Trump gets down to business at trade talks with European Commission president
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Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Sir Keir should not emulate Hugh Grant
His feet had barely touched British soil before Donald Trump started swinging his big stick. 'You better get your act together or you're not going to have Europe anymore,' he lambasted his Western allies after arriving in Scotland to visit his golf courses (not for the 47th president, concerns about second jobs). 'You've got to stop this horrible invasion that is happening to Europe, many countries in Europe… this immigration is killing Europe.' Setting aside the rights and wrongs of British immigration policy, our beleaguered Prime Minister would be forgiven for feeling a little peeved. What other American president would have presumed to blend personal and state business so brazenly and deliver such insulting rhetoric into the bargain? Amid social unrest in Epping, Reform on the march and small boats arrivals up by a staggering 50 per cent, immigration is Sir Keir's Achilles' heel. With his approval ratings at rock bottom, the last thing he needed was a punishment beating from Trump. Certainly, Sir Keir's backbenchers will be begging him to stand up to the Donald, if only to appease their voters in places like Ashton-under-Lyne, where many may be tempted by the Corbyn-Sultana cult or a Gaza Independent at the next election. Did Sir Sadiq Khan recommend that the Prime Minister reprise the 20ft Trump 'baby blimp' that he authorised to be flown above Parliament during the presidential visit of 2018? I wouldn't be surprised. And he wouldn't have been the only one. In the Left-wing mind, the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually looms disproportionately large. This is for the sake of one scene alone. In it, Hugh Grant – whom most progressives, particularly those of a Liberal Democrat persuasion, wish was the prime minister in real life – upbraids the American president at a press conference. 'I fear that this has become a bad relationship; a relationship based on the president taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain,' Grant lectures his opposite number, played by Billy Bob Thornton. 'We may be a small country, but we're a great one, too… and a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.' Forgive me for quoting that Richard Curtis idiocy at such length. But that is precisely what Guardianista-in-chief Polly Toynbee did in a petulant little column before Sir Keir's visit to the White House in February, under the screaming headline: 'Starmer has the backing of Britons to stand up to Trumpism.' I rest my case. But does he? When it comes to immigration, the opposite would appear to be the case. Although 55 per cent of Labour voters want the numbers to stay the same or go up, polls show that most of the population wishes them very much reduced, with 32 per cent viewing immigration as a 'bad' or 'very bad' thing. Small boats get people's backs up even more. For all his braggadocio and swagger, the sorry truth is that on this issue, Donald Trump speaks for a greater number of Britons than our own prime minister. For this reason, Sir Keir would be best advised to tell his backbenchers to pipe down. Trump's big stick has caused the PM enough pain already. Tweaking the orange tail might play well to certain parts of the gallery but after a year of economic mismanagement, we are hardly able to withstand the tariffs with which Trump would surely retaliate. Whatever Hugh Grant may think.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis
Migrant hotel protests are erupting across the country, as 'tinderbox' Britain catches fire. What began with a series of protests in Epping, Essex, over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a recently arrived Ethiopian migrant, has now spread, as Brits air long-standing grievances about asylum seekers they have been forced to host in their own communities. A powerful tendency now exists in the British state towards displacement activity Demonstrations have so far been reported in Bournemouth, Southampton and Portsmouth, Norwich, Leeds and Wolverhampton, Sutton-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, Altrincham and even at Canary Wharf in London. With years of unaddressed anger rapidly making themselves felt, the police, pulled in all directions, are struggling to keep up. 'Local commanders are once again being forced to choose between keeping the peace at home or plugging national gaps', admits the head of the Police Federation. Still, it seems there is one thing the government is more than happy to devote resources to: trawling the internet for anti-migrant sentiment. The Telegraph reports that an elite team of police officers convened by the Home Office is set to monitor social media to flag up early signs of unrest. Working out of the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in Westminster the new National Internet Intelligence Investigations team will 'maximise social media intelligence' gathering in order to 'help local forces manage public safety threats and risks'. If this new division was just about intelligence-gathering that would be one thing. It's true that social media is in invaluable resource for following events on the ground at such gatherings, while local Facebook groups are often where grassroots protests are organised. Yet we know that when it comes to the British state and social media, censorship and punishment for online speech is never far behind. Ever since Sir Keir Starmer repeatedly linked the Southport unrest last year with social media, the idea has firmly taken root in Whitehall that the best way to stop unrest is to aggressively police the internet. Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, already takes this view, and the link has even been drawn in Department for Education guidance on how to talk to schoolchildren about the Southport disorder. In a recent report, the police inspectorate said that that forces must be 'better prepared and resourced to monitor, analyse, use and respond to online content', which it argues was a risk to public safety. This general zeal for social-media policing is why Big Brother Watch believes the new unit is very likely to infringe on free speech. The investigations team is 'Orwellian' and 'disturbing', says interim director Rebecca Vincent, creating the possibility that it 'will attempt to interfere with online content' as other government bodies are known to have done during Covid. As if there weren't enough threats to free speech already. This week age verification provisions in the latest stage of the Online Safety Act (OSA) kicked in, meaning that some footage of protests is now inaccessible on social media for many users. Not even parliamentary privilege is safe from the censorship regime. Katie Lam's searing April speech on the rape gangs, in which she quoted court transcripts and survivors, could not be watched on X without age verification. We are beginning to look like North Korea with rainbow flags: for the public's 'safety', footage exposing grievous failures of the British state now cannot be viewed in the UK. Little wonder, given the OSA explicitly earmarks content relating to 'child sexual abuse' and 'illegal immigration and people smuggling' as the 'kinds of illegal content and activity that platforms need to protect users from'. The Conservatives, who bequeathed us this blank cheque for digital authoritarianism, certainly need to take a long, hard look at themselves. The claims that the OSA is merely about restricting access to pornography has been exposed as a mere fig leaf. And still things could still get worse. As the Free Speech Union has noted, shortly after last year's riots, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a pro-censorship lobby group with ties to Morgan McSweeney, 'hosted a closed-door meeting under the Chatham House rule to discuss the role of social media in civil unrest'. In attendance were officials from the Home Office, the Department of Science, Information and Technology, Ofcom and other organisations. The CCDH proposals that emerged included amending the OSA to 'grant Ofcom additional 'emergency response' powers to fight 'misinformation' that poses a 'threat' to 'national security' and 'the health or safety of the public''. This would give Secretary of State Peter Kyle the ability to directly flag unapproved content to be taken down at a time of 'crisis'. Should the unrest continue this could well be coming down the track. What all this illustrates is just how ill-equipped the people in charge are to deal with Britain's problems, as The Spectator's Madeline Grant noted earlier this week. A powerful tendency now exists in the British state towards displacement activity. Spin doctors 'manage' the news. Police surveil social media. The government shuffles asylum seekers from hotel to hotel, or to HMOs, or even to privately rented accommodation (which it uses your own taxes to outbid you for). For his part, the prime minister has been tweeting about the women's football. As the unrest grows, leading politicians continue doggedly insist that Britain remains a 'a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country'. In reality, there are answers to the asylum hotels crisis, it's just that the government simply lacks the will to act. Large numbers of illegal migrants need to be deported, while those that are here should be placed in a secure holding facility somewhere remote. What is surely obvious by now where they should not be: in hotels, in an Essex market town 500 yards from a school; on the Bournemouth beachfront; in the London's financial district; in a Leeds suburb right next to a shopping centre. As it is, however, it seems the regime will try anything and everything before addressing people's real concerns.
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Trump makes 'biggest of all the deals' with the EU. What's next?
👉 Follow Trump100 on your podcast app 👈 Donald Trump arrives in Scotland. His weekend is spent playing golf - occasionally with a helping hand from his caddie - before a surprise visit from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sees a major trade deal brokered in Ayrshire. The president is celebrating the deal, and so is the EU. But who is the real winner? And what does this mean for Sir Keir Starmer and Scottish First Minister John Swinney, who are due to meet Mr Trump separately at the start of this week? If you've got a question you'd like the Trump100 team to answer, you can email it to trump100@
