Category: Politics

In case there is any doubt of the kind of country Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla) has in mind for the United States, his administration has hired a company whose CEO supports the Governor’s presidential campaigns and specializes in combat training and uses a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes as an instructor to train civilian forces, according to a new report.

When DeSantis first activated the State Guard to “help” the National Guard with emergencies two years ago, he was accused of wanting a secret police force. That accusation looks more and more on par, and new revelations about how he is training them add a lot of disturbing weight to the accusations.

Florida has agreed to pay Stronghold SOF Solutions “up to $1.2 million to recruit, vet and train volunteer members of the Florida State Guard, the World War II-era force that DeSantis revived last year to respond to emergencies,” Ana Ceballos and Lawrence Mower reported in the Miami Herald on Friday.

Some members of the state civilian force, aka DeSantis’ secret police being trained for combat by a company that touts the instructor accused of killing civilians and being “perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” are now able to make arrests and carry weapons, according to the report. “(I)ts scope has been expanded to allow the state guard to respond to emergencies anywhere in the country, and some members have been granted the ability to make arrests and carry weapons.”

Stronghold SOF Solutions, the company training DeSantis’ secret police, have praised his “you loot, we shoot” slogan and they claim they are preparing future the “warfighter,” which is saying the quiet part out loud.

DeSantis approved the contract with Stronghold during a state emergency he issued, which they point out “could have allowed the state to waive procurement and vetting requirements for vendors.”

These kinds of moves are all about using power to legalize the theft of more power, which is used to hold power in the future. A secret police operating like it’s in a combat war zone certainly would be helpful to silence any dissent and one can imagine them even being deployed as “poll watchers,” which isn’t much of a stretch after the Trump campaign sent their thugs to intimidate poll workers and voters in 2020. DeSantis is Trump but without the national pushback.

The Miami Herald points out that the company has also done work with the Department of Defense, so that’s alarming as well and something that the Biden administration should be addressing, because even as their policing mission is the opposite of the militaristic one evinced by Republicans, the DOD isn’t training civilian forces. But we don’t need anyone in national defense to be trained by a company that hired and is proud of Eddie Gallagher’s “evil” behavior while in Iraq.

Gallagher is a former Navy SEAL embraced by Donald Trump, who “was court martialed for shooting at civilians from a sniper’s post and murdering a defenseless captive in Iraq.”

The platoon leader turned in by his own platoon, who reported that he shot not only civilians and “stabbed a defenseless prisoner to death,” but according to The New York Times, “was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving.”

“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators,” the Times reported in December of 2019. They continued:

“Platoon members said they saw Chief Gallagher shoot civilians and fatally stab a wounded captive with a hunting knife. Chief Gallagher was acquitted by a military jury in July of all but a single relatively minor charge, and was cleared of all punishment in November by Mr. Trump.”

We’ve all witnessed the militarization and weaponization of law enforcement under Trump during his four years as president, but this shouldn’t be confused with support for law enforcement as we also witnessed Trump incite his own supporters to attack law enforcement protecting the U.S. Capitol on January 6th in an attempted self-coup. This suggests that it’s not just a militarization of civilian forces, but a militarization of civilian forces that agree with the fascist leadership style of the executive, be that person Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott. The individual doesn’t matter; this is the model of the authoritarian push coming from the Right around the globe.

“Ron DeSantis plans Florida paramilitary force outside federal control,” The Guardian reported in 2021 of the State Guard DeSantis activated.

It was too much for some military veterans, who quit over its “militia-like focus.”

The Herald wrote that while it was “unclear how many State Guard members have been recruited, vetted and trained by the company, if any, but a state database shows a payment of $300,000 last month for work related to the State Guard. Records show the state has also authorized spending more than $217,000 on ammunition for the State Guard… during its first training at Florida National Guard headquarters in June, military veterans quit over its militia-like focus.”

The Republican Governor requested nearly $100 million for the new State Guard force in March of this year, citing a vision of deploying them via planes and boats with police powers.

A Special Message From PoliticusUSA

If you are in a position to donate purely to help us keep the doors open on PoliticusUSA during what is a critical election year, please do so here.

We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.

Adam Hawksbee is Deputy Director of the think tank Onward.

The recent history of British deindustrialisation is both simple and underappreciated. Thirty years ago, manufacturing generated about one in every six pounds of the UK’s economic output; by 2009, after the financial crisis, the figure was one in every ten pounds. It has stayed at that level ever since.

So the 1990s and 2000s represented the tail-end of a transition towards a service-based economy – a sectoral shift which has now largely stopped. We are left with a manufacturing base that is smaller, but stable and highly productive, providing opportunities in places that need it most and underpinning our economic resilience.

But energy prices, interest rates, and a tight labour market have hit these firms hard. When the Chancellor delivers the Autumn Statement next week, he should prioritise British manufacturing.

His speech will rightly focus on restoring growth and increasing private investment. But in recent decades even liberal economists like Larry Summers have recognised that the location of growth and type of investment matters just as much as overall levels, and that governments should target left behind places and R&D intensive firms.

This is where manufacturing can play a unique role. It drives innovation outside of the South, generating 40 per cent of productivity growth in the West Midlands and the North West between 1997 and 2017. Investment in manufacturing tends to be locationally sticky, creating the long-term anchor industries that underpin regeneration.

And as more countries deploy scientific capabilities as part of geopolitical power struggles, it is increasingly important that we maintain manufacturing capacity for strategically important technologies.

Support for manufacturing to date has been, at best, piecemeal. In the absence of coordinated industrial policy, firms have been left to navigate a fractured set of skills programmes and poorly targeted subsidies.

There are some exceptions: the “Made Smarter” programme, designed by ministers but delivered by metro mayors, has helped thousands of firms to adopt advanced technology and export to new markets.

But more must be done. Jeremy Hunt should take two big steps when he stands up to the dispatch box next week.

First, he should make full expensing permanent. Capital allowances and the headline rate of corporation tax have been hugely volatile over the past ten years, adding to the uncertainty facing businesses. Hunt rightly introduced full expensing in the Spring Budget earlier this year, meaning firms could write off investment in productivity-enhancing plant and machinery from their corporate tax bill in exactly the same way as they can for day-to-day expenses.

Onward called in 2021 for the extension of enhanced capital allowances to increase investment by manufacturing firms, given the outsized importance of machinery to their productivity; recent IFS research has even revised down the cost of the policy from around £10 billion a year to £1-3 billion.

But full expensing means little if it is a temporary measure. In practice only a small number of the biggest firms invest more than the previous Annual Investment Allowance. And these large firms – often in pharmaceuticals, aerospace, defence or automotive – make investment decisions over significant time horizons.

A three-year window for full expensing means they’ll just shuffle forward planned purchases, instead of making genuinely new investments. This means, in the blunt words of tax guru Dan Niedle, temporary full expensing is “a waste of money”.

Making full expensing permanent would provide firms with much needed certainty, particularly as Rachel Reeves has hinted Labour would continue the policy. Hunt could even go further, expanding it to investments in buildings or simplifying the tax treatment of intangibles. He could also change the tax treatment of debt-financed investment, to ensure that firms taking advantage of full expensing aren’t borrowing for bad purchases.

Regardless, the underpinning principle is clear: the targeting of tax incentives matters as much as, if not more than, the headline rate.

Second, the Autumn Statement should unlock investment from pension funds. Only the largest firms benefit from full expensing and the vast majority of Britain’s manufacturers are SMEs – many of which can’t access the capital to grow.

Too many of Britain’s cutting-edge start-ups are moving abroad, listing on foreign stock exchanges, or folding due to a lack of long-term capital investment needed to scale up. Less than half of Britain’s most innovative firms reach their second funding round, compared to around two thirds of American ones.

British pension funds continue to shy away from these investments, meaning firms lose out on a critical source of capital. UK pensions amount to a mere ten per cent of the domestic venture capital pool, compared to 72 per cent in the US.

The Treasury has shown appreciation of the challenge when it announced the so-called Mansion House Reforms earlier this year to encourage more investment by pension funds into assets such as venture capital. Although a good first step, the five per cent target is still well below the largest US or Canadian pension funds, which invest respectively 13 per cent and 21 per cent of their assets in this investment category.

A new Onward report by Zachary Spiro and Allan Nixon argues we need to tackle the three root causes holding back pension investment in British manufacturers: a fragmented market, outdated industry attitudes, and a preoccupation on keeping down costs at the expense of returns.

The biggest single step the Chancellor could take is the creation of a Science Superpower Fund – an investment vehicle housed within the British Business Bank made up of cash from smaller pension funds, local government pensions, and private savers, looking to invest in promising British companies.

The Autumn Statement could also include a raft of smaller measures to get pensions funds working harder for growth: new tax credits to encourage smaller pensions to wind up, active capitalisation of public sector pension schemes, stronger transparency and reporting requirements to target under-performing funds, and reformed regulatory duties for pension fund trustees.

There is a risk that calls for a focus on manufacturing sound like what’s sometimes called bring-backery, harking to an era of heavy industry that is long gone.

But what we make, how we make it, and who makes it, have all changed for the better. Much of our domestic manufacturing is now advanced, R&D-intensive manufacturing – just as likely to be in life sciences or aerospace as more traditional areas like automotive or food and drink.

As economist Jonathan Haskel has observed, within most manufacturing firms the distinction with a services firm fades away; developers, designers, and project managers are as common as engineers and machine operators.

And while manufacturing will never employ as many people in low-skilled roles as it did in the early 20th Century, the jobs it provides are stable, technical and well paid with good opportunities for progression. When paired with apprenticeships and adult skills programmes, they’re one of the surest routes for social mobility in many of this country’s left-behind places.

It’s a myth that Britain no longer makes things. But the people and places that are designing the next wave of British goods and looking to export them around the world are under immense pressure. This Autumn Statement, it’s these businesses and towns that should be at the forefront of the Chancellor’s mind.

In an exclusive interview, Caroline Lucas reflects on her time in parliament, gives her verdict on the last five Tory prime ministers and expresses her concerns about Labour under Keir Starmer

Caroline Lucas is one of the most prominent parliamentarians in the UK. A household name on the left, she has served 13 years in the House of Commons, sitting as the sole MP for the Green Party. Earlier this year, she announced she would be standing down at the next election. In light of this, Left Foot Forward spoke to her about her time in parliament, her reflections on a tumultuous period of politics and what she intends to do next as part of our series of interviews with retiring MPs.

Lucas is initially humble when speaking on her achievements since entering parliament in 2010. “As a single backbench MP it’s very unlikely that I’m going to suddenly bring in a new piece of legislation,” she says.

However, she then goes on to point to a series of things that have her mark on them, starting by saying: “In terms of policy, one of the things I’m most proud of is persuading the government to introduce a new GCSE in natural history”. She continues: “I think perhaps a better way of measuring the difference that having Greens in any room where there’s any kind of power is it does change the conversation.

“And I think, for example, 13 years ago it was inconceivable that parliament would declare a climate emergency. I remember suggesting keeping coal in the ground and I was looked at like it was a totally ridiculous idea.

“The campaign against fracking – and that involved obviously also taking peaceful direct action – but I think that the work that I was able to do around fracking in parliament did contribute significantly to the changing view around fracking in parliament which even survived Liz Truss trying to bring it back through the back door when she was prime minister.

“So I think there are issues on the political agenda that wouldn’t be there if you didn’t have a Green in the room – in this case if I weren’t there in parliament.”

With Lucas having played a part in these campaigns on climate and the environment, has the UK got closer or further away from taking the action it needs to address the increasingly urgent climate and ecological emergencies than when she was first elected? Lucas starts by telling Left Foot Forward: “We are better off than we were then”, pointing towards the fact that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels and there is a “momentum now behind green energy”.

Alongside this, she says that “nature herself has kind of stepped in with the number of, what were, freak weather events now regularly occurring”, This, Lucas argues, has led to climate denial being an untenable position for other MPs to maintain. She says: “When I first went to parliament, I think there probably would have been a number of MPs on the Tory side who would have been relatively comfortable challenging climate science. Now they don’t challenge the science. They challenge the policy. They challenge whether or not you have to act fast.” Reflecting on this shift, she goes on to say: “Maybe we have to go through this stage as well before we actually get to the blindingly obvious – that action on climate is cheaper if you take it now than if you take it in 30 years time.”

Lucas’ self awareness when talking about her successes in parliament is reflected when she is asked what she regrets over the 13 years she has spent as an MP. She doesn’t prevaricate and instead takes the question head on.

On her biggest regret, she tells Left Foot Forward: “I think maybe it is that I voted for the Brexit referendum.” With the Greens having been vocal campaigners against Brexit and for a People’s Vote, it’s not hard to see why. Explaining why she decided to vote to hold the initial referendum, she says: “I voted for that referendum in good faith because I’d been a member of the European Parliament for over ten years.

“And during that time I said so many times that if only people understood how the European institutions worked, if only we had a bit of media focus on what we do in the European Parliament, then if you could see that actually democratically elected members of the European Parliament are taking part in democratically agreed votes that change the lives of people in this country, I naïvely thought if only people could see all of that they would understand the importance of EU institutions and perhaps learn to like them a bit more. And so I believed that the referendum campaign could have been an opportunity to have a serious debate about the future of the EU.”

“And as history has shown so plainly, that was such a misconception. And maybe looking back it was naïve to think that we could possibly have had that debate.”

Brexit is just one of many issues that has made the last decade and a half of British politics chaotic and febrile. The financial crash, austerity, the covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis have all played their part. Since Lucas entered parliament in 2010, there have been no less than five different Tories occupying Number 10. Having served as an MP through each of these prime ministers, Lucas gives a damning verdict on them.

“I suppose he started off better than he finished”, she begins on David Cameron, “For a while he was hugging huskies and he ended up saying ‘let’s get rid of the green crap’. And we know that by getting rid of what he called ‘green cap’ – in other words environmental measures – he ended up costing every household hundreds of pounds more every year because their energy is more expensive, because their homes aren’t insulated.”

On Theresa May, she says: “Living through Theresa May when she was prime minister, I was horrified by her total lack of appreciation of complexity in the sense that it was Theresa May who would come out with sentences like ‘Brexit means Brexit’ – it was just such a pointless, foolish thing to say.” While Lucas says that May was “in her own way more honourable” than the other Tory prime minister’s we’ve had before and since, she then goes to say, “albeit, as soon as I say that, I remember those immigration vans she sent round which were telling people to ‘go home’”.

“The trouble is, you compare everyone with Boris Johnson”, Lucas says. Johnson, in her eyes, was “such a toxic, delinquent, reckless prime minister that anybody in comparison pretty much with him comes off slightly better than they should”. Her criticism only gets stronger from there. She says: “He didn’t give a shit about hundreds of thousands of people’s lives. And when I think the true story of Covid is properly told and when I hope that people can focus on it instead of focusing on the latest awful thing that’s filling our headlines, I think that people will recognise that the choices he made have been responsible for the needless deaths of so many people through Covid.

“And that’s before we even get to the fact that he prorogued parliament when it suited him when it got in his way. He lied continually about whether or not he had an over ready Brexit. He just has no moral compass. Words begin to fail you really when it comes to Boris Johnson.”

While Lucas speaks at length about her assessment of the other PMs, she offers just a one word judgement of Liz Truss – “Lettuce, what more can I say?”

As for Rishi Sunak, Lucas tells Left Foot Forward: “What he has done on climate has just been so dangerous, because there was a broad consensus in parliament around climate which was still there in 2010 in the sense that the Climate Change Act had been passed and – to their credit – some of that had happened under a Tory government, and that had gone through with only a handful of people voting against it.

“And what Rishi Sunak has chosen to do is to unravel that climate consensus, to wreck it, to deliberately deconstruct it in order to chase a few more votes to try to shore up his failing popularity. And by using climate as a wedge issue, I think he’s just shown the most unforgivable recklessness when it comes to the climate policies.”

While she is unsurprisingly damning about the prime ministers who have been in office over her 13 years in the House of Commons, Lucas has had to work closely with MPs from other parties. By virtue of being the only MP for her party, working cross-party has been central to much of her work. As a result, she offers strong praise for MPs on the opposition benches who she has worked with over the years.

She tells Left Foot Forward: “I work really closely with people like Nadia Whittome and Clive Lewis on the Green New Deal, and we have an all party group on the Green New Deal and we work very closely together on that. I enjoy working with Barry Gardiner actually on the Environmental Audit Committee just because he’s such a terrier when it comes to cross-questioning ministers. From the Liberal Democrats I work very closely with Wera Hobhouse on environmental issues, green issues. Plaid [Cymru] are very good on social issues and I’m probably closest to them of all the parties in Westminster.”

However, such praise is definitely absent from her assessment of the likely next prime minister – the Labour leader Keir Starmer. She starts by acknowledging that she and the Green Party would “prefer to see a Labour government than a Tory government”, but goes on to ask “what kind of Labour government” we are likely to get.

“I think there are real concerns over the U-turns that Keir Starmer has been performing – whether that is on what was originally a £28 billion commitment for green investment, he was going to scrap tuition fees, things like the two child benefit cap which is a really, really obscene policy and his own frontbench have said its obscene yet he has now said that he is not going to reverse that.

“He’s better on oil and gas to the extent that he’s said he won’t give licenses to new oil and gas. But then there’s a totally incoherent position of saying that he will allow Rosebank to go ahead. Whereas if he had said were he to get into government he would have tried to roll back that decision it would never have been taken in the first place, because the signal that would have given to Equinor, the Norwegian investor who is going to go ahead with Rosebank would have thought twice. So on oil and gas, there’s a problem there.”

Lucas says that on the economy and other issues, Starmer is operating with a “lack of ambition” which is “so desperately disappointing because he seems to think that if he just plays it incredibly safe, then he can tip-toe into Downing Street”, before going on to say “I think he needs to worry as well about the number of people he simply won’t be inspiring to get off their chairs and down to the polling station at all – and right now it is incredibly hard to say what Keir Starmer stands for”.

Given that Lucas spoke to Left Foot Forward the day after the major vote in parliament on whether the government should call for a ceasefire in Gaza, she also criticises Labour for failing to vote to support a ceasefire. “I think it was incredibly disappointing that Labour is on the wrong side of history on this”, she says.

Our conversation closed by looking not at the past, but to the future. With Lucas standing down at the next election, she is hoping that her Green colleague Sian Berry will replace her in her Brighton Pavilion constituency. After a difficult set of local elections for the Greens earlier this year, in which Labour retook control of the council, Berry will need a fierce campaign to keep the seat Green.

Whether it is Berry or someone else that replaces her though, Lucas has some advice for her successor: “Sometimes it’s easy to get carried away with Brighton being the centre for entrepreneurship, for independent, vibrant shops and businesses […] but it’s also a city of great inequality and of people who are really struggling”, adding, “So I think it would be about just remembering the full complexity of this city and to reflect that in the work that they do”.

What many are no doubt keen to learn about the future is what Caroline Lucas does next. When she announced she would be standing down earlier this year, Lucas said “the intensity of these constituency commitments, together with the particular responsibilities of being my party’s sole MP, mean that, ironically, I’ve not been able to focus as much as I would like on the existential challenges that drive me – the nature and climate emergencies”.

It’s not surprising, then that she finishes our interview by saying: “The climate and nature stuff [is] what gets me out of bed in the morning”, and “I know that I want to keep working on climate and nature”. She admits that she doesn’t “yet know what that will look like”. But given that she has already driven these issues up the agenda as an MP, as an MEP before that, and as the most prominent Green politician in the country, even with Lucas leaving parliament, she will no doubt remain a major public figure fighting the climate and ecological emergencies as her campaigning activity enters its next phase.

This article is part of a series of interviews with MPs standing down at the next general election. The other interviews published in the series are:

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

Image credit: UK Parliament – Creative Commons

The tweet that got Michael Eisen fired as editor-in-chief of a prestigious science journal seems less provocative with each passing day.  

On October 13, less than a week after Hamas’ cold-blooded rampage near the Gaza-Israel border, satirical news outlet the Onion posted a brief article on X, headlined, “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.”

The piece, which, as the Onion does, uses dark humor to make a serious point—in this case about the mainstream response to the horrific attacks and the brutal retaliation already in progress—struck a chord with Eisen, a 56-year-old geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Eisen is perhaps best known as a leader in the movement to transform science publishing. He’s also known for his outspokenness. That evening, frustrated by what he considered to be the “feckless” response of college and university administrators to the crisis, he reposted the Onion link on his personal account, with commentary.

The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university. https://t.co/R8gufC9opJ

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) October 13, 2023

The post went viral overnight, and resulted in his dismissal by eLife, the online journal where he’d served as editor since 2019.

Amid the raw emotions of the crisis (on social media, no less, with propaganda flying like shrapnel from all sides), nuance and context were early casualties and the public discourse has been ugly. Criticism of Israeli actions is conflated with (or deliberately portrayed as) antisemitism. Support for Palestinians is misconstrued as support for Hamas, and Palestinians are tarred as Hamas supporters—just as Jews are sweepingly (and derogatorily) branded as Zionists. Students are doxxed and blacklisted and student groups decertified for expressing unpopular opinions. Hate speech and violence targeting Jews and Muslims alike has spiked. In Illinois, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was fatally stabbed by his landlord shortly after the Hamas attacks. In California, an elderly Jewish man died following an altercation during competing street protests. Like I said, ugly.

By comparison, Eisen’s experience may seem inconsequential—he’s alive and well and a still tenured professor at a revered university—but the saga offers some useful insight into the way people and institutions are still struggling to thread the needle of free speech amid the heightened sensitivities, and complicated history, of an exceptionally volatile situation.

For the record, Eisen is Jewish, with relatives in Israel. Some family members are observant, he told me, others less so, but “pretty much everybody was very Israel-obsessed when I was a kid,” so “I’m very familiar with the history and the political discourse.”

His grandparents “would brook no criticism whatsoever of Israel and its politics and actions,” whereas some of the younger generations had issues with the way Israel treated the Palestinians. “For most of my childhood, I felt like Israel like was poised between a desire for peace and a desire for self-preservation,” he says. “And at some point that was replaced by a mentality, first in the settlers and the hard right, and then increasingly in the government, of people [who] were very racistly anti-Palestinian and supported and participated in violent acts, and just cruel things to make [Palestinian] lives increasingly miserable.”

Eisen remembers where he was on November 4, 1995, the day Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Rabin—who shook hands with the late Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat at the White House in that iconic 1993 photo—was a force behind the Oslo Accords, the framework for a peace process aimed at fulfilling what the UN called “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

But the Oslo Accords infuriated both Hamas—which, unlike the PLO and its mid-1990s successor, the Palestinian Authority, never recognized Israel’s right to exist—and Israeli extremists, one of whom murdered Rabin after hard-right politicians, including Netanyahu, had riled up their followers. “I remember sitting in a car in Providence, Rhode Island, listening to the news and just like in tears, feeling like maybe the last chance to have a sane outcome was lost,” Eisen says. 

After he reposted the Onion piece, a couple of people he knew replied to ask whether he condemned Hamas. Eisen answered that he did, and that he also was “terrified” by the ongoing collective punishment of the people in Gaza.

He figured that was the end of it. He was wrong. He went to bed and “by the time I woke up the next morning all hell had broken loose.”

Several Israeli scientists, incensed by his post, were agitating to get him fired from eLife. They and others vowed to stop submitting papers to the journal—some said they were stepping down as article editors or reviewers. In tweets and emails, they accused Eisen of anti-Israeli bias, and worse.

Tel Aviv University researcher Oded Rechavi reposted resignation announcements and suggested a new hashtag (#resignfromelife). He and others tweeted at eLife’s top funders, which include Max Planck Institute, Wellcome Trust, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Many X commenters expressed outrage, calling Eisen a “disgrace” or a “self-hating Jew”—at least one suggested he supported terrorism. The Onion aspect rankled many. “Is this a joke to you?” asked a senior researcher from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.

In a longer critique, Israeli researcher Uri Ben-David wrote that Eisen’s “extreme insensitivity toward his Israeli colleagues” and “clear bias against Israel” rendered him unable to judge the work of Israeli scientists fairly and therefore he should resign from eLife. He and others also took Eisen to task for not condemning Hamas.

Eisen bristles at all of this criticism. Finding fault with Israel and its response and condemning Hamas “are separate things,” he says. “First of all, it’s like, fuck you for saying I should condemn Hamas—of course I condemn Hamas! The idea that if I don’t literally issue a statement I’m not condemning them—it’s offensive.” (Indeed, a prominent scholarly declaration on anti-Semitism says it is anti-Semitic to require people, “because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism.”)

The post, he says, wasn’t directed at Israelis—who “are traumatized and in the middle of some shit”—but US college administrators. “I don’t buy the premise that I’m only allowed to speak on someone else’s terms,” he says. “The fact that people are like, ‘You’re a Hamas-supporting anti-Semite’ the second you say anything in support of Palestine—that is a bigger problem than the fact that I didn’t [explicitly condemn Hamas].”

Meanwhile, eLife, which is UK-based, issued a statement on X without consulting Eisen first:

Fede Pelish, a scientist who resigned from eLife‘s board of directors in protest of how everything went down, cited the journal’s (since deleted) post in his resignation letter, which he provided. “Do I agree with Dr. Eisen’s tweets? It doesn’t matter,” he wrote. “Unlike Dr. Eisen’s tweet, eLife’s tweet in response was not only an irrational, emotional response, but also carried the weight of the organisation…While an emotional reaction is understandable and expected from a social media platform, and people disgusted by Dr Eisen’s exercised their freedom of speech, logic and reason should guide an organisation’s reaction.”

The journal’s response merely amplified the uproar, Eisen says: “They made it about eLife. And they made it about the political stance by staking out what they portrayed as kind of an oppositional stance to mine.”

Eisen has never shied away from speaking his mind. He was—still is—a prolific presence on Science Twitter (now X), where he has more than 75,000 followers and nearly as many posts. He’s not the type to pull his punches, and is prone to dropping the F-bomb.

In fact, and this is relevant, Eisen, who studies the fruit fly genome, inadvertently sparked the silliest Twitter blow-up imaginable in 2020, when in response to an account asking people to name the “most overhyped animal” he jokingly nominated a rival research organism, the tiny roundworm C. Elegans.

C. elegans. They wiggle forward. They wiggle backwards. And occasionally they fuck themselves. That’s it. https://t.co/wYyXXViciJ

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) July 19, 2020

Some worm researchers didn’t find this so amusing, and eLife‘s board was unhappy with his language—“even though, in my opinion, using ‘fuck’ as a verb isn’t swearing,” Eisen says. “But whatever.” The board asked him to refrain from further cussing in personal Twitter posts, and he complied.

Seemingly more problematic, Eisen’s online critics unearthed a tweet from May 15, 2018, in which he’d simply written, “Fuck Israel.” They didn’t mention the context: The day before, Israeli forces had slaughtered more than 60 Gazans who’d rushed to the border fence to protest the designation of Jerusalem as Israel’s new capital. Thousands more were injured in what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as a “bloodbath.” 

The post that got Eisen fired was inspired by statements from academic leaders that in his view were primarily crafted not to offend the wrong people—and then were modified on the fly in response to complaints from students, faculty, and donors. “Their statements aren’t heartfelt. They’re ChatGPT statements,” Eisen says. “And the general tenor in my reading of them was, Hamas is terrible. Israel has a right to defend itself. Palestinians are gonna die in response. And that sucks, but it’s gonna happen anyway.”

He was distressed by what felt like an institutional acceptance of the notion that the killing of innocents by Hamas somehow justified the killing of innocents by Israel. “And maybe you can’t have that conversation in any sane way in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy,” he says. “But the next phase wasn’t waiting. The bombs happened pretty quickly.” (Indeed, the retaliation had commenced almost immediately, as Netanyahu vowed a “mighty vengeance.”)

Hamas killed some 1,200 people on October 7, per Israeli authorities—about 70 percent of them civilians, the New York Times reported—and more than 240 were taken hostage. To date, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that Israel’s retaliatory bombings have killed at least 11,100 people, including some 4,500 minors. And while those numbers have not been independently verified, US officials have conceded that the bombardment has killed thousands of civilians. 

In response to the backlash to his post, Eisen tried to clarify his take. 

The Onion is not making light of the situation. And nor am I. These articles are using satire to make a deadly serious point about this horrific tragedy.

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) October 14, 2023

That’s when the chair of the eLife‘s board sent him an email asking him to delete the original Onion post and to stop posting altogether. He refused to delete the post, he told me, “because that would be capitulating to what I thought was a really misdirected effort to silence any expression of support of Palestinians.” Instead, he temporarily deactivated his X account, which his critics interpreted as fleeing from the backlash.  

Over the next few days, Eisen says, he spoke with the people at eLife, arguing that it was “ludicrous” to believe he harbored bias against Israeli scientists, with whom he works all the time, and that his problem was clearly with the Israeli government. 

But he already had a “somewhat testy” relationship with the board. On his watch, eLife had embraced a radical new publishing model called “publish-review-curate.” The journal would no longer make up-or-down decisions as to which papers to accept. Instead, it would publish them all, along with comments from the journal’s reviewers. Plenty of people were resistant to the new model (which eLife says it will continue). Some “had it in for me, and they started piling on and being like, ‘Mike’s an embarrassment, he’s unprofessional,’” he says.

The board summoned him in and asked him to explain himself. Then its members went into a private session. A few hours later, Eisen says, a board member called and told him the board was asking him to resign: “I said, ‘No, I can’t resign under these circumstances, because first, it’s a bad decision for eLife.’ Second, it would be an admission that this was a bad thing, and I don’t think it was.”

When he learned the board was securing his replacement, he announced his firing on X. The journal released a statement the same day thanking him for his service, and asserting that Eisen’s dismissal was based on past issues as well: “Mike has been given clear feedback from the board that his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife’s mission. It is against this background that a further incidence of this behaviour has contributed to the board’s decision.”

Eisen is incredulous. “They were referring to that fucking worm thing. I’m not even kidding!” he says. There also had been, he admits, some “internal brouhahas in which my style of communicating with people who are trying to have me fired was not up to what they wanted…But when the board asked me to change the way I communicated, I always did.”  

Tensions between a nonprofit’s leaders and board are “par for the course,” he told me. But it is “just silly” for eLife to try and link his firing to past disputes. The Onion dust-up “was outside of the scope of my employment. It had nothing to do with eLife.” 

Just as some Israeli scientists vowed to cut ties with eLife because of Eisen’s post, others—deputy editors, senior editors, and reviewing editors, along with board member Pelish—stepped down in protest of his firing. Eisen says he’s heard from “dozens” that they’d resigned, although he says he has no way to verify that.

Besides Pelish, the few former eLife staffers I reached out to did not respond to emails. I did hear from Rasmus Nielsen, a longtime Berkeley colleague, who describes Eisen’s dismissal as “a real injustice.”

“Mike essentially voiced the opinion that Palestinian civilians should not be collectively punished for the crimes of Hamas. I find that viewpoint uncontroversial and fully in line with international law,” Nielsen said in an email. “The fact that a coordinated online effort managed to get him fired,” he added, “sets an unfortunate precedent and I fear that it will contribute to an environment where other academics, particularly younger and less established researchers, do not dare to speak up.”

Eisen is very clear that eLife had every right to fire him. “That’s their call,” he says. “I think that they panicked and were overwhelmed by a Twitter mob and didn’t function properly, and made a stupid decision in their tweet, and they made a bad decision in deciding to replace me under those terms. I think they did more damage to eLife than my tweet possibly could have.”

Even in hindsight, Eisen says he probably wouldn’t have acted much differently: “I never got into this world to squelch my morals in favor of having a job.” And although “one tweet is inadequate to express an entire worldview on something that I’ve been thinking about for a half-century,” he says, “I don’t regret it. If anything, I regret not having been a little bit more forceful.”

There’s little doubt that Eisen’s timing, so soon after the attacks, was hurtful to the Israeli scientists. Yet it’s also true that Israel’s retaliation wasn’t waiting for anyone to grieve. Beyond social media, positive response to his outspokenness has been “huge,” Eisen says. An open letter to eLife from researchers protesting his firing has gathered nearly 2,000 signatures.

He’s also gotten hundreds of positive emails—too many to respond to, he says—many from Palestinian and Arab scientists in the United States who were frustrated by “the lack of expression of concern for their families and their people” in academic circles, and science in particular. “They found it ghastly and they felt abandoned,” Eisen says. “So many people were so thankful that somebody in science in a position of some power is willing to say this simple thing, just like, Palestinians are humans and we should treat them as such.”

“Overall, the government is unlikely to charter a new course for the economy or provide relief for millions of households though with an eye on next year’s general election it may throw a crumb or two to bribe the electorate.”

Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

Next week, the UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will present his Autumn Statement or the Budget on the state of the economy and the government’s tax and spending decisions. What should the government do and what will it actually do?

The UK economy is stagnant and growth prospects are lagging well behind the G7 countries. Economic rejuvenation can’t be achieved without redistribution of income and wealth and improving the purchasing power of the masses.

For the last 13 years, the government has done the opposite. Since 2010, the UK economy has grown by 24%, but the gains have not trickled-down to most of the population. In 2022, the poorest fifth of society had only 8% of the total income, compared to 36% for top fifth. The average real wage has returned to the 2007 level. In October 2023 median monthly pay was £2,276 or £27,312 a year, utterly inadequate to support a family or buy a home. With the relative absence of public housing, people are forced to enter the private rental market and are paying 40% or more of the salary in rents.

The government led assault on wages and public services has forced 14.4m people to live in poverty. Last year, 3.8m people experienced destitution, including around one million children. This is nearly two-and-a-half times the number of people in 2017, and nearly triples the number of children. The Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food bank network, has handed out 116% more food parcels than five years ago. The government’s own data shows that homelessness has increased by more than 10% in a year.

Low incomes deny people access to good food, housing, education, pension, healthcare and lead to greater pressures on the National Health Service (NHS), social care and mental health and support services. Some 7.8m people in England are waiting for a hospital appointment. 2.6m are chronically ill to work and nearly 500,000 have dropped out of the labour market altogether due to prolonged health problems, leading to labour shortages. Most of the maternity units in NHS hospitals are not safe enough. Child death rates are rising, with the steepest rise in deaths for children under five.

Such social squalor cannot provide the foundations for a sustainable economy. Major political parties are not showing any enthusiasm for creation of money, as advocated by supporters of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), or a new round of quantitative easing to increase investment in productive assets. They also oppose increases in the public debt. That leaves recalibration of taxation policies as the only major tool for economic rejuvenation.

A key part of the government’s discourse on taxation is that corporations and the rich need incentives and lower tax rates, and this will somehow stimulate the economy. This has not delivered the requisite investment. For example, the headline corporate tax rate declined from 30% in 1983 to 19% in 2002, and oscillated around 19% until 2022. This was accompanied by numerous tax reliefs, ultra low interest rates and low inflation rates, but did not stimulate private sector investment in productive assets. The UK is ranked 27th out of 30 OECD countries. A key lesson from Scandinavian countries is that businesses thrive when the state provides good transport, education; healthcare, pension and social infrastructure and masses have good purchasing power. Such aspects have been neglected in the UK.

The government policy has been to incentivise the rich. Therefore, chargeable capital gains are taxed at rates ranging from 10%-28% and dividends at rates between 8.75% and 39.35%. However, there is never a talk about incentivising workers who invest their brains and brawn to generate wealth.

Wages above £12,570 a year are taxed at rates of 20% to 45%. Workers also pay national insurance contributions (NIC) at the rate of 12% on income between £12,570 and £50,270, and 2% on income above £50,271, but no  NIC is levied on investment income even though its recipients use the NHS, social care and can claim various benefits. One study estimated that aligning capital gains tax with the rates of income tax can raise £17bn a year more in tax revenues. Another £8bn can probably be raised by levying NIC on capital gains. Aligning taxes on dividends with wages and charging NIC on the same can raise another £6bn-£10bn.

The government urges people to make private provision for pensions, but hands extra privileges to the rich. In 2020-21, the government handed £67.3bn of tax relief on pension contributions. Nearly 58% of this went to 4.7m individuals paying income tax at marginal rates of 40% and 45%; and 48% is shared by 27m basic rate (20%) taxpayers. Those with incomes of less than £12,570 receive no tax relief. By giving everyone tax relief/credit at the rate of 20%, government can generate additional £14.5bn a year.

The above is a small sample of reforms that eliminate tax anomalies and can generate £45bn-£50bn for redistribution and rebalance the tax system which currently privileges wealth.

Taxing the wealthy is appropriate because they have been major beneficiaries of government policies. For example, governments have handed £895bn of quantitative easing (QE) to speculators. This pushed up asset prices and financial returns. One study estimates that QE boosted the wealth of the richest 10% household by between £128,000 and £322,000. Bailouts of banks and energy companies have conferred substantial benefits on their shareholders. Higher interest rates have inflicted misery on millions, but have enriched the rich. Government policies have increased concentration of wealth and the richest 1% of Britons has now more wealth than 70% of the population combined. Patriotic Millionaires, some of the richest persons in the UK, are openly urging the government to increase their taxes. A wealth tax of 2% on those with assets over £10m, about 20,000 people, could generate up to £22bn a year.

The additional revenues can be used for investment in new industries, exempt minimum wage earners from income tax; abolish VAT on domestic fuel, provide free school meals, inflation-proof social security benefits and more. Higher spending power of the less well-off has a greater multiplier effect on the local economy as they tend to spend on everyday things and stimulate production of goods and services.

However, a government addicted to squeezing the less well-off is targeting tax cuts for the rich, especially inheritance tax. This is to be funded by cutting welfare spending which involves forcing the sick and disabled to work, with the threat that if they refuse their benefits would be cut. Former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss has called for income tax cuts for the highest earners, accompanied by cuts in the minimum wage, workers’ redundancy pay and rights, paid holidays and reversal of sickness benefits, already the lowest in OECD countries

Overall, the government is unlikely to charter a new course for the economy or provide relief for millions of households though with an eye on next year’s general election it may throw a crumb or two to bribe the electorate.

Image credit: Andrew Parsons – Creative Commons

Rwanda 1) Sunak faces ‘storm of criticism’ on Rwanda as crossings surge

“Border Force officers are braced for a surge in migrants crossing the Channel as Rishi Sunak faces criticism from right-wing Tories over his “weak” plans to get the Rwanda scheme back on track. Dozens of Tory MPs have signed a letter urging the prime minister to adopt a radical plan that would bar migrants from using human rights laws to block their deportation to Rwanda. Suella Braverman, who was sacked as home secretary on Monday, is leading the backlash to Sunak’s “twin-track” approach of signing a treaty with Rwanda and passing emergency legislation to prevent any legal challenges against the policy as a whole… Downing Street is expected, however, to resist the demands. Government sources said the broader the scope of the legislation, the more open it was to challenges.”- The Times

• Hunt admits Rwanda flights may not take off before election – The Times
• New Rwanda migrant treaty will be done in days, insists Cleverly – The Sun
• Peers and MPs pledge to block Sunak’s plan – The Guardian
• Government can’t claim ‘black is white’ in Rwanda fight, says Sumption – The Daily Telegraph
• Tory MPs warn Sunak his new bill must be ‘belt and braces’ – The I
• Failure to reform asylum laws is inhuman – and Sunak must say so – Fraser Nelson, The Daily Telegraph
• Sunak seeks tougher measures – Esther McVey, Daily Express

Rwanda 2) Braverman says the Prime Minister’s latest plain is ‘doomed to fail’

“Former UK home secretary Suella Braverman has lashed out at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, saying his plans to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda were doomed to fail unless emergency legislation is introduced that expressly overrides international human rights and refugee law. Braverman was sacked by Sunak on Monday, two days before the government’s flagship policy designed to curtail irregular cross-Channel migration by removing asylum seekers to Rwanda was declared unlawful by the Supreme Court. The prime minister has since vowed to transform the UK’s memorandum of understanding with Rwanda on removals into a legally binding treaty, and to address shortcomings in the central African nation’s asylum processes outlined by the court.” – The Financial Times

• Why does the UK want to send refugees to Rwanda? The legal plan explained – The Times
• She has a ‘five-point plan’ to get Rwanda flights off the ground – The Daily Telegraph
• The ex-Home Secretary demands MPs cancel Christmas break to pass Rwanda legislation – Daily Express
• Braverman and her supports have never understood Red Wall voters – Sebastian Payne, The I
• Tinkering with a failed plan will not stop the boats – Suella Braverman, The Daily Telegraph
• Tory Party’s internal feud may undermine public confidence in elections – Ross Clark, Daily Express

Rwanda 3) Leaving ECHR ‘off the table’ while Cameron is Foreign Secretary, says Osborne

“George Osborne has said that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is “off the table” while Lord Cameron is Foreign Secretary. Mr Osborne, who served as the former prime minister’s chancellor, suggested that withdrawing from the international treaty would be too “extreme” for Lord Cameron, despite frustrations in Government after the Supreme Court ruled its Rwanda scheme unlawful. It comes as Rishi Sunak was warned that his proposed new law to overcome the ruling would be blocked by the Lords, with a former Supreme Court judge describing it as “constitutionally extraordinary” and “profoundly discreditable”. Lord Cameron was brought back into Government by the Prime Minister earlier this week and made a life peer…” – The Daily Telegraph

• Cameron meets Zelensky in Ukraine on first trip as Foreign Secretary – The Times
• A Tory civil war can only end in disaster – Leo McKinstry, Daily Express

>Today:

Hunt ‘poised to halve the rate of inheritance tax’…

“Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is considering plans to halve the rate of inheritance tax and cut taxes for small businesses in his autumn statement. The Treasury has been told by official forecasters that it has far more “fiscal headroom” because of rising tax revenues and falling borrowing costs. It has also been reported that council tax will rise by up to £120 a year for the average house, because the Treasury will allow local authorities to increase their bills by up to 5 per cent a year. Improved public finances mean that government has more than £20 billion of headroom at Wednesday’s autumn statement, compared with £6.5 billion at the time of March’s budget. While some of the headroom will be retained as a “cushion”, Hunt is considering an array of tax cuts…” – The Times

…as he is to spend ‘£2.5 billion on employment support’…

“UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt plans to spend an extra £2.5bn on employment support for people suffering from long-term sickness and joblessness, as part of a broader push to cut the welfare bill and boost the workforce. The Autumn Statement next Wednesday will include a “Back to Work” plan intended to help people with mental and physical health conditions look for and retain jobs, the Treasury said on Thursday. The chancellor said “a combination of carrot and stick” would help both businesses and individuals while boosting the economy, and is billing the changes as the biggest reform to the welfare system since the introduction of the flagship universal credit system in 2010.” – The Financial Times

• Unemployed who ‘refuse to engage’ could lose benefits in Hunt crackdown – The Guardian
• They will ‘lose free NHS prescriptions’ if they refuse work – The Times

…as he is to unveil an ‘expanded role for UK’s pensions lifeboat fund’

“The government is pushing ahead with a controversial proposal to expand the role of the UK’s pension lifeboat fund as it looks for ways to unlock billions of pounds of retirement fund capital to boost economic growth. Jeremy Hunt, chancellor, is expected to announce a consultation on a widened role for the Pension Protection Fund (PPF), in his Autumn Statement next week. The move is expected to be part of a wider range of measures designed to encourage pension fund investment in so-called “productive finance” or areas that can help boost economic growth. The £33bn PPF was established in 2005 to rescue defined benefit pension plans in the event of the sponsoring employer collapsing and to ensure members continue to receive retirement benefits.” – The Financial Times

• ‘Flip-flopping’ has cost the UK billions in investment cash since 2010, says report – The Guardian

Cleverly ‘takes swipe at his predecessor’ by saying he will criticise police ‘in private’

“James Cleverly has promised police chiefs that he will “praise in public” and “criticise in private”. In a thinly veiled swipe at Suella Braverman, his predecessor, the new Home Secretary told delegates at a policing summit that he did not want a “relationship of conflict”. Mrs Braverman was sacked on Monday, just days after publishing a newspaper column in which she accused the police of bias in the way they handled protests. Her comments were criticised as an attack on the operational independence of policing. Speaking at the National Police Chiefs’ Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners annual summit in Westminster, Mr Cleverly signalled he wanted a reset in the relationship between the Home Office and forces.” – The Daily Telegraph

• Number 10 vows to stop activists climbing war memorials – The Times
• Met Police are making up excuses as they go along to give pro-Hamas mob a free pass to bring fear to out streets – Editorial, The Sun
• Memorial madness betrays our fallen – Editorial, The Daily Mail

UK will refrain from regulating AI ‘in the short term’

“The UK has said it will refrain from regulating the British artificial intelligence sector, even as the EU, US and China push forward with new measures.  The UK’s first minister for AI and intellectual property, Viscount Jonathan Camrose, said at a Financial Times conference on Thursday that there would be no UK law on AI “in the short term” because the government was concerned that heavy-handed regulation could curb industry growth. The announcement comes as executives and policymakers around the world debate how to regulate the emerging technology, which holds the promise of transforming many industries and driven the rise in large tech company valuations over the past year.” – The Financial Times

>Today:

Labour 1) Starmer ‘facing more frontbench resignations’ if Gaza policy does not change

“Keir Starmer faces more resignations from Labour’s frontbench if he does not shift his policy on Gaza, amid growing anger in the party over how he has handled the vote on the Israel-Hamas conflict. The Labour leader suffered the biggest rebellion of his tenure on Wednesday night as 10 frontbenchers resigned or were sacked from his team after voting for a Scottish National party motion that called for a ceasefire. Sources say several of those who remained loyal and kept their jobs are nonetheless angry about how the issue has been managed, and would be willing to quit if Starmer does not push the government to take a tougher line on Israeli military action in the region… The SNP motion…has triggered one of the biggest crises of Starmer’s leadership…” – The Guardian

• He ‘begs’ frontbench to be ‘as united as we can’ – The Sun
• Inside Labour tensions over Gaza – The I
• Pupils march on office of MP who abstained – The Times
• Guardian website forced to remove Bin Laden’s anti-Semitic ‘Letter to America’ – The Guardian
• Will the Labour Party’s troublesome factions let it govern? – Editorial, The Daily Telegraph
• Starmer has been severely tested by a mass revolt of Labour MPs calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – Editorial, The Times
• Britain is the new capital of anti-Israel hate – Douglas Murray, The Daily Telegraph
• Unlinking Starmer has eyes on the bigger prize – Patrick Maguire, The Times
• As a Labour MP, it was my duty to vote for a ceasefire – Richard Burgon, The I

>Yesterday:

Labour 2) One day we’ll be ashamed of trans debate fury, says Nandy

“Lisa Nandy has defended her strong support for transgender rights and said that society would look back and be “utterly ashamed” of the tone of the debate. Nandy, the shadow international development secretary, said that the criticism levelled at her by JK Rowling “breaks my heart” after she was asked whether Labour could be trusted to keep women and girls safe. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, said that Nandy was “one of the biggest reasons many women on the left no longer trust Labour” after she made a speech at the Labour Party conference saying that women’s rights were “non-negotiable”. Rowling argued that Nandy had failed to stand up for women’s rights in the past…” – The Times

Labour 3) Matthew Lynn: Drakeford’s socialist experiment in Wales should terrify us all

“You can’t drive more than 20 miles an hour across swathes of the country. If you need any public services the civil service is eyeing a four-day week, and there may soon be tourist levies to pay if you feel like visiting despite all this. The Welsh administration has been quietly doing everything it can think of to make life in the country as difficult as possible. Now, it’s taking things a step further, planning what in effect will be the UK’s first “mansion tax”. Under the dismal leadership of Mark Drakeford, Wales is being turned into an experiment in what Joseph Stalin used to call “socialism in one country” – and the results will be catastrophic… The Welsh Assembly is increasingly turning the country into Venezuela, with sheep instead of oil.” – The Daily Telegraph

• Labour ‘open to returning Elgin Marbles’, Greek media claims – The Times

Scottish minister under pressure to quit over £11,000 data roaming bill

“Scotland’s health secretary was under pressure to resign on Thursday after admitting that his children had helped run up an £11,000 roaming bill watching football on his work tablet during a week-long family holiday last winter. Michael Matheson’s admission on Thursday came after previous denials that his official device had been used for non-work related tasks while he was on holiday in Morocco. The controversy threatens to derail first minister Humza Yousaf’s attempts to stabilise his scandal-hit Scottish National party, which has been reeling from a police investigation into its finances. Scottish Labour said it was “unfathomable” that Matheson could keep his job.” – The Financial Times

• I’m a father first, he said, as he took the painful decision to hang his sons out to dry – Stephen Daisley, The Daily Mail

>Yesterday:

News in Brief: 

• The Rishification of the Tory Party – James Heale, The Spectator 
• Could the implosion of Germany’s far-Left benefit the AfD? – Katja Hoyer, UnHerd 
• The objectification of Britney Spears – Victoria Smith, The Critic 
• The time for tinkering has passed. We need decisive action to stop the boats – Neil O’Brien, CapX 
• The end of Conservative England – Andrew Marr, The New Statesman