Was the first female chairman of the Conservative Party.
Was introduced to her husband in 1976 at an Oxford Conservative Association dance by Benazir Bhutto, who later became the prime minister of Pakistan.
Lost both of her parents in her 20s.
Co-founded Women2Win, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of conservative women in Parliament.
Is the second female prime minister of Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher was the first. She served from 1979 to 1990.
1977 – Takes a job with the Bank of England.
1985 – Begins working for the Association for Payment Clearing Services as an adviser on international affairs.
1986-1994 – Councillor in the London borough of Merton.
May 1997 – Elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Maidenhead.
1999-2001 – Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Employment.
2001-2002 – Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions.
2004-2005 – Shadow Secretary of State for the Family.
May 2010-July 2016 – Home Secretary.
2012 – Introduces the controversial Data Communications Bill, which would require UK internet service providers and communications companies to collect more data about users’ online activities. Opponents call it the “Snoopers’ Charter.”
April 17, 2018 – May apologizes for her government’s treatment of some Caribbean immigrants to the UK and insists they were still welcome in the country. The apology comes amid widespread condemnation of the government’s treatment of the so-called Windrush generation, the first large group of Caribbean migrants to arrive in the UK after World War II.
July 6, 2018 – At the end of a cabinet meeting on Brexit, May announces a proposal that aims to preserve free trade with the European Union. In return for free access to its biggest export market, the UK would commit to following EU rules and regulations on goods and accept a limited role for its highest court. Two cabinet members – Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – resign days later in protest to the plan.
July 17, 2018 – May survives a crucial vote in parliament when MPs vote 307 to 301 against a proposal by Remain-supporting members of her Conservative party that would have significantly undermined her Brexit strategy.
September 21, 2018 – After an EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, at which her Brexit plan was largely rejected, May called for the EU to “respect” the British position and the Brexit vote. Negotiations, she said, are “at an impasse.”
December 12, 2018 – Survives a vote of no-confidence among Tory members of parliament, garnering 200 of the 317 possible votes. The vote was called after May postponed a parliamentary decision on a Brexit deal amid signs it would not be approved.
January 16, 2019 – May survives a vote of no-confidence in the House of Commons. Lawmakers voted 325 to 306 in favor of the government remaining in power. Following the vote, May calls on Britain’s political parties to “put self-interest aside” and word together on a compromise Brexit deal.
May 24, 2019 – May announces that she will resign as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7th. She will stay on as prime minister until a successor is chosen.
DAVOS, Switzerland — Britain’s top finance minister Jeremy Hunt has warned Donald Trump that a return to U.S. protectionism would be a “profound mistake” if he wins the U.S. election in November.
Speaking during a press briefing at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Hunt hit out at the Republican party frontrunner’s proposal for a universal tariff on all goods imported into the U.S.
Asked by POLITICO if he was concerned about the impact on the U.K. economy “if the U.S. elects a protectionist candidate for president like Donald Trump”, Hunt replied: “I don’t support protectionist measures. I think they harm the people who introduce them as much as the people they are aimed at.”
Hunt argued that a “huge flourishing of global trade” has helped to lessen poverty around the world, adding: “It would be a profound mistake to move back to protectionism.”
In an interview with Fox News in August last year, Trump floated an automatic 10 percent tariff on all goods imported to the U.S.
During his first term as U.S. president, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
Hunt’s comments will be seen as a direct rebuke of the U.S. Republican frontrunner, who has had a mixed relationship with senior U.K. politicians in the past.
Trump was known to hold a low opinion of former PM Theresa May, whom he undermined during her time in Downing Street. The former president was closer to her successor Boris Johnson, however — even giving Johnson his private phone number.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
LONDON — World leaders will touch down in Dubai next week for a climate change conference they’re billing yet again as the final off-ramp before catastrophe. But war, money squabbles and political headaches back home are already crowding the fate of the planet from the agenda.
The breakdown of the Earth’s climate has for decades been the most important yet somehow least urgent of global crises, shoved to one side the moment politicians face a seemingly more acute problem. Even in 2023 — almost certainly the most scorching year in recorded history, with temperatures spawning catastrophic floods, wildfires and heat waves across the globe — the climate effort faces a bewildering array of distractions, headwinds and dismal prospects.
“The plans to achieve net zero are increasingly under attack,” former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, who set her country’s goal of reaching climate neutrality into law, told POLITICO.
The best outcome for the climate from the 13-day meeting, which is known as COP28 and opens Nov. 30, would be an unambiguous statement from almost 200 countries on how they intend to hasten their plans to cut fossil fuels, alongside new commitments from the richest nations on the planet to assist the poorest.
But the odds against that happening are rising. Instead, the U.S. and its European allies are still struggling to cement a fragile deal with developing countries about an international climate-aid fund that had been hailed as the historic accomplishment of last year’s summit. Meanwhile, a populist backlash against the costs of green policies has governments across Europe pulling back — a reverse wave that would become an American-led tsunami if Donald Trump recaptures the White House next year.
And across the developing world, the rise of energy and food prices stoked by the pandemic and the Ukraine war has caused inflation and debt to spiral, heightening the domestic pressure on climate-minded governments to spend their money on their most acute needs first.
Even U.S. President Joe Biden, whose 2022 climate law kicked off a boom of clean-energy projects in the U.S., has endorsed fossil fuel drilling and pipeline projects under pressure to ease voter unease about rising fuel costs.
Add to all that the newest Mideast war that began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
On the upside, investment in much of the green economy is also surging. Analysts are cautiously opining that China’s emissions may have begun to decline, several years ahead of Beijing’s schedule.And the Paris-based International Energy Agency projects that global fossil fuel demand could peak this decade, with coal use plummeting and oil and gas plateauing afterward. Spurring these trends is a competition among powers such as China, the United States, India and the European Union to build out and dominate clean-energy industries.
But the fossil fuel industry is betting against a global shift to green, instead investing its profits from the energy crisis into plans for long-term expansion of its core business.
The air of gloom among many supporters of global climate action is hard to miss, as is the sense that global warming will not be the sole topic on leaders’ minds when they huddle in back rooms.
“It’s getting away from us,” Tim Benton, director of the Chatham House environment and society center, said during a markedly downbeat discussion among climate experts at the think tank’s lodgings on St James’ Square in London earlier this month. “Where is the political space to drive the ambition that we need?”
Fog of war
The most acute distraction from global climate work is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The conflagration is among many considerations the White House is weighing in Biden’s likely decision not to attend the summit, one senior administration official told POLITICO this month. Other leaders are also reconsidering their schedules, said one senior government official from a European country, who was granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive diplomacy of the conference.
The war is also likely to push its way onto the climate summit’s unofficial agenda: Leaders of big Western powers who are attending will spend at least some of their diplomatically precious face-time with Middle East leaders discussing — not climate — but the regional security situation, said two people familiar with the planning for COP28 who could not be named for similar reasons. According to a preliminary list circulated by the United Arab Emirates, Israeli President Isaac Herzog or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend the talks.
A threat even exists that the conference could be canceled or relocated, should a wider regional conflict develop, Benton said.
The UAE’s COP28 presidency isn’t talking about that, at least publicly. “We look forward to hosting a safe, inclusive COP beginning at the end of November,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement. But the strained global relations have already thrown the location of next years’ COP29 talks into doubt because Russia has blocked any EU country from hosting the conference, which is due to be held in eastern or central Europe.
The upshot is that the bubble of global cooperation that landed the Paris climate agreement in 2015 has burst. “We have a lot of more divisive narratives now,” Laurence Tubiana, the European Climate Foundation CEO who was one of the drafters of the Paris deal, said at the same meeting at Chatham House.
The Ukraine war and tensions between the U.S. and China in particular have widened the gap between developed and developing countries, Benton told POLITICO in an email.
Now, “the Hamas-Israel war potentially creates significant new fault lines between the Arab world and many Western countries that are perceived to be more pro-Israeli,” he said. “The geopolitical tensions arising from the war could create leverage that enables petrostates (many of which are Muslim) to shore up the status quo.”
Add to that the as yet unknown impact on already high fossil fuel commodity prices, said Kalee Kreider, president of the Ridgely Walsh public affairs consultancy and a former adviser to U.S. Vice President Al Gore. “Volatility doesn’t usually help raise ambition.”
The Biden administration’s decisions to approve a tranche of new fossil fuel production and export projects will undermine U.S. diplomacy at COP28, said Ed Markey, a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
“You can’t preach temperance from a barstool, and the United States is running a long tab,” he said.
U.N. climate talks veterans have seen this program before. “No year over the past three decades has been free of political, economic or health challenges,” said former U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa, who now heads the consulting firm onepoint5. “We simply can’t wait for the perfect conditions to address climate change. Time is a luxury we no longer have — if we ever did.”
The EU backlash
Before the Mideast’s newest shock to the global energy system, the war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s energy dependence on Russia — and initially galvanized the EU to accelerate efforts to roll out cleaner alternatives.
But in the past year, persistent inflation has worn away that zeal. Businesses and citizens worry about anything that might add to the financial strain, and this has frayed a consensus on climate change that had held for the past four years among left, center and center right parties across much of the 27-country bloc.
In recent months, conservative members of the European Parliament have attacked several EU green proposals as excessive, framing themselves as pragmatic environmentalists ahead of Europe-wide elections next year. Reinvigorated far-right parties across the bloc are also using the green agenda to attack more mainstream parties, a trend that is spooking the center.
Germany’s government was almost brought down this year by a law that sought to ban gas boilers — with the Greens-led economy ministry retreating to a compromise. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has joined a growing chorus agitating for a “regulatory pause” on green legislation.
If Europe’s struggles emerge at COP28, the ripple effect could be global, said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank.
The “EU has established itself as the global laboratory for climate neutrality,” he said. “But now it needs to deliver on the experiment, or the world (which is closely watching) will assume this just does not work. And that would be a disaster for all of us.”
U.K. retreats
The world is also watching the former EU member that stakes a claim to be the climate leader of the G7: the U.K.
London has prided itself on its green credentials ever since former Prime Minister May enacted a 2019 law calling for net zero by 2050 — making her the first leader of a major economy to do so.
According to May’s successor Boris Johnson, net zero was good for the planet, good for voters, good for the economy. But under current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the messaging has transformed. Net zero remains the target — but it comes with a “burden” on working people.
In a major speech this fall, Sunak rolled back plans to ban new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030, bringing the U.K. into line with the EU’s 2035 date. With half an eye on Germany’s travails, he said millions of households would be exempted from the gas boiler ban expected in 2035.
In making his arguments for a “pragmatic” approach to net zero, Sunak frequently draws on the talking points of net zero-skeptics. Why should the citizens of the U.K., which within its own borders produces just 1 percent of global emissions, “sacrifice even more than others?”
The danger, said one EU climate diplomat — granted anonymity to discuss domestic policy of an allied country — was that other countries around the COP28 negotiating table would hear that kind of rhetoric from a capital that had led the world — and repurpose it to make their own excuses.
Sunak’s predecessor May sees similar risks.
“Nearly a third of all global emissions originate from countries with territorial emissions of 1 per cent or less,” May said. “If we all slammed on the brakes, it would make our net zero aspirations impossible to achieve.”
Trump’s back
The U.S., the largest producer of industrial carbon pollution in modern history, has been a weathervane on climate depending on who controls its governing branches.
When Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, it created a major drag on Biden’s promise to provide $11.4 billion in annual global climate finance by 2024.
Securing this money and much more, developing countries say, is vital to any progress on global climate goals at COP28. Last year, on the back of the pandemic and the energy price spike, global debt soared to a record $92 trillion. This cripples developing countries’ ability to build clean energy and defend themselves against — or recover from — hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires.
Even when the money is there, the politics can be challenging. Multibillion-dollar clean energy partnerships that the G7 has pursued to shift South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and India off coal power are struggling to gain acceptance from the recipients.
Yet even more dire consequences await if Trump wins back the presidency next year.
A Trump victory would put the world’s largest economy a pen stroke away from quitting the Paris Agreement all over again — or, even more drastically, abandoning the entire international regime of climate pacts and summits. The thought is already sending a chill: Negotiations over a fund for poorer countries’ climate losses and damage, which Republicans oppose, include talks on how to make its language “change-of-government-proof” in light of a potential Trump victory, said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of island states.
More concretely for reining in planet-heating gases, Trump would be in position to approve legislation eliminating all or part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden’s signature climate law included $370 billion in incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and other carbon-cutting efforts – though the actual spending is likely to soar even higher due to widespread interest in its programs and subsidies – and accounts for a bulk of projected U.S. emissions cuts this decade.
House Republicans have attempted to claw back parts of Biden’s climate law several times. That’s merely a political messaging effort for now, thanks to a Democrat-held Senate and a sure veto from Biden, but the prospects flip if the GOP gains full control of Congress and White House.
Under a plan hatched by Tubiana and backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, countries would in the future log their state and local government climate plans with the U.N., in an attempt to undergird the entire system against a second Republican blitzkrieg.
The U.S. isn’t the only place where climate action is on the ballot, Benton told the conference at Chatham House on Nov. 1.
News on Sunday that Argentina had elected as president right-wing populist Javier Milei — a Trump-like libertarian — raised the prospect of a major Latin American economy walking away from the Paris Agreement, either by formally withdrawing or by reneging on its promises.
Elections are also scheduled in 2024 for the EU, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Russia, and possibly the U.K.
“A quarter of the world’s population is facing elections in the next nine months,” he said. “If everyone goes to the right and populism becomes the order of the day … then I won’t hold out high hopes for Paris.”
Zack Colman reported from Washington, D.C. Suzanne Lynch also contributed reporting from Brussels.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
LONDON — Rishi Sunak appointed David Cameron as Britain’s new foreign secretary — in a shock comeback for the former prime minister.
Cameron, who resigned as PM in 2016 and later quit as a member of parliament after losing the Brexit referendum, will become a life peer in the House of Lords in order to take on the government role.
The move comes as Sunak carries out a major reshuffle of his government ranks, in a bid to arrest his Conservative Party’s large deficit in opinion polling.
He kicked off the reshuffle Monday by firing Home Secretary Suella Braverman, a key figure on the party’s right. James Cleverly, previously foreign sec, takes over from Braverman at the interior ministry.
Cameron’s return on Monday to one of the highest positions in government sent shockwaves through Westminster and the Conservative Party.
It marks the first post-war example of a former prime minister serving in a successor’s Cabinet since the 1970s, when Conservative Alec Douglas-Home was named foreign secretary in Ted Heath’s government.
Although both are seen as Tory centrists, Sunak and Cameron campaigned on opposite sides of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Cameron — who led a coalition government in 2010 and pulled off a dramatic election victory for the Tories in 2015 — has recently been critical of the prime minister over his decision to axe key parts of the HS2 rail link.
The ex-PM’s reputation took a hit amid a lobbying scandal in 2021. His record on foreign policy is controversial among some Conservatives. As prime minister he heralded a so-called “Golden Era” in U.K. relations with China, and hosted President Xi Jinping for a state visit.
Cameron: I want to help Sunak deliver
In a statement following his appointment, Cameron said the U.K. would “stand by our allies, strengthen our partnerships and make sure our voice is heard.”
And he added: “Though I may have disagreed with some individual decisions, it is clear to me that Rishi Sunak is a strong and capable prime minister, who is showing exemplary leadership at a difficult time.
“I want to help him to deliver the security and prosperity our country needs and be part of the strongest possible team that serves the United Kingdom and that can be presented to the country when the general election is held.”
But Pat McFadden of the opposition Labour Party used the new hire to take a dig at Sunak, who has recently attempted to pitch himself against successive governments of all stripes.
“A few weeks ago, Rishi Sunak said David Cameron was part of a failed status quo, now he’s bringing him back as his life raft,” McFadden quipped.
LONDON — Elon Musk sat down with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London’s Lancaster House on Thursday night for a chat that veered closer to “love-in” than interview.
In the lavish gold-trimmed room where Theresa May gave one of her most famous Brexit speeches, the tech tycoon and British PM were joined by an audience that included Cabinet ministers, tech execs and — somewhat improbably — the American rapper will.i.am.
Here’s what we learned as the conversation unfolded:
Elon thinks you won’t need to work
The world’s richest man predicted a “future of abundance” from advances in AI models.
“There will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk said. “You can have a job if you want to have a job … but the AI will be able to do everything. I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable.”
Sunak, who will be out of a job himself after the next U.K. election if current polls are correct, laughed along nervously.
Rishi should leave the journalism to the pros
The format was meant to be Sunak interviewing Musk — but the PM’s lengthy questions diverged into listing his own achievements and heaping praise onto the tech tycoon.
“You’re known for being such a brilliant innovator and technologist,” the PM gushed, during one attempt to get a question out.
Rishi loves Big Tech
Sunak sees the AI Safety Summit as a key part of his legacy, and has been cozying up to leading AI lab founders over the last six months. This event was no different, with the PM taking his chance to list his pro-tech and pro-investment policies and to heap praise on Musk, who owns Tesla, SpaceX and X.
“It’s been a huge privilege and pleasure to have you here,” the British prime minister told Musk as they left the stage.
The love-in was mutual
Musk can play down the provocateur shtick and dial up the charm when he needs to.
He ticked every box for Sunak, praising London as a destination for AI companies, hailing the AI Safety Summit’s achievements and — crucially — backing Sunak’s decision to invite China to the Bletchley Park event, which has angered some lawmakers in the U.K. Conservative Party.
“Thank you for inviting them,” Musk said. “Having them here is essential. If they’re not participants, it’s pointless.”
AI is your new best friend … or worst enemy
It wasn’t just Sunak and Musk building a friendship on Thursday night. Musk predicted that humans more generally will make deep friendships with AI once the technology becomes intelligent enough.
But in the parts of the discussion where they debated the risks of frontier AI models, Musk called for a “referee” and an “off switch” built-in to models to “throw it into a safe state.”
Sunak also said AI-generated misinformation would be a “real issue” in elections taking place next year, including in the U.K. “Probably,” he added teasingly, given the election could yet be pushed to January 2025.
Musk, whose own social media platform has been plagued by misinformation, said he wanted to make X as “accurate as possible and as truthful as possible.”
Late last year, after a breakneck ascent of British politics put her in charge of the country’s migration, crime and national security agenda, Suella Braverman revealed her political fantasy.
“I would love to (see) a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda,” the home secretary (interior minister) told that newspaper, referring to her controversial efforts to deport asylum-seekers to the central African nation. “That’s my dream. That’s my obsession.”
Braverman is no stranger to the front pages. Her self-proclaimed “obsession” with curbing migration – and the loaded and occasionally inflammatory language she uses to address it – has attracted forceful criticism from international agencies, lawyers, rights groups and many of her own colleagues, making her arguably Britain’s most divisive politician.
But among Conservative Party members and the chief architects of Brexit, she is a star; someone who is prepared to say and do controversial things in pursuit of a singular goal.
“She’s the cutting edge of the populist, radical right-wing strain in the Conservative Party,” Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London, and the author of books on the party, told CNN.
“In a way, that allows her to say what some Conservative MPs would think of as the unsayable.”
Braverman has railed against what she calls an “invasion” of migrants, holding “values which are at odds with our country” – and suggested she would break international law to deport them from Britain.
And she is an equally furious culture warrior, borrowing rhetoric from the American right when lambasting “woke” culture, transgender rights and climate protesters.
But Braverman has speedily made herself a central figure in British politics; the assassin of Liz Truss’s premiership and the kingmaker of Rishi Sunak’s, she has made evident her desire to ultimately enter Downing Street as prime minister herself – a prospect that sits uneasily with much of the country’s political establishment.
Braverman, who evangelizes on the benefits of Brexit and has made migration curbs her political mission, has a backstory that seems to teem with contradictions.
She is the daughter of migrants, who wants to cut net migration to Britain to the “tens of thousands.” Her parents, both of Indian origin, arrived in the country from Kenya and Mauritius “with very little” in the 1960s.
She was a practicing lawyer before entering politics, but has displayed an unabashed indifference about whether her flagship migration bill complies with international law.
And she is an avid Francophile, sometimes speaking in French when meeting her counterpart in Paris, who championed the project to leave the European Union. Braverman says she fell in love with France while studying at the renowned Sorbonne university in Paris, taking advantage of the EU’s Erasmus program that encourages students to spend time in other parts of the continent. Brexit shut the program off to British students.
Now, she has staked her political reputation on her ability to “Stop the Boats” – an oft-repeated government pledge, borrowed from Australia’s hardline rhetoric towards asylum-seekers, to reduce the growing number of migrants crossing the English Channel on small vessels.
It is a stance that has drawn sharp criticism – including from within the traditional wing of Braverman’s Conservative Party.
“Braverman has placed far too much emphasis on curbing migration,” said Ben Ramanauskas, an economist and adviser to Truss when the previous prime minister was secretary of state for international trade. “Her priority seems to be attempting to be as cruel as possible.”
The government’s flagship bill, which was approved by MPs last week but faces scrutiny in the House of Lords, essentially hands the government the right to deport anyone arriving illegally in the United Kingdom. “It’s incredibly dangerous, hostile, cruel, and fundamentally unworkable,” migration policy expert and campaigner Zoe Gardner told CNN.
And experts say it deliberately misses the point. “Deterrents don’t work… There is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between how brutally we respond to migration, and the numbers of people forced to move,” Gardner said. “We need a functioning asylum system where we process people’s claims, (and) we need to give people safe routes in order to travel.”
Braverman, however, is steadfast in the face of criticism. The Home Office told CNN in a statement that her bill “will break the business model of the people smuggling gangs and restore fairness to our asylum system. It will ensure anyone arriving via small boat or other dangerous and illegal means will be in scope for detention and swiftly removed.”
Braverman’s plans have won praise from Europe’s leading populist figures, including Italy’s hardline deputy leader Matteo Salvini and French far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
But that is company many in the Conservatives feel uncomfortable keeping.
“The UK’s ability to play a role internationally is based on our reputation – not because we’re British, but because of what we stand for and what we do,” ex-Prime Minister Theresa May said in a stinging intervention in the House of Commons last month. May added last week that the bill’s removal of modern slavery protections “will consign victims to remaining in slavery.”
And Sayeeda Warsi, the first Asian chair of the Tory party, has attacked what she described as Braverman’s “racist rhetoric,” after Braverman prompted controversy by singling out British Pakistani men when attacking grooming gangs in the country.
“Braverman’s own ethnic origin has shielded her from criticism for too long,” Warsi wrote in The Guardian. “Black and brown people can be racist too.” The Home Office told CNN that Braverman “has been clear that all despicable child abusers must be brought to justice. And she will not shy away from telling hard truths, particularly when it comes to the grooming of young women and girls in Britain’s towns who have been failed by authorities over decades.”
Braverman fronts a newer, more populist streak in the UK’s ruling party – a move that has troubled some of its grandees but has found an audience among voters.
“The voters that she’s appealing to is the majority of the British public,” said James Johnson, who ran polling in May’s Downing Street operation and later founded the JL Partners pollster. “There is a very significant disconnect between what people on Twitter about immigration, and what people actually think about immigration.
“Voters do not react to (Braverman’s) language with the same outrage that some people do,” he told CNN. “(They) want their politicians to at least be trying.”
Polling shows that approval of Braverman’s tough stance on migration significantly outpaces support for the government in general – as well as approval of Braverman herself – with research often indicating that a slim majority of the public supports her plans.
And those who support her – particularly those in Euroskeptic circles, where she is almost revered – say Braverman speaks to the concerns of modern Britain in a way that her more seasoned critics cannot. “When finally even I wobbled about backing Brexit in name only, Suella stood firm,” prominent Brexit backer Steve Baker said when he supported her leadership campaign last year, praising Braverman’s resolve to defeat May’s Brexit deal and push for a harder-line departure from the EU. “It wouldn’t have happened without her.”
But research has also shown that the importance of immigration to British voters has receded since the bitter debates of the mid-2010s.
It appears inevitable that the Tories will seek to make migration a wedge issue at the next election, ensuring Braverman plenty of airtime as the government looks to draw a contrast between itself and the Labour party. But a series of brutal electoral results in local polls on Thursday will further fuel questions about whether that is a winning strategy.
Braverman’s political coming-of-age took place just as the 2016 EU referendum shifted the tectonic plates underneath Westminster, giving younger, Euroskeptic voices like hers an inroad with the public.
It was Braverman’s role fronting an anti-EU backbench committee that “propelled her to her (current) position, and she knows it,” former Conservative MP Antoinette Sandbach told CNN.
Today, she takes the populist mantle further than many of her peers on a range of matters far beyond Brexit. Braverman appears to relish “culture war” confrontations with her political enemies like few other frontline politicians; “you almost feel sometimes that she gets a kick out of ‘owning the libs,’” the politics professor Bale told CNN.
She has taken aim at the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” from the despatch box, and insisted she will “not be hectored by out-of-touch lefties.” In 2019, she said she considers herself engaged in a “battle against cultural Marxism.”
Braverman’s Home Office recently reportedly backed two pub landlords who refused to remove their minstrel-style children’s toys that are considered a racist relic of the 1970s. And she has criticized police officers for “virtue signaling,” saying in a speech last week that “they shouldn’t be taking the knee.”
But those battles have left some traditional Tories cold. “The Conservative Party has moved right since I joined, and become much more like the MAGA Republicans” since the dividing line of 2016, said Sandbach, who was expelled from the party by Boris Johnson after trying to avert a no-deal Brexit. She subsequently joined the Liberal Democrats.
Those who worked alongside Braverman describe her as friendly and personable, and few doubt her ambition.
As 23-year-old Suella Fernandes, she nearly ran against her own mother to become the Tory candidate in a 2003 by-election, until the elder Fernandes – a Conservative councilor and NHS nurse – persuaded her to pull out.
Braverman succeeded in becoming an MP in 2015. In a series of tweets that bemoaned her “lamentable hopelessness,” one of her more critical backbenchers, William Wragg, claimed she asked in her first week in Parliament whether she could expense a fine for speeding.
But her determination to drive towards power has served her well. No politician emerged more triumphant from the psychodrama that has transfixed British politics than Braverman, who started 2022 as attorney general and ended it a household name – having served in three different Cabinets, twice as home secretary.
An initial departure from frontline politics theoretically came amid scandal (Braverman resigned for breaching ministerial rules by using a private email address), but her scathing parting letter turned her misconduct into a maneuver, essentially pulling the plug on Truss’s shambolic tenure.
“I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility: I resign,” Braverman wrote, in a thinly veiled attempt to contrast herself with Truss. Six days later she was back in the same post, having aligned herself with Sunak’s successful leadership bid.
Few doubt Braverman’s long-term ambitions. “You have to interpret everything Suella Braverman does and says in the light of the leadership contest that many people assume will take place if… Sunak were to lose the next election,” Bale said.
Crucial to that target is her reputation among party members and its more hardline MPs. It is those groups that pick a party leader, and she is met enthusiastically by grassroots Conservatives who tend to reflect the more right-wing, populist traits of the bloc.
That prospect undoubtedly perturbs some. “There will be many Tory MPs who simply could not stomach her as leader,” Bale added. “I think the lack of support she received in her leadership bid (last year) reflects how she was seen by the party as a whole,” Sandbach said.
Nevertheless, Braverman is storming up the approval rankings among ordinary Conservative members. In its latest monthly league table of Cabinet ministers, the ConservativeHome website – widely regarded as having its finger on the pulse of the grassroots party – puts Braverman fourth from the top with a net approval rating of 47.8. Only last November, she was sixth from bottom in the site’s regular survey of party members. “The panel seems to have decided that if the Government fails to stop the boats it won’t be for want of the Home Secretary trying,” wrote the website’s editors in April.
Should Braverman succeed at her next bid for the party leadership, her critics fear another rightwards shift in British politics.
“Braverman has taken some cues from the US, and also from history,” Gardner said. “She’s recognized that in the current political climate, her way of creating an impact… (is) positioning herself as a Trump tribute act.
“She’s setting herself up to lead a more extreme, right-wing populist version of the Tory party.”
The BBC faces a spiraling revolt by its top sporting presenters amid a row over the broadcaster’s impartiality standards, after star football host Gary Lineker was chastised for tweets criticizing the U.K. government’s new asylum policies.
Calls of hypocrisy were also leveled at the U.K. broadcaster on Saturday, as Labour leader Keir Starmer accused the BBC of “caving in” to the demands of Conservative Party members.
The broadcaster’s sporting coverage was plunged into uncertainty due to a boycott from a group of hosts and co-hosts who disagreed with the BBC for attempting to penalize “Match of the Day” presenter Lineker for his recent comments against what he called the government’s “immeasurably cruel policy” on immigration. He has been told to “step back” from his BBC presenting duties.
In a March 7 tweet, the ex-England international footballer compared the U.K. government’s new policy on illegal migrants with the language of Nazi Germany, prompting a backlash from Conservative MPs and members of the government. The BBC says the tweet violated its impartiality standards.
The U.K.’s new asylum policy would block undocumented migrants from entering the country on small vessels. The bill has been condemned by the United Nations, which said it amounts to an “asylum ban.”
“Match of the Day” — a flagship BBC football show for Premier League fans — found itself without regulars Ian Wright, Alan Shearer, Jermaine Jenas, Micah Richards and Jermain Defoe, who all pledged to stand by Lineker in the dispute. The BBC said “Match of the Day” would be aired Saturday without presenters or pundits.
Popular broadcasts “Football Focus” and “Final Score” have also been deleted from the BBC’s schedule this weekend, after Alex Scott, Kelly Somers and Jason Mohammad all backed Lineker’s corner. BBC Radio 5 Live’s football build-up transmission was ditched minutes before airing, as other leading hosts and pundits joined forces against the broadcaster’s disciplining of Lineker.
BBC Director General Tim Davie apologised for the disruptions and said “we are working very hard to resolve the situation.” In an interview with BBC News late Saturday, Davie said “success for me is getting Gary back on air.” Davie said he would “absolutely not” be resigning over the row.
The BBC boss said he was prepared to review impartiality rules for freelance staff like Lineker.
In an earlier statement, the BBC said it considers Lineker’s “recent social media activity to be a breach of our guidelines.”
“The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting Match of the Day until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media,” according to the statement.
A five-year contract that Lineker signed in 2020 includes guarantees to adhere to the BBC’s impartiality code. He is on a reported £1.35 million-a-year salary.
Labour’s Starmer accused the BBC of pandering to the demands of the Conservative Party on Saturday.
“The BBC is not acting impartially by caving in to Tory MPs who are complaining about Gary Lineker,” Starmer told broadcasters at Welsh Labour’s conference in Llandudno, Wales. “They got this one badly wrong and now they’re very, very exposed.”
Labour leader Keir Starmer accused the broadcaster of caving in to Tory demands | Jason Roberts/Getty Images
Conservative MP Nadine Dorries tweeted on Friday that Lineker needs to decide whether he is “a footie presenter or a member of the Labour Party.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak defended the government’s asylum policy in a statement on Saturday and said the impartiality dispute is for the broadcaster and the presenter to sort out.
“I hope that the current situation between Gary Lineker and the BBC can be resolved in a timely manner, but it is rightly a matter for them, not the government,” Sunak said in the statement.
The links between the BBC and the U.K.’s governing Conservative Party run deep. The corporation’s chairman, Richard Sharp, was previously outed as having facilitated an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson, the former U.K. prime minister. On Saturday, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey called for Sharp to resign.
The communications officer for former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May — Robbie Gibb — has sat on the BBC board as a non-executive director since 2021. Current BBC Director General Tim Davie previously stood as a councilor for the Conservative Party in Hammersmith, a London constituency.
LONDON — “Back to her old self again” was how one erstwhile colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the U.K.’s front pages at the weekend.
That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak and his allies were afraid of.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in No. 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectful period of 13 weeks’ silence, the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister exploded back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that her radical economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance.”
In her first interview since stepping down, broadcast Monday evening, she expanded on this, saying she encountered “system resistance” to her plans as PM and did not get “the level of political support required” to change prevailing attitudes.
While the reception for Truss’s relaunch has not been exactly rapturous — with much of the grumbling coming from within her own party — it still presents a genuine headache for her successor, Sunak, who must now deal with not one but two unruly former prime ministers jostling from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job, but is never far from the headlines. Recent engagements with the U.S. media and high-profile excursions to Kyiv have ensured his strident views on the situation in Ukraine remain well-aired, even as he racks up hundreds of thousands in fees from private speaking engagements around the world.
Wasting no time
Truss and Johnson have, typically, both opted for swifter and more vocal returns to frontline politics than many of their forerunners in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They have tended to follow the lead of [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 promised: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.’”
Such an approach has never been universal. Ted Heath, PM from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “behaved appallingly” — in Bale’s words — to John Major, who replaced her in Downing Street in 1990 after she was forced from office.
But more recent Tory PMs have kept a respectful distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the EU referendum in 2016, and waited three years before publishing a memoir — reportedly in order to avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions in the House of Commons on subjects close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and rail services in her hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect to see former prime ministers be a tad more circumspect in the way they re-enter the political debate,” says Paul Harrison, former press secretary to May. “But then she [Truss] wasn’t a conventional prime minister in any sense of the word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done something very unconventional.”
Truss’s rapid refresh has not met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes that “rather than concede, move on, and focus on the future, she denies, digs in and reimagines the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’ time in office “was a period that [people] would rather not really remember too clearly.”
One long-serving Conservative MP said “she only had herself to blame for her demise, and we are still clearing up some of the mess.” Another appraised her latest intervention simply with an exploding-head emoji.
Trussites forever
But despite Tory appeals for calm, the refusal of Truss and Johnson to lie low remains a serious worry for the man eventually chosen to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought better of trying to stage a comeback.
Between them, the two ex-PMs have the ability to highlight two of Sunak’s big weaknesses.
While Truss may never live down the disastrous “mini-budget” of last September which sent the U.K. economy off the rails, her wider policy agenda still has a hold over a number of Conservative MPs who believe they have no hope of winning the election without it.
This was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a caucus of MPs who will carry the torch for the low-tax, deregulatory approach to government favored by Truss and who continue to complain Sunak has little imagination when it comes to supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Truss, insisted “she has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and “posed important questions” about how the U.K. models economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives have been advocating a reappraisal of the actions of the Bank of England in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that Truss was unfairly blamed for a collapse in the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she may be the best advocate for the causes she represents. “There’s a question about whether it actually best serves her interests in pushing back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened so soon after leaving office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — continues to symbolize the star quality and ballot box appeal which they fear Sunak lacks.
One government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, “was all about hard work.”
These apparent deficiencies feed into a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too tentatively and, as one ally put it recently, needs to rip off the “cashmere jumper.”
It’s been posited that British prime ministers swing back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds” — and nothing is more likely to underline Sunak’s nerdiness than a pair of recently-deposed jocks refusing to shut up.
Trouble ahead
Unluckily for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket items coming up which will provide ample ground on which his nemeses can cause trouble.
One is the forthcoming budget — the government’s annual public spending plan, due March 15. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to get personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a nuisance of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to offer the paucity of answers on growth they already fear.
Before that, Truss is expected to make her first public appearance outside the U.K. with a speech on Taiwan which could turn up the heat on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
One person close to her confirmed China would be “a big thing” for her, and is expected to be a theme of her future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of the Northern Ireland protocol, the thorniest unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortured negotiations appear to be reaching an endgame.
Sunak has been sitting with a draft version of a technical deal since last week, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, and is now girding his loins for the unenviable task of trying to get a compromise agreement past both his own party and hardline Northern Irish unionists.
A Whitehall official working on the protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and that “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to assemble the former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind him on a matter of such huge national and international significance. But as things stand such a get-together is difficult to picture.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’ actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departures.
They appear fated to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it — “not caring how much trouble they cause Sunak, because in their view, he should never have taken over from them in the first place.”
LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first.
Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill.
On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain.
The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.
“Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.
Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends.
Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.
In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.
The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused.
Long and winding road
Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.
The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.
Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.
The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.
The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.”
That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.
Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda.
When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations.
Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content.
Not just free speech
In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.
That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.
Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU. Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.
“This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”
Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.
[ad_2]
Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott
After six years of chaos and recrimination since Britons voted to leave the European Union, there are signs the country is showing an unexpected outbreak of common sense in its approach to the bloc.
In his first weeks in office, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — a Brexiteer himself — has sent clear signals that he wants a more constructive relationship with Brussels and Paris, and to avoid a trade war with Britain’s biggest economic partner.
Gone are the nationalist bombast of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the sheer havoc wrought by his successor Liz Truss crashing the economy in pursuit of a Brexit dividend. Instead, they have both given way to a sudden burst of pragmatism, as Sunak is seeking practical solutions to festering problems.
This change in outlook may be partly due to the realization that Europe needs to stand united in the face of a threat to its common security from Russian President Vladimir Putin — although that hadn’t stopped Johnson from bragging about how leaving the EU had supposedly freed the United Kingdom to be more supportive of Ukraine than France or Germany.
It may also be due to the dire economic straits Britain is in after the collapse of Truss’ short-lived experiment for a deregulated, low-tax Singapore-on-the-Thames. Or, perhaps, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hard line on any EU deal with the U.K. has had a sobering effect. As may have the shift in British public opinion, which now thinks leaving the bloc was a mistake by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.
For whatever reason, it is a welcome start.
In just three weeks, Sunak has signed up to an EU defense initiative to make it easier to move armed forces around the Continent, he’s acted to improve Britain’s relations with Ireland, and he’s created political space for a possible compromise on the vexed issue of trade with Northern Ireland, which has bedeviled relations with Brussels since the U.K.’s exit from the EU.
At their first meeting, Sunak told United States President Joe Biden that he wants to have a negotiated settlement on the Northern Ireland Protocol in place by next April — the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement. So, sustained pressure from Washington is starting to pay off as well.
The prime minister has also sought to thaw frosty relations with France, clinching an agreement with Paris to clamp down on migrants crossing the Channel from northern France in small boats. Europe’s only two nuclear powers have now agreed to hold their first bilateral summit since 2018 early next year, focusing on strengthening defense cooperation.
To be fair, after saying “the jury is still out” on whether Macron was a friend or foe of the U.K., Truss had already taken a symbolic first step toward reconciliation by agreeing to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community last month. The geopolitical grouping was dreamed up by Macron to bring the entire European family together — except Russia and Belarus.
What’s more, the torrent of Europe-bashing rhetoric from Conservative ministers has almost dried up — at least for now. Suddenly, making nice with the neighbors is back in fashion, if only to ensure they don’t turn the lights off on the U.K. by cutting energy exports when supplies get tight this winter.
The tone of contrition adopted by Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, once the hardest of Brexit hardliners, was one of the most striking signals of this new humility. “I recognize in my own determination and struggle to get the U.K. out of the European Union that I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he told Ireland’s RTÉ radio recently. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. And I want to put that right.”
Meanwhile, encouragingly, Sunak is reportedly considering deprioritizing a bill by ousted Brexit ideologue Jacob Rees-Mogg to review, reform or automatically scrap some 2,400 retained EU laws, standards and regulations by the end of 2023 — a massive bureaucratic exercise that has rattled business confidence and angered almost everyone. The prime minister now seems receptive to pleas from business to give the review much more time and avoid a regulatory vacuum.
A bonfire of EU rules would inevitably provoke new trade tensions with Brussels — and at a time when the Office of Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog, has just confirmed the growth-shredding damage inflicted by Brexit.
This isn’t the end of Britain’s traumatic rupture with the bloc. Just how neuralgic the issue remains was highlighted when earlier this week, Sunak had to deny reports that senior government figures were considering a Swiss-style relationship with the EU to ensure frictionless trade. He vowed there would be no alignment with EU rules on his watch.
To paraphrase Churchill, it may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Puncturing the illusion of a deregulated fiscal paradise fueled by borrowing without new revenue has had a sobering effect on the U.K. — offering Sunak a political window of opportunity to start fixing EU ties. After all, the Conservative Party can’t afford to defenestrate yet another prime minister after Theresa May, Johnson and Truss, can it?
But beyond the conciliatory tone, the real test still lies ahead.
Sunak will have to confront the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to push through any compromise with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As the province remains part of the EU single market under the withdrawal treaty, any such deal is bound to involve some customs checks in Northern Ireland on goods arriving from Great Britain — even if they are scaled down from the original plan. It’s also bound to involve a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union as the ultimate arbiter of EU law. Both are anathema to the DUP.
But securing such an agreement would at least open the door to a calmer, more cooperative and sustainable relationship between London and Brussels.
LONDON — The British government on Sunday denied a report that it is seeking a “Swiss-style” relationship with the European Union that would remove many of the economic barriers erected by Brexit — even as it tries to improve ties with the bloc after years of acrimony.
Health Secretary Steve Barclay told Sky News “I don’t recognize” the Sunday Times report, insisting the U.K. was still determined to “use the Brexit freedoms we have” by diverging from the EU’s rules in key areas.
Switzerland has a close economic relationship with the 27-nation EU in return for accepting the bloc’s rules and paying into its coffers.
The U.K. government said “Brexit means we will never again have to accept a relationship with Europe that would see a return to freedom of movement, unnecessary payments to the European Union or jeopardize the full benefit of trade deals we are now able to strike around the world.”
But despite the denials, the new Conservative government led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants to restore relations with the EU, acknowledging that Brexit has brought an economic cost for Britain. Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt last week expressed optimism that trade barriers between the U.K. and the EU would be removed in the coming years.
The shift comes as public opposition grows to the hard form of Brexit pursued by successive Conservative governments since British voters opted by a 52%-48% margin to leave the bloc in a 2016 referendum.
Now, according to polling expert John Curtice, 57% of people would vote to rejoin the bloc and 43% to stay out.
When the U.K. was negotiating its divorce from the EU, Conservative governments under Prime Ministers Theresa May and her successor Boris Johnson ruled out remaining inside the EU’s borderless single market or its tariff-free customs union. Politicians who wanted closer ties were ignored or pushed aside.
The divorce deal struck by the two sides in 2020 has brought customs checks and other border hurdles for goods, and passport checks and other annoyances for travelers. Britons can no longer live and work freely across Europe, and EU citizens can’t move to the U.K. at will.
The British government’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, said last week that leaving the EU has had “a significant adverse effect on U.K. trade.”
Yet only recently have members of the government begun acknowledging Brexit’s downsides. Hunt, who last week announced a 55 billion-pound ($65 billion) package of tax increases and spending cuts to shore up an economy battered by soaring inflation, acknowledged Brexit had caused “trade barriers” with the U.K.’s nearest neighbors.
“Unfettered trade with our neighbors is very beneficial to growth,” he told the BBC, and predicted that the “vast majority” of barriers would be removed – although it would take years.
Any move to rebuild ties with the EU will face opposition from the powerful euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party. Even the opposition Labour Party — reluctant to reopen a debate that split the country in half and poisoned politics — says it won’t seek to rejoin the bloc, or even the EU’s single market, if it takes power after the next election.
Sunak, who took office last month, is a long-time Brexit supporter, but also a pragmatist who has made repairing the economy his top priority. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has rocked European security and sent energy prices soaring, has put Brexit squabbles into perspective for politicians on both sides of the English Channel.
Sunak wants to solve a festering feud with the EU over trade rules that have caused a political crisis in Northern Ireland, the only part of the U.K. that shares a border with an EU member nation. When Britain left the bloc, the two sides agreed to keep the Irish border free of customs posts and other checks because an open border is a key pillar of the peace process that ended 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.
Instead, there are checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. That angered pro-British unionist politicians, who say the new checks undermine Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. They are boycotting Belfast’s power-sharing government, leaving Northern Ireland without a functioning administration.
The U.K. government is pinning its hopes on striking a deal with the EU that would ease the checks and coax Northern Ireland’s unionists back into the government.
Months of talks when Johnson was in office proved fruitless, but the mood has improved since Sunak took over, though as yet there has been no breakthrough. ———
Follow AP’s coverage of Brexit at https://apnews.com/hub/brexit and of British politics at https://apnews.com/hub/british-politics
LIVERPOOL, England — On the long picket line outside the gates of Liverpool’s Peel Port, rain-soaked dock workers warm themselves with cups of tea as they listen to 1980s pop.
Dozens of buses, cars and trucks honk in solidarity as they pass.
Dockers’ strikes are not new to Liverpool, nor is depravation. But this latest walk-out at Britain’s fourth-largest port is part of something much bigger, a great wave of public and private sector strikes taking place across the U.K. Railways, postal services, law courts and garbage collections are among the many public services grinding to a halt.
The immediate cause of the discontent, as elsewhere, is the rising cost of living. Inflation in the United Kingdom breached the 10 percent mark this year, with wages failing to keep pace.
But the U.K.’s economic woes long predate the current crisis. For more than a decade, Britain has been beset by weak economic growth, anaemic productivity, and stagnant private and public sector investment. Since 2016, its political leadership has been in a state of Brexit-induced flux.
Half a century after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger looked at the U.K.’s 1970s economic malaise and declared that “Britain is a tragedy,” the United Kingdom is heading to be the sick man of Europe once again.
The immediate cause of Liverpool dockers’ discontent that brought them to strike is the rising cost of living. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Here in Liverpool, the “scars run very deep,” said Paul Turking, a dock worker in his late 30s. British voters, he added, have “been misled” by politicians’ promises to “level up” the country by investing heavily in regional economies. Conservatives “will promise you the world and then pull the carpet out from under your feet,” he complained.
“There’s no middle class no more,” said John Delij, a Peel Port veteran of 15 years. He sees the cost-of-living crisis and economic stagnation whittling away the middle rung of the economic ladder.
“How many billionaires do we have?” Delij asked, wondering how Britain could be the sixth-largest economy in the world with a record number of billionaires when food bank use is 35 percent above its pre-pandemic level. “The workers put money back into the economy,” he said.
What would they do if they were in charge? “Invest in affordable housing,” said Turking. “Housing and jobs.”
Falling behind
The British economy has been struck by particular turbulence over recent weeks. The cost of government borrowing soared in the wake of former PM Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget on September 23, with the U.K.’s central bank forced to step in and steady the bond markets.
But while the swift installation of Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, as prime minister seems to have restored a modicum of calm, the economic backdrop remains bleak. Spending and welfare cuts are coming. Taxes are certain to rise. And the underlying problems cut deep.
U.K. productivity growth since the financial crisis has trailed that of comparator nations such as the U.S., France and Germany. As such, people’s median incomes also lag behind neighboring countries over the same period. Only Russia is forecast to have worse economic growth among the G20 nations in 2023.
In 1976, the U.K. — facing stagflation, a global energy crisis, a current account deficit and labor unrest — had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. It feels far-fetched, but today some are warning it could happen again.
The U.K. is spluttering its way through an illness brought about in part through a series of self-inflicted wounds that have undermined the basic pillars of any economy: confidence and stability.
The political and economic malaise is such that it has prompted unwanted comparisons with countries whose misfortunes Britain once watched amusedly from afar.
“The existential risk to the U.K. … is not that we’re suddenly going to go off an economic cliff, or that the country’s going to descend into civil war or whatever,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London. “It’s that we will become like Italy.”
Portes, of course, does not mean a country blessed with good weather and fine food — but an economy hobbled by persistently low growth, caught in a dysfunctional political loop that lurches between “corrupt and incompetent right-wing populists” and “well-intentioned technocrats who can’t actually seem to turn the ship around.”
“That’s not the future that we want in the U.K,” he said.
Reviving the U.K.’s flatlining economy will not happen overnight. As Italy’s experience demonstrates, it’s one thing to diagnose an illness — another to cure it.
Experts speak of an unbalanced model heavily reliant upon Britain’s services sector and beset with low productivity, a result of years of underinvestment and a flexible labor market which delivers low unemployment but often insecure and low-paid work.
“We’re not investing in skills; businesses aren’t investing,” said Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “It’s not that surprising that we’re not getting productivity growth.”
But any attempt to address the country’s ailments will require its economic stewards to understand their underlying causes — and those stretch back at least to the first truly global crisis of the 21st century.
Crash and burn
The 2008 financial crisis hammered economies around the world, and the U.K. was no exception. Its economy shrunk by more than 6 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. Five years passed before it returned to its pre-recession size.
For Britain, the crisis in fact began in September 2007, a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when wobbles in the U.S. subprime mortgage market sparked a run on the British bank Northern Rock.
The U.K. discovered it was particularly vulnerable to such a shock. Over the second half of the 20th century, its manufacturing base had largely eroded as its services sector expanded, with financial and professional services and real estate among the key drivers. As the Bank of England put it: “The interconnectedness of global finance meant that the U.K. financial system had become dangerously exposed to the fall-out from the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market.”
The crisis was a “big shock to the U.K.’s broad economic model,” said John Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. Productivity took an immediate hit as exports of financial services plunged. It never fully recovered.
“Productivity before the crash was basically, ‘Can we create lots and lots of debt and generate lots and lots of income on the back of this? Can we invent collateralized debt obligations and trade them in vast volumes?’” said James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum and a former adviser to Labour’s left-wing former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.
A post-crash clampdown on City practises had an obvious impact.
“This is a major part of the British economy, so if it’s suddenly not performing the way it used to — for good reasons — things overall are going to look a bit shaky,” Meadway added.
The shock did not contain itself to the economy. In a pattern that would be repeated, and accentuated, in the coming years, it sent shuddering waves through the country’s political system, too.
The 2010 election was fought on how to best repair Britain’s broken economy. In 2009, the U.K. had the second-highest budget deficit in the G7, trailing only the U.S., according to the U.K. government’s own fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
The Conservative manifesto declared “our economy is overwhelmed by debt,” and promised to close the U.K.’s mounting budget deficit in five years with sharp public sector cuts. The incumbent Labour government responded by pledging to halve the deficit by 2014 with “deeper and tougher” cuts in public spending than the significant reductions overseen by former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
The election returned a hung parliament, with the Conservatives entering into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The age of austerity was ushered in.
Austerity nation
Defenders of then-Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity program insist it saved Britain from the sort of market-led calamity witnessed this fall, and put the U.K. economy in a condition to weather subsequent global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.
“That hard work made policies like furlough and the energy price cap possible,” said Rupert Harrison, one of Osborne’s closest Treasury advisers.
Pointing to the brutal market response to Truss’ freewheeling economic plans, Harrison praised the “wisdom” of the coalition in prioritizing tackling the U.K.’s debt-GDP ratio. “You never know when you will be vulnerable to a loss of credibility,” he noted.
But Osborne’s detractors argue austerity — which saw deep cuts to community services such as libraries and adult social care; courts and prisons services; road maintenance; the police and so much more — also stripped away much of the U.K.’s social fabric, causing lasting and profound economic damage. A recent study claimed austerity was responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
Under Osborne’s plan, three-quarters of the fiscal consolidation was to be delivered by spending cuts. With the exception of the National Health Service, schools and aid spending, all government budgets were slashed; public sector pay was frozen; taxes (mainly VAT) rose.
But while the government came close to delivering its fiscal tightening target for 2014-15, “the persistent underperformance of productivity and real GDP over that period meant the deficit remained higher than initially expected,” the OBR said. By his own measure, Osborne had failed, and was forced to push back his deficit-elimination target further. Austerity would have to continue into the second half of the 2010s.
Many economists contend that the fiscal belt-tightening sucked demand out of the economy and worsened Britain’s productivity crisis by stifling investment. “That certainly did hit U.K. growth and did some permanent damage,” said King’s College London’s Portes.
“If that investment isn’t there, other people start to find it less attractive to open businesses,” former Labour aide Meadway added. “If your railways aren’t actually very good … it does add up to a problem for businesses.”
A 2015 study found U.K. productivity, as measured by GDP per hour worked, was now lower than in the rest of the G7 by a whopping 18 percentage points.
“Frankly, nobody knows the whole answer,” Osborne said of Britain’s productivity conundrum in May 2015. “But what I do know is that I’d much rather have the productivity challenge than the challenge of mass unemployment.”
‘Jobs miracle’
Rising employment was indeed a signature achievement of the coalition years. Unemployment dropped below 6 percent across the U.K. by the end of the parliament in 2015, with just Germany and Austria achieving a lower rate of joblessness among the then-28 EU states. Real-term wages, however, took nearly a decade to recover to pre-crisis levels.
Economists like Meadway contend that the rise in employment came with a price, courtesy of Britain’s famously flexible labor market. He points to a Sports Direct warehouse in the East Midlands, where a 2015 Guardian investigation revealed the predominantly immigrant workforce was paid illegally low wages, while the working conditions were such that the facility was nicknamed “the gulag.”
The warehouse, it emerged, was built on a former coal mine, and for Meadway the symbolism neatly charts the U.K.’s move away from traditional heavy industry toward more precarious service sector employment. “It’s not a secure job anymore,” he said. “Once you have a very flexible labor market, the pressure on employers to pay more and the capacity for workers to bargain for more is very much reduced.”
Throughout the period, the Bank of England — the U.K.’s central bank — kept interest rates low and pursued a policy of quantitative easing. “That tends to distort what happens in the economy,” argued Meadway. QE, he said, is a “good [way of] getting money into the hands of people who already have quite a lot” and “doesn’t do much for people who depend on wage income.”
Meanwhile — whether necessary or not — the U.K.’s austerity policies undoubtedly worsened a decades-long trend of underinvestment in skills and research and development (Britain lags only Italy in the G7 on R&D spending). At British schools, there was a 9 percent real terms fall in per-pupil spending between 2009 and 2019, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Xu. “As countries get richer, usually you start spending more on education,” Xu noted.
Two senior ministers in the coalition government — David Gauke, who served in the Treasury throughout Osborne’s tenure, and ex-Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable — have both accepted that the government might have focused more on higher taxation and less on cuts to public spending. But both also insisted the U.K had ultimately been correct to prioritize putting its public finances on a sounder footing.
It was February 2018 before Britain finally achieved Osborne’s goal of eliminating the deficit on its day-to-day budget.
Austerity was coming to an end, at last. But Osborne had already left the Treasury, 18 months earlier — swept away along with Cameron in the wake of a seismic national uprising.
***
David Cameron had won the 2015 election outright, despite — or perhaps because of — the stringent spending cuts his coalition government had overseen, more of which had been pledged in his 2015 manifesto. Also promised, of course, was a public vote on Britain’s EU membership.
The reasons for the leave vote that followed were many and complex — but few doubt that years of underinvestment in poorer parts of the U.K. were among them.
Regardless, the 2016 EU referendum triggered a period of political acrimony and turbulence not seen in Westminster for generations. With no pre-agreed model of what Brexit should actually entail, the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU became the subject of heated and protracted debate. After years of wrangling, Britain finally left the bloc at the end of January 2020, severing ties in a more profound way than many had envisaged.
While the twin crises of COVID and Ukraine have muddled the picture, most economists agree Brexit has already had a significant impact on the U.K. economy. The size of Britain’s trade flows relative to GDP has fallen further than other G7 countries, business investment growth trails the likes of Japan, South Korea and Italy, and the OBR has stuck by its March 2020 prediction that Brexit would reduce productivity and U.K. GDP by 4 percent.
Perhaps more significantly, Brexit has ushered in a period of political instability. As prime ministers come and go (the U.K. is now on its fifth since 2016), economic programs get neglected, or overturned. Overseas investors look on with trepidation.
“The evidence that the referendum outcome, and the kind of uncertainty and change in policy that it created, have led to low investment and low growth in the U.K. is fairly compelling,” said professor Stephen Millard, deputy director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
Beyond the instability, the broader impact of the vote to leave remains contentious.
Portes argued — as many Remain supporters also do — that much harm was done by the decision to leave the EU’s single market. “It’s the facts, not the uncertainty that in my view is responsible for most of the damage,” he said.
Brexit supporters dismiss such claims.
“It’s difficult statistically to find much significant effect of Brexit on anything,” said professor Patrick Minford, founder member of Economists for Brexit. “There’s so much else going on, so much volatility.”
Minford, an economist favored by ex-PM Truss, acknowledged that “Brexit is disruptive in the short run, so it’s perfectly possible that you would get some short-run disruption.” But he added: “It was a long-term policy decision.”
Where next?
Plenty of economists can rattle off possible solutions, although actually delivering them has thus far evaded Britain’s political class. “It’s increasing investment, having more of a focus on the long-term, it’s having economic strategies that you set out and actually commit to over time,” says the IFS’ Xu. “As far as possible, it’s creating more certainty over economic policy.”
But in seeking to bring stability after the brief but chaotic Truss era, new U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has signaled a fresh period of austerity is on the way to plug the latest hole in the nation’s finances. Leveling Up Secretary Michael Gove told Times Radio that while, ideally, you wouldn’t want to reduce long-term capital investments, he was sure some spending on big projects “will be cut.”
This could be bad news for many of the U.K.’s long-awaited infrastructure schemes such as the HS2 high-speed rail line, which has been in the works for almost 15 years and already faces a familiar mix of local resistance, vested interests, and a sclerotic planning system.
“We have a real problem in the sense that the only way to really durably raise productivity growth for this country is for investments to pick up,” said Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. “And the headwinds to that are quite significant.”
For dock workers at Liverpool’s Peel Port, the prospect of a fresh round of austerity amid a cost-of-living crisis is too much to bear. “Workers all over this country need to stand up for themselves and join a union,” insisted Delij.
For him, it’s all about priorities — and the arguments still echo back to the great crash of 15 years ago. “They bailed the bankers out in 2007,” he said, “and can’t bail hungry people out now.”
LONDON — Observers of Britain’s governing structure can be forgiven for scratching their heads in recent weeks as they watch the country reel through a succession of prime ministers without holding an election. While the opposition Labour Party is demanding an election, the governing conservatives are pushing on with choosing another prime minister from within their own ranks, which they have the right to do because of the way Britain’s parliamentary democracy works.
BRITONS NEVER ACTUALLY VOTE FOR THEIR PRIME MINISTER
Britain is divided into 650 local constituencies, and people tick a box for the representative they want to become their local member of parliament, or MP. In most cases, this will be a member of one of the country’s major political parties.
The party that wins the majority of seats gets to form a government, and that party’s leader automatically becomes prime minister. While coalitions are possible, Britain’s voting system favors the two largest parties and in most cases a single party will take an absolute majority of seats, as is the case for the Conservatives in the current Parliament.
HOW DO THE PARTIES CHOOSE THEIR LEADERS?
Since 1922, all of Britain’s 20 prime ministers have come from either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. This means the members of these parties have an outsized influence on who will be the country’s prime minister. The processes the parties use to choose them can appear Byzantine.
Deep breath: For the Conservative Party, their lawmakers must first signal their support for a potential leader. If there is enough support, this person will become an official candidate. All Conservative MPs then cast a series of votes, gradually whittling down the number of candidates to two. Finally, the party’s ordinary members — around 180,000 of them — vote between these two candidates. Last time they chose Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
If the MPs are able to unite behind a single candidate then there is no need for the wider party members to have a vote. This last happened in 2016 when the lawmakers backed Theresa May after the resignation of David Cameron and she automatically became prime minister. This could happen again.
The Labour Party has its own process that is, arguably, even more complicated.
BUT DIDN’T BRITAIN VOTE FOR BORIS JOHNSON IN 2019?
Johnson was selected by his party following the resignation of Theresa May. He had already been prime minister for five months when electors ticked their ballot cards in December 2019. However, voters’ support for the Conservative Party did cement his position as prime minister.
Even in that election, though, it was only actually around 70,000 people who got the chance to vote directly for or against Johnson — those who happened to live in his Parliamentary constituency of South Ruislip and Uxbridge, in west London.
Since then, another prime minister, Liz Truss, has come and gone, and one more will be in place by the end of next week — all without anyone troubling the general electorate.
WILL THERE BE A GENERAL ELECTION SOON?
Constitutionally, no general election is required in Britain for two more years. But as the prime ministers come and go, selected by a tiny proportion of the population, a lot of Britons are beginning to wonder why they are not getting a chance to influence who is their next leader. The clamor for a general election in the near future is only likely to get louder.
LONDON — It is a British cliché that a week is a long time in politics. Liz Truss proved it true on Thursday when she became the shortest-serving British prime minister in history. In a matter of days, her U-turn on economic plans that made global markets jittery and the resignations of key ministers prompted calls from within Truss’ party for her to step down. But the shakeup at the top is hardly an outlier in the recent history of Britain’s Conservatives, whose latest troubles have been years in the making.
DAVID CAMERON’S DECISION
Some observers date the current leadership crisis to Conservative Party infighting over the role of the European Union during Cameron’s 2010-2016 tenure Britain’s leader. The pro-EU prime minister decided to resolve the debate by calling for a nationwide referendum on Britain’s membership in the bloc. With almost 52% voting to leave and 48% to remain, the 2016 referendum resulted in a divisive Brexit. It also led Cameron to resign.
MAY’S BREXIT MANDATE
Theresa May succeeded Cameron as Conservative leader and prime minister on a mandate to “deliver Brexit.” She remained in the job for three years and 11 days, by which time the U.K.’s departure from the Europe Union was still pending. The House of Commons three times rejected the withdrawal agreement May’s government negotiated with the EU. It was a tumultuous time mired in frustration in Brussels and discord in Westminster. Following a string of Brexit-related resignations from her government and under pressure from within her party, May ended up resigning.
BORIS JOHNSON’S TURN
In July 2019, Leave campaigner Boris Johnson became Britain’s third prime minister in just over three years. Johnson made Brexit finally happen in January 2020 after four years of international squabbling. The emergence of the coronavirus pandemic weeks later threw the U.K. off course again. Johnson’s was accused of moving too slowly to limit travel, create an effective test-and-trace program and to project vulnerable older people. Though Johnson won praise for a swift rollout of a nationwide vaccination program, the tight restrictions on businesses, public events and private gatherings the government ultimately imposed would lay the groundwork for the end of his tenure.
WHOSE PARTY IS THIS?
Photos and witness accounts emerged indicating Johnson and government officials broke their own COVID-19 rules on social gatherings during the pandemic. In April of this year, Johnson received a fixed penalty notice for attending one such gathering. He was the first sitting U.K. prime minister to be punished for breaking the law. The scandal, dubbed “partygate” by the British press, triggered a wave of disgust across Britain, especially among those who were not permitted to attend the funerals of loved ones who died during the pandemic. Though Johnson survived a no-confidence vote over that, revelations in July that he appointed a deputy chief whip accused of misconduct led to a wave of ministerial resignations. It cost Johnson his job. He announced his resignation on July 7.
TRUSS MAKES HISTORY
Johnson ally and former Foreign Secretary Liz Truss swept past former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak in September to become Britain’s third female prime minister – and the last leader to meet with Queen Elizabeth II. However, Truss is likely to be remembered for her brevity. After resigning Thursday, she holds the record as the shortest-serving leader in modern British history, clocking up a mere 44 days in office. Her demise was swift. The pound plummeted after the announcement of her mini-budget, which included billions in unfunded tax cuts. To stymie the damage, Truss made U-turns on major tax policies and replaced her Treasury chief. But the resignation Wednesday of Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who left with pointed criticism of her boss, unleashed a torrent of Tory calls for Truss to resign, too.
———
AP journalist Thomas Adamson in Paris contributed to this story.
———
Follow AP’s coverage of British politics at https://apnews.com/hub/british-politics
