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      Special relationship becomes personal as Sunak and Biden bond in San Diego

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      It is common for British and American leaders to try to show the “special relationship” between their two countries extends to them personally.When Rishi Sunak landed in San Diego for a flash visit to see Joe Biden, the world’s media were spared any such attempts verging on the grandiose.There was some light banter from Biden about Sunak’s home in California and carefully coordinated invites between the two leaders for future visits.It was a far cry from the scenes of David Cameron playing table tennis with Barack Obama, or Theresa May holding hands with Donald Trump.But when journalists were ushered out of the gym on the naval base in Point Loma, where the leaders of the three Aukus powers had gathered for a summit, the real strength of the relationship between Sunak and Biden became clear.Instead of reams of officials sitting round listening closely, the two leaders spent nearly an hour alone, preferring to have a more personal conversation.There was plenty for them to bond over, before they got into the nitty gritty. Sunak is a big college football fan, from his days as a business student at Stanford. He still has a house in Santa Monica, around three hours’ drive up the west coast. The prime minister also remains so fond of chocolate chip muffins and Mexican cola that he brought a stash of both home.Of course, Sunak is not always keen to talk publicly about his close ties to the US – particularly the green card he held until 2021 and whether he will publish his US taxes.Biden’s angling for an invite to Sunak’s California home may have left the prime minister wanting to wince.But such encounters are highly valuable.Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to Washington, has made persistent requests for a bilateral meeting between the two leaders. They appear to have paid off, with the prospect of a visit by Biden to Northern Ireland in April, before Sunak returns for a longer trip to the US in June, this time to Washington DC.In between, they will meet again at the G7 summit in Japan in May. Three such meetings in as many months means hopes are not high Biden will come to the UK for the king’s coronation.There are plenty of issues requiring joint engagement by both leaders that will continue in the background. As well as fulfilling plans to give Australia a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and working through Britain’s concerns about the US Inflation Reduction Act, the question of how to deal with China’s growing “aggression” is a live one.It is likely to have been one of the main topics the two leaders discussed when they held talks away from prying eyes this week.Biden joined the US Senate in 1973, meaning he has been in frontline politics for longer than Sunak, 42, has been alive. There is a wealth of wisdom and experience for the prime minister to admire, especially when it comes to China.During a career keenly focused on foreign affairs, Biden is said to have spent about 100 hours speaking to President Xi Jinping. Much of that was face to face, instead of on long-distance phone calls, making Biden the western world leader with perhaps the greatest personal insight into Xi’s character.At Monday’s summit of the three Aukus powers, they agreed that the “challenge” posed by China stretched decades ahead.So for Sunak to be able to draw on reflections from Biden looking back long term may prove a helpful counterbalance to hot-headed Tory backbenchers. More

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      Aukus deal 'the biggest single investment in Australia's defence capability in history' – video

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      Anthony Albanese joined US president Joe Biden and UK prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce an Aukus agreement in San Diego that ‘represents the biggest single investment in Australia’s defence capability in all of our history,’ Albanese said. The first Australian-built nuclear-powered submarines, fitted with vertical launch systems to fire cruise missiles, are due to enter into service in the early 2040s

      Aukus: nuclear submarines deal will cost Australia up to $368bn
      Aukus nuclear submarine deal loophole prompts proliferation fears
      Size of UK’s nuclear submarine fleet could double under Aukus plans More

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      Revealed: the US adviser who tried to swing Nigeria’s 2015 election

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      Revealed: the US adviser who tried to swing Nigeria’s 2015 electionSam Patten, an American consultant later mired in controversy, exploited emails obtained by Tal Hanan’s team In late December 2014, a team from Cambridge Analytica flew to Madrid for meetings with a handful of old and new contacts. A member of the former Libyan royal family referred to as “His Royal Highness” was there. So, too, was the son of a US billionaire, a Nigerian businessman and a private Israeli intelligence operative.For Alexander Nix, the Etonian chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and his new employee Brittany Kaiser, who networked like most other people breathed, there may have been nothing unusual about such a gathering.But, by any other measure, it was an unlikely ensemble, not least because last week the identity of the intelligence operative was revealed to be Tal Hanan: an Israeli “black ops” mercenary who, it is now known, claims to have manipulated elections around the world.Hanan, who operates using the alias “Jorge”, has boasted of meddling in more than 30 elections. His connection to the now defunct Cambridge Analytica offers a revealing insight into what appears to have been a decades-long global election subversion industry.Hanan’s group, “Team Jorge”, was unmasked by an international consortium of media, including the Guardian and Observer, which revealed the hacking and disinformation tactics it uses to try to sway elections.Quick GuideAbout this investigative seriesShowThe Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay. The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. Read more about this project.Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. Please consider supporting it today.Three reporters in Israel went undercover, pretending to be consultants trying to delay an election in a politically unstable African country. They secretly filmed more than six hours of Team Jorge’s pitches, including a live demonstration by Hanan showing how he could use hacking techniques to access the Telegram and Gmail accounts of senior political figures in Kenya. Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment but said: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”Previously unpublished emails leaked to the Observer and Guardian proved that Hanan had interfered in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election, in an attempt to bolster the electoral prospects of then incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan – and discredit Muhammadu Buhari, his main rival. And he did it in coordination with Cambridge Analytica.There is no suggestion that Jonathan knew of either Cambridge Analytica or Team Jorge’s ultimately failed attempts to get him re-elected. And the campaign had nothing to do with the hack of Facebook data that propelled the company into the headlines in 2018.Instead, its most salient feature was a classic dirty tricks campaign. Team Jorge obtained documents from inside the opposition campaign of Buhari that could later be leaked to the media. Cambridge Analytica did the leaking.That episode has been drawn sharply into focus in recent days. But one name so far not mentioned has been that of Sam Patten, the consultant who managed Cambridge Analytica’s campaign on the ground in Nigeria. Three years later, Patten would come to be known as a cooperating witness in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.A former state department official, Patten was ultimately charged and pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent to a Ukrainian oligarch. And among a memorable cast of characters who wound up as part of Mueller’s investigation, Patten’s business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, stood out: he was a Russian spy.A spy who allegedly passed polling data – processed by Cambridge Analytica – from the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence in 2016 and planted false narratives about Ukraine in the 2020 election. Kilimnik was later subjected to sanctions by the US Treasury, which described him as a “known Russian intelligence services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf”. He has denied that he worked for Russian intelligence.A campaign so dirty it panicked staffClose readers of the Observer may fuzzily recall some elements of this story from our coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. In the news frenzy that followed the Observer and New York Times revelations about the illicit (and now known to be illegal) heist of millions of people’s Facebook data, one story got lost in the mix.Four days after the original report in the Observer, we published a series of follow-up stories in the Guardian about a campaign so dirty that, even at the time, employees worried that they were implicated in illegal activity. This was the Nigeria campaign that resurfaced this week, with the unmasking of Hanan finally solving the mystery of the identity of the “Israeli consultants” referenced in the story.In 2018, some employees knew Hanan as “Jorge” but his true identity was unknown. Kaiser, grilled by MPs in parliament, said she could not “recall” his name, and she did not know about his activities until after the event.Emails leaked to the Guardian and Observer reveal when Nix asked her the real name of “Jorge” from “the Israel black ops co” in May 2015, she replied: “Tal Hanan is CEO of Demoman International.”Kaiser told the Observer that her parliamentary testimony had been a “daunting experience”, adding: “I didn’t remember the name of the Demoman company when asked.” She said she had no prior knowledge of the methods Team Jorge would end up using in Nigeria, and downplayed her role in the campaign.Observer front pagesCambridge Analytica and Team Jorge were, she said, working “separately but in parallel” for the same client – the Nigerian businessman both sides had met during the gathering in Madrid. “Alexander flew in for this one to pitch the Nigerians and separately so did Jorge,” Kaiser recalled.After the Madrid meeting, Kaiser said, she was not involved in any “operational matters with Jorge” in relation to the Nigeria campaign, which was led by a team on the ground. “I sent some emails to put everyone in contact with each other and sort out who was doing what as time was short,” she added.The emails suggest that Patten would, as part of his role at Cambridge Analytica, take responsibility for exploiting the material that Hanan obtained from the Nigerian opposition. Despite anxiety over the material, which panicked staff had assumed had been “hacked”, someone at Cambridge Analytica combed through the documents, looking for dirt on the opposition candidates.And it was Patten who appears to have leaked select documents to BuzzFeed and the Washington Free Beacon.‘Ghost’ campaign in NigeriaIn January 2015, Patten found himself parachuted into Abuja, Nigeria, to lead a last-minute $1.8m “ghost” campaign for SCL (Cambridge Analytica) in support of President Jonathan and against Buhari. Kaiser had helped land the contract in her first weeks with the company.In her memoir, Targeted, she writes that it was her friend, a former Libyan prince, who introduced her to “wealthy Nigerian oil industry billionaires” who wanted a last-minute anonymous campaign to help get Jonathan re-elected.Emails obtained by the Observer show that Kaiser’s travel schedule in December 2014, when she was helping seal the contract, was a whirlwind of meetings across three continents with highly placed contacts and a complicated web of different, though often overlapping, projects.One was the last-minute attempt to affect the outcome of the west African election. While the wealthy Nigerian client hired Cambridge Analytica and Team Jorge on separate contracts, the expectation was that both sides would coordinate.Within a fortnight of the Madrid meeting, Patten flew into Abuja. He is understood to have coordinated with others in the country against Buhari – among them Hanan, who sources say he met in a hotel in Abuja. Another Team Jorge operative working in Nigeria did so under the alias “Joel”.Hanan claimed in emails that they had entered the country on a “special visa”. A highly placed source told the Observer in 2017 that the Israeli contractors travelled on Ukrainian passports and that their fee for work in Nigeria – $500,000 – was transmitted via Switzerland into a Ukrainian bank account.A busy time for Sam PattenIn press reports, Patten has said he was not involved in Cambridge Analytica’s controversial data-targeting practices. The work he performed for the now defunct firm, he told New York magazine in 2019, was more “standard”, described as analysis, speechwriting, ads and “attempts to sway the media”.But the consortium’s investigation and previous reporting by the Observer suggest a different story. It was a busy time for Patten, whose work in Nigeria took place days before he founded a new company – Begemot Ventures – with Konstantin Kilimnik, the Ukrainian-born political consultant alleged to be a Russian intelligence agent by the US government.According to the emails, Patten flew to London at the end of January. That was where, according to the subject line of one email, a “final sweep” of the material that Team Jorge had obtained using deceptive measures was undertaken. There is no evidence that Patten knew about the nefarious methods through which that material had been obtained by the IsraelisBut others at the firm were alarmed. Cambridge Analytica employees who worked in the company’s office in Mayfair, central London, told the Observer in 2018 how they had been given a thumb drive by two Israeli operatives, one of whom is now known to be Hanan. Employees described their panic when they realised they were looking at private emails that they assumed had been illegally hacked, with one said to have “freaked out”.Do you have information about Tal Hanan or ‘Team Jorge’? For the most secure communications, use SecureDrop or see our guide.Kaiser told parliament that episode was “concerning”. But she said she did not believe the emails had been “hacked” in the classic sense, via computer, but by a person hired by the Israeli team to physically infiltrate the Buhari campaign and illicitly download them there.Whatever the case, it was Cambridge Analytica’s job to search for dirt. We “continue to analyse the information that we received from Jorge to see if there is anything that would ignite the international press”, an employee told a representative of the client. “If we find something, then we will push it.”Patten, it would appear, was focused on exactly that. The problem was that the data dump was disappointing. Referring to “the matter that brought us back to London”, Patten asked colleagues: “Did anyone come up with anything that could be of interest? My overall read is that, while a good insight into campaign thinking, there are few silver bullets or smoking guns.”He added that he would “use the AKPD bits”. That was a reference to emails revealing that AKPD Message and Media, the political consultancy founded by David Axelrod, a former chief strategist to Barack Obama, had briefly been hired by the Buhari campaign.“What are our media pitch angles?” Patten asked the next day, in an email enumerating three points, including that “B’s [Buhari’s] actual positions are obscured by a slick ‘change’ campaign steered by well-heeled American consultants”.Hours later, he sent another email: “Boom. Story 1 in progress, background sources needed, off the record, who other than me can do?” He then sent another email to clarify that he needed someone on the team to speak to a journalist to tell them Buhari, the leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), was “running a tight, American-style campaign with discipline and a scripted message”.Five days later, an article appeared in BuzzFeed headlined “Firm founded by David Axelrod worked in Nigerian election as recently as December”. It referenced “emails between top APC officials obtained by BuzzFeed News”, which echoed Patten’s talking points.On the same day, another article appeared in the Washington Free Beacon that also referenced the leaked emails. It cited “a series of emails” obtained by the conservative news website “between senior APC party members and advisers”.BuzzFeed declined to comment. The Washington Free Beacon did not respond to a request for comment. When reached by phone, Patten said he had no recollection of a man named Tal Hanan or Jorge, and was “not involved” in anything having to do with the “Israeli hackers” who were previously the subject of media attention.When asked whether he had ever contacted reporters to discuss AKPD working for Buhari, he paused. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said, before ending the conversation. He did not respond to further requests for comment. Nix did not respond to questions, other than to say this newspaper’s “purported understanding is disputed”.TopicsCambridge AnalyticaDisinfo black opsEspionageNigeriaGoodluck JonathanMuhammadu BuhariAfricaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The Observer view on the secret garage files that could deal a severe blow to Joe Biden’s hopes | Observer editorial

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      The Observer view on the secret garage files that could deal a severe blow to Joe Biden’s hopesObserver editorialMore harmful than the alleged misplacement of classified documents will be a further erosion of trust in US politics It is almost a Washington tradition that, sooner or later, a sitting president will face investigation by a federal special counsel or special prosecutor – the terms are interchangeable. In recent history, only Barack Obama has escaped this fate and that was not for lack of opponents accusing him of nefarious misdeeds.Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn and wolves are once again baying at the door of the Oval Office.At first glance, last week’s revelations that old, possibly outdated classified documents had been found at a thinktank where Biden worked after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017, and in a garage at his home in Delaware, may not seem such a big deal. But such a view fails to understand the way Washington works. Significant or not, the find has given the flailing Republican party a stick with which to beat the president and it has seized it with grateful alacrity.A clutch of GOP-controlled committees in Congress has already launched a series of investigations, in addition to the independent special counsel inquiry ordered by Biden’s attorney-general, Merrick Garland. They want to know whether national security was compromised; whether Biden’s son Hunter – a longtime Republican target – had access to the files; and why the White House failed to admit their existence until forced to do so by a CBS TV scoop.Crucially, Biden’s opponents are posing the classic Watergate questions: what did the president know, when did he know it and was there a cover-up? It’s a sad fact that whatever Biden says now or in the course of what are likely to be wearying, attritional months of testimony and hearings, many Americans will not believe him. The distrust that infects and distorts US politics can only be expected to deepen.The distraction of attention from Biden’s agenda and achievements is one of many prospective negatives for the president. Another is the unfair, potentially disastrous conflation of his alleged wrongdoing with the ostensibly much more serious case of his predecessor. Donald Trump is accused of secreting hundreds of contemporary classified papers at his Florida home and refusing to hand them over.Biden previously accused Trump of “irresponsible” behaviour, words that are now being thrown back in his face. Suggestions that the misplacing of the documents was a mere oversight or act of forgetfulness play into the hurtful Republican narrative of a senile, incompetent 80-year-old president.Biden did not help himself by joking that his garage was a secure space because he keeps his classic Corvette car there. If the word “Corvette-gate” has not already entered the lexicon, it soon will.The extent of the damage to Biden and the Democrats will depend in part on whether Trump, the Republicans and their Fox News boosters succeed in sustaining and widening the scandal. They will propagate lies, disinformation and conspiracy theories.The White House will try to play down the affair. Yet if, for example, the special counsel discovers the documents – reportedly relating to Ukraine, Iran and the UK – are not merely historical but contain current, sensitive or embarrassing secrets, Biden could be in deep water, politically and legally.It’s almost exactly two years since Biden took office. After a rough start, his fortunes have steadily improved. Inflation is sharply down, Covid is mostly over (unlike in China), Russia is losing in Ukraine, Democrats did better than expected in the midterm elections and Maga Trump-ism continues to divide House Republicans. An announcement of a Biden run for a second term had been expected soon. All these gains suddenly appear in jeopardy and all because of a few dusty boxes of files.TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenRepublicansDonald TrumpeditorialsReuse this content More

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      Today’s rightwing populists aim to disrupt, not to govern | Letters

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      LettersToday’s rightwing populists aim to disrupt, not to govern Readers respond to an article by Jonathan Freedland on the decline of politics on both sides of the Atlantic An excellent analysis by Jonathan Freedland on the problems with the far right and their inability to govern as grownups (After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t govern, 7 January). Governance has been reduced to the anarchic whims of individuals who learn their trade on social media, a platform that fuels their infantilism. It is extremely dangerous when these people have access to power. Exhibit A: Donald Trump.Suppose that during the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the elected lawmakers and the police had rolled over and given way to the mob, let them take up residence in the Capitol and become the new lawmakers. What might have played out? Would one of them (the man in the horned helmet perhaps?) have declared himself a senator/congressman and the leader of the House? Would he have proposed some new laws to his comrades in arms, or laws to help fellow American citizens live happier and better lives? Alison HackettDún Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland As ever, Jonathan Freedland critically analyses the descent of rightwing politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The deterioration, however, is not restricted to the right. In days gone by, politicians such as John Smith, Gordon Brown, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke sought to lead, not follow, the public. They said what they believed and tried to implement and convince. Today, politicians seem to follow rather than lead the public, following, no doubt, the latest focus groups in marginal constituencies.Politicians such as Keir Starmer and Jeremy Hunt undoubtedly know that Britain’s interests are best served by a closer relationship with (if not membership of) the European Union. Rather than be honest about this and try to persuade their fellow citizens, they coalesce around what they believe is the popular position.Brian RonsonSefton, Merseyside The truth is that today’s right wing is not motivated to govern. They have been complicit in, and echo, the rightwing media message that has droned on for decades – a message straight out of the anti-democracy playbook. This is nothing new in recorded human history. “My way or burn it down” has been a consistent theme in radical fascist or fundamentalist mentality. Concern for consequence or social justice is not a guiding principle here. In fact, there is no guiding principle other than a manic five-year-old’s ambition to control the household. When that ambition inevitably leads to a bad end, they blame everyone but themselves and/or reach for a match. Curt Chaffee Seaside, California, USTopicsUS politicsDonald TrumpThe far rightRepublicansBrexitlettersReuse this content More

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      After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t govern | Jonathan Freedland

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      After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t governJonathan FreedlandThe farcical scenes among US Republicans have echoes in our Tory party. Both promise disruption, then deliver exactly that The US right has this week been staging a clown show that has had liberals in that country and beyond pulling up a chair and breaking out the popcorn. There has been a karmic pleasure in watching the Republicans who won control of the House of Representatives struggle to complete the most basic piece of business – the election of a speaker – but it’s also been instructive, and not only to Americans. For it has confirmed the dirty little secret of that strain of rightwing populist politics that revels in what it calls disruption: it always ends in bitter factional fighting, chaos and paralysis. We in Britain should know, because Brexit has gone the exact same way.Start with the karma that saw House Republicans gather two years to the day since they sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another: often overlooked in the anniversary recollections of 6 January 2021 is that, mere hours after rioters had stormed the US Capitol, a majority of Republican House members voted to do precisely as the rioters had demanded and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Yet here were those same House Republicans on 6 January 2023, having prevented the smooth transfer of power from one party to another – except this time, the party they were thwarting was their own.House still without speaker as McCarthy pleads with Republican holdouts – liveRead moreIt should have been straightforward. Republicans won a narrow majority in the House in November, which gave them the right to put one of their number in the speaker’s chair. The trouble was, while most backed Kevin McCarthy, about 20 rebels did not. By Thursday night, they had gone through 11 rounds of voting – the most since the civil war era – without McCarthy or anyone else winning a majority. The result: deadlock.It was a study in incompetence. A party asks the electorate to give them power; they get it and then freeze, unable to take even the first step towards using it. There’s no clear political logic to the stalemate. The rebels are devotees of Donald Trump, but McCarthy himself is a tireless Trump sycophant – patronised by the former president as “my Kevin” – who begged for and won the backing of the orange one. The pro-Trump rebels are divided among themselves: one rebuked Trump for sticking with McCarthy, while another voted to make Trump himself speaker.It’s telling that the rebels’ demands are not on policy but on procedure, seeking rule changes or committee seats that would give them more power. Otherwise, they can’t really say what they want. They succeeded in getting metal detectors removed from the entrance to the chamber, so now people can walk on to the floor of the House carrying a gun, but apart from that, and their hunger to start investigating Democrats, including Joe Biden’s son Hunter, nothing.All this has significance for the year ahead in US politics. For one thing, it’s yet more evidence of the diminishing strength of Trump among Republican leaders, if not yet among the party faithful. For another, if Republicans cannot make a relatively easy decision like this one, how are they going to make the tough but necessary choices that are coming – such as authorising the spending, and debt, required to keep the US government functioning?But its meaning goes far wider. For what’s been on display this week, in especially florid form, is a strain of politics that has infected many democracies, including our own. Its key feature is its delight in disruption, in promising to upend the system. That was the thrust of the twin movements of 2016, Trump and Brexit. Both promised to sweep away the elites, the experts, the orthodoxy – whether in Washington DC or Brussels. They were new movements, but they were drawing on deep roots. Four decades ago both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cast themselves as radicals daring to shake off the dead hand of the government.So we can hardly be surprised that those who railed against government should be so bad at it. They promised disruption, and that’s what they’ve delivered. In the US it was the chaos of Trump himself, and now a House of mini-Trumps that can’t tie its own shoelaces. In the UK, it looks different: we have a prime minister in Rishi Sunak whose pitch is technocratic competence. But that should not conceal two things.First, the post-2016 Tory party delivered just as much parliamentary turmoil and intra-party division as McCarthy and co served up this week. Whether it was the Commons gridlock of the two years preceding the 2019 election or the psychodrama of the three years after it, Brexit-era Conservatism has proved every bit as unhinged as Trump-era Republicanism. When it comes to burn-it-all-down politics, the Republicans’ craziest wing are mere novices compared with a master arsonist such as Liz Truss. The US and UK are simply at different points in the cycle.House Democrats should unite with moderate Republicans to elect a speaker | Robert ReichRead moreSecond, even with Sunak in charge, and though painted in less vivid colours, Brexit-era Toryism is just as paralysed as its sister movement in the US. The five-point plan unveiled in the PM’s new year address consisted mostly of the basics of state administration – growing the economy, managing inflation – rather than anything amounting to a political programme.And that’s chiefly because his party, like the Republicans, cannot agree among themselves. Consider how much Sunak has had to drop, under pressure from assorted rebels. Whether it was reform of the planning system, the manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new houses a year or the perennial pledge to grasp the nettle of social care, Sunak has had to back away from tasks that are essential for the wellbeing of the country. True, he has avoided the farcical scenes that played out this week on Capitol Hill, but that’s only because he has preferred to preserve the veneer of unity than to force a whole slew of issues. The result is a prime minister who cannot propose much more than extra maths lessons lest he lose the fractious, restive coalition that keeps him in office.None of this is coincidence. It’s in the nature of the rightwing populist project, in Britain, the US and across the globe. Brexit is the exemplar, a mission that worked with great potency as a campaign, as a slogan, but which could never translate into governing, because it was never about governing. It was about disrupting life, not organising it – or even acknowledging the trade-offs required to organise it. It offered the poetry of destruction, not the prose of competence.The Conservatives are several stages further down this road than the Republicans, perhaps because their power has been uninterrupted throughout. But in both cases, and others, the shift is unmistakable. Once parties of the right saw themselves as the obvious custodians of state authority: the natural party of government. Now they are happier shaking their fists at those they insist are really in charge. They are becoming the natural party of opposition. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansDonald TrumpBrexitConservativesRishi SunakEuropean UnioncommentReuse this content More

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      The right thrives on bullying ‘snowflakes’. But who will vote for it when they grow old? | Owen Jones

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      The right thrives on bullying ‘snowflakes’. But who will vote for it when they grow old? Owen JonesYoung people deprived of prosperity may represent the first generation that doesn’t grow more conservative with age Spite. When you dig down to the essence of modern rightwing politics, you’re left with little else. This wasn’t always the case. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan offered clear, coherent visions of society, even if their worship of free markets delivered economic insecurity and stagnating living standards. While today’s Tories and Trumpified Republicans remain committed to defending privileged interests, their driving ambition now seems to be deliberately provoking fury among the progressively minded, much to the delight of their supporters. It’s this tendency that led Donald Trump to denounce Mexicans as criminals and attempt to ban Muslims from entering the US; it’s the same tendency that drove the home secretary, Suella Braverman, to declare that her “dream” and “obsession” was to see a flight transporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Cruelty is precisely the point.But this spite has found a particular target in younger British and American people, many of whom increasingly embrace progressive social values such as anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights (granted, this relies on a generous definition of youth as millennials – while the oldest members of Generation Z are only in their mid-20s, the most senior millennials have now reached their early 40s). These generations have become a common enemy for the right. The feeling is mutual. According to new research and survey data, millennials are defying a supposed iron law of politics, that we shift to the right as we age. No other generation in recorded political history has retained such an entrenched rejection of rightwing politics as they’ve grown older.The right has become its own gravedigger for two reasons. First, by building an economic model that promised individual freedom but delivered mass insecurity; and second, by intentionally and repeatedly insulting the social values of the young. British culture fetishes home ownership even while its economic policies make this an increasingly distant dream for younger citizens. Young people have also borne the brunt of austerity, being saddled with university debt and suffering the closure of youth and Sure Start centres. Yet a generation that is more educated than ever but simultaneously deprived of prospects is treated with unadulterated contempt by the right. It is, after all, labelled the “snowflake generation”, which the Collins English Dictionary has defined as “the young adults of the 2010s, viewed as being less resilient and more prone to taking offence than previous generations”.On both sides of the Atlantic, the right fears a younger generation of economically insecure and socially progressive citizens. Commentators and politicians treat younger people as woke barbarians at the gates threatening to tear down everything conservatives hold dear. The moral panic over so-called “cancel culture” is a striking example of this: what it really boils down to is an attempt by millennials and zoomers to assert their progressive social values and reject the bigotries found among some older Britons and Americans. “Millennials are the silencing generation,” complains the rightwing Wall Street Journal, denouncing them as “perpetually offended” (what this perhaps really means is that younger people are less keen on demonising migrants or obsessing over the existence of trans people). “Millennials were woke enough … but the next generation is much worse,” cries the Telegraph, denouncing university students as “Stalinist foot-soldiers”. Younger people are more likely to defend the rights of the minorities bullied and harassed by rightwing politicians, and conservatives hate them for it.And so the British and US right have apparently condemned themselves to a political doom loop: savaging the progressive values of younger generations, and in doing so driving them further into the arms of the left. This bile may serve a short-term political purpose in rallying the core vote of the Tories and Republicans, but it seems that conservatives have thought little about what will happen as younger generations come of age politically and culturally. Perhaps rightwingers believed that the historic precedent of voters shifting rightwards with age would automatically assert itself, however much the young remained locked out of the prosperity their parents had enjoyed. What’s intriguing is how rightwing politicians and commentators alike have doubled down on poisonous invectives that alienate young people. Perhaps this is evidence of a fatalism: they know their fate is sealed, so nothing is to be gained from restraint.As a case in point, last week a British rightwing shock jock announced that she’d choose the life of professional misogynist Andrew Tate “over the life of a half-educated, autistic, doom-mongering eco-cultist” Greta Thunberg. Her use of autistic as an insult was indicative of an increasingly vicious rightwing culture, but the unapologetic loathing towards Thunberg – whose offence is to seek to prevent humanity from destroying itself – was revealing. Thunberg has become emblematic of progressive younger generations: the bile frequently directed at her speaks to a hatred and fear of those whom she is seen to represent.In building and benefiting from an economic model that has left younger people bereft of a secure future, and repelling them with a “culture war” against progressive values, British and US conservatism seems to be authoring its own demise. Young people voted for Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in the 1980s, but little over a fifth of voted for the party in 2019. While young Americans flocked to support Reagan in the 1980s, today their political icons are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The political right has treated the young as the enemy within. It may soon realise what bitter harvest it has reaped as oblivion awaits.
      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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