Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 238 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the Tory right and Trump: a moral abyss and an electoral dead end | Editorial

      by

      The Tory party is carrying out a postmortem on Rishi Sunak’s leadership before it has expired. It is a gruesome spectacle. Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister, has called on the prime minister to resign on the grounds that he is navigating the Conservatives towards electoral calamity and incapable of steering them to safety.MPs who might privately agree with Mr Clarke’s analysis have denounced the intervention as counterproductive. The majority of Conservatives recognise that defeat looms under their current leader and also that it would loom larger still if he were defenestrated. The succession would be chaotic; the government’s threadbare mandate would be void. Fourteen years in office would make any administration feel stale. The lack of tangible achievements, coupled with economic stagnation and decline in public services, gives Mr Sunak’s reign an unshakable aura of decay.But there are also ideological schisms and geographic faultlines running through the Conservative base that make recovery harder. The majority that Boris Johnson won in 2019 combined long-established Conservative supporters, concentrated in southern England, with former Labour voters in the north and the Midlands.It was a politically incoherent coalition, united only in support for Brexit (or at least impatience to end the bickering about it) and aversion to the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. Labour is now under new leadership and Brexit is enacted without material benefits. What some Tory strategists identified as an epic realignment of the electorate has unravelled in the absence of either a positive prospectus for the future or charismatic leadership. Mr Johnson’s potency in that department was overrated but not inconsequential. The incineration of his popularity in the Partygate scandal also contaminated an already diminished Conservative brand.The realignment theory is not entirely without foundation. Sir Keir Starmer might be poised to reclaim many seats in Labour’s former heartlands, but that doesn’t mean that the old allegiance, rooted in working-class identity and local culture, is renewed. Brexit was the catalyst for abandonment of a loyalty that had degraded over the preceding generation. Much of the so-called red wall will remain marginal territory after the next election.That leads some Tory MPs to imagine a swift recovery under a more radical prospectus – fiercer in opposing immigration; more aggressive in “anti-woke” campaigns; and fanatical in cutting taxes.The Conservative ultras draw inspiration from Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march towards nomination as the Republicans’ presidential candidate, and the plausible prospect of his return to the White House in November. The apparent lesson is that blood-curdling nationalism, culture wars on a nuclear scale, contempt for democratic norms and disregard for truth are a winning formula.As a model this is repellent on ethical grounds. On the amoral test of practicality, Trumpism has limited application in Britain. Fixating on potential gains from a more radical rightwing platform spares party ideologues the less comfortable task of accounting for lost support among moderate, liberal and former remain-voting Conservatives. They are now swinging to the Lib Democrats, Labour, or whichever of the two is better placed to oust the local Tory.The more in thrall the Conservatives become to the extreme wing of the US Republican movement, the more brutal will be the electoral punishment that is stirring them to panic – and the more deserved. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      How Winston Churchill became a mascot for anti-woke warriors | Zoe Williams

      by

      ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts,” Ron DeSantis said, as he pulled out of the race to lead the Republican party. It was a strange way to announce that what counts – the continuing bit – is the thing you don’t have. Also, it is quite contestable, for such a short statement; failure isn’t necessarily fatal, but it does depend on what you have failed at. Still, what set most pedants afire wasn’t the substance but the attribution: DeSantis said it was Winston Churchill; the International Churchill Society disagreed. Meh, let’s not split hairs. It is a sort of obvious notion, made of words, so it is surely the kind of thing Churchill would have said, had he said it.This is my favourite kind of Churchill-eering, where politicians summon his ghost simply by adopting similar rhetoric. Penny Mordaunt’s fabulous “Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!” before going on to add, “Never forget those who went before us and remember that without a Churchill, you can’t have a Zelenskiy” during her speech to last year’s Tory conference was a classic of the genre: a pitch-perfect throwback to “We shall fight on the beaches”, having first removed the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets, the hills, any obvious enemy, any clear sense of what was being defended and any endgame. Churchill here stands in as an all-purpose fighty-man, and as such wouldn’t make much of a cultural export, since everyone’s history has those.It took Boris Johnson to repackage Churchill for an international audience, not so much with his book, The Churchill Factor, as in his strategically idiotic attack on Barack Obama in 2016. He was mayor of London then, when the most he could screw up was planning on the Vauxhall gyratory which, to be fair, quickly cohered as a literal and figurative shrine to the emptiness of late capitalism, and is probably the most coherent thing he ever did. But in his downtime, he wrote a column for the Sun, enraged that Obama had moved a bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office (a full seven years previously), contending that the “part-Kenyan president” was motivated by anti-colonialism, “ancestral dislike” of the British empire. To follow the logic, Johnson, having German heritage, would also have reason to dislike Churchill, but he is not doing logic, he is focusing on Obama’s race, which I feel Obama should have met with unending hellfire, rather than a mild: “No, we just moved Churchill to a different corridor.”Too late to worry about that now: Churchill, in Johnson’s new frame, stood not only for nostalgia, a comforting world order with the posh at the top, but also for white supremacy and colonial brutality as an essential part of that past. Winston was now a mascot for the anti-woke warriors, the embodiment of their core principles: the past is better than the present; the world makes more sense with the posh at the top, just listen to their lovely cadence; the dicey bits – racist exploitation and carnage – are expiated by nostalgia (it was all a long time ago) and implicitly celebrated by it (weren’t things better then?), and anyone who disagrees hates their country.It makes no sense as an export, least of all to the US, which had made its feelings plain about the yoke of the British empire 99 years before Churchill was born. It doesn’t even make much sense as a British narrative, which had previously been happy to dial down Churchill’s imperialism, concentrating on its more nuanced expressions, and use him mainly as the totem of Britain’s successful fight against fascism. In Johnson’s revision, Churchill the Coloniser is as valorised as Churchill the anti-Nazi. Its nonsensical nature is why it’s the perfect cultural export: stripped of all meaning, just some loud, posh vibes, caricatured to the point where you can’t remember what the original looks like, political rhetoric’s answer to Saltburn.Loth as I am to get into combat about who knows Churchill the best, between me, Johnson and DeSantis, we all know this, right? He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid; he would have hated this. He would be turning in his grave. More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      A skirt served my grandfather well in the first world war | Brief letters

      by

      Re your letters about men’s skirts (12 January), I am proud to say that my grandfather fought his way through the whole of the first world war wearing a khaki skirt. As a soldier he was part of the London Scottish regiment fighting in the trenches. Furthermore, it is said that his fellow soldiers told that he shaved every day.Mary TippettsBristol It’s useful to get a clear sight of what really matters to the UK and US governments. The prompt military action against Houthis in Yemen (Report, 11 January) shows clearly that any threat to global trade and the smooth running of capitalism is far more important than meaningful action to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza.Norman MillerBrighton I agree with the first eight reasons (Yes, it’s cold, it’s wet and it’s dark – but here are nine reasons to love January, 14 January), but I take issue with number nine: “It really can’t get any worse.” What about February?Geoff SmithEndon, Staffordshire Re dramas that have changed history (Letters, 14 January), Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was allegedly greeted by Abraham Lincoln during the American civil war with the words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”Tom StubbsLondon What’s all this about men in their 70s wearing underpants (Letters, 14 January)? Gosh, I must try it sometime.Toby WoodPeterborough More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Houthis vow retaliation for US and UK airstrikes – video

      by

      A Houthi military spokesperson says overnight strikes by the US and UK, in response to the movement’s attacks on ships in the Red Sea, will not go without ‘punishment or retaliation’.

      Yahya Sarea said the strikes had killed five Houthi fighters and wounded six others, and that the group would continue to target ships headed for Israel in response to the country’s war on Gaza.

      The US and the UK said steps had been taken to minimise civilian casualties, partly by attacking at night, but it was unclear initially what damage had been done on the ground and the impact on the Houthi and civilian populations More

    • 263 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Beware the ‘botshit’: why generative AI is such a real and imminent threat to the way we live | André Spicer

      by

      During 2023, the shape of politics to come appeared in a video. In it, Hillary Clinton – the former Democratic party presidential candidate and secretary of state – says: “You know, people might be surprised to hear me saying this, but I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot. Yeah, I know. I’d say he’s just the kind of guy this country needs.”It seems odd that Clinton would warmly endorse a Republican presidential hopeful. And it is. Further investigations found the video was produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI).The Clinton video is only one small example of how generative AI could profoundly reshape politics in the near future. Experts have pointed out the consequences for elections. These include the possibility of false information being created at little or no cost and highly personalised advertising being produced to manipulate voters. The results could be so-called “October surprises” – ie a piece of news that breaks just before the US elections in November, where misinformation is circulated and there is insufficient time to refute it – and the generation of misleading information about electoral administration, such as where polling stations are.Concerns about the impact of generative AI on elections have become urgent as we enter a year in which billions of people across the planet will vote. During 2024, it is projected that there will be elections in Taiwan, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, the European Union, the US and the UK. Many of these elections will not determine just the future of nation states; they will also shape how we tackle global challenges such as geopolitical tensions and the climate crisis. It is likely that each of these elections will be influenced by new generative AI technologies in the same way the elections of the 2010s were shaped by social media.While politicians spent millions harnessing the power of social media to shape elections during the 2010s, generative AI effectively reduces the cost of producing empty and misleading information to zero. This is particularly concerning because during the past decade, we have witnessed the role that so-called “bullshit” can play in politics. In a short book on the topic, the late Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit specifically as speech intended to persuade without regard to the truth. Throughout the 2010s this appeared to become an increasingly common practice among political leaders. With the rise of generative AI and technologies such as ChatGPT, we could see the rise of a phenomenon my colleagues and I label “botshit”.In a recent paper, Tim Hannigan, Ian McCarthy and I sought to understand what exactly botshit is and how it works. It is well known that generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT can produce what are called “hallucinations”. This is because generative AI answers questions by making statistically informed guesses. Often these guesses are correct, but sometimes they are wildly off. The result can be artificially generated “hallucinations” that bear little relationship to reality, such as explanations or images that seem superficially plausible, but aren’t actually the correct answer to whatever the question was.Humans might use untrue material created by generative AI in an uncritical and thoughtless way. And that could make it harder for people to know what is true and false in the world. In some cases, these risks might be relatively low, for example if generative AI were used for a task that was not very important (such as to come up with some ideas for a birthday party speech), or if the truth of the output were easily verifiable using another source (such as when did the battle of Waterloo happen). The real problems arise when the outputs of generative AI have important consequences and the outputs can’t easily be verified.If AI-produced hallucinations are used to answer important but difficult to verify questions, such as the state of the economy or the war in Ukraine, there is a real danger it could create an environment where some people start to make important voting decisions based on an entirely illusory universe of information. There is a danger that voters could end up living in generated online realities that are based on a toxic mixture of AI hallucinations and political expediency.Although AI technologies pose dangers, there are measures that could be taken to limit them. Technology companies could continue to use watermarking, which allows users to easily identify AI-generated content. They could also ensure AIs are trained on authoritative information sources. Journalists could take extra precautions to avoid covering AI-generated stories during an election cycle. Political parties could develop policies to prevent the use of deceptive AI-generated information. Most importantly, voters could exercise their critical judgment by reality-checking important pieces of information they are unsure about.The rise of generative AI has already started to fundamentally change many professions and industries. Politics is likely to be at the forefront of this change. The Brookings Institution points out that there are many positive ways generative AI could be used in politics. But at the moment its negative uses are most obvious, and more likely to affect us imminently. It is vital we strive to ensure that generative AI is used for beneficial purposes and does not simply lead to more botshit.
      André Spicer is professor of organisational behaviour at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London. He is the author of the book Business Bullshit More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      2024: what happens when US and UK elections collide? – podcast

      by

      There are big election years and then there is 2024. In the US that means a full primary season in which Donald Trump looks set to be confirmed as the Republican party’s presidential nominee before an election expected to be an extremely tight re-run of the race in 2020. Meanwhile in the UK, polls show Labour is favourite to return to power after an absence from government of 14 years. But as Jonathan Freedland tells Michael Safi, nothing is predictable – and even more so when these elections collide. This last happened in 1992, when John Major held on as prime minister in the UK and Bill Clinton came to power in the US. But much has changed since then: now candidates must contend with a wild west of social media as well as the new influence of AI-assisted disinformation campaigns. That and an increasingly polarised electorate and economies still reeling from the Covid crisis. If there is one certainty it’s this: it won’t be boring. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden signals he has no interest in signing US-UK trade agreement

      by

      Ministers have given up on signing a trade agreement with the US before the next election, after the Biden administration signalled it had no interest in agreeing one.British officials had been hoping to agree a “foundational trade partnership” before both countries head to the polls in the next 12 months, having already decided not to pursue a full-blown free trade agreement.However, sources briefed on the talks say they are no longer taking place, thanks to reluctance among senior Democrats to open US markets to more foreign-made goods. The story was first revealed by Politico.A British government spokesperson said: “The UK and US are rapidly expanding cooperation on a range of vital economic and trade issues building on the Atlantic declaration announced earlier this year.” Multiple sources, however, confirmed the foundational trade partnership was no longer on the table.Vote Leave campaigners said giving the UK the freedom to sign bilateral trade agreements with other countries would be one of the biggest benefits of Brexit, with a US trade deal often held up as the biggest prize of all.Talks over a free trade agreement stalled early on, however, thanks in part to resistance from Democratic members of Congress and concerns in the UK about opening up UK markets to chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-injected beef.Earlier this year, the Guardian saw documents outlining how Washington and London could instead coordinate over a partnership covering digital trade, labour protections and agriculture. The deal would not have included lower barriers for service companies, meaning it fell short of a fully fledged free trade deal, but could have paved the way for one in the future.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSources say the deal was always likely to prove difficult to finalise, in part because the US still wanted greater access for their agricultural products. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, said at a food security summit earlier this year that he would not allow either chlorine-washed chicken or hormone-injected beef into the UK.It also became clear in recent weeks that the Biden administration had no interest in signing any kind of a deal before the election, given how Donald Trump had weaponised international trade agreements during his first run for president.A spokesperson for Ron Wyden, the Democratic chair of the Senate finance committee, told Politico: “It is Senator Wyden’s view that the United States and United Kingdom should not make announcements until a deal that benefits Americans is achievable.” More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      A written constitution won’t right Britain’s wrongs | Letters

      by

      Gavin Esler (Here’s the key question about Britain in 2023: why do we put up with this rubbish?, 25 October) makes some good points, but his implication that we should have a written constitution, as the US does, should be resisted. There’s no more pernicious element in American life than the country’s practically irreformable constitution. Made for a slave-owning gentry republic (not a modern democracy), the constitution sports an electoral college that can, and does, overturn democratically elected majorities – often in cahoots with the supreme court, one of the world’s most nakedly political courts (and we complain about Hungary and Poland).The US constitution makes it impossible to legislate for firearms control and periodically allows an irresponsible legislature to threaten the dissolution of all federal government by withholding the revenue needed for the armed forces and civil servants. The US constitution is an affliction that Americans must bear. Let’s not have one. George Baugh Much Wenlock, Shropshire Gavin Esler says that ours is an antiquated democratic system. How can it be described as democratic at all when we have an unelected head of state, an unelected second chamber, a voting system that gives huge majorities in parliament with less than 50% of the vote?In addition, we have three different sorts of devolution to the three smallest parts of the UK and no effective devolution to the much larger regions of England. Dr Ken Hughes Hale Barns, Greater Manchester Gavin Esler’s article poses the questions “why are things so … shit?” and how it is that Liz Truss, Chris Grayling and others seem to repeatedly fail upwards? Esler proposes constitutional change as the solution. There is a much swifter alternative. Don’t vote for people who don’t use public transport. Don’t vote for people who don’t send their children to local schools. Don’t vote for people who don’t use the NHS. Don’t vote for people without links to your local community. Forget constitutional change. Politics can be that simple. Peter Riddle Wirksworth, Derbyshire Gavin Esler’s excellent article identifies the first necessary step in halting our prolonged descent into dysfunction and despair. This age-old decline will not be reversed without grasping the nettle of constitutional reform. How Keir Starmer can be so blind as to claim electoral reform especially is “not a priority” beggars belief. Dr Robert HercliffeLee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire Gavin Esler has it right. Almost every democratic country in the world except the UK has a written contract between its people and their government: a constitution. No sane person would agree to buy a house or a car from a salesman who said that there was no need for a written contract and that “their word was their bond”. And yet most British citizens seem happy to accept that situation with regards to their country. While there are plenty of other challenges facing the UK right now, a written constitution, created by the people, would go some way to resolving much of the dissembling, lying and corruption that are now endemic in our political system. It’s long past time to boot the dodgy car salesmen out of Westminster. Stephen Psallidas Newcastle upon Tyne More