Nigel Farage demands spot on BBC's Question Time live election debate

Farage was speaking after a youGov poll put Reform ahead of the Tories for the first time.

Stuart Henderson
Updated Fri, 14 June 2024 

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at The Wellington, in central London, on Friday. (PA)


Nigel Farage has demanded a slot on the BBC's Question Time election debate next week.

The Reform UK leader told a press conference on Friday that one recent poll - which put his party just ahead of the Conservatives for the first time - meant he should share a platform on the BBC's four-way leaders' special on 20 June.

“I think we can demand of right now that the BBC put us into that debate,” he said. "I would also very much like to do a debate head-to-head with Keir Starmer and the reason’s very simple – we think this should be the immigration election.”


Farage also labelled himself “leader of the opposition” during the press conference, held in central London. He also predicted his party would get six million votes. That total would be significantly more than the 3.9 million votes his former party, Ukip, received under his leadership in 2015 when it secured 12.6% of the vote.

Read more: Will Nigel Farage's Reform UK 'beat' the Tories in the election?

The debate next week, hosted by Fiona Bruce, is currently scheduled to include representatives of the UK’s four largest parties: the Conservatives, Labour Party, SNP and Liberal Democrats.

The shock YouGov poll released on Thursday night showed support for Reform at 19%, just ahead of the Tories on 18%.


And while the results of the poll were certainly newsworthy, it is the only poll to date to have Reform ahead of Rishi Sunak's party.

According to the PA news agency, an average of all polls carried out wholly or partly during the seven days to 13 June puts Labour on 43%, 21 points ahead of the Conservatives on 22%, followed by Reform on 14%, the Lib Dems on 10% and the Greens on 6%.

(PA)

That means Reform’s average is up one percentage point on the previous week while the Tories are down one point.

And while Reform may be polling higher numbers than the Lib Dems, the UK's first-past-the-post voting system means it is highly unlikely Farage's party will get anywhere near the number of seats being targetted by Ed Davey.

The latest prediction based on opinion polls from 05 Jun 2024 to 13 Jun 2024, sampling 19,426 people. (Electoral Calculus)

According to polling experts Electoral Calculus, The Conservatives are projected to win between 42 and 236 seats, the Lib Dems between 34-77 seats, the SNP between 20-38 and Reform way back, with an expected one seat and a possible high of seven.

However, it is clear that Reform UK has continued the renewed momentum sparked when Farage announced he was taking over as leader and would stand for election in the Essex seat of Clacton on 4 June.

An 'utter disaster' for the Tories

The continued rise of the Reform UK is also marked it could potentially spell election disaster for the Conservatives, one of the UK's leading election experts warned in the wake of the YouGov poll.

Polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice said Reform's growing support was a "real, real problem for the Conservatives" because nearly all the voters shifting their support were switching from those who had previously backed the Tories in 2019.

“Any chance the Conservatives ever had when they fired the starting gun on May 22 that they might be able to narrow Labour’s lead was predicated on them being able to win back those Reform voters.

“Their failure already to squeeze the Reform vote before Farage entered was itself bad news, and then Farage has boosted it further and made things even worse.

Prof Curtice said the average of recent polls shows backing for Reform at about 15% or 16%, was an “utter disaster for the Conservatives”.

Sunak insisted that voting for Reform UK would be “handing Labour a blank cheque” as he played down the YouGov survey.

But in Friday's press conference, Farage claimed his party was "well ahead" of the Conservatives in several regions including the North East, the North West, the East Midlands, in the West Midlands, as well as in the so-called red wall. Adding to this he said: "The inflection point means that, actually, if you vote Conservative in the red wall, you will almost certainly get Labour. A Conservative vote in the red wall is now a wasted vote."

Why Reform will struggle to win any seats – despite beating the Tories in the polls

Ollie Corfe

THE TELEGRAPH
Fri, 14 June 2024 




One week ago, Nigel Farage voiced his goal for Reform to overtake the Conservatives in the polls.

On Thursday, a YouGov poll said he had finally achieved it, surpassing the Tories by one point.

The poll has Reform on a national vote share of 19 points, with the Conservatives trailing on 18. Labour continues to be way ahead on 37 points.

It is important to note this is just one poll: across 12 pollsters’ latest polls, Reform are averaging on 14 per cent, compared to the Conservatives on 22 per cent.

Reform has seen a jump in support – around 3 to 4 per cent since the election was called.

Despite this, very few experts, including the party itself, predict it will secure more than a handful of seats.

This is because, unlike a party like the Liberal Democrats, support for Reform is spread evenly across the country rather than being concentrated in a small number of seats. So while it can score high in nationwide polls, it may not be able to secure enough support in individual seats to claim success – especially given the UK’s first past the post electoral system.
Are Reform on course to win seats in Parliament?

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Friday, Mr Farage said: “Whatever we do, we may not get the number of seats we deserve, but are we going to win seats in Parliament? Yes.”

The latest YouGov MRP – which polls voting intention in each constituency, surveying some 50,000 people in total – conducted just before Mr Farage took control of the party, had the party on no seats whatsoever.

However, Mr Farage is clearly optimistic that the recent surge in the polls since his return to the helm of Reform will result in the party sending MPs to Westminster.

Hypothetically, Reform will need a much larger percentage of the vote than has been seen so far for his party to secure more than a couple of seats.
What constituency swing is needed?

This latest MRP, which uses modelling and constituency-level polling to predict individual seat outcomes, had Labour on 422 MPs to the Conservatives 140 MPs.

On average, across all the seats, Reform secured 10.2 per cent of the vote share in the survey. This left it in second place in 27 seats, but the winner in none.

In a situation where, uniformly across all seats, each vote gained by Reform was stolen solely from the Conservatives, the party would need to see its share increase by 12 points before it started picking up seats.

This is because in the seats where Reform comes second, it is Labour that stands in the way, not the Conservatives and, even where it is in second, it is substantially behind the projected winner.

For example, YouGov’s MRP has support for Reform at its strongest in Barnsley North, at 23 per cent to the Tories’ 7 per cent. If every Conservative voter abandoned the party and threw their weight behind Reform, its share would rise to 30 per cent. It would still lose to Labour, polling there at 48 per cent.

If there was a uniform 12-point swing to Reform in every seat from current polling levels, Reform would return three MPs: Mr Farage in Clacton, Richard Tice in Boston and Skegness and a third in New Forest East.

It would not be until a 15-point swing from the Tories to Reform that it would secure over 10 seats. And a massive 19-point swing would be needed to get them above the Lib Dems, in which case the Conservative party would be left without a single seat.

In a second scenario, where for every two votes Reform steals from the Conservatives, it takes one from Labour, Reform getting an MP elected is more within reach.

In this scenario, Reform gets its first and only seat with an 11-point swing. Interestingly, its first winner isn’t the party leader, but Garry Sutherland in Exmouth and Exeter East.

Lee Anderson would join the Reform victors with a 12-point swing, Mr Farage and Mr Tice after a 14-point swing, and a 17-point swing would see them become the second party on 81 seats.
Why is it so difficult?

The bar for becoming a major political party is incredibly high.

This is almost entirely explained by the first-past-the-post system, where parties are punished if their support is distributed widely instead of focused in a small number of seats.

For Reform voters, one point of contention will likely be that the Liberal Democrats, currently trailing them nationwide on 10 per cent of voting intention, are predicted by the YouGov MRP to secure 48 seats.

Crucially, this Liberal Democrat vote share is extremely focused in some areas.

The Liberal Democrats are projected to gain less than 10 per cent of the total vote share in around three quarters of seats across the country. Reform on the other hand is predicted to experience vote share this low in fewer than half of seats.

However, the Lib Dems could see shares of over 30 per cent in around 11 per cent of all seats. Reform is not expected to see this anywhere.

Effectively, this means that while Reform has a more uniform level of middling vote share across seats, the Liberal Democrats experience very high support and very low support.

This feeling is not unique to Reform.

The Greens could have its vote share triple this year and even become the second party with younger parties, but are still only projected to pick up Brighton Pavillion and – maybe – Bristol Central.

Reform UK: Where did party come from and what are its policies?

Sophie Wingate and Ian Jones, PA
Fri, 14 June 2024 

With a major poll showing Reform UK edging past the Conservatives for the first time, Nigel Farage’s party has the potential to blow up the General Election.

Here the PA news agency answers some key questions on the party.

– Where did Reform UK come from?

It was formed in 2021 as a relaunch of Mr Farage’s previous project, the Brexit Party, which had in turn been founded from the remnants of Ukip.




Mr Farage helped found Ukip in the 1990s, which in later decades ate away at Tory support and proved instrumental in paving the way for the in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

In the aftermath of Brexit, Mr Farage announced he was quitting for a third time as Ukip leader. As the party descended into infighting, amid claims of a sharp turn to the right, he dramatically announced he was returning to the political front line with the formation of the new Brexit Party.

Mr Farage and Richard Tice in 2020 announced the Brexit Party would be renamed Reform as they railed against Covid-19 lockdowns. Unusually, it was set up as an “entrepreneurial political start-up”, with Mr Farage the company’s majority shareholder and honorary president.

Reform remained relatively unknown until recently, despite a major boost with the defection of Tory party deputy chairman Lee Anderson earlier this year.

Lee Anderson defected to Reform while he was the MP for Ashfield (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Mr Anderson became the party’s first MP following his suspension from the Conservative Party over comments he made about London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

– What happened when the General Election was called?

After Rishi Sunak called the General Election, Mr Farage at first announced he would not stand as a Reform UK candidate, saying he would support his party from the sidelines while focusing on getting Donald Trump re-elected as US president.

But less than two weeks later, he performed a screeching U-turn. Not only would he seek to become the MP for Clacton, but he would do so as leader of Reform UK, replacing former businessman and MEP Mr Tice in the role.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage holding a McDonald’s banana milkshake after one was thrown at him in Essex (James Manning/PA)

Mr Farage, who has failed in his previous seven attempts to be elected to the Commons, said his decision was motivated by a “terrible sense of guilt” towards his supporters as he vowed to lead a “political revolt”.

His takeover came as a huge blow to Mr Sunak’s already faltering campaign, heightening Tory fears that Reform could snatch voters from the right.

Following the veteran Eurosceptic’s decision to stand, celebrated with great fanfare by party backers in the Essex seat he is hoping to win, Reform began to climb in the polls.



– What are Reform’s policies?

The party will fight the election on immigration, pledging an “employer immigration tax” on companies that choose to employ overseas workers instead of British citizens.

This would see businesses paying a national insurance “premium” of 20% of an employee’s salary, as opposed to 13.8%, if the worker is from overseas.

The party has vowed to freeze lawful immigration with the exception of healthcare and leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

On the economy, Reform has set out an ambition to slash £91 billion off public spending by stopping the Bank of England paying interest on quantitative easing reserves and finding £50 billion of wasteful spending in Whitehall.

It has promised there would be no tax on earnings under £20,000 a year.

Reform has also said it would abolish the Government’s net zero targets and “stand up for British culture, identity and values”.

The party is set to unveil its full manifesto on Monday June 17.



– How have Reform’s poll ratings changed since the campaign began?

On the day Mr Sunak called the election, Reform was averaging 11% in the opinion polls.

The party remained around this level until the first week of June, when – a few days after Mr Farage announced he was standing as a candidate – its average poll rating began to climb and currently stands at 15%, six points behind the Conservatives’ average of 21%.

While most polls published in the past two weeks show a clear rise in support for Reform, there is no agreement among them over how the party is faring in relation to the Conservatives.

Only one poll so far has put Reform ahead of the Tories. The YouGov poll put Reform at 19% to the Tories’ 18% in voting intention, although pollsters caveated that Reform’s lead is within the margin of error.

Five other polls have been published in the past 24 hours, all of which show Reform trailing the Conservatives between one percentage point (Redfield & Wilton) and 12 points (More in Common).

– So what are Reform’s chances in the election?

Mr Farage has been bullish about Reform’s chances, expressing hope the party can “get through the electoral threshold” while declining to put a target on the number of seats he believes it could win.

But the first-past-the-post electoral system means the party could gain millions of votes without taking a single constituency.

Nigel Farage and Richard Tice announcing their party’s economic policy (James Manning/PA)

Nonetheless, Reform could have a big impact on the result by taking votes away from the Conservatives and costing Tory candidates closely contested seats.

Mr Farage’s stated ambition is to engineer a reverse takeover of the Conservative Party to form a new centre-right grouping.

He has hinted at the possibility of striking an election deal with the Tories, although Mr Tice dismissed the comments as “banter”.

In 2019, the then-Brexit Party withdrew candidates in seats across the country in a bid to help then-Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson win.

What does Reform UK stand for? Their history and vision under Nigel Farage

Dominic Penna

THE TELEGRAPH
Fri, 14 June 2024 

Since rebranding itself in 2020, Reform UK has become a formidable force on the political scene

Founded in 2021 as a relaunch of the Brexit Party, Reform UK stands almost neck and neck with the Conservatives in the wake of Nigel Farage shock announcement that he will stand as an MP and the party’s leader.

They are on track to cost the Conservatives a significant proportion of voters from the political Right ahead of the looming general election on July 4, edging one point ahead of the Prime Minister’s party for the first time in the latest figures from YouGov.

Already, the party has faced pivotal change throughout their campaign with co-founder Mr Farage returning to front-line politics to lead a “political revolt” aimed at toppling the Conservative Party after replacing Richard Tice, a former businessman and MEP who has led the party since 2021.

His pledge came as a surprise to most given Mr Farage had previously ruled out standing in the general election in his first campaign speech on May 23, promising to support Mr Tice from the sidelines instead.

Reform gained its first MP in March after Lee Anderson, a former deputy chairman of the Tory Party, defected following his suspension over a row about Sadiq Khan.

Mr Tice and Mr Farage announced the Brexit Party would become Reform on Nov 1 2020 in an article for The Telegraph published at the start of the second Covid lockdown.

They used the joint article to declare “lockdowns don’t work” and instead advocated a policy of “focused protection” for the most vulnerable. They also called for sweeping reform of major institutions beyond the pandemic.

Reform stood candidates at the London Assembly, Scottish Parliament and Senedd elections in 2021. Though failing to pick up any seats, the party gathered just over 42,500 supporters across all three elections.

The same year it won two council seats in the local elections, both in Derby.

Reform UK polls

The party’s backing in the polls remained largely static throughout 2021, averaging around three percentage points, although it had risen to an average of 6 per cent by the end of 2022 amid growing public frustration with the Conservative Party in the wake of the deposition of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.


The party’s fortunes improved vastly during 2023 and the early months of 2024, with average support for Reform almost doubling from 6 per cent in January 2023 to 10.1 per cent at the start of March.

The rise of Reform can be attributed to a combination of the party’s policy offer and fortuitous circumstances.
Reform UK policies

On the economic front, it has promised sweeping cuts to levies including corporation tax and inheritance tax at a time when Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are overseeing the country’s highest tax burden since the Second World War, with a further peak projected later this decade.

Despite successive Conservative governments promising to cut immigration, net migration reached record levels in 2022 and previous Reform leader Mr Tice has cited this “betrayal” by the Tory government of its past manifesto pledges as a driving force behind his party’s success.

Research from the More in Common think tank in February 2022 found that immigration was the main reason 2019 Tory voters were defecting to Reform, with around one in five of those who backed Boris Johnson and his party at the last election expected to support Mr Farage.

Reform’s promises on border control include “net zero immigration”, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – a demand made by many Tory backbenchers, and a popular idea among the party’s grassroots – and declaring illegal immigration as a national security threat.

On May 30, the party announced plans to introduce a migrant tax that would force employers to pay a higher National Insurance (NI) rate on foreign workers.

Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Tice pledged a 20 per cent National Insurance rate for every foreign worker in comparison to the current 13.8 per cent for domestic British workers.

The party has also vowed to abolish the Government’s flagship net zero targets, claiming that the green push is doing more damage to the British economy than anything else.

There was a further bounce in support for Reform following Mr Sunak’s November reshuffle, in which Suella Braverman was sacked as Home Secretary over her criticism of pro-Palestinian protests, which she dubbed “hate marches”.

The same reshuffle took Westminster by surprise with the return of Lord Cameron as the new Foreign Secretary, a move that angered many on the Tory Right as the former prime minister is widely perceived to be on the liberal wing of the party.

Mr Tice told GB News at the time: “The truth is our server has almost exploded with fury at what’s happened today with the return of David Cameron. Let’s remember this is the gentleman who campaigned against Brexit, and almost everything he did on foreign policy was wrong.”

As a result of its outflanking of the Conservatives on the Right in many policy areas and channelling the disillusionment of traditional Tories with its rhetoric, the party may well have an even greater impact at the next general election than in 2019, when it stood aside from seats held by Mr Johnson’s Tory candidates.

Now commanding the support of around one in ten voters, the party could block Mr Sunak from winning in dozens of seats he may otherwise retain.

 

How Daniel Ellsberg’s Moral Power Remains Alive

A Year After His Death, He’s Still with Us

by Norman Solomon and Tom Engelhardt Posted onJune 11, 2024

Strange to think that, without Daniel Ellsberg, Watergate might never have happened, Richard Nixon might have remained president, and the war in Vietnam might have taken even longer to end. So many decades later, it’s easy to forget how, in June 1971, when Ellsberg released those secret government documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and their shocking revelations about that distant war hit the front page of the New York Times, Nixon and crew were determined to move against him – and fast. It mattered not at all that he would be “indicted on 12 felony counts, including theft and violation of the Espionage Act,” and face up to 115 years in prison. That wasn’t enough for them. Nixon wanted to “try him in the press” and turned to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate him.

As it happened, though, Hoover was a buddy of Louis Marx, the father of Ellsberg’s wife and the head of a major toy company that, among other things, made plenty of toy soldiers. (Marx regularly gave Hoover toys that he could turn over to his employees for their kids at Christmas.) So when the FBI chief moved far too slowly on Ellsberg, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, worrying about those Pentagon Papers revelations (even though they didn’t deal with Nixon’s own nightmarish role in the then-ongoing wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), decided to set up a White House Special Investigations Unit. It came to be known informally as “the Plumbers.”

Its first assignment would be to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of damaging information on him. (No luck, as it turned out, but when the judge in Ellsberg’s trial found out about that break-in, he dismissed the case.) Nine months later, that unit’s ultimate assignment would, of course, have nothing to do with Ellsberg. It would be the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in — yes! – the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The result was history that would have been inconceivable without – yes! – Daniel Ellsberg.

As TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, makes clear today, Ellsberg led quite a life thereafter before dying in June 2023. Let him rest in peace. (If only the rest of this planet could do the same!) ~ Tom Engelhardt

---

The Absence – and Presence – of Daniel Ellsberg

by Norman Solomon

On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.

After working inside this country’s doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American war-making. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we’re superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration’s illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle.”

That miracle enabled Dan to keep on speaking, writing, researching, and protesting for the rest of his life. (In those five decades, he averaged nearly two arrests per year for civil disobedience.) He worked tirelessly to prevent and oppose a succession of new American wars. And he consistently gave eloquent public support as well as warm personal solidarity to heroic whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, Daniel Hale, Matthew Hoh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Mordechai Vanunu, Ann Wright, and others — who sacrificed much to challenge deadly patterns of official deceit.

Unauthorized Freedom of Speech

Dan often spoke out for freeing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose work had revealed devastating secret U.S. documents on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of a visit in June 2015, when they said goodbye inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, I saw that both men were on the verge of tears. At that point, Assange was three years into his asylum at that embassy, with no end in sight.

Secretly indicted in the United States, Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for nearly four more years until London police dragged him off to prison. Hours later, in a radio interview, Dan said: “Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic.”

Unauthorized disclosures were the essence of what WikiLeaks had published and what Dan had provided with the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, countless exposés about U.S. government war crimes became possible due to the courage of Chelsea Manning, and profuse front-page news about the government’s systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment resulted from Edward Snowden’s bravery. While gladly publishing some of their revelations, major American newspapers largely refused to defend their rights.

Such dynamics were all too familiar to Dan. He told me that the attitude toward him of the New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize with its huge Pentagon Papers scoop, was akin to a district attorney’s view of a “snitch” – useful but distasteful.

In recent times, Dan detested the smug media paradigm of “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad.” So, he pushed back against the theme as rendered by New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a lengthy piece along those lines in late 2016. Dan quickly responded with a letter to the editor, which never appeared.

The New Yorker certainly could have found room to print Dan’s letter, which said: “I couldn’t disagree more with Gladwell’s overall account.” The letter was just under 300 words; the Gladwell piece had run more than 5,000. While promoting the “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad” trope, the New Yorker did not let readers know that Ellsberg himself completely rejected it:

“Each of us, having earned privileged access to secret information, saw unconstitutional, dangerously wrong policies ongoing by our government. (In Snowden’s case, he discovered blatantly criminal violations of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, on a scale that threatens our democracy.) We found our superiors, up to the presidents, were deeply complicit and clearly unwilling either to expose, reform, or end the wrongdoing.

“Each of us chose to sacrifice careers, and possibly a lifetime’s freedom, to reveal to the public, Congress, and the courts what had long been going on in secret from them. We hoped, each with some success, to allow our democratic system to bring about desperately needed change.

“The truth is there are no whistleblowers, in fact no one on earth, with whom I identify more closely than with Edward Snowden.

“Here is one difference between us that is deeply real to me: Edward Snowden, when he was 30 years old, did what I could and should have done – what I profoundly wish I had done – when I was his age, instead of 10 years later.”

As he encouraged whistleblowing, Dan often expressed regret that he hadn’t engaged in it sooner. During the summer of 2014, a billboard was on display at bus stops in Washington, D.C., featuring a quote from Dan — with big letters at the top saying “DON’T DO WHAT I DID. DON’T WAIT,” followed by “until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.” Two whistleblowers who had been U.S. diplomats, Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright, unveiled the billboard at a bus stop near the State Department.

A Grotesque Situation of Existential Danger

Above all, Daniel Ellsberg was preoccupied with opposing policies that could lead to nuclear war. “No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane,” he wrote in The Doomsday Machine. “The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness.”

It’s fitting that the events set for Daniel Ellsberg Week (ending on June 16th, the first anniversary of when Dan passed away) will include at least one protest at a Northrop Grumman facility. That company has a $13.3 billion contract to develop a new version of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which – as Dan frequently emphasized – is the most dangerous of all nuclear weapons. He was eager to awaken Congress to scientific data about “nuclear winter” and the imperative of shutting down ICBMs to reduce the risks of nuclear war.

Five years ago, several of us from the Institute for Public Accuracy hand-delivered paperbacks of The Doomsday Machine – with a personalized letter from Dan to each member of the House and Senate – to all 535 congressional offices on Capitol Hill. “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years,” Dan wrote near the top of his two-page letter. Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”

Dan’s letter singled out the urgency of one “immediate step” in particular: “to eliminate entirely our redundant, vulnerable, and destabilizing land-based ICBM force.” Unlike air-launched and sea-based nuclear weapons, which are not vulnerable to attack, the ICBMs are vulnerable to a preemptive strike and so are “poised to launch” on the basis of “ten-minute warning signals that may be – and have been, on both sides – false alarms, which press leadership to ‘use them or lose them.’”

As Dan pointed out, “It is in the power of Congress to decouple the hair-trigger on our system by defunding and dismantling the current land-based Minuteman missiles and rejecting funding for their proposed replacements. The same holds for lower-yield weapons for first use against Russia, on submarines or in Europe, which are detonators for escalation to nuclear winter.”

In essence, Dan was telling members of Congress to do their job, with the fate of the earth and its inhabitants hanging in the balance:

“This grotesque situation of existential danger has evolved in secret in the almost total absence of congressional oversight, investigations, or hearings. It is time for Congress to remedy this by preparing for first-ever hearings on current nuclear doctrine and ‘options,’ and by demanding objective, authoritative scientific studies of their full consequences including fire, smoke, nuclear winter, and famine. Classified studies of nuclear winter using actual details of existing attack plans, never yet done by the Pentagon but necessarily involving its directed cooperation, could be done by the National Academy of Sciences, requested and funded by Congress.”

But Dan’s letter was distinctly out of sync with Congress. Few in office then – or now – have publicly acknowledged that such a “grotesque situation of existential danger” really exists. And even fewer have been willing to break from the current Cold War mindset that continues to fuel the rush to global annihilation. On matters of foreign policy and nuclear weapons, the Congressional Record is mainly a compendium of arrogance and delusion, in sharp contrast to the treasure trove of Dan’s profound insights preserved at Ellsberg.net.

Humanism and Realism to Remember

Clear as he was about the overarching scourge of militarism embraced by the leaders of both major parties, Dan was emphatic about not equating the two parties at election time. He understood that efforts like Green Party presidential campaigns are misguided at best. But, as he said dryly, he did favor third parties – on the right (“the more the better”). He knew what some self-described progressives have failed to recognize as the usual reality of the U.S. electoral system: right-wing third parties help the left, and left-wing third parties help the right.

Several weeks before the 2020 election, Dan addressed voters in the swing state of Michigan via an article he wrote for the Detroit Metro Times. Appearing under a headline no less relevant today – “Trump Is an Enemy of the Constitution and Must Be Defeated” – the piece said that “it’s now of transcendent importance to prevent him from gaining a second term.” Dan warned that “we’re facing an authoritarian threat to our democratic system of a kind we’ve never seen before,” making votes for Joe Biden in swing states crucial.

Dan’s mix of deep humanism and realism was in harmony with his aversion to contorting logic to suit rigid ideology. Bad as current realities were, he said, it was manifestly untrue that things couldn’t get worse. He had no intention of ignoring the very real dangers of nuclear war or fascism.

During the last few months of his life, after disclosing a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer, Dan reached many millions of people with an intensive schedule of interviews. Journalists were mostly eager to ask him about events related to the Pentagon Papers. While he said many important things in response to such questions, Dan most wanted to talk about the unhinged momentum of the nuclear arms race and the ominous U.S. frenzy of antagonism toward Russia and China lacking any sense of genuine diplomacy.

While he can no longer speak to the world about the latest developments, Dan Ellsberg will continue to speak directly to hearts and minds about the extreme evils of our time – and the potential for overcoming them with love in action.

A free documentary film premiering now, “A Common Insanity: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg About Nuclear Weapons,” concludes with these words from Dan as he looks straight at us: “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.

Copyright 2024 Norman Solomon

In rapidly ageing China, millions of migrant workers can't afford to retire

INTERNAL MIGRATION

Security guard Yang Xiping, 59, keeps watch at the entrance of a residential compound in Beijing, China April 9, 2024.

PHOTO: Reuters file
PUBLISHED ONMAY 08, 2024

BEIJING/HONG KONG — After three decades selling homemade buns on the streets of the Chinese city of Xian, 67-year-old Hu Dexi would have liked to slow down.

Instead, Hu and his older wife have moved to the edge of Beijing, where they wake at 4 am every day to cook their packed lunch, then commute for more than an hour to a downtown shopping mall, where they each earn 4,000 yuan (S$750) monthly, working 13-hour shifts as cleaners.

The alternative for them and many of the 100 million rural migrants reaching retirement age in China over the next 10 years is to return to their village and live off a small farm and monthly pensions of 123 yuan.

"No one can look after us," said Hu, still mopping the floor. "I don't want to be a burden on my two children and our country isn't giving us a penny."

The generation that flocked to China's cities at the end of last century, building the infrastructure and manning the factories that made the country the world's biggest exporter, now risks a sharp late-life drop in living standards.

Reuters interviewed more than a dozen people, including rural migrant workers, demographers, economists and a government adviser, who described a social security system unfit for a worsening demographic crisis, which Beijing is patching rather than overhauling as it pursues growth through industrial modernisation. At the same time, demand for social services is growing rapidly as the population ages.

"The elderly in China will live a long and miserable life," said Fuxian Yi, a demographer who is also a senior scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. "More and more migrant workers are returning to the countryside, and some are taking low-paid jobs, which is a desperate way for them to save themselves."

If these migrants were to rely solely on China's basic rural pension, they would live on less than the World Bank's poverty threshold of US$3.65 a day, though many supplement their earnings by labouring in the cities or by selling some of their crop.


China's National Development and Reform Commission, the human resources and civil affairs ministries and the State Council did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

China's latest statistics showed some 94 million working people — around 12.8 per cent of China's 734 million labour force — were older than 60 in 2022, up from 8.8 per cent in 2020.

That share, while lower than in wealthier Japan and South Korea, is set to skyrocket as 300 million more Chinese reach their 60s in the coming decade.

A third of this cohort are rural migrants, who typically lack the professional skills for an economy aspiring to move up the value chain.

PHOTO: Reuters

The main reason China has not built a stronger safety net for them is that policymakers, fearing the economy might fall into the middle-income trap, prioritise growing the pie rather than sharing it, the government adviser told Reuters.


To achieve that, China is directing economic resources and credit flows towards new productive forces, a catch-all term for President Xi Jinping's latest policy push for innovation and development in advanced industries such as green energy, high-end chips and quantum technology.

US and European officials say this policy is unfair to Western firms competing with Chinese producers. They have warned Beijing that it stokes trade tensions, and that it diverts resources away from households, suppressing domestic demand and China's future growth potential.

China, which has rejected those assessments, has instead focused on upgrading production, rather than consumption, as its desired path toward prosperity.

"It would be easier to solve the equality problem if we could first solve the productivity growth problem," said the adviser, granted anonymity to speak freely about pension-policy debates happening behind closed doors.

"People have different views" on whether China can make that leap in productivity, the adviser said. "Mine is that it may be difficult if we do not reform further and remain at odds with the international community."

'Vested interests'

Pensions in China are based on an internal passport system known as hukou, which divides the population along urban-rural lines, creating vast differences in incomes and access to social services.

Monthly urban pensions range from roughly 3,000 yuan in less-developed provinces to about 6,000 yuan in Beijing and Shanghai. Rural pensions, introduced nationwide in 2009, are meagre.

In March, China increased the minimum pension by 20 yuan, to 123 yuan per month, benefitting 170 million people.

Economists at Nomura say transferring resources to the poorest Chinese households is the most efficient way to boost domestic consumption.

But the rural pension hike amounts to an annual effort of less than 0.001 per cent of China's US$18 trillion GDP.


China's Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) estimates the pension system will run out of money by 2035.

Beijing has introduced private retirement schemes and is transferring funds to provinces with pension budget deficits which they cannot replenish themselves due to high debts.

Other countries have tried to increase pension funding by lifting the retirement age. In China, it is among the lowest in the world at 60 for men and 50-55 for women depending on their line of work.

Beijing has said it plans to raise the retirement age gradually, without giving a timeline.

Government concerns that the population would perceive raising the threshold as benefiting "vested interests" at the expense of ordinary citizens are holding up the implementation of those plans, the adviser said.

Chinese think "officials want to retire later to fatten up their own pensions," he said.

PHOTO: Reuters

Poverty threat

CASS surveys show the level of healthcare funding for urban workers was in some cases about four times higher than for those with a rural hukou.

"There aren't enough social services to solve the problems of these people, who are prone to falling back into poverty," said Dan Wang, chief China economist at Hang Seng Bank.

More than 16 per cent of rural residents older than 60 were "unhealthy", compared with 9.9 per cent in the cities, according to an October article by Cai Fang, a CASS economist and former central bank adviser, published in the Chinese Cadres Tribune, a Communist Party magazine.

Sixty-year-old Yang Chengrong and her 58-year-old husband Wu Yonghou spend their days collecting piles of cardboard and plastic for a recycling station in Beijing, earning less than one yuan per kilogramme.

Yang said she has heart issues, while Wu has gout, but they can't afford treatment. They fear their 4,000 yuan monthly income is unsustainable as "people consume and waste less."

"Villagers like us work ourselves to near-death, but we must keep working," said Yang, her shoulders covered in snow after a day of scavenging.

Wu, next to her, said they do not dare to retire.

"I only feel secure if I have work, even if it's dirty work," he said.

Traditionally in China, children had been expected to support the elderly.

But most of those retiring in the coming decade, a group almost as large as the entire US population, only had one child due to birth limits enforced from 1980 to 2015.

High youth unemployment compounds the problem.

"Relying on families for elderly care is no longer feasible," Cai wrote in his article.

The silver lining for some of the elderly is that younger Chinese, despite struggling to find the services jobs they went to university for, reject hard labour.

"The mall can't find younger people," said Hu, the cleaner. "As long as I can still move, I'll keep working."

ALSO READ: China's ageing population threatens switch to new economic growth model

Source: Reuters

Heatwave hammers Thailand’s stinky but lucrative durian farms


AFP
May 4, 2024

Among Thailand's most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent durian has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years - Copyright AFP Lillian SUWANRUMPHA
Watsamon Tri-Yasakda and Sarah Lai

Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian labourer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms some 15 metres (50 feet) below.

Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years.

But a vicious heatwave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiralling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry.

“This year is a crisis,” durian farmer Busaba Nakpipat told AFP bluntly.

The weather-beaten 54-year-old took over her parents’ farm in eastern Chanthaburi province — Thailand’s durian heartland — three decades ago.

“If the hot weather continues to rise in the future, it’ll be over,” she said. “Farmers wouldn’t be able to produce durian anymore.”

Durian season usually lasts from March until June, but the soaring temperatures — which in her province have hovered around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for weeks — and subsequent drought have shortened the harvest.

Busaba said the heat causes the durian, which is graduated by weight and size, to ripen faster so it does not grow to its fullest — and most valuable — size.

“The quality of the durian won’t meet the standard,” she said.

And not only is she getting less money for the crop, Busaba’s operational costs have risen.

Since March a drought has sucked water from the wells, so to keep her precious durian trees alive Busaba is forced to bring in thousands of litres by truck.

“We have to buy 10 water trucks for 120,000 litres of water for one-time watering the whole 10-rai (1.6 hectares) of our farm,” she said, repeating the process every other day, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

“We have prayed for rain,” she said. “But there was no rain.”


– This year, less –


Thailand’s durian exports are worth billions and are the kingdom’s third most valuable agricultural product — behind rice and rubber.

But in the nearby durian market, anxiety is running high among stall-holders, many of them with family businesses going back generations.

Siriwan Roopkaew, manning her mother’s stall, said the lack of water has impacted the size of the fruit, but for now prices remain high thanks to demand from China.

Around 95 percent of Thaliand’s durian exports are to China, which shipped nearly $4.6 billion worth of the love-it-or-hate-it fruit from the kingdom in 2023, according to data from Beijing’s commerce ministry.

But the weather is threatening Thailand’s dominance.

In May Chinese state media reported an almost 50 percent rise in durian imported from Vietnam, citing heat and drought in Thailand.

“Hot weather means there will be less durian. Even this year, there is less durian,” Siriwan, 26, said.

“Normally, my stall would be full of durian by now.”

While farmers worried about water, she said, sellers like her family were more concerned about the knock-on economics.

“Less durian means our earnings are less,” she said, “so it’d be hard for us to live the whole year.”

Meanwhile, back at the farm, Busaba sighed as she considered the months ahead.

“The future of durian, it’s over if there’s no water,” she said.

UK

Lib Dems call for Biden-style tax on share buybacks at spring conference

Sophie Wingate, 

PA Deputy Political Editor
Sat, 16 March 2024 

The Liberal Democrats have called for a new tax on share buybacks by large companies as the party holds its spring conference in York.

Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem Treasury spokeswoman, used her speech on Saturday to set out the plan to follow Joe Biden’s example and impose a 4% levy on the share buybacks by FTSE 100 firms.

The measure could raise around £2 billion annually for public services and investment in green industries, the party said.

Critics say buybacks – when a company purchases its own shares – are used to inflate share prices and come at the expense of spending on investment.

The US president introduced a 1% tax on share buybacks of US-listed companies in 2022 and has now proposed to raise it to 4%.

Party leader Sir Ed Davey said: “Large corporations from fossil fuel giants to banks are making huge profits off the back of families facing soaring energy bills, mortgage payments and food prices. It is only fair that we ask these companies to pay more in tax.

“This new levy would not just raise much-needed money for public services, it would encourage investment, help create jobs and boost growth including in the green industries of the future.”

The £2 billion the policy could raise is close to what the Labour Party said its plan to tax non-doms could have brought in, before Chancellor Jeremy Hunt deprived Sir Keir Starmer’s party of that funding by adopting the measure in his Budget.

In her speech, Ms Olney said: “Some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world are listed on the London Stock Exchange. And every year, these same companies spend tens of billions of pounds doing nothing more than buying back their own shares.

“Every pound spent inflating share prices is a pound that could have been spent productively. And at a time when the UK is near the bottom of the table for business investment amongst major economies, that’s a problem.

“And it’s an even bigger problem for our fight against climate change. If we’re going to achieve net zero, we need big corporations to channel serious investment in energy efficiency, green technologies and clean energy. But too many put their share price above the good of our planet.”

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey is expecting to make gains across the so-called Tory ‘blue wall’ (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

She pointed to oil giant BP, which she said spent less than £1 billion of its £11 billion profit last year investing in low carbon energy and more than £5 billion buying back its own shares.

“In the last two years, share buyback programmes from the hundred biggest firms on the Stock Exchange reached record highs, exceeding £50 billion a year. Just think what our economy could have achieved if this money was spent on productive investment — think of the progress we could have made on the green transition.

“Let’s put a 4% tax on share buybacks to incentivise proper business investment, spur economic growth and raise funds fairly for our public services to the tune of £2 billion a year. Let’s take bold action to supercharge green investment and break the cycle of Conservative stagnation and recession.”

Ms Olney also attacked Mr Hunt’s Budget, saying that “even after his changes to national insurance, he is raising taxes to their highest level in the post-war era”.

She added: “And it’s not just that he’s putting up taxes during a cost-of-living crisis. It’s that he’s doing it in the most unfair way possible with a stealth tax that keeps income tax thresholds frozen, dragging millions of people on low pay into income tax for the first time.”

Layla Moran, the only MP of Palestinian heritage, addressed the Israel-Hamas war in her spring conference speech 

(James Manning/PA)

Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson Layla Moran, who is of British-Palestinian descent, said in her speech that the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza has “gone beyond the pale”.

She called for sanctions on violent Israeli settlers to be extended to “anyone who enables the insidious settler movement, the lawyers, the accountants, the businesses”.

She said: “If they support illegal activity, they shouldn’t be allowed in the UK and if their money is flowing through our economy, we should go after it. No longer can acting with impunity go without consequence.”

Ms Moran also accused the Tories of fanning “flames of antisemitism and Islamophobia” in the UK, saying the Lib Dems reject their “false dichotomy” of standing either with the hostages and against Hamas, or with the Palestinians and against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Elsewhere, the Lib Dems passed a new policy calling for key sporting events such as Premier League matches, Six Nations Rugby, Ryder Cup and the Ashes to be legally shown on free-to-air TV channels.

(PA Graphics)

The party is using the gathering to prepare for a further push into “blue wall” seats — traditional Conservative strongholds — ahead of the general election.

The party won 11 seats at the 2019 general election but have since gained formerly Conservative constituencies across southern England in a series of by-elections.

These have included Chesham and Amersham in Buckinghamshire, Frome in Somerset, Tiverton and Honiton in Devon, and North Shropshire.

But some polls suggest the far-right Reform UK party has overtaken the Lib Dems in popularity across the UK.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak this week ruled out holding an election on May 2 to coincide with local elections, having previously indicated he will send the country to the polls in the latter half of 2024.