Politics
White House Comms Chief’s F-Bomb Attack On Former Trump Official Draws Backlash Online
Critics blasted White House communications director Steven Cheung over his latest profane social media post targeting a former top official in Donald Trump’s administration.
Cheung fired back: “Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He’s not read into anything that’s happening, so how would he know.”
The outburst is the latest in a string of inflammatory posts from Cheung.
Just last week, he warned Trump’s critics to “Fuck around, find out” if they doubted the president’s “political power.” He has also previously referred to former “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert as an “entitled prick.”
Critics said Cheung’s latest remarks were unbecoming of a senior White House official:
Philippe Marlière looks at the prospective candidates for the French presidential elections in 2027 for both the left and the right, as well as the key challenges they will have to overcome should they run.
As in 2017, the upcoming French presidential election will be a transitional one that could trigger further political upheaval. Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent President, is no longer eligible to run. His departure opens a wide range of contenders. Jordan Bardella (National Rally, RN) is leading in the polls and considered the frontrunner. But his election is far from certain. The campaign that has already unofficially begun could therefore hold a few surprises.
A disunited and historically weak left
What are the chances of the left? Very slim. It could be eliminated from the second round for the third consecutive time. It will be Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s fourth attempt since 2012. A powerful speaker, comfortable in the media, able to use the registers of radicalism and a unifying discourse, he is more than anyone else at ease in an election where personal capital and communication skills are key.
Mélenchon enters the fray with a disciplined movement. He could, as in 2017 and 2022, benefit from tactical voting from those who do not like him but desperately want the left to reach the second round. Will he succeed? It should not be ruled out in the context of a fragmented and evolving political landscape. However, his personal image is deeply tarnished. He is criticised for his ethnic factional rhetoric, authoritarianism, anti-European Union stance, conciliatory remarks towards Putin, al-Assad, and China; and numerous accusations of anti-Semitism are leveled against him. He is currently more “demonised” in the media and political class than the RN, which, for its part, has largely “de-demonised” itself. In a runoff between Mélenchon and Bardella, polls predict an emphatic victory for the RN leader.
The rest of the left claims to be organising a “unity primary”, intended to select a single left-wing candidate (outside of LFI). Negotiations between party leaders are stalled, the Socialist Party is divided on the issue, and the Communist Party refuses to participate. This primary will probably not happen, opening the door to multiple left-wing candidacies, including that of Raphaël Glucksmann, leader of the small Place Publique party, who is fiercely opposed to Mélenchon. If no non-LFI candidate gains traction in the polls by the end of 2026, the possibility of François Hollande, the former President, running as the saviour of the moderate left should not be ruled out.
Macronism rejected and the Republicans in decline
Who will embody the Macronist centre right? Two former Prime Ministers of Macron stand out: Édouard Philippe, president of the micro-party Horizons, and Gabriel Attal, president of Renaissance. A recent poll shows that the Macronist block is deeply fragmented: the “heirs” (35%) remain loyal to the centre right and will support either Philippe or Attal. Those “tempted by the right” (27%) could vote for Les Républicains (LR), or even the RN. Those “tempted by the left” (23%) are considering a return to the moderate left. Finally, the “disillusioned” (15%) appear disappointed by Macronism and politics in general and could abstain. Philippe is currently in second place in the polls behind Bardella, but he is being closely followed by Mélenchon. His stilted style is struggling to win people over, and he will find it difficult to distinguish himself from Macronism, which is now very unpopular.
The situation is hardly better within LR. Three main candidates are currently in the running: Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and president of LR, was chosen by the party members in April 2026. David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes and a proponent of a broad right-wing coalition, is also a candidate. Xavier Bertrand, an elected Republican who opposes any alliance with the RN, could also run. None of them have the slightest chance of making it to the second round. In the event of a RN victory, will LR support the new far-right government? This is now a conceivable prospect for the (distant) heirs of Gaullism.
On the far right, there will be a new candidacy from Éric Zemmour, who has been convicted several times for racist comments and has popularised the themes of “great replacement” and “remigration” in the public debate.
Is the RN truly “de-demonised”?
We will have to wait until 7 July to find out if Marine Le Pen will be able to run, when the Paris Court of Appeal will issue a ruling concerning Le Pen’s conviction for illegal financing. If the appeal is upheld, she will be ineligible, and Bardella will be the candidate. Both are projected to win the election according to current polls, though Bardella appears slightly more popular. But Le Pen is experienced, while the young Bardella (31 years old) is not. Furthermore, she has a more “social” approach than Bardella, who has a neoliberal economic profile which could alienate part of the RN’s working-class electorate. He has already announced that the RN will backtrack on its proposal to return the retirement age to 62, a proposal which Le Pen still supports.
This is above all an historic election that could bring the far right to power in France for the first time since 1945. A RN presidency would have a significant impact on France’s domestic and foreign policy and would reinforce the nativist and nationalist camp in Europe.
The RN seems certain to qualify for the second round. Which other candidate will make it to the second round to challenge Bardella or Le Pen? A centre-left, pro-European candidate like Glucksmann or Hollande? That seems highly unlikely at present. A centre-right candidate like Édouard Philippe? It is a possibility, but he will have to overcome the widespread rejection of Macronism. A Bardella-Mélenchon showdown? That is a plausible scenario because Mélenchon excels in personalised elections and should still benefit from tactical voting on the left.
In this scenario, would we witness the return of the “Republican Front”, the alliance of all against the far right, in a great anti-fascist surge? This is indeed the great unknown of this election: has the RN definitively been “de-demonised”, like in other European countries, such as Italy? Or does a visceral aversion to it persist, leading “democrats of all stripes” to prefer, at the last minute, to support a candidate they dislike? This is Mélenchon’s hope. Is it realistic? Polls indicate that LFI is currently considered by voters to be “more dangerous for democracy than the RN”. It is therefore a slim hope.
By Philippe Marlière, Professor of French and European Politics at University College London.
The year was 1930 and in Montevideo, Uruguay, the rain showed no signs of abating. Then, in an instant, the dreariness waned when young Frenchman Lucien Laurent scored the first goal in World Cup history . It was the start of a tournament, a ritual, and a sporting mania spanning continents and oceans.
When Mexico and South Africa walk out at the Azteca Stadium today, they won’t simply be kicking off another World Cup. Instead, they will be writing the latest chapter in a 100-year-old story. Since the opening France–Mexico match at the inaugural 1930 World Cup, audiences have learned that in those 90 minutes, part of the magic is that anything can happen. Across the 22 opening matches played in World Cup history, 60 goals have been scored. This is an average of 2.7 goals per match. Often, these games feature attacking moments and palpable pressure. It’s clear the world cup always brings anticipation and drama.
Opening the tournament
For decades, the privilege of opening the tournament went to the defending champions. Argentina stepped onto the pitch first in 1982, Germany in 1994, Brazil in 1998, and France in 2002. But in 2006, FIFA changed the rules — from then on, the host nation would take centre stage. Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar, and now Mexico have carried the torch, welcoming the world to the first match.
Upsets and iconic moments
Opening matches have often defied expectations. In 1990, reigning champions Argentina were stunned 1–0 by Cameroon. Twelve years later, France, fresh off their 1998 triumph, fell 1–0 to Senegal in the first game of 2002. Even hosts have stumbled. In 2022, World Cup Host Qatar became the first host nation to lose an opening match. They fell 2–0 to Ecuador. Some matches, like South Africa’s 1–1 draw with Mexico in 2010, remain memorable for sheer energy and hope rather than shock. In the world cup, every opener has its surprises.
Goals that last
Lucien Laurent’s strike in 1930 may have been the first, but it set the tone. Decades later, in 2010, Siphiwe Tshabalala’s thunderous goal against Mexico became one of the most iconic opening goals in World Cup history, a reminder that the tournament’s first moments echo far beyond the scoreline.
Azteca Stadium makes history
Today, the Azteca Stadium becomes the first venue to host a World Cup opener for a third time, having done so in 1970 and 1986. And as Mexico and South Africa prepare to take the field, the pattern feels familiar: new players, new teams, new stories—but the same truth remains. The first whistle always carries promise, and the opening match always has the power to shape a tournament. The stadium’s connection to world cup tradition is truly remarkable.
From Uruguay to Mexico, across 96 years of history, World Cup openers have never been simple introductions. They are statements—sometimes shocking, sometimes symbolic, always unforgettable. Indeed, the world cup has become woven into the fabric of sports worldwide.
Featured image via Hulton Archive / Getty Images
By Alaa Shamali
The following is a call for evidence from The Fraud author Paul Holden into how Labour Together shaped the current crop of Labour MPs.
Call for Evidence: The Labour Together Parliament
Shadow World Investigations and Paul Holden – author of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy – are today announcing a new investigative project
about the transformation of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) under the Labour Together Project.
This long-germinating project is soliciting evidence about how Labour Party processes were used (and abused) to manipulate the selection of Labour MP candidates who now make up the majority of the PLP.
Keir Starmer was the frontman for a rotten political project that spent the best part of a decade remaking the Labour Party along rigidly factional and exclusionary lines.
The most consequential transformation was of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Two thirds of the Labour MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons were selected through a process tightly controlled by Morgan McSweeney, reportedly with direct (albeit informal) input from Peter Mandelson.
Labour Together, and its key donors, then spent over £2m on getting this intake of MPs elected. The selection process that McSweeney oversaw was beset by allegations of misconduct and irregulates so widespread that veteran journalist Michael Crick described it as ‘corruption’.
One MP selection resulted in criminal charges being filed against Labour officials with close connections to key Labour Together figures.
These are the MPs that not just determine the future of the country but will play a key role in either making or breaking the political fortunes of whoever next succeeds Starmer.
In a follow up to The Fraud, my colleague Jessica Murray and I will be embarking upon ‘The Labour Together Parliament’ project to examine the legitimacy of the process that resulted in the current
Parliament, upon which any Labour government will rest.
What we need as a first step is information
We would like evidence of any wrongdoing or stitch-ups during the selection process. We would like to build a collection of evidence about the ways in which bureaucrats forced through or manipulated the selection process, including in the finalisation of longlists and shortlists, and, where it happened, the decision being removed from local democratic decision making altogether.
We’re particularly interested in the vote tallies from every Labour candidate selection between 2022 and 2024. These have not been routinely published. We are particularly interested in tallies
that distinguish between postal/online/and in-person votes.
These different vote tallies would have been provided to losing candidates. Sometimes they were only read out in selection meetings. We are not only looking for results that seem ‘dodgy’ – but all vote tallies, including those that are not in the least suspicious. This will allow us to build a holistic database and rigorously test different hypotheses.
We would also like tallies from candidate selections in seats that weren’t Labour targets and didn’t result in any MP. Ideally, it would be great if we could be provided with contemporaneous evidence of these vote tallies – such as a screenshot of a message or email relaying the result. We would also be interested in narrowing down which Constituency Labour Parties used Anonyvoter for MP selection, even if the vote tallies are not available.
We have set up an email account research@shadowworldinvestigations.org for any information to be submitted to. It would be much appreciated if this call for information could be shared widely.
Featured image via the Canary / Leon Neal – Getty Images / Dan Kitwood – Getty Images
By Paul Holden
There’s a spectre haunting Europe – the spectre of fascism. Or at least that is what the Brussels establishment and its media allies seem to think. They never cease to liken the rise of national-populism to the movement that devastated the continent from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War.
Yet is the right-wing, populist rebellion really a copy of 20th-century fascism? The Guardian, unsurprisingly, thinks so, raising the idea that Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the one right-wing leader currently in office in a major country, represents a new version of Mussolini’s fascist movement. Much the same charge has been levelled at other Europeans labelled ‘far right’.
To be sure, many of the ascendant parties – the National Rally in France, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, Germany’s AfD and even Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – have attracted some unpleasant figures, and even some genuine admirers of Mussolini. But are these parties and their supporters fascist in intent and tactics?
We certainly see nothing like the ecstatic crowds that came to hear Il Duce’s speeches. Right-wing protests do not generate anything like the enthusiasm that fascism inspired in Italian society, or later under Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Let’s look at Meloni, whose party has the closest historical ties to Mussolini’s movement. She hardly governs with dictatorial powers – she recently lost an important referendum on judicial reform and meekly accepted the result. She has also backed away from some of the promised crackdowns on immigration, largely at the behest of the business elite. ‘She has been about standing still’, suggests Mattia Guidi of the University of Siena. ‘She’s muddling through.’
When Meloni lost, no ‘blackshirts’ stormed the streets of Rome holding fasces or pictures of her. Likewise, when Viktor Orbán, often labelled a neo-fascist destroyer of democracy, lost this year’s Hungarian election, he simply yielded to the voters’ wishes and stepped down. He was then replaced by another rightist who promised to continue the country’s closed-door policy towards refugees and illegal migrants.
Yet the term ‘fascist’ does serve a purpose. It allows Europe’s elites, and their mimics in Britain, to deflect attention from the real cause of the rightward turn: their own failures.
In reality, the ‘far right’ of today does not resemble the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. The son of a socialist blacksmith, Mussolini viewed himself as a revolutionary transforming society. Il Duce defined fascism as ‘organised, concentrated, authoritarian democracy’. His goal was to establish a ‘sublime totalitarian order’. During his heyday, he was widely admired in the West. The usually sober Times of London reported that under the fascists, ‘Italy has never been more united than she is today’, adding that the regime fostered a ‘spiritual revolution’.
The current far right lacks such a revolutionary vision. Italian fascism was profoundly future-oriented. Its ideological framework was captured well by leading Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who embraced a vision that celebrated science, violence and a transhumanist ideal linked to technology. ‘War is beautiful’, he wrote, ‘because it initiates the dreamt-of metallisation of the human body’.
Fascism ‘drew in all class levels, from workers to the aristocracy’, notes Martina Caruso, whose great-uncle was persecuted by the regime, but who has been reading the letters of her grandfather, a particularly vicious fascist police commissioner. ‘It stirred people with a contemporary culture including the cult of beauty, the fetishisation of courage (and by extension violence), and the sense of belonging to a community. That’s how it gained hegemony – through symbols, mass rituals, the media and modernist architecture.’
In contrast, the populist right does not appeal to educated elites in the way that Mussolini and Hitler once did. Its appeal is centred more on those who might be considered the losers of globalisation.
Similarly, much of Reform’s base comes from what was once Labour’s bulwark among the working class. Hence Reform has grown most strongly in the once industrial north of England and even in Scotland – it now enjoys as much support among unionised workers as Labour.
Similarly, the AfD has recently made major gains in the Ruhr, the long-time linchpin of Germany’s fading industrial heartland. In Europe’s largest economy, the percentage claiming Germany is in decline rose from 47 per cent in 2021 to 53 per cent today. More than two-thirds of people in most European countries – despite the welfare state – feel that ordinary people matter little to political elites.
Like Hitler and Mussolini, the new right appeals to many people under 30. But unlike the 20th-century fascist movements, it appeals less to middle-class and educated youngsters than those struggling young people worried about their financial futures. And this is bearing electoral fruit, too. In recent elections, Germany’s AfD won more votes among the young than the Greens. Likewise, in Britain’s recent local elections, voters aged 25 to 49 supported Reform as much as the Greens.
There are, of course, some similarities between the fascist era and our own. People in the 1920s and 1930s also experienced economic dislocation and social unrest. There are parallels with the Biennio Rosso of 1919 and 1920, a two-year period marked by strikes and high unemployment that preceded the fascist takeover. This period was followed by two years of fascist oppression – the Biennio Nero of 1921 and 1922 – that all but obliterated Italian democracy.
Yet if the mood music is similar, the cure proposed by Europe’s populists today differs dramatically from that offered by the fascists. Few on the right today adopt the militancy or dictatorial inclinations of Hitler, Mussolini or Spain’s Francisco Franco. Nor do they embrace the idea that the state should become ‘the moving centre of economic life’ through a close alliance with the country’s leading companies.
‘At its fullest development’, writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, ‘[fascism] redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had previously been untouchably private’. Lenin was the politician Il Duce most admired.
Hitler’s Germany followed a similar trajectory. Like Mussolini, he made alliances with big business, but once in office, the direction of the economy fell largely to his key ally, Hermann Göring. Krupp, Siemens and AEG may have seen a bright future for themselves in a Greater Germany, but when it collapsed, they survived and prospered.
This model of state-business collusion characterises economies such as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, but perhaps most of all China. The People’s Republic may identify as Marxist-Leninist, but it follows a distinctly Mussolinian approach of exploiting private greed to advance national ends. Since 2000, hundreds of billionaires from technology and other sectors have sat in the country’s Communist legislature, a development Mao Zedong would never have countenanced.
Such a co-dominion between big business and the state is unlikely to appeal to the motley collection of struggling shopkeepers, artisans, pensioners and underemployed young people who favour today’s populist right. In some respects, it is the EU bureaucracy that more closely resembles fascism’s economic essence through its top-down industrial policy.
Indeed, like Napoleon’s ‘European system’ or Hitler’s Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), the unelected EU, operating under what one observer described as ‘fortress liberalism’, seeks to strengthen the continent’s weak economies not through entrepreneurship, but through a cultivated form of corporate manorialism.
Across Europe, the bureaucracy constrains entrepreneurship, regulating small industries, farmers and logistics workers in pursuit of its ideological, and plainly unattainable, goal of Net Zero. This has sparked protests ranging from France’s gilets jaunes to farmers’ revolts in Portugal, the Netherlands and Poland. Not surprisingly, suggests Sebastiano Maffettone, a leading Italian political theorist, ‘there’s no deep love for Europe’.
Critically, parties of the populist right reject the militarism that characterised 20th-century fascism. Meloni and her counterparts, like most Europeans, tend towards caution rather than rearmament. Only 16 per cent of Italians, according to one poll, support higher defence spending.
Rather than ideology, the biggest reason for the rise of the populist right, notes author Frank Furedi in his new book, In Defence of Populism, lies elsewhere – in a grassroots cultural rejection of the globalist, identitarian values of European elites. This populist pushback has focussed above all on opposition to large-scale immigration, which many Europeans believe threatens what remains of the continent’s already beleaguered civilisation.
Some of this is linked to concerns about crime. Immigrants appear to play a disproportionate role in rising criminality in countries such as Spain, Sweden, France and Italy. Some critics regard such assertions as intrinsically racist because many newcomers come from outside Europe.
Ultimately, the populist right in Europe is not concerned with fascist dreams of global greatness. Its supporters are concerned rather with defending a way of life against globalist disruption, both cultural and economic. Europeans, whether on the right or the left, value a slower and more congenial society – even at the cost of economic growth and national power. This is a far cry from the ambitions of fascism.
For all the media hubbub, today’s so-called far right possesses relatively little of the ruthlessness or vast ambition that once defined fascism. Instead, it appears to be a desperate cry from neglected grassroots communities seeking not empire, but something closer to normality.
Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute. Find him on Substack here.
In the aftermath of Henry Nowak’s murder, many commentators have agreed that serious questions need to be asked about the influence of race-based diversity training within British policing. Invariably, this concession is followed by a familiar caveat. Whatever mistakes may have been made in the Nowak case, in treating him as a perpetrator of racism rather than a victim of violent crime, we are reminded that black people are still stopped and searched at far higher rates than white people.
The implication is clear. The pursuit of racial equity may sometimes produce errors or excesses, but the underlying project remains necessary because the statistics prove that racial disadvantage persists.
This argument has become so familiar that few people stop to examine its assumptions. Yet the limits of this framework are becoming increasingly obvious. At a time when anti-Semitism is a growing feature of British public life, it is striking how little such developments feature in discussions dominated by the language of disproportionality and equity. Some forms of prejudice fit comfortably within that framework – others do not.
But what exactly do the oft-quoted stop-and-search figures show? We are typically presented with a comparison between ‘black people’ and ‘white people’, as if these were coherent social groups whose members share broadly similar experiences.
Yet, as British writer Kenan Malik observed almost 20 years ago, racial categories often conceal more than they reveal. Minority populations are not homogeneous entities. They are divided by class, sex, age, locality and culture as much as any other population. Yet modern anti-racism increasingly encourages us to treat race as the decisive explanatory factor. Disparities are no longer viewed as phenomena requiring explanation. They become evidence of racism in themselves.
This way of thinking did not emerge from nowhere. The decisive turning point was the 1997 Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The inquiry began as an examination of the police incompetence that had marred the Met’s investigation. But as the aristocrat Sir William Macpherson listened to a stream of race experts relate their experience, he became convinced that little had changed. A submission to the inquiry by one academic stated, ‘institutional racism in this sense is in fact pervasive throughout the culture and institutions of the whole of British society, and is in no way specific to the police service’. And so Macpherson formed the view that racism was the affliction of us all, whether we know it or not.
Macpherson encouraged institutions to see unequal outcomes as evidence of institutional racism and to treat disproportionality itself as evidence of discrimination. As such, the Macpherson principles became fertile soil on which American imports like Black Lives Matter and critical race theory could flourish decades later.
Perhaps the most influential expression of this shift was Macpherson’s definition of a racist incident as ‘any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. The intention was understandable. Police forces had often failed to take allegations of racism seriously. But the effect was to blur the distinction between allegation and fact. Incidents were increasingly recorded according to perceptions.
The influence of this approach spread rapidly beyond policing. Through the amended Race Relations Act in 2000 and subsequent guidance, schools were encouraged to record racist incidents and promote anti-racist awareness. Teachers found themselves reporting playground disputes through racial frameworks that would previously have seemed extraordinary. Across the public sector, race increasingly became the preferred language through which social problems were understood.
The consequences were not always benign. Initiatives intended to reduce racism often encouraged people to think more consciously in racial terms. Children were encouraged to understand themselves through ethnic identities. Educational difficulties were increasingly interpreted through the language of racial disadvantage. Public institutions became more obsessed with racial categories than ever before.
What began as Sir William Macpherson’s attempt to combat legitimate racism in the 1980s gradually evolved into a culture of racial thinking. The Henry Nowak case should prompt us to ask whether that culture has now reached its limits.
The crucial question is not whether Britain suffers from ‘anti-white racism’, as claimed by some commentators. Britain remains one of the most tolerant and ethnically integrated societies in the world. Nor is the question whether racism has vanished altogether. The question is whether ethnicity and racism have become the default explanations for social disparities, institutional failures and human behaviour, and whether we have become so accustomed to viewing society through racial categories that we struggle to see anything else.
The tragedy of Henry Nowak suggests that we should be wary of replacing one form of racial thinking with another. If the answer to anti-racist identity politics is a competing white identity politics, then nothing fundamental has changed. We remain trapped within the same intellectual framework.
The alternative is older, simpler and ultimately more radical. It is to return to the universal principle that people should be judged as individuals rather than as representatives of racial groups. Equal treatment before the law. Equal dignity as citizens. And a willingness to investigate disparities without prejudging their causes.
The lesson of Henry Nowak is not that Britain needs a different racial settlement. It is that Britain needs the confidence to move beyond racial thinking altogether.
Adrian Hart is the author of That’s Racist!: How the Regulation of Speech and Thought Divides Us All.
Ahead of the ten year anniversary of the EU referendum on 23 June, UK in a Changing Europe experts have written a short series of blogs reflecting on some of the issues at the heart of Brexit then and now. Here, Nicola McEwen reflects on Brexit and devolution.
The UK voted to leave the European Union a decade ago while Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, voted to remain. Those divergent choices marked a shift not just in the UK’s relationship with its European partners, but in the political and institutional relationships between the constituent parts of these islands.
The implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland dominated Brexit negotiations. Accommodating its distinctive status has been a key aspect of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Considerably less effort went into accommodating Scotland’s distinctive preferences. Early proposals to facilitate a special relationship with the EU, including within the EU internal market, were quickly dismissed without much consideration. And over the past decade, the politics and process of leaving and living outside of the European Union have contributed to a weakening of the authority of the devolved institutions and perhaps of the Union itself.
EU law provided a regulatory architecture that supported devolution in the UK, limiting the likelihood of policy divergences producing market distortions. As a political community in which sovereignty was explicitly pooled, the EU also helped to reconcile the doctrine of Westminster parliamentary sovereignty with the principle of sharing political authority across the UK’s constituent units, while facilitating the plurality of political and territorial identities on these islands. The Brexit drive to reassert ‘national sovereignty’ and to ‘take back control’ sat uneasily alongside these shared sovereignty norms and self-government claims that underpinned devolution.
One manifestation has been a weakening of the Sewel convention. This convention held that, although its sovereignty was not affected by devolution, the UK Parliament would not normally legislate on devolved matters without the consent of the devolved legislatures. The corresponding process of securing legislative consent became a routine feature; consent was rarely withheld, and when it was, it was usually temporary pending a negotiated compromise.
That was until the Brexit referendum. When the UK government passed the EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018, it did so without the Scottish Parliament’s consent, which Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, described as ‘a terrible precedent’. Breaching the convention became much more frequent as the Brexit process got underway. Then Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford noted: “The Sewel convention was never breached, not once, by Conservative Governments, as well as Labour Governments, for nearly 20 years… we now see… the breach of Sewel becoming almost normalised.”
Perhaps the most blatant breach was also the most controversial of the Brexit legislation introduced by the UK government. The four administrations had been working together to explore whether and how they might develop ‘common frameworks’ in some areas where EU law intersected with devolved law, to avoid unnecessary divergence after the UK left the EU. That cooperative process contrasted with UK government legislation to underpin the UK internal market.
The UK Internal Market Act (2020) was passed in the face of fierce opposition from the devolved institutions. It introduced two Market Access Principles (MAPs). The first ensures that goods and services that can be legally sold/provided in one part of the UK can be sold anywhere in the UK, without having to meet further requirements. The second protects businesses and professionals from being subject to direct or indirect discrimination that favours local goods or service providers.
The effect has been to erode the legal authority of the devolved parliaments and inhibit their ability to introduce distinctive legislation that regulates goods and services. A process was established to permit exclusions from the MAPs, but this delays law-making, creates uncertainty, masks accountability, and has, in effect, given the UK government a veto over devolved legislation that falls within the MAPs’ scope. ‘In effect’ because the UKIM Act does not explicitly curb the competence of the devolved legislatures to pass laws that regulate the market in distinctive and divergent ways, but in restricting the application of such laws to goods and services that originate in local markets, it renders them unworkable.
The most notable example of this process disrupting policy making emerged when the Scottish Government legislated for a deposit return scheme (DRS) to boost recycling. In so doing, they sought to move faster than similar schemes elsewhere in the UK and with a broader scope that included glass bottles. When the requested exclusion from the MAPs was eventually offered by the UK government, it was on a temporary basis and excluded glass, citing powerful business concerns about interoperability of DRS schemes and ‘unnecessary barriers to trade’. The Scottish Government subsequently put its scheme on hold, the company set up to administer it collapsed, and the waste firm, Biffa, sued the Scottish government – unsuccessfully – for £50 million in damages. These Brexit-related developments led to a significant deterioration in relationships between the UK government and its Scottish and Welsh counterparts.
As part of its ‘reset’ of intergovernmental relationships, Keir Starmer’s government has worked more cooperatively with the devolved governments in the implementation of the Sewel convention, despite negotiations to agree a new Memorandum of Understanding on how it should operate failing to reach agreement thus far.
The Labour government also brought forward the statutory review of the UKIM Act, softening some of its hard edges. Exclusion requests should now be considered within the cooperative common frameworks process, with evaluations of environmental protection and public health benefits to be weighed up against the economic costs of regulatory divergence.
But the government is committed to retaining the Act, despite it remaining deeply controversial and a barrier to strengthened relationships.
The Brexit referendum also had the immediate impact of reigniting the issue of Scottish independence. Its 62% Remain vote led to claims that Scotland was ‘being taken out of the EU against our will’, which then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said was a ‘significant and material change of the circumstances in which Scotland voted against independence in 2014’. Brexit also increased discussion among the ‘indycurious’ in Wales.
The recent election victories for Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party, the devastating defeats for the Labour Party, and the emergence of Reform UK as an electoral force are testament to some of the political legacies of Brexit. Though neither the Scottish nor Welsh parliaments have the constitutional competence to pursue the SNP and Plaid’s self-government ambitions, the vote to leave the European Union a decade ago continues to test the resilience of the UK Union today.
By Nicola McEwen, Professor of Public Policy and Governance, University of Glasgow Centre for Public Policy.
Denby Pottery has survived more than its fair share of economic turmoil in its 217-year existence. But nothing it seems on the scale of the industry-destroying policies of the current Labour government. This week, the famed Derbyshire company closed its doors for the final time, citing soaring energy and labour costs. Around 600 workers have lost their jobs.
The pottery firm took its name from the village where, in 1809, it first began turning local clay into stoneware bottles, before expanding to homewares. It went on to furnish dining tables in Britain and across the world for 10 generations. But, in June, work at its kilns ceased. No doubt weak consumer demand for upmarket housewares was partly to blame. Clearly, too, chancellor Rachel Reeves’ hikes in the national insurance taxes haven’t helped. Yet make no mistake: the real culprit in all of this is energy secretary Ed Miliband.
In March, when administrators were appointed for the floundering company, Denby was perfectly clear what the problem was – ‘soaring industrial energy costs’. This is an insurmountable problem for a ceramics business because, to get a finished product, kilns must run at a temperature of about 1,200 degrees Celsius for hours at a stretch. And it’s here that Westminster’s depressing ignorance of science, combined with its dogmatic loyalty to Net Zero, has taken its toll.
Denby isn’t the first British victim of Net Zero. In November, hundreds of jobs were lost when ExxonMobil closed the Fife Ethylene Plant in Scotland. In 2024, 2,000 jobs vanished when the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales closed its last two blast furnaces to meet decarbonisation targets. Later that year, Vauxhall shut its 120-year-old van factory in Bedfordshire, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. Only a last-ditch intervention by the government prevented British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant – and its 2,700 employees – from facing the same fate.
These tales of economic devastation have one thing in common: Net Zero. It has led to Britain having the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, and made it all but impossible to make or produce anything.
We can expect many other of Britain’s famed potteries to go the way of Denby. According to Rob Flello, CEO of industry body Ceramics UK, for kilns to reach the same temperatures with electricity as they do with gas is four or five times more expensive. Now, as with steelmaking, those of an environmentalist persuasion talk up new electrical technologies as an alternative to heat supplied by gas. In principle, future technologies, including low-carbon ones, are always worth exploring. But with ceramics, electric methods of heating will not supplant gas ones for years.
Britain’s Trade Union Congress has published a very balanced report about decarbonising high-temperature ceramics production through electrification. It notes that while electric kilns may make for better glazes, their components degrade rapidly and do not distribute heat as uniformly as gas. To retrofit existing kilns is a big, expensive hassle, and to scale up electrical heating technologies and power supply for industrial purposes will be no easy business, either.
So why does the government dogmatically insist that electrification is the way to go for UK ceramics factories? After all, Miliband himself states that 30 per cent of UK power generation is still based on gas. His figure is debatable, but clearly full decarbonisation of British ceramics factories is decades away.
Oblivious to all this, Miliband, the messiah of Net Zero, demands that industry abandon the cheap gas it currently depends on for some of the dearest electricity on Earth. Worse, a byzantine system of energy-relief schemes for business, first introduced by the previous Conservative government and now made still more complicated by Labour, only softens costs for firms that rely on electricity, not gas. A summary of the reliefs contains not a single mention of gas.
Looking forward, a relief system for gas-intensive industries could prevent future bankruptcies like that of Denby. Moreover, future UK governments should celebrate ‘heritage’ manufacturing for its design merits. That is not nostalgia – it is entirely in the UK’s interests. Denby outlets in America, China and South Korea are still operating.
It isn’t just Labour that is to blame for Denby’s closure. Tory bigwig Tom Tugendhat has claimed that ‘energy policies that have pushed prices higher in search of a carbon ambition at home’ are the culprit at Denby. This is rich, given that, in 2022 he (along with other candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party) made an unreserved commitment to uphold Net Zero.
What makes Denby’s closure all the more galling isn’t only the jobs that have now vanished. We have lost something of British history, too. In 2024, it was reported that Denby Pottery Village welcomed 300,000 visitors a year.
This is the cost of Net Zero. Thousands of jobs and livelihoods lost. Factories that were once the lifeblood of a community decommissioned. And the memory of all of the remarkable things our nation once produced, vanishing without a trace.
James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. Follow him on X: @jameswoudhuysen.
Voters punished ruling parties across the globe in 2024. They are doing it again now.
The same voters who rejected their rulers without mercy on both sides of the Atlantic — throwing out Britain’s Conservatives after 14 years in power and humbling Democrats in the United States — are now poised to deliver resounding defeats to the very leaders they elected two years ago.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces the prospect of being ousted later this year if a key rival in Manchester can pull off a win in a special parliamentary vote next week. President Donald Trump, while locked into power until January 2029, appears to be barreling toward lame duck status with Democrats growing increasingly bullish about their midterm prospects in November — particularly in winning back the U.S. House.
And The POLITICO Poll suggests Western voters’ desire for political bloodletting hasn’t abated.
Building on previous work by Public First, the London-based firm that conducts the survey, a new analysis of May POLITICO Poll results show large shares of voters in both the United Kingdom and United States express deep cynicism about politics and a constant desire for radical change — suggesting the forces behind the backlash may still be potent, and that power switching hands this year may not be enough to quell them.
In America, 71 percent of adults say politicians only look out for themselves, including 79 percent of those who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and 71 percent who voted for Trump. In the U.K., voters are similarly angry at politicians, who they blame for being unable to address a variety of issues, including cost of living and immigration. New results from The POLITICO Poll, conducted over the weekend, show a 56 percent majority of U.K. adults said the bigger problem with politics in the U.K. is the politicians who do not do the right thing, while just 15 percent blame the system itself.
That deep dissatisfaction has metastasized into a perpetual anti-incumbent frustration in recent years. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party had its worst result in a national election in several decades, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau stepped down amid growing voter frustration. Just since February of last year, the rulers of Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic have all been ejected at key elections.
Now the U.K. is watching the vote in Makerfield next week, which may determine whether Starmer gets to keep his job amid public outrage at his handling of fallout from the Epstein scandal, and voter concerns about immigration, the economy and law enforcement. If Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, succeeds in being elected back to Parliament next week, it will almost certainly trigger a series of events that could end in the removal of the deeply unpopular Starmer as the head of the Labour Party — and prime minister.
The result could ripple across the Atlantic as Republicans face their own political headwinds ahead of the crucial November midterms in the United States.
“What we’re seeing is a cross-Atlantic disconnect between voters and electeds,” said Kevin Madden, a longtime GOP communications strategist in Washington and senior partner at Penta, a consulting firm.
“Voters in the U.S. are squarely focused on at-home domestic priorities and kitchen-table concerns like food, health care and housing costs. So when the headlines are focused on foreign conflict and disruptions to global markets, those will reinforce the disconnect.”
Deep cynicism in the UK spells trouble for Starmer
In 2024, the rejection of incumbents came amid a growing frustration over the cost of living and broader economic anxieties. Whether that backlash was a temporary response — or reflects an engrained dissatisfaction with political institutions — is a question now confronting leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, as affordability concerns continue to spiral.
In the U.K., the analysis from Public First finds a deep sense of political disillusionment. The firm developed a series of measures to understand that feeling of “anti-politics”, and cynicism stood out: Voters who believe politicians are self-serving, that political talk rarely leads to real action and that the public has little influence over what politicians actually do.
Nearly half of British adults — 45 percent — scored high on Public First’s cynicism scale; so did 37 percent of U.S. adults.
The findings underscore the challenge facing Starmer. New results from The POLITICO Poll conducted last weekend show nearly two-thirds of U.K. adults — 64 percent — said they don’t think Starmer will remain as prime minister until the next general election.
The center-left U.K. leader has suffered the most dramatic plunge in popularity of any prime minister in British history. Since winning a landslide victory just under two years ago, Starmer has seen his Labour Party fall to historic lows in opinion polls, while the nationalist right-wing Reform U.K. of Nigel Farage has stormed into the lead in polls and local elections, mirroring the success of insurgent populists across Europe.
Three-quarters of highly cynical voters in the U.K. hold an unfavorable view of Starmer, the Public First analysis of a May POLITICO Poll found — far higher than the national average.
The Makerfield by-election on June 18 will determine whether Burnham, Starmer’s chief internal rival, is elected as Labour’s representative, giving him the chance to challenge Starmer for the party leadership and potentially replace him as prime minister. Burnham’s main rival in the by-election is the Reform U.K. candidate — whose victory would likely end Burnham’s leadership ambitions, plunge Labour into unprecedented turmoil and send the national government into fresh disarray.
But Makerfield looks likely to be terrible for Starmer, whoever wins. Either it will be Burnham, who will then go to London to try to oust the prime minister, or it will be Reform U.K. — fuelling claims that Starmer has toxified his own party beyond repair.
Why Trump should be watching closely
It’s a cautionary tale for Trump, the Public First research found.
As Starmer confronts dropping favorability ratings, Trump’s own numbers have also plummeted — and the segment of cynical Americans may be as dangerous for the president as their British cohort is for the prime minister.
Among this group, 57 percent hold an unfavorable view of Trump and his agenda, compared with 48 percent nationally.
That could pose a challenge for Republicans heading into the midterms. Elections in the U.S. historically punish the party in power, and many Republicans are bracing for an even more difficult than anticipated midterm landscape, fueled by the mounting economic concerns and an unpopular war in Iran.
“The biggest mood shift is taking place among voters in the big middle,” Madden said. “These are the same voters that migrated toward Trump and the GOP in 2024 because they were nostalgic for a Trump economy and they rallied around a message focused on tackling inflation.”.
Sizable shares of cynical Americans hold negative views about the economy. Among these respondents, 52 percent say their financial situation has worsened since Trump took office in 2025 and 59 percent say Trump has spent too much time focused on international affairs rather than domestic issues.
Trump, who rode to power in 2024 in large part over voter dissatisfaction to the economy during the Biden administration, is now confronting a similar challenge. Recent polling finds voters increasingly blaming Trump for their financial pressures, even as he continues to cast blame to his predecessor.
Part of the problem for incumbents is that many people blame politicians — not the broader system — for their dissatisfaction, underscoring the challenge for the leaders as voters begin to turn on them. Nearly half of British adults, 45 percent, say the country keeps changing prime ministers “because none of them are any good,” while just 26 percent blame “big problems that not even a good PM could solve.”
As soon as leaders are elected by a frustrated, dissatisfied electorate to turn things around — as both Starmer and Trump were in 2024 — the clock begins to tick.
“Elections are so often now about which candidate can channel the frustrations of a cynical electorate,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First, POLITICO’s polling partner.
“Republicans and Democratic candidates alike should pay attention to what is happening in the U.K.,” he said. “It is far harder to win over an antipolitical voter base when you represent the ‘politics,’ and given how fast Britain is working through Prime Ministers cynical voters seem to be getting more common and less patient.”
The number of working days lost to strike action plummeted by almost two thirds during Labour’s first year in power. This is according to new analysis from the GMB union.
The 12 months leading up to July 2024, when Labour won power, saw 1,406,000 working days of strikes.
During the year following Labour’s win, there were 559,000, a huge drop of more than 60%.
The GMB will discuss the figures, which come from analysis of Office of National Statistics data, at its annual congress in Blackpool.
Lifting the wages of millions of low paid workers and improvements to employment rights, such as day one sick pay, help explain the drop, the union said.
Ross Holden, GMB head of research and policy, said:
Workers go on strike when work doesn’t pay and bad bosses don’t listen.
It’s no wonder we saw the biggest strike disruption in decades under the Tories who took the side of bad bosses and left our economy in chaos.
This drop in strike days shows that employers have nothing to fear in Labour’s plan to Make Work Pay. It must be delivered in full.
Featured image via Leon Neal / Getty Images
By The Canary
The UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been accused of genocide, massacres and sexual violence. Sudan’s civil war has raged for three years with the backing of foreign and regional powers. Now survivors have filed the first war crimes complaint in Kenya.
Twelve victims backed by a Swiss legal NGO urged Kenya’s chief of prosecution to pursue the case. Associated Press (AP) reported on 9 June:
It is the first attempt to prosecute members of the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, the paramilitary group fighting against the Sudanese military for over three years, outside Sudan.
The group, which has been accused by rights organizations of committing atrocities amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity, has ties with Kenya’s government.
AP said:
Kenyan President William Ruto has previously hosted RSF leader Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo for talks that he said were aimed at advancing peace efforts in Sudan, a move that sparked diplomatic tensions.
The twelve survivors are working with the Switzerland-based NGO Legal Action Worldwide. Their testimony details:
torture and sexual violence committed by RSF members at various locations in and around Khartoum between April 2023 and March 2025 when the Sudanese capital was controlled by the paramilitaries.
The charges against RSF included that their victims:
were held in inhumane conditions, with little or no food, limited access to water, and inadequate sanitation facilities. They allege that they were beaten, burned, suffocated, subjected to electric shocks, and sexually abused, including through rape.
Some were reportedly forced to transport dead bodies from detention facilities.
RSF is backed by the UAE but many other nations have made the war worse through active participation or through humanitarian inaction.
Rapid Support Forces and Sudan’s ongoing foreign-backed civil war
The RSF, backed by the UAE, is fighting the Sudanese government, with gold interests and regional influence at stake.
Numerous foreign actors, including the UK, have caused the war to fester through active participation and/or outright passivity. Israel, too, is a player in the war.
The war in Sudan is theoretically between the Arab-majority RSF and the Sudanese government. But foreign states pursuing their own interests are backing the combatants.
Turkey, Egypt and many more countries are pursuing their own interests in Sudan too. British military components have also shown up on the battlefield in RSF hands. The UK is a major arms supplier to UAE.
The RSF has killed Sudanese civilians in vast numbers. Some estimates say 150,000 people have died and more than 10 million civilians have been displaced by fighting.
Sources have also claimed the UK downgraded the situation in Sudan to avoid “pissing off the Emiratis”.
Drone war over Sudan
Drones have been a major feature of the war. Both RSF and Sudanese government forces have deployed them. On 9 June government forces engaged RSF drones over the capital Khartoum. The Sudan Tribune reported:
Military sources said a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) drone attempted to bomb military sites northwest of Omdurman before ground defences intercepted it and prevented it from reaching its targets.
The same sources said air defences also engaged strategic drones in East Nile, with no casualties reported.
A recent UN report said drones were a serious threat to life and limb in the war:
Drones caused more than 80 per cent of civilian deaths in Sudan’s war during the first four months of 2026, killing at least 880 people.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned both sides for their use of unmanned aerial weapons:
Armed drones have now become by far and away the leading cause of civilian deaths.
And the Ayin investigative network reported that clashes between local people and RSF allies in Sudan’s south have resulted in a village being burned:
violence last month killed at least 61 civilians, including women and children, who were targeted during clashes between the [RSF-aligned] SPLM-N, led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu and the Ottoro tribe in Kauda.
Part of the conflict is due to:
the Ottoro’s refusal to allow the SPLM-N-allied Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to mine in their area.
The submission of a first official war crimes complaint is a good sign. Yet lawyers say allegations are hard to corroborate in a country gripped by war and devastation. A semblance of peace and justice for Sudan in this foreign-backed war may still be a long way off.
Featured image via Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
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