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      in US Politics

      US government appeals UK ruling against Julian Assange's extradition

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      The US government has appealed a UK judge’s ruling against the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, according to a justice department official.The appeal made clear that Joe Biden intends to have Assange stand trial on espionage- and hacking-related charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents.The justice department had until Friday to file an appeal against the ruling on 4 January that Assange suffered mental health problems that would raise the risk of suicide were he extradited to the US for trial.“Yes, we filed an appeal and we are continuing to pursue extradition,” a justice department spokesperson, Marc Raimondi, told AFP.Human rights groups had called on Biden to drop the case, which raises sensitive transparency and media freedom issues.After WikiLeaks began publishing US secrets in 2009, the Obama administration – in which Biden was vice-president – declined to pursue the case. Assange said WikiLeaks was no different than other media outlets constitutionally protected to publish such materials.Prosecuting him could mean also prosecuting powerful US news organisations for publishing similar material – legal fights the government would probably lose.But under Donald Trump, whose 2016 election was helped by WikiLeaks publishing Russian-stolen materials damaging to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, the justice department built a national security case against Assange.In 2019, Assange, an Australian national, was charged under the US Espionage Act and computer crimes laws on multiple counts of conspiring with and directing others, from 2009 to 2019, to illegally obtain and release US secrets.In doing so he aided and abetted hacking, illegally exposed confidential US sources to danger and used the information to damage the US, according to the charges. If convicted on all counts, the 49-year-old faces a prison sentence of up to 175 years.John Demers, an assistant attorney general, said at the time: “Julian Assange is no journalist.”Assange has remained under detention by UK authorities pending the appeal.This week 24 organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and Reporters Without Borders, urged Biden to drop the case.“Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret,” they said in an open letter. “In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalise these common journalistic practices.” More

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      in UK Politics

      Young people more worried about Brexit than catching Covid

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      Despite ongoing concern about the spread of the coronavirus, young adults in Britain are more worried by the devastating economic impacts of Brexit than the pandemic.A new survey shows more than two fifths of young adults – 45 per cent – report being “stressed” about the consequences of the UK’s disruptive exit from the EU’s single market and customs union.UCL academics found a lower proportion of 18 to 29-year-olds were worried about catching Covid-19. Some 32 per cent of young people said they were stressed over the prospect, and only 22 per cent said they feared becoming seriously ill from the disease. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden's announcement on Yemen is a hopeful sign – now the UK must follow suit | Anna Stavrianakis

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      In a speech at the US state department last week, President Biden turned the war in Yemen from a forgotten crisis to front-page news. Since March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition, militarily and diplomatically backed by the US and UK in particular, has been involved in the conflict, which grew out of a failed political transition following the 2011 revolution.The war has killed more than 100,000 people, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, subjected large swathes of the population to famine and generated the worst cholera outbreak since modern records began. All parties to the war have likely committed violations of international law.Biden’s announcement of an end to “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales” has been widely welcomed as part of a US return to multilateralism and an active step to end the conflict. The news should be greeted with cautious optimism: the sense of relief that the US administration seems to be taking the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen seriously is tempered by concerns about the policy detail and the memory that Joe Biden was vice-president under Barack Obama, who initiated US involvement in the war.Changes in US policy will have significant ramifications for the UK, not least in the area of arms sales, which is one of the main ways the UK is involved in the war. First, the UK risks being isolated diplomatically as US policy becomes more focused on preventing the Saudi-led coalition from violating international law and as EU states continue to operate more restrictive arms export policies, most recently in Italy.For a country so invested in its reputation as a leader in the rule of law, this is dangerous territory. The UK can continue on the path of supplying weapons, be castigated as an outlier and risk even greater criticism for putting the arms industry and relationships with the Saudi royal family above human rights and humanitarian law; or change course, restrict or halt arms transfers, and face further censure about the integrity of its policy up to this point.Second, the US decision indicates that the sale of precision-guided munitions will be halted, which will have implications for UK industry. The CEO of Raytheon, one of the world’s largest arms producers, has stated that the company has removed a $500m deal from its books – widely understood to refer to the planned sale of Paveway bombs. Paveway IV bombs are produced in the UK by the British subsidiary of Raytheon, so any cancellation of US deals would probably mean a halt to UK exports. Ministers are no doubt involved in frantic attempts to figure out the implications of this for the UK arms industry.Third, the US developments may well affect the course of justice in the UK. The Campaign Against Arms Trade has launched a second judicial review of UK arms export policy, challenging the government’s position that violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen are only “isolated incidents” and do not constitute a pattern. Depending on the reasoning behind and scope of changes to US policy, the UK government’s position may become even harder to sustain.For these reasons, I think there are grounds to be somewhat hopeful that something will have to change in UK arms export policy, to restrict, suspend or halt transfers – including actual deliveries, not just licences – to the Saudi-led coalition. However, there are no guarantees in terms of the details and practical implementation of Biden’s announcement, and there is room for manoeuvre afforded by the qualifiers around what constitutes “offensive” operations and what the “relevant” arms sales are that will be cancelled.The UK has its own record of playing with words while Yemen burns: take the corrections to the parliamentary record to amend what the government says it knew about the Saudis’ conduct in the war; the narrowing down of all potential breaches of international law in Yemen to only a “small number” and the implausible claim that they are only “isolated incidents”; or the endless repetition of the mantra that the UK operates a “robust” control regime. What we can expect is the government to come out robustly in defence of its own actions.This behaviour is part of what has allowed the war in Yemen to continue for so long and so horrifically. UK policy is to assess whether there is a clear risk that arms transfers might be used in violations of human rights and humanitarian law: risk assessment is supposed to prevent the use of UK-supplied weapons in such violations. But the UK has applied its risk assessment in such a way as to facilitate rather than restrict arms exports. The government also points to the very fact that it conducts risk assessments as a way of legitimising and justifying further arms sales.An end to US/UK arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition won’t end the war in Yemen by itself. But it could force a change by pushing the warring parties back to the negotiating table. As Radhya Almutawakel, the chair of the Yemeni organisation Mwatana for Human Rights, put it, all the parties to the conflict are weak in different ways such that none can “win” outright. In this context, the Biden announcement could be a catalyst for change.The current strategy of the Saudi-led coalition and its western backers has not been working for a long time: the war has not made the Houthi rebel movement any weaker. The conflict won’t end overnight, but the principles of justice and accountability demand an end to arms sales now. More

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      in US Politics

      To restore trust in democracy, the US should lead a global 'fact fightback' | Timothy Garton Ash

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      To survive, democracy needs a minimum of shared truth. With the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US showed us just how dangerous it is when millions of citizens are led to deny an important, carefully verified fact – namely, who won the election.
      To prosper, democracy needs a certain kind of public sphere, one in which citizens and their representatives engage in vigorous argument on the basis of shared facts. Restoring that kind of public sphere is now a central task for the renewal of liberal democracy. Call it the fact fightback.
      The basic idea comes to us from the very beginnings of democracy, 2,500 years ago. The citizens of ancient Athens gathered in an open air debating place known as the Pnyx – the original “public square”. “Who will address the assembly?” asked the herald, and any citizen could get up on a stone platform to speak. After facts and arguments had been presented and debated, a policy was put to a vote. It was through this deliberative process that the ancient Athenians decided to fight the invading Persians at sea, in the Battle of Salamis, and saved the world’s first democracy.
      To be sure, ancient Athens never entirely measured up to its own revolutionary ideal of equal, free speech for the public good; nor did the US “public square”, even before the arrival of Fox News and Facebook. Beware the myth of a pre-Zuckerberg golden age, when only the purest waters of Truth flowed from the mouths of supremely principled newspapermen, and all citizens were rational, informed and respectfully open-minded. But most democracies have in recent years moved further away from the Athenian ideal: some rapidly (the US, Poland), others more slowly (Germany, Britain).
      To address this challenge, we need a twin-track strategy. On the first track, individual democracies must tackle the particular problems of their own national information environments. In Britain, for example, the battle to defend and improve the BBC is more important than anything the UK government does about Facebook or Twitter.
      A public service broadcaster such as the BBC gives us not just verified facts but a curated diversity of arguments in one place: a digital Pnyx. Any democracy that has a decent public service broadcaster should double its budget, strengthen its independence from government and task it with enhancing the digital public square for tomorrow’s citizens.
      In Poland, where public service broadcasting has been destroyed by a populist ruling party, it is now crucial to defend independent private media such as the TVN television channel and the onet.pl internet platform. They and others are coming under sharp attack, with measures straight out of the playbook of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
      In the US there is no shortage of diverse, free, privately owned media, including some of the best in the world. The problem there is that Americans have largely separated out into two divorced media worlds – with different television channels, radio stations, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds (such as the currently deleted @realDonaldTrump) giving them incompatible versions of reality.
      It is as if half the citizens of ancient Athens had assembled on the old Pnyx, where they were addressed by Pericles, while the other half gathered on a counter-Pnyx, where the would-be tyrant Hippias (Donald J) held them enthralled. How do you bring Americans back together so they listen to each other again?
      Yet no single nation is big enough to take on the private superpowers of the digital world – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Netflix. Here, on this second track, we need the co-ordinated action of a critical mass of democracies, starting with the US and those of the European Union.
      Outside China, the US is the world’s leading digital trendsetter while the EU is its leading norm-setter. Put together the trendsetter and the norm-setter, add a bunch of other leading democracies, and you have a combination of market and regulatory power to which even His Digital Highness Mark Zuckerberg must bow.
      When I hear politicians confidently pontificating about Facebook or Google, I am reminded of HL Mencken’s remark: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Make them pay for news links on their platforms! (The Australian solution.) Put the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre on to them as head of the UK media regulator Ofcom! Treat platforms as publishers!
      The US’s giant for-profit platforms are neither “dumb pipes” nor publishers, but a new creation somewhere in-between. They are algorithmic selectors, distributors and promoters of content provided by others and, at the same time, mass collectors and commercial exploiters of our data.
      At best, they are important aids to truth-seeking. (We Google the sharpest criticism of Google.) At worst, they are unprecedentedly powerful amplifiers of lies. The profit motive pushes them towards the dark side, via algorithmic maximisation of the currency of attention. In a 2016 internal report, Facebook itself found that 64% of those who joined one extremist group on Facebook did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them. (“We’ve changed, you know!” protests Facebook, like a reformed alcoholic. But has he really stopped drinking?)
      What we need now is a process, led by the US and EU, to distil some coherent policies from what is already a large body of good research. Some, such as amending the US Communications Decency Act to make platforms more directly responsible for curbing harmful content, will depend on the new US Congress. Others, such as breaking what are clearly monopolies or near-monopolies, will require a strategic combination of EU competition policy and revised US anti-trust legislation.
      For content moderation, we should build on the hybrid regulation model pioneered in Facebook’s new oversight board, which has just issued its first rulings. (Next challenge: should Facebook, and by implication Twitter, continue to ban ex-president Trump?) Serious solutions will involve technological innovation, business practice, fact-checking and digital education, as well as democratically mandated law and regulation.
      Ideally, this would result in a set of proposals being put before the “summit of democracies” planned by the US president, Joe Biden. Of course, 80 different countries are not going to adopt identical measures. But there must be some coherence in the underlying principles and basic approaches, otherwise the internet of the free, which has already lost China, will become even more of a splinternet. Moreover, the private superpowers will be the only ones who can afford the cost of complying with 80 different sets of regulations, thus unintentionally strengthening the fateful trend to monopoly. Since these are US companies, a special responsibility falls on Washington. Here is a unique opportunity for Biden’s US to show that it can listen as well as lead.
      Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World More

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      in Elections

      Peer is asked to investigate the activities of extreme right and left

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      The government has reportedly ordered an investigation into the extreme fringes on both ends of the political spectrum, with a peer tasked with offering recommendations to the prime minister and home secretary.The review will be led by John Woodcock, the former Labour MP who now sits in the upper chamber as Lord Walney and was appointed as the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption last November.Announcing the review in an interview with the Telegraph, the unaffiliated peer cautioned that the UK must take notice of the rise of far-right groups in the US following the storming of the Capitol building last month.Woodcock stressed that there was “not an equivalence of threat between the far-left and the far-right” in the UK, with the latter a far bigger issue.In September, Home Office data showed that right-wing extremists now make up almost a fifth of terrorists in jail, rising from 33 in 2018/19 to 45 in the year to 30 June 2020 in England and Wales.Furthermore, last year’s annual figures for the government’s controversial Prevent scheme showed that the largest number of referrals related to far-right extremism.James Brokenshire, the security minister, warned that far-right terror posed “a growing threat”, which had been accelerated by the amplification of conspiracy theories online during the pandemic. Of the cases ultimately referred to the government’s Channel programme for specialist support, 302 (43%) were referred for rightwing radicalisation.Walney told the Telegraph that there had also been isolated incidents of some leftwing causes “overstepping the mark into antisocial behaviour”, and the activities of these groups would also be investigated.He said: “There have been a number of, at the moment isolated, examples of climate change activist groups, particularly Extinction Rebellion, overstepping the mark into antisocial behaviour. I think there’s been a recognition that, even among that movement, they have at times risked undermining their own cause.“I’m coming at this with an open mind, but with an understanding that there is clearly a potential for groups to develop into increasingly problematic areas.”The home secretary, Priti Patel, has previously claimed Extinction Rebellion activists are “so-called eco-crusaders turned criminals” who threaten key planks of national life.In a speech to the annual conference of the Police Superintendents’ Association last September, Patel said XR was “attempting to thwart the media’s right to publish without fear nor favour”, and claimed their campaign of civil disobedience was “a shameful attack on our way of life, our economy and the livelihoods of the hard-working majority”. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Covid relief: ideologies matter in democracies | Editorial

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      When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More

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      in UK Politics

      Inside Politics: Michael Gove wants trade rules relaxed in Northern Ireland

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      A top British beekeeper fears 15 million bees could be seized and burned because of new imports rules. 15 million bees burned at the altar of Brexit bureaucracy – we didn’t see that on the side of the Vote Leave bus. Vote Leave veteran Michael Gove thinks the hive mind can help sort some of the huge problems Brexit has created in Northern Ireland. The Cabinet Office minister is hoping to pollinate some goodwill when he gathers his EU counterpart and leaders from the province for a showdown summit today. Westminster, Stormont and Brussels are buzzing for a breakthrough.
      Inside the bubbleOur political commentator Andrew Grice on what to look out for today: More

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      in US Politics

      Don't swerve the culture war – that's the lesson from Joe Biden to UK progressives | Owen Jones

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      “Culture war” used to be a term inextricably linked with the maelstrom of US politics. Popularised by American sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, it described how socially progressive and conservative coalitions were locked in a seemingly eternal conflict. It could make for surprising alliances, he noted, citing Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy joining forces in anti-abortion movements during the late 1980s.The battlegrounds of the US culture war are familiar ones, long regarded with bafflement by patronising and complacent European eyes: God, guns, abortion, gay rights and, of course, race. In a moment that threatened to temporarily derail his 2008 presidential bid, Barack Obama said of working-class rust-belt Americans: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” As the Tea Party movement’s backlash against his Medicare proposals underlined, culture wars became a highly effective means to mobilise low-income white Americans to vote against their economic interests.Brexit proved the detonator for the British culture war, which became not so much about our relationship with a trading bloc but about identity: we were no longer Labour or Tory, or working class or middle class, but remainers and leavers. As polling by Lord Ashcroft after the referendum showed, pro- and anti-EU were equally divided about whether capitalism was a force for good or ill. But while leave voters overwhelmingly believed multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism and the green movement were forces for ill, remain supporters believed the opposite.This set the basis for a clash of values that proved electorally fatal for Jeremy Corbyn: after all, the basis of any authentic leftwing project is class politics – “for the many, not the few”, as his Labour party put it. Culture wars are the toxic reaction to class politics.Yet culture wars continue not simply to shape politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but to define it. According to the Financial Times, just as Joe Biden swept the rust-belt states, Keir Starmer believes he can win back Labour’s lost red wall by copying the US president’s “emphasis on ‘family, community and security’ … and avoiding endless arguments about ‘culture war’ issues such as trans rights and the destruction of historic statues”.Yet this is a curious lesson to draw from the US. It is true that Biden’s past record can hardly be described as a beacon of progressive social norms: he backed crime legislation that led to the mass incarceration of Black people; his chosen vice president, Kamala Harris, was among those who assailed him for once working with segregationists, and said she believed the women who had accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour. But progressive movements have succeeded in shifting the centre of gravity within the Democrats to an extent no nominee can ignore.Take trans rights, which has become one of today’s totemic “culture war” issues. Harris has her pronouns in her Twitter bio; Biden campaigned promising trans people, “We see you, we support you, and we will continue to do everything we can to ensure you are affirmed and accepted just as you are.” He became the first president-elect to thank trans people in his victory speech, issued an order expanding LGBTQ protections and repealed the ban on trans military personnel.There were, of course, howls of outrage: one Republican senator questioned “Another ‘unifying’ move by the new Administration?” But according to the polling, it was indeed unifying: more than seven in 10 Americans support trans people serving in the military. Here is an instructive example. Rightwingers often push back at moves to secure rights for minorities on the grounds that they are “divisive”: yet, though noisy and obsessed, they are also unrepresentative.As it does in the US, polling in Britain consistently shows women and younger people are most supportive of trans rights, with older men least supportive. There is a complication here: while support for trans rights is a given in US feminist, “centrist” and progressive circles, transphobia is a permissible prejudice across the political spectrum in Britain. This week the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, condemned transphobia in her party’s ranks after it had led to an exodus of younger members. But while anti-trans activists are vocal, for the majority of people it’s not an issue on their radar. As the Democrats underlined, what is needed is leadership – or a vacuum will be filled by increasingly emboldened bigotry.But there are other lessons too. Rather than treating claims for racial justice as risking the support of white floating voters, the Democrats embraced Black Lives Matter. After the killing of George Floyd this spurred a surge in Black voter registration, and the relationship between grassroots Black organisers and the Democrats played a pivotal role in flipping several states in the presidential race. As well as working with movements representing the struggles of minorities – rather than treating them as unhelpful – a progressive political project needs policies that unify working-class people, regardless of background. Take the New Labour period: policies such as tax credits and investment in public services made a considerable difference to millions of lives; yet in its final years, wages began to stagnate or decline for the bottom half, and an escalating housing crisis hit living standards.The resulting grievances among struggling people can be exploited by savvy rightwing populists claiming progressive politicians only care about minorities rather than “people like me”.The answer, then, isn’t to swerve the culture war, or stick fingers in our ears and pretend it isn’t there. It is to offer political leadership, work closely with minorities to expand the electorate, and stand on a policy platform that uplifts the living standards of the majority, irrespective of their identity. To throw minorities under a bus is not only immoral: it’s a recipe for electoral defeat. More