cardinal Robert Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV, is originally from Chicago. Trump went on:
      What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!
      For more from the Vatican, my colleague Jakub Krupa has been live-blogging the moment:Tom Bradshaw, president of the UK’s National Farmers’ Union, told the Guardian he is concerned the beef imported from the US will be produced to a lower standard than the UK product. He said:
      80% of our beef diet comes from grass so it’ll be interesting to see exactly what the standards for the imported beef is. We are unclear on that as the details are still being worked on.
      Many beef cattle are fed with soy, which can be bad for the environment as it comes from sensitive areas including the Amazon rainforest.Bradshaw said the “main focus” in their recent lobbying was on hormone-treated beef, but said “the large US beef lots were also a big concern for our members – we will be watching that very closely.”The US has vast factory farms for its beef, which outcompete those in the UK, farmers fear. Bradshaw added:
      What we need to look at is how the US beef is produced, what are the health and welfare standards and what is the diet. [British] beef is one of the most sustainable in the world.
      However, he said he was pleased the UK secured reciprocal access to the beef market, adding:
      We’ve had a very clear ask that we wanted reciprocal access back, and the red lines on animal health and welfare standards have thankfully been maintained. We cannot see agriculture used as a pawn to shoulder the burden of tariffs.
      US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said she hopes to expand today’s agreement to include “all meats” and that she will be visiting the UK next week to make this point, adding: “There is no industry that has been treated more unfairly than our agriculture industry.”Bradshaw replied “good luck with that,” adding:
      The [UK] government is trying to negotiate with the EU [which also has high food standards] at the same time so that sounds unfeasible.
      The US-UK trade deal includes £5bn worth of agricultural exports. The farming sector in the UK has been very concerned about farmers being undercut with cheap products from the US, which has lower environmental standards for its food than the UK. They say the large beef feedlots in the US outcompete the smaller farms in the UK.US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters:
      This [trade deal] is going to exponentially increase our beef exports. American beef is the crown jewel of American agriculture for the world.
      UK ministers have been clear that chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef will not be included in any deal, but Rollins said she hopes to expand today’s agreement to include “all meats” and that she will be visiting the UK next week to make this point, adding:
      There is no industry that has been treated more unfairly than our agriculture industry.
      Donald Trump, however, mentioned that US agriculture could end up being produced to higher health and environmental standards under the leadership of his health chief Robert F Kennedy Jr, adding:
      Bobby Kennedy is probably heading towards your system.
      The UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs sources said imports of hormone-treated beef or chlorinated chicken will remain illegal, and that the deal will open up exclusive access for UK beef farmers to the US market. They said only a few countries such as Australia have this access. More

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      Flattery gets Starmer somewhere as The Donald stays awake to toot tariff deal | John Crace

      by

      Three days ago, Donald Trump promised an announcement that would be very possibly the greatest announcement in the whole history of announcements. Come Thursday morning, he said the US and the UK had reached a full and comprehensive trade deal.I guess a lot depends on what you mean by the words “greatest announcement” and “full and comprehensive”. As details of the deal began to emerge, it rather looked as if the UK had managed to negotiate a worse deal with the US than we had even two months ago. One that was hardly transformative. Just reversing some of the damage that had been done to the UK by the US starting a global trade war. Tariffs as a protection racket.Still, a deal is a deal. These days, Keir Starmer has learned you get what you can get. And it’s more than any other country has got so far. It remains to be seen if others come out of the White House with anything better. But Keir wasn’t the only one who needed a quick result. Trump did, too. He had a reputation to maintain as a deal-maker and Americans were beginning to get twitchy that none had been reached. It wasn’t clear if this was a victory for crack negotiating teams, or a sign that both the US and the UK had been a bit desperate. So both sides were keen to chalk the deal up as a win for themselves.Then there was the choreography to think of. A televised phone call between the president and the prime minister, before each gave separate press conferences. In both instances it was Agent Orange to go first. Presumably, because no one was sure he could stick to the script. When you do a deal with The Donald, there’s no guarantee he isn’t going to change his mind before the ink is dry. It would be no surprise if he were to announce new tariffs by the weekend.Cut to the Oval Office where, 45 minutes later than planned, Trump was on the phone to Starmer. Bizarrely, he started by talking about rare-earth minerals, which weren’t part of the deal. He seemed to have forgotten what had been agreed with whom. His minders set him back on track and there were warm words about one of America’s greatest and most cherished allies. You wondered why he had previously treated the UK with indifference if he cared so much.“This is an historic day,” said Starmer. All the more so because it had happened on VE Day. Keir could almost believe he was Winston Churchill addressing a jubilant nation after six years of war. At this point, it looked as if Agent Orange might drop off.Trump’s powers of concentration aren’t all they might be and he finds it difficult when he’s not the centre of attention. Keir did his best to stop the president from flatlining by showering him with flattery. The Donald had been the best. Everyone and everything would be nothing without him.At this, Trump began to perk up. The US and the UK had been working for years on a trade deal. People had said it couldn’t be done, he boasted. And yet he had done it in a matter of weeks. Truly, he was incredible. He didn’t seem to realise that he hadn’t negotiated a full trade agreement. Just a small side hustle encompassing a few sectors. There was a ripple of applause from the sycophants in the Oval Office when Trump managed to press the right switch to disconnect the call.The Donald then invited his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnik, to expand a little on the deal. Howie is reportedly a billionaire but he also delivers a pitch-perfect impersonation of a halfwit. It’s hard to imagine him in a room negotiating the sale of a secondhand car. “This was the president’s deal,” he cooed. “If it had been left to me, it would have taken at least three years. He did everything. He is the closer.” Imagine. Howie had just told the entire world he had been out of his depth in a puddle. Truly, the world is fucked if he is one of its masters.Next up was the British ambassador, Peter Mandelson. Bowing deeply. Full of reverence. Mandy was born for days like these. When all that is required is oleaginous smooth-talking masquerading as sincerity. Truly, The Donald was nothing short of a genius. He wasn’t fit to wipe the president’s shoes. Trump had achieved more than anyone else in the history of the world. Thank you, thank you. We have reached the end of the beginning, he sobbed. Everyone was getting in on the Churchill act this VE Day. Trump nodded. Mandy was right about him.Back in the UK, Starmer was just starting his own press conference at the Jaguar Land Rover factory. Britain was open for business, he said. No less than the whole future of the UK had been saved. Keir, alone, had altered the course of history. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. Keir had managed all three. This was bigger than VE Day. Bring out the bunting. Drink the pubs dry. We were entering a new era of prosperity.This wasn’t just a victory for the UK. It was a victory for Starmer personally. Some people had said he should stand up to Agent Orange. Put the phone down. Don’t give in to bullies. But Keir had emerged triumphant. His brown-nosing had achieved the impossible. Which was, er … not quite as good as the deal we had not so long ago. It was time for the king to get out his silk pyjamas, line up the Diet Cokes and the Haribos and prepare for his sleepover with the president. If Keir had to suck it up, then so could Charles. More