Brit living in Belgium and earning an income from building interfaces. Interestes include science, science fiction, technology, and European news and politics
Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was supposed to offer a vote of confidence in the British economy, a moment of respite for a Labour government so gaffe-prone and unpopular that it appears to have been taking PR advice from Prince Andrew. Before the wheels of Air Force One hit the tarmac at Stansted, a series of announcements had been arranged to showcase American investment in the UK: a new partnership on nuclear power; a £5bn investment by Google. Investment is the key to growing the economy, but it comes with strings attached, particularly when it comes from the US.
The main reason for this is that the US owns so much of Britain already. The most recent US Internal Revenue Service data (for 2022) records 1,369 multinationals reporting more than $836bn in revenue in the UK, a number equivalent to more than a quarter of that year’s GDP. Large chunks of what we think of as the British economy – from leading companies such as the AI pioneers DeepMind to everyday entities such as Boots and Morrisons, to energy suppliers and nursery chains – are American-owned.
This gives American business interests huge power over the UK economy, and consequently Britain’s politics. The investments recently scrapped by major pharmaceutical companies in the UK might suddenly be un-scrapped if the government decides to allow them to charge the NHS more for drugs. If the government allows Silicon Valley to keep helping itself to Britain’s intellectual property, the data centres will keep on coming. New deals on technology are on offer if we reconsider the laws our elected politicians made on online safety and taxing digital services.
We have already been making these compromises for a long time, and the cultural and economic consequences are now obvious. Nine of the ten highest grossing films in the UK last year were American. The only Brit on the list was Paddington, whose citizenship is, let’s face it, uncertain (Michael Bond never got round to writing Paddington and the Indefinite Leave to Remain). All the major online streaming platforms are US-owned. The UK spends more than three times as many hours watching YouTube as it does watching BBC iPlayer. Of the ten biggest-selling songs in the UK last year, eight were by Americans (Sabrina Carpenter appeared twice; the other was by an Irish person, singing in an American accent). On Britain’s bookshelves, the five biggest-selling print novelists of 2024 were Richard Osman and four American women.
The internet, as experienced by British people, is basically America. Of the 20 most visited websites in the UK, only the UK government and the BBC are British. Social media is America. The one social platform that wasn’t already American – China’s TikTok – is being switched to US-controlled ownership, because Americans are not stupid enough to let another country have direct, unaccountable control over their citizens’ main source of news.
After Elon Musk appeared via video link at a large far-right rally in London on 13 September, the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey wrote a sternly worded letter to Keir Starmer warning, in case the PM hadn’t noticed, that Musk was in his view “deliberately spreading misinformation, stoking anger and encouraging violence”. Davey then published this letter on X, the platform Musk owns, where the attention it generated made some more money for Musk. Davey continues to post multiple times per day on X, using his time as an MP to create free content for someone he believes wants to “undermine our democracy”. Musk both profits from Davey’s posts and controls the algorithm that decides by whom and in what context they are seen. The bile and ridicule to which Davey is subjected are variables for which Musk holds the dials.
Vying with Musk for the title of the world’s richest individual is Larry Ellison, a friend of Donald Trump and ex-CEO of Oracle – a strategic supplier to the British state – and a fellow investor in Britain’s culture and its politics. Two notable investments are £1bn in Oxford University and more than $350m in the Tony Blair Institute, which is highly influential on Starmer’s government. The Blair Institute is known for espousing technological solutions to social issues, a position that is not inconsistent with Ellison’s commercial goals.
America even helps to decide the price of our debt. When Rachel Reeves makes a decision, the yields on government bonds are checked hastilyto see if the shadowy forces of the market have been angered. In reality, these numbers are partly decided in the US. Trump’s tax cuts are adding trillions to America’s immense debt pile, and a market that is being asked to gorge itself on US Treasuries consequently has less of an appetite for UK gilts. If Trump manages to gain political control of US interest rates, then this too could have significant effects on the UK economy.
There is a huge amount to gain from Britain’s relationship with the US, but we should never forget the power relationship involved. What we do is of little consequence to the White House, but we have to deal with the consequences of American risk-taking. We are a mouse sharing a bed with a walrus.
Cosying up to Trump is an all-in gamble. Britain should be building better relations with more reliable allies closer to home
Interpreters are not required for visiting US heads of state, but that doesn’t mean Donald Trump and Keir Starmer will speak the same language this week. The UK prime minister will practise the art of tactful diplomacy emphasising mutual advantage and historical alliance. Most of the words in that sentence mean nothing to a president who is fluent only in self-interest.
Given the likelihood of miscommunication between two men from such different political cultures – the showbiz demagogue and the lawyer technocrat – relations have been remarkably friendly and, in Downing Street’s estimation, fruitful.
State broadcaster says it will withdraw from next year’s contest in Vienna unless Israel is excluded over Gaza war
Spain has become the latest country to say it will not take part in next year’s Eurovision song contest if Israel participates.
Board members of the state broadcaster RTVE voted in majority favour of boycotting the contest if Israel is among the countries fielding an entry next year.
If there’s one essential rule for these relentlessly dispiriting and perilous times, it’s this: that no matter how bad you think things have become, they can always be made into something worse. I recognise that this is not the most uplifting message, but if we are to have even the slightest chance of getting to a better place, it’s essential to recognise exactly what we are up against.
The response to the horrific murder of the MAGA troll Charlie Kirk is another demonstration of this rule. I should lay my cards on the table here. I never could stand Kirk when he was alive, and I certainly haven’t changed my opinion now that he’s dead. I dislike smirking grifters as a matter of principle, whether they are on the right or the left. And Kirk was a horrible representative of a horrible movement: a white supremacist, a racist, a misogynist, a bully and a conspiracy theorist, who recycled every MAGA talking point and enriched himself in the process.
This was a man who supported the January 6 insurrection; who published a sniggering tweet mocking the near-lethal assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer; who considered that murdered schoolchildren were a price worth paying to preserve the Second Amendment; a free speech advocate whose organization drew up lists of academics and teachers who ‘discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.’
Many of these academics were bombarded with death threats and racist or misogynist language as a result of those lists. Of course, Kirk didn’t participate in violence himself. That’s not for the likes of troll-provocateurs like him. Their job is merely to keep the rage boiling over, and encourage white folk to see themselves as victims of immigrants, Palestinians, minorities, women, feminazis, transpeople and all the other godless hordes that make up the ‘radical left’ - a category that can include anyone from Joe Biden and George Soros to Kermit the Frog.
This was what Kirk did, and no one can say he didn’t do it well. He was a troll dressed up as a democratic debater, the willing servant of a movement that conspired to overthrow an elected president, and which has been actively dismantling American democracy since January this year.
When did you hear Kirk defend the foreign students in the US who were arrested and deported because of what they had said about Gaza? Or the universities that have had funds cut for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s political or culture war agenda? Or the journalists and media organizations attacked by Trump and his government and subjected to vexatious lawsuits?
You didn’t, because he didn’t. Last week an Israeli general coolly admitted that his army had killed and wounded 200,000 Gazans - a shattering admission that barely raised a political eyebrow in the United States or anywhere else. Kirk entirely accepted and supported this insane slaughter, on the usual shallow grounds that Hamas was like Japan and Germany in World War II, and therefore had only itself to blame ‘for everything that results.’
No one should be surprised that Kirk also had a history of antisemitic remarks - because antisemitism is not incompatible with fervent support for Israel. His attitude to free speech belonged to the tradition that Goebbels once expressed:
We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As wolves to the flock, we come.
The ‘new’ far right works in much the same way. To achieve power, it presents the right to offend as a test of democratic freedom and the limits of liberal discourse. In power, no one should offend or insult them. This is why Georgia Meloni routinely sues journalists. It’s why, in January 2017, Steve Bannon called the media ‘the opposition party’, whose only role is to ‘be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.’
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Kirk was on board with all of that, and a bullet in the neck doesn’t make him into a saint or a martyr. Nor does it mean that he deserved to be killed, or that his death is something to be mocked or celebrated, though some people have done this. However repellent Kirk’s views may have been, his murder is a repugnant crime, and the movement that he belonged to will not be defeated by apeing its worst features, let alone by propagating baseless fantasies that Israel was responsible.
All those features have been on display over the last few days. Kirk’s death has ignited a firestorm of fanaticism, dishonesty and bad faith that threatens to become MAGA’s Reichstag moment, and which perfectly illustrates the moral, political, and intellectual sewer that American society has become in the Drumph/MAGA era.
Civil War
Let’s get the gaslighting out of the way first.
No one need take any lessons on compassion or moderation from anyone involved in the MAGA horrorshow. A few days before Kirk’s death, Pete Hegseth was boasting that the US had ‘smoked a drug boat’ supposedly containing 11 Venezuelan ‘terrorists’ - regardless of the complete absence of evidence to suggest that it was anything of the kind. Asked by journalist Brian Krassenstein whether this strike might be called a ‘war crime’, JD Vance replied: ‘I don’t give a shit what you call it.’
The macho posturing, savagery and vulgarity of this administration and its supporters are only matched by their brazen and relentless dishonesty. When two Democrat representatives were murdered in their Minnesota home in June by a deranged Trump fanatic, Elon Musk and various Republican politicians tried to blame it on the left. So it was no surprise that within hours of Kirk’s murder, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and an array of political lowlife were gleefully predicting ‘civil war’ and a crackdown on ‘the left’, before anyone even knew anything about the perpetrator.
Jones posted a video of himself weeping, and declaring ‘We’re in a war’. This is not Achilles mourning Patroclus. You are entitled to weep when your friends are shot, but if you film yourself weeping, then it is very likely that your tears are entirely fake and performative, especially when they come from a man who actually declared the victims of school shootings to be ‘crisis actors’, and accused their parents of faking their grief.
But nothing can ever shame these lying clowns, whether it’s Steve Bannon calling Kirk a ‘casualty of war’, or Infowars host Harrison H. Smith declaring: ‘The left is evil and insane and needs to be crushed with the force of the state.’ After reading that Tyler Robinson’s shell cases indicated ‘transgender and antifascist ideology’, the MAGA influencer and Trump pal Joey Mannarino, tweeted:
If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We’ve already tolerated far too much from those creatures.
That species. Those creatures. No mercy. It doesn’t take much for these MAGA tough guys to locate their inner psychopath. Never mind that these messages did not exist (thanks Wall Street Journal!), or that the messages on the shell cases referred to memes used to torment the furry community.
MAGA thought it had hit ‘the left’ bang to rights when it was revealed that Tyler Robinson’s shell cases contained the chorus from the Italian partisan anthem ‘Bella Ciao’ and the message ‘hey, Fascist! Catch', with arrows. Now it turns out that these messages are lines from a computer game, which a 22-year-old’s Internet-raddled brain as parsed into a justification for homicide.
This is not antifascist resistance, but the plot line from some unwritten JG Ballard dystopia.
Don’t expect Trump and his minions to care, any more than the Nazis cared about who set the Reichstag on fire. In July, the MAGA vampire queen Laura Loomer was attacking Kirk on X as a ‘charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.’ On the day his death, Loomer was prowling the X deathscape and summoning her demons from the underworld:
It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund & prosecute every single leftist organization. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.
And then there was Nick Fuentes, the Nazi sleazebag leader of the Groyper movement to which Kirk’s assassin seems to have belonged. It wasn’t long ago that Fuentes could be heard denouncing Kirk because he wasn’t white supremacist enough. But there he was last week, gazing up to heaven and asking his followers to ‘pray for Charlie Kirk’s soul, his young family and for our country. The violence and hatred has to stop. Our country needs Christ more than ever.’
You can’t make this stuff up, except these hollowed-out simulacra of human beings never stop doing just that, and not only in America. On Saturday, ‘Tommy Robinson’ called on his ‘unite the kingdom’ marchers to ‘march for freedom, for your children, and march for Charlie Kirk.’
Robinson raged against ‘the bastard who has murdered him, or the organisation, the corporation or the government it is that killed him.’
Was it a bastard, organisation, corporation or government? No one cares, least of all the man who asked the questions. At the same gathering, Elon Musk - the Ketamine Krupp himself - exorted the crowd by video link to - ‘fight or die’ because ‘the left are the party of murder’.
Unlike some of the mocking responses to Kirk’s murder, these threats and lies are not coming from the Internet fringes. They begin at the very top and reach across the MAGA spectrum. Trump was already promising to crack down on all those who ‘contributed’ to the murder, before he or anyone else had the slightest idea who was responsible, let alone who ‘contributed’ to it. Trump also declared:
Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
Asked a few days later, how Americans might ‘come back together’ and whether its fractured political landscape could be ‘fixed’, Trump told his interviewer, in a rare expression of honesty: ‘ I couldn’t care less.’
The Great Man went to compare the patriotic radicals of the right who ‘don’t want to see crime’ with the radical left who are ‘ vicious, and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy — although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.’
When these people show you who are, believe them. Except that Trump and his movement have shown many times who they are, and too many Americans refused to see it or liked what they saw. Kirk’s murder is unlikely to change this. Already, someone - god knows who - has set up a website called: charliesmurderers.com with the following message:
Charlie Kirk was murdered.
Is an employee or a student of yours supporting political violence online?
Look them up on this website.
The US government is following this lead. Flags are flying at half-mast. People are losing their jobs for expressing what MAGA regards as inappropriate responses to Kirk’s death. The more Kirk advances towards secular canonisation, the more his death will be used by the government as a pretext for repression. Last week, Trump’s sinister henchman Stephen Miller told Fox News’ Sean Hannity:
Let me tell you something I've not shared with anybody, the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven. He said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us, and we are going to do that!
Miller is very likely lying about that ‘last message.’ But whether Kirk said this or not, the ‘radical left’ [Clue: anyone who is not MAGA] will pay the price for it. Just in case there was any doubt, JD Vance - the Hillbilly Faust himself - told The Charlie Kirk Podcast yesterday:
We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years, and I believe, is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet. We’re going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity, real unity that can only come when we tell the truth.
Vance has about as much interest in the truth as Stephen Miller does in his ‘creator in heaven.’ And the only unity that they have in mind is the unity that Adolf Hitler promised on February 27, 1933, while watching the Reichstag burn:
This is a God-given signal! If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now crushing out this murder pest with an iron fist.
This is what Trump and his cohorts will now try to do, and no one should be fooled by their crocodile tears. When a reporter on Friday offered his condolences to Trump on the ‘loss of your friend’ and asked him how he was ‘holding up’, the Great Man responded:
I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.
Such is the man Charlie Kirk helped to make president, who Karoline Leavitt says has been ‘hurt’ by his assassination. And we should not pretend that the movement he belongs to has any more concern for Kirk than it does for the republic it claims to be making great again. And we should not expect a kumbaya moment of collective soul searching.
On the contrary, Americans should brace themselves for further repression, and quite possibly more deaths, as some of the most despicable and dangerous politicians in America’s history unleash their war of vengeance in the madhouse that they have done so much to build.
Putin and Netanyahu are creating chaos in the vacuum left by a weak US president. But there are still ways to foil them
It is too easy to blame Donald Trump for everything that goes wrong in the world. The ability of any US president to fundamentally change or control the behaviour of other major powers is frequently overestimated. Yet by posing as a sort of uncrowned global monarch and grand arbiter of war and peace, Trump perpetuates fantasies of US hegemony, omnipotence and divine right. Intoxicated by such ego-inflating delusions, he pledged before taking office to swiftly end the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. Perhaps, in his vanity and hubris, he truly believed he could.
Eight months on, the exact opposite is happening. Both crises are expanding and escalating. The bubble has burst, his bluff has been called, the emperor has no clothes – and there is no denying that Trump, by alternately appeasing, excusing and encouraging the two foremost villains of these twin tragedies, is greatly to blame. Last week’s multiple Russian drone incursions into Nato member Poland – which Polish officials are right to call deliberate –risk transforming the Ukraine war into a Europe-wide conflagration. Likewise, the reckless, illegal Israeli airstrike in Qatar, which blew up the Gaza peace process, physically and metaphorically, has supercharged regional tensions.
President Donald Trump is already using ICE and the National Guard like two personal armies.
And Congress and the Courts are nodding along with rather than checking and balancing each abuse of executive power.
There are of course lots of dark moments, lots of points of concern.
Yet the Speaker telling elected civil politicians to “yield” to the domestic use of military force is especially significant.
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, a good deal of our constitutional traditions were borne out of restricting what the executive could do domestically with military force.
The question of who controls “legitimate” coercive and lethal power is perhaps the most fundamental issue in any constitutional politics.
(By “legitimate” is meant that the control will be upheld by the courts if challenged – assuming a challenge is possible.)
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And anyone with a knowledge of Northern Ireland knows that the domestic deployment of troops will cause its own social and political problems.
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Troops are, by definition, not civil police.
And although there can be some overlap in their training and experience, troops are not especially well positioned to do civil policing.
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Of course, the suspicion must be that the internal mobilisation of troops is not for the purported reason of addressing crime.
That purported reason makes little or no sense – as there are other ways the federal government could assist Democrat cities with crime. And the crime rate in Washington DC, where troops have already been mobilised, is historically low.
One reason may be that this is being done for perceived political advantage, perhaps with one eye on the mid-terms.
Imagine troops and ICE “patrolling” voting stations.
Indeed, a good deal of what is happening in the United States seems to be Trump and his supporters thinking backwards from the mid-terms and putting in place measures so as to ensure they do not lose votes and seats.
Trump’s supporters are putting a lot of thought and energy into maintaining power.
Another reason for this mobilisation is that – like a dog licking itself – this is being done simply because Trump can do it, and he knows nobody will stop him.
Congress and the Courts could stop all this immediately, if they wanted to do so.
But they will not.
For they have, well, yielded.
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