World

Andy Burnham is Britain’s Biden

Watching Andy Burnham in Manchester, dressed in his T-shirt and jacket and pronouncing the return of a more old-fashioned, pro-worker left, I had a sense of déjà vu. I had seen this movie before, but with different accents. For the politician Burnham obviously resembles is not British at all – it is Joe Biden. Just like Biden, Andy Burnham’s self-image is based on the idea that those on the left are the tribunes of ordinary working people, not progressive elites. Like Joe Biden, Andy Burnham is a provincial throwback to an earlier time, just from the North West, not the Midwest. Just like Biden, Burnham rails against the "neoliberal" changes of the 1980s, which he blames for the economic problems of today.

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Will the ‘anti-Trump playbook’ work in Britain?

Commentators were so busy fulminating against Trump’s FIFA shenanigans yesterday they mostly missed his intervention in the big story now roiling British politics. "They’re Running the 2024 Anti-Trump Playbook on Nigel Farage," the President posted on Truth Social, linking to an article on the National Pulse, an American media site founded by Farage’s old mucker Raheem Kassam. The point, now being repeated by Reform’s talking heads on TV, is clear. "They" – the SW1 elite – are trying to stop Nigel Farage, just as the Washington establishment mounted a ridiculously elaborate lawfare campaign to try to stop Donald Trump.

What Trump and Erdoğan want from each other

Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s attending this year's NATO summit in Ankara for one reason only: “respect for President Erdoğan.” Trump told NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte last month that if it hadn’t been for the veteran Turkish President’s invitation, “I don't think I would have gone to it.” NATO’s summit will, therefore, be dominated by the alliance’s two most militarily powerful and at the same time most problematic members. Trump seems set on pursuing his long-held goal of making Europe pay for its own defense, while Erdoğan is determined to leverage his strategic relationship with the US, Russia and Ukraine to scrap restrictions on Turkish purchases of US military hardware.

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Ukraine

Russia is relying on drones to bring it victory in Ukraine

Earlier this week, Ukraine was subjected to one of the largest aerial assaults by Russia since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion over four years ago. Overnight from Monday into Tuesday, Russia sent 73 missiles and 656 drones into Ukraine, killing at least 21 and injuring dozens across the country. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, this strike was retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on a vocational school in the occupied region of Luhansk on May 22. But, as the Kremlin’s war grinds on well into its fifth year, it also appears to signal a step change in how the Russian armed forces are choosing to fight.

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Ukraine’s Jehovah’s Witnesses are refusing to go to war

Prison guards led Vitalii Kryschenko to an inhospitable, cramped cell. Inside, the prisoners were curious. They watched with great interest as Kryuschenko found his allotted place. A small, gentle man with a nervous expression, he wasn’t a typical criminal but a Jehovah’s Witness. Kryschenko was jailed by Ukrainian authorities for refusing to go to war; taking up arms is forbidden by his religion. He was now going to share his days with the very worst of Ukrainian society. This would include thieves, those guilty of assault or worse.  "I was living with murderers, people jailed for life," he said. "It was terrifying. On my first night, I asked myself how I would survive in these conditions. All the same, I continued my daily prayers and read the Bible.

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Putin’s nuclear escalation is a sign of desperation

As Vladimir Putin senses the momentum of the war shifting in Ukraine’s favor, he has redoubled his attempts to coerce Kyiv and its European partners. Russian troops are in retreat, losing territory overall for the first time since Ukraine launched its Kursk offensive in August 2024. Drone strikes have forced all of central Russia’s major oil refineries – accounting for a quarter of the country’s refining capacity – to halt or reduce output. Meanwhile, the cracks are beginning to show as Russians cease believing in their President, with some openly calling for an end to Putin’s so-called special military operation. His only available response, it seems, has been to resort to nuclear intimidation and threats of military confrontation with the Baltic states.

Israel

Can Israel fend off Hezbollah without alienating America?

As the 60-day period of negotiations stipulated by the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US gets under way, the issue of Lebanon is fast emerging as a central bone of contention. It is also revealing significant differences in the stances of America and Israel.   Israel has sought throughout to detach its battle with the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah in Lebanon from the negotiations – and from the larger effort to settle the conflict between the US and Iran. The logic is as follows: Hezbollah intends to continue its war against Israel.

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Israel is the new Ukraine

J.D. Vance didn't call Benjamin Netanyahu out by name, but in sternly reprimanding the "Cabinet of the Israeli government" from the White House podium on Thursday, he sent Israel and its Prime Minister a clear message. In demanding more respect, raising the threat of severe consequences and ordering the country to get in line, the Vice President echoed the public fight he picked with another world leader and US ally: Volodymyr Zelensky. It wasn't quite as spectacular as the now infamous Oval Office blow up in February last year between Trump, Vance and the Ukrainian president. But Vance went further in his criticism of Israel than any other US President or Vice President in recent memory.

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Is Trump going to defund Israel?

Cutting US military aid to Israel was once an impossible dream of the most extreme fringe of the Democratic party. Today axing the $3.8 billion annual package is a bipartisan issue being spearheaded by the GOP. The number of free US tax dollars that Israel would receive to spend on its military under a GOP plan being discussed by both governments would be reduced to zero. The brainchild of Marlin Stutzman, a staunch Israel ally and Republican congressman from Indiana, the proposed memorandum of understanding, which would come into effect when the current deal ends in 2028, now forms the basis of the negotiations and was endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

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America

Europe

Germany is quietly falling apart

In Germany, the trains have stopped running on time, bridges have been shut over safety fears, and the country's largest carmaker, Volkswagen, is cutting a sixth of its workforce. The government's response amounts to a shrug, dressed up as reform. It seems like Germany is on a bad streak – and the AfD looks set to reap the rewards. Why does a country that still thinks of itself as Europe's engine room seem to have lost the ability to fix its own bridges? Take the railways, the infamous Deutsche Bahn. A few weeks ago, they ground to a total halt. Every train in the country stood still, because the radio system that lets drivers talk to signal boxes – a system that appears to date, in spirit if not in silicon, from the Kaiserreich – simply stopped working.

Why is the New York Times celebrating the slave-trading Vikings?

Norway plays the Ivory Coast tomorrow afternoon in the first knockout phase of the soccer World Cup, and one suspects the New York Times will be backing the Norsemen. The Gray Lady has gone gaga for Norway’s "Viking Row," a synchronized routine where fans mime the rowing of a Viking longboat to the bang of a drum. It’s caught on among the Norwegian players as well as politicians back in Norway, who performed the row in parliament last week. For the last two weeks the NYT has been publishing breathless pieces about the zany Norwegians and their Viking antics. “The 'Viking Row' is in full flow” was one headline on June 18; five days later they described how it "has taken the World Cup by storm." And their editorial office from the sound of things.

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The death of British two-party politics has been greatly exaggerated

Every twist in the winding road of Britain's politics brings a latest thing to say. These wisdoms usually survive a season or two before succumbing to the new thing to say, which often asserts the opposite. This summer we have “Britain is moving into an era of multiparty politics.” Allow me, therefore, to leap ahead with my candidate for its successor: “Reports of the death of two-party politics are greatly exaggerated.” I don’t say our current governing party and principal opposition must always be the two parties in question. Labour may be dying. The Tories may be showing signs of life. In both cases I fervently hope so. But whether or not these remain our two options in elections to come, the tendency will always be for the choice to boil down to two.

politics

In praise of the American Loyalists

As the United States marks 250 years since the country's unilateral declaration of independence, most of the Fourth of July celebrations have focused on the rebels. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have hogged the limelight for too long. What about the American Loyalists, those who defied the intense social pressure and stayed loyal to the British Crown? Loyalists were often bad writers who simply lacked the flair of radicals such as Thomas Paine In popular imagination, the American Revolution was a contest between the Americans and the British. In reality, however, only about 40 percent to 45 percent of the colonial population joined the rebellion. Around a fifth stayed loyal. The rest backed neither side.

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Can the Kremlin afford to fix Russia’s oil crisis?

For a country that pumps roughly nine million barrels of oil a day – the third highest of any country in the world – Russia has managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable: it cannot keep its own gas stations stocked. More than half of its regions are now reporting shortages, the consequence of a Ukrainian drone campaign that has struck with increasing frequency and precision at the refinery infrastructure on which the country's civilian economy depends. The sometimes hours-long lines that have appeared – even in Moscow, for what may be the first time in the war – carry a symbolic weight that no amount of official reassurance from the Kremlin has managed to dispel. How this has come about is obvious enough.

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The confessions of J.D. Vance

There were many reasons why 2016 was a strange year. One of them was the halfhearted effort by people on both sides of the Atlantic to try to understand why voters had voted the "wrong" way in the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. The book that was touted as an explainer for all of this was Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by someone called J.D. Vance about his upbringing in rural Ohio. After the election of Donald Trump, Vance’s description of family breakdown, de-industrialization, poverty and drug abuse was said to explain why so many Americans had voted for Trump. There was much that was patronizing about all this – mirrored in France by the attention paid to Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims.

How Brand Scotland conquered America

In his highly entertaining history of alcohol and the British, Empire of Booze, Henry Jeffreys observed how one effect of the Napoleonic Wars was to make Scotland a popular destination for English holiday makers. What with the continent being isolated and everything, there weren’t many more exotic places for the richer, more adventurous traveler to visit. I’m a huge admirer of how the Scots put national identity to its most benevolent and noble purpose: using it to milk wealthy Americans of their money The country was until then largely unknown to many people south of the border, something also true of its trademark drink.

The truth about Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom has spent the last two years building a national profile for himself beyond his controversial governorship of California. But does he have what it takes for a presidential run in 2028, something that would take him far outside the left-wing political bubble of the Golden State? Freddy speaks to Christopher Rufo, author of the Christopher Rufo Substack and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about the real Gavin Newsom and the decay of California under his watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-gXQQfkqA&pp=0gcJCU4LAYcqIYzv Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano.

The truth about Gavin Newsom

Why is America’s radical left winning?

After success in the New York Democratic primaries for far-left candidates, President Trump says "the game is on. Enjoy Watching." Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist, Roger Kimball, about how Trump plans to deal with the radical left, the lawlessness of New York under Zohran Mamdani and how artificial intelligence is changing politics. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.

Why is America’s radical left winning?
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The Iran war is Trump’s Suez crisis

Clarissa Eden famously declared that "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room." Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined. In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt.

Is the US-Israel special relationship over?

Until recently, the Israeli right regarded President Donald Trump as its greatest ally. He was often described in quasi-religious terms – as a savior, even a messiah sent to rescue Israel from international pressure and the constraints imposed by previous American administrations. According to several American media reports, Trump told Netanyahu: "You’re fucking crazy" and "All the Jews are sick of you" That admiration stemmed from Trump’s unwavering support during his first term. He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and adopted Netanyahu’s position that Washington should withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated in 2015 under president Barack Obama.

Even Andy Burnham doesn’t know what Andy Burnham stands for

The British constitution is an admirably flexible thing, so I would not claim that Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign, and the coverage thereof, is unconstitutional, but it is certainly unseemly. Why did a BBC helicopter follow his train from Manchester to London (which arrived, of course, late) as if he were Lenin heading for the Finland Station? And why was he allowed to preempt his result with a mass selfie with about 200 of his supporting MPs in Westminster Hall? He is merely a new Member of Parliament, until he isn’t. Turning the place into his stage set is a way of intimidating possible challengers. If he is challenged, he will surely still become leader, but the point of a challenge is to force him to say what he means to do.

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Venezuela’s earthquake is the cruelest blow

Venezuela thought its luck was changing. Then the earthquakes stuck. For a country that's economy has long been in tatters, parts of Venezuela are now in ruins. The huge 7.2 of and 7.5 magnitude quakes have devastated pockets of Venezuela, with parts of the capital, Caracas, and the northern coast dotted with mounds of rubble. Rodriguez could also use this tragedy to argue an election is not what the country needs It's a cruel twist of fate the South American nation that was finally beginning to pull itself out of dismal abyss it had found itself in. Many Venezuelans, little by little, were allowing them to be more optimistic this year. Nicolás Maduro was out of the picture following his capture in January. Hundreds of political prisoners had been released.

The Brexit decade: was it worth it?

It may not feel or sound like it but Keir Starmer is a born-again Brexiteer. His achievements in office may be nugatory, his search for a legacy tragicomic, but there are countless actions this government boasts of which simply would not have been possible if we had stayed in the EU. Earlier this year, Labour moved to protect our steel industry with a tariff package possible only because we have an independent trade policy. I was delighted this month when the minister in the Lords made it clear this was a Brexit benefit. Those same Brexit freedoms allowed the Chancellor last month to cut tariffs on more than 100 foodstuffs to ease the cost-of-living crisis.

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donald trump

Is Trump’s quest for peace doomed?

J.D. Vance jokingly compared himself to Richard Nixon yesterday. "Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media... kinda sounds like J.D. Vance," he said at the Richard Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. "I’ve always liked Richard Nixon." At the same time, 8,000 miles away, in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian forces struck another ship, further undermining what critics have called "the Vance deal" – the "Memorandum of Understanding" between Tehran and Washington. And that suggests, at a foreign-policy level, the Nixon-Vance parallel is more apt than the 50th Vice President realizes. Of course, Nixon was Commander-in-Chief and Vance is not. And the Vietnam War is very different to America’s current fight with Iran.

South Africa

South Africa now has its answer to ICE

A force of 10,000 inspectors is being recruited to weed out foreigners: door-to-door across the nation, they will check mines, factories and shops, rounding up those without papers for deportation. Oh, and the target will be black people! Trump madness? Marine le Pen? No, this is South Africa and a project launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa to expel millions of black migrants from across the rest of Africa who have jumped the border or overstayed their visa.  It's Africa's answer to ICE, though you won't find many people protesting: quite the opposite.  Government and the police are desperate to demonstrate they're on top of the problem; to assuage the rising rage of native South Africans, and try to stop them taking matters into their own hands.

Bibi

Will Bibi go into exile?

In January 2027, Benjamin Netanyahu could leave office for the final time. In the middle of a corruption trial at home and facing arrest in many countries due to an International Criminal Court warrant, Netanyahu can’t spend his retirement traveling the world or relaxing at home.  Some have speculated that Bibi, who’s grown to enjoy the finer things in life, might follow in the footsteps of the two Yairs – his younger son Yair and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro – and head off to a luxurious exile in Florida, sheltered by the Trump administration from his worries at home and abroad.  Of course, this all depends on whether he loses the election.

What Iran could learn from Denmark

Iran is looking increasingly Danish, which sounds like a strange thing to say. What could Iran (a theological dictatorship which massacred 30,000 of its citizens earlier this year) and Denmark (a social democracy which is one of the world’s most generous foreign aid donors) possibly have in common? Iran has chosen a great short-term policy in asserting its control over Hormuz, but a mediocre long-term one But Iran’s theologians like to keep themselves half a millennium back from contemporary mores.

Why Jack Schlossberg lost

Jack Schlossberg was, until yesterday, a high-profile candidate in New York’s 12th congressional district who seemingly had everything you might need for a modern political career: a winning smile, a Kennedy connection, an engaging social media presence. The only thing he was missing? Actual policies on which to predicate his campaign. He came third in yesterday's primary, after securing just over 10 percent of the vote. “Jack didn’t have a message other than, ‘It’s time to shake up politics,’” Democratic consultant Chris Coffey told the New York Times.

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northern ireland

Northern Ireland has been the biggest loser from Brexit

In the decade since the vote to leave the European Union, arguably no issue has consumed more energy, column inches, political capital and careers than how to solve the problem of Northern Ireland. It was on that narrow, jagged border between North and South that the substantive skirmishes took place between the UK and EU on what their future relationship would look like. While Michel Barnier and Lord Frost arguing the toss over the finer points of agri-food regulation may lack the luster of the Battle of the Boyne or the romantic connotations of 1916, it was no less significant a moment in Northern Ireland’s history.

Britain is the weak man of Europe on border control

Britain and France have rewritten the "one in, one out" migrant deal nearly a year after it came into effect. The treaty, described as "groundbreaking" by both countries last summer, has struggled to stem the numbers of migrants heading from France to England in small boats. It soon became apparent that the deal contained a loophole that enabled a handful of deported migrants to return to Britain in the back of a lorry. Britain's Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has agreed with her French counterpart, Laurent Nuñez, to close this loophole by tweaking the treaty to stipulate that its terms apply to any returning migrant regardless of whether they enter a second time by boat or by vehicle.

The real threat to democracy after Brexit

Ten years after the Brexit referendum, its long-term impact on British politics is evident. Not so evident is why this is the case. Every general election sees comparable debates. So too did the 1975 referendum on membership called by Harold Wilson. But none of these other elections has ever produced such an extreme and long-lasting reaction, or a concerted attempt to use both informal and formal methods – constitutional and legal – to block the result.

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