Keir Starmer to meet Donald Trump for talks at Turnberry resort
The US president, who played a second round of golf at Turnberry on Sunday, will open a second 18-hole course on his Menie estate at Belmedie in Aberdeenshire later.First Minister John Swinney is also expected to meet Trump, with Swinney having said it would present an opportunity to "essentially speak out for Scotland" on issues such as trade and the increase of business from the United States in Scotland.
The first minister said he would also raise "significant international issues" including "the awfulness of the situation in Gaza".President Trump arrived in Scotland on Friday evening, with Air Force One touching down at Glasgow Prestwick Airport before his entourage travelled to nearby Turnberry.He has since spent two days at Turnberry, playing golf with friends and guests in what has been billed as a private visit.
A high-level security operation was ramped up over the weekend, but public protests were limited to a handful of individuals at Turnberry while the main anti-Trump demonstrations in Aberdeen and Edinburgh on Saturday passed off largely peacefully.Protesters showed their frustrations towards the president's politics, including his views on climate change and his position on the conflict between Israel and Gaza.Trump hosted a meeting with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at Turnberry on Sunday, where they agreed a new transatlantic trade deal.After shaking hands on the deal, Trump said: "It's going to bring us closer together... it's a partnership in a sense."Von der Leyen also hailed it as a "huge deal", which came after "tough negotiations".The agreement sets the US tariffs on goods from Europe at 15% across the board.The European Union had been facing a 30% levy on its exports to the US from 1 August.President Trump will travel back to Washington on Tuesday and is due to return to the UK for an official state visit in September.
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The Independent
11 minutes ago
- The Independent
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The Guardian
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The National
an hour ago
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Any move which recognises the humanity of Palestinians is going to provoke the pro-Israel lobby, who long sank into a sewer of genocidal depravity, and so it proved. What about everyone else – that is, popular opinion, given the polling shows overwhelming public support for recognition of a Palestinian state, an arms embargo on Israel, as well as the arrest of its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity? Starmer's team are essentially arguing that if Israel tones down its genocide, then it will withdraw support for Palestinian statehood. The inalienable right of a people to be free is reduced to a crude bargaining chip, a chess piece on a board to be discarded for a greater strategic cause. So who is this supposed to please, exactly? Here's the gruesome truth. Obviously, Britain should have supported Palestinian national self-determination many moons ago. But there won't be any Palestine left to recognise at this rate. Here is the most symbolic gesture on offer, and even that is reduced to a cynical ploy. There is growing pressure on the Government, because they are facilitating what the former UN aid chief, Martin Griffiths, calls the 'worst crime of the 21st century'. Here is an attempt to deflect from action they could be taking, like ending all arms sales to Israel, including crucial components for F-35 jets that are exterminating Palestinians, or imposing sweeping sanctions on Israel. Indeed, earlier this year, Britain joined other Western states in imposing sanctions on two particularly extreme Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They are both genocidal maniacs who belong in jail, sure, but it is easy to make them the bogeymen in order to absolve the wider guilt of the Israeli state. Notably, the sanctions were justified on the grounds of their incendiary comments, rather than their actions, because the latter implicates the British government. Nothing our government has done remotely meets the scale of the crime. A consensus of genocide scholars – including Israeli scholars – long ago concluded this is genocide. B'Tselem was one of two Israeli human rights organisations to reach the same conclusion this week, alongside Israeli author David Grossman, who won Israel's top literary prize in 2018. Gaza has been plunged into deliberate famine by an Israeli state which repeatedly broadcast to the world that it was intentionally starving the strip. More hungry Palestinians have been massacred at aid points alone since late May than the total number of Israeli civilians and soldiers killed on October 7. And even the BBC is now having to report that Palestinian children are being systematically shot in the head or chest – evidence which points in only one direction: that the Israeli army is deliberately shooting kids. The depravity is so extreme, documented and confessed to, that it is difficult to know either where to begin or end. The British government had a choice when confronted with an incontrovertible criminal reality: to make itself complicit in this historic abomination, or to abide by the most rudimentary building blocks of international law. It chose the former, and now it seeks to wash away its guilt by publicly agonising over Israel's crimes while making tokenistic gestures about a Palestinian nation it has literally helped to massacre. You would have to be either terminally gullible, or a dupe, to be beguiled by this. Throughout history, monsters didn't realise that that is what they are, but they were still monsters. The same applies to Westminster's rulers – and that will be the definitive conclusion of history and, we can hope, the courts, too.
