It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Larry Fink Sees Large Opportunities for Deals to Transform BlackRock
Loukia Gyftopoulou and Myriam Balezou Fri, 29 September 2023
(Bloomberg) -- BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink said he’s open to more acquisitions, as the world’s largest asset manager increasingly seeks to position itself as a one-stop shop for investors.
“I do see some very large opportunities for inorganic growth,” Fink told Bloomberg Television’s Dani Burger at the Berlin Global Dialogue forum on Friday.
The co-founder of the firm was responding to a question whether he would consider an acquisition as transformative as the $15.2 billion purchase of Barclays Global Investors in 2009. That blockbuster deal added BGI’s IShares exchange-traded funds and quantitative strategies, turning it overnight into the world’s biggest fund manager.
After dominating stocks and debt investing for years, BlackRock — which now oversees $9.4 trillion — has been offering not only listed equity and bond funds but also private-asset strategies as well as tech, data, analytics and financial markets advice to clients. As part of the alternatives strategy, it announced the purchase of London-based private debt manager Kreos Capital this year.
BlackRock is in the midst of an aggressive push into alternatives, building out its private markets business. In 2019, it bought eFront, a French software provider for $1.3 billion in cash to expand private equity and real estate analytics for clients, adding to its risk management technology platform called Aladdin.
Private money has a crucial role to play as most democracies grapple with elevated fiscal deficits and hit the threshold of excess debt, Fink said in the interview on Friday. While warning of a crisis, he said the only solution is to reorient and reimagine how their growth is financed.
“The way we’re going to be able to finance growth is public to private,” he said. “There’s so much private money looking for great long-term investments.”
Structural Inflation
Speaking at the Berlin event, he said he expects 10-year borrowing costs to stay at 5% or higher because of embedded inflation, adding investors are underestimating how the changes in geopolitics are structurally inflationary. The fragmentation of supply chains means higher wages in the long run, he said.
“Business leaders and politicians are not providing the foundation to help explain this,” he said. “We have not seen inflation like this in over 30 years.”
All of this means that businesses will be moving more aggressively toward technology in pursuit of productivity, whether it’s by using more robotics or artificial intelligence, he said. However, AI could hurt some of the fastest-growing economies the most because they will see the greatest number of job losses, he added.
Fink said he has been telling every political and business leader he meets that they need to help create more “certainty” and “hope,” but what he sees instead is “fear,” citing the example of a surge in the savings rate in China.
“In my mind, when we see savings rates decline and they’re consuming more, that’s an indication of more hope” he said.
Some economies are likely to enter recession early, with the US maybe seeing one by 2025, he said without elaborating.
“Whatever recessions we’re going to have are going to be modest, so I’m not that fearful,” he said.
--With assistance from Dani Burger and Julia Manns.
Bloomberg Businessweek
Medium hints at a nascent media coalition to block AI crawlers Devin Coldewey Thu, 28 September 2023 Image Credits: Carol Yepes / Getty Images
Web publishing platform Medium has announced that it will block OpenAI's GPTBot, an agent that scrapes web pages for content used to train the company's AI models. But the real news may be that a group of platforms may soon form a unified front against what many consider an exploitation of their content.
Medium joins CNN, The New York Times and numerous other media outlets (though not TechCrunch, yet) in adding "User-Agent: GPTBot" to the list of disallowed agents in its robots.txt. This is a document found on many sites that tells crawlers and indexers, the automated systems constantly scanning the web, whether that site consents to being scanned or not. If you would for some reason prefer not to be indexed on Google, for instance, you could say so in your robots.txt.
AI makers do more than index, of course: They scrape the data to be used as source material for their models. Few are happy about this, and certainly not Medium's CEO, Tony Stubblebine, who writes:
I’m not a hater, but I also want to be plain-spoken that the current state of generative AI is not a net benefit to the Internet. They are making money on your writing without asking for your consent, nor are they offering you compensation and credit... AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers.
Therefore, he writes, Medium is defaulting to telling OpenAI to take a hike when its scraper comes knocking. (It is one of the few that will respect that request.)
However, he is quick to admit that this essentially voluntary approach is not likely to make a dent in the actions of spammers and others who will simply ignore the request. Though there is also the possibility of active measures (poisoning their data by directing dumb crawlers to fake content, for instance), that way lies escalation and expense, and likely lawsuits. Always with the lawsuits.
There's hope, though. Stubblebine writes:
Medium is not alone. We are actively recruiting for a coalition of other platforms to help figure out the future of fair use in the age of AI.
I’ve talked to <redacted>, <redacted>, <redacted>, <redacted> and <redacted>. These are the big organizations that you could probably guess, but they aren’t ready to publicly work together.
Others are facing the same problem, and like so many things in tech, more people aligned on a standard or platform creates a network effect and improves the outcome for everyone. A coalition of big organizations would be a powerful counterbalance to unscrupulous AI platforms.
What's holding them back? Unfortunately, multi-industry partnerships are in general slow to develop for all the reasons you might imagine. By the standards of publishing and copyright, AI is absolutely brand new and there are countless legal and ethical questions with no clear answers, let alone settled and widely accepted ones.
How can you agree to an IP protection partnership when the definition of IP and copyright is in flux? How can you move to ban AI use when your board is pushing to find ways to use it to the company's advantage?
It may take a 900-pound internet gorilla like Wikipedia to take a bold first step and break the ice. Other organizations may be hamstrung by business concerns, but there are others unencumbered by such things and which may safely sally forth without fear of disappointing stockholders. But until someone steps up, we will remain at the mercy of the crawlers, which respect or ignore our consent at their pleasure.
AI not close to matching humans, says Meta executive
James Titcomb Fri, 29 September 2023 Ahmad Al-Dahle, head of generative AI at Meta, said breakthroughs would be needed in how the technology was developed to reach general intelligence milestone
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has rejected claims that artificial intelligence is close to becoming as powerful as humans.
A top AI executive at Facebook’s parent company said there are “fundamental limitations” in how technology such as ChatGPT is built which means the systems are inherently prone to making mistakes.
The comments made by Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s head of generative AI, are in stark contrast to predictions that say the next wave of AI technology could match human intelligence and become an existential risk.
“There are fundamental limitations in the underlying technology that as an industry, as an AI community, we don’t have solutions to,” Mr Al-Dahle told The Telegraph.
He said leading AI companies had not adequately addressed “hallucinations” – a common problem in which today’s AI models routinely make up answers to questions.
“We’ve done a lot as a community to make it more truthful and grounded or helpful,” said Mr Al-Dahle. “All of these things have helped tremendously, but they haven’t closed the gap.
“We’re going to need new advances and new methods in order to eliminate them [hallucinations] entirely.”
He said that current approaches were unlikely to produce artificial general intelligence (AGI), a milestone in AI in which the technology matches humans in any field that companies such as OpenAI have described as an existential risk.
“I just don’t think the current approaches or technology will scale there,” Mr Al-Dahle said. “We need more inventions, and these inventions are hard to schedule. I don’t know if we’ll get there in a year, five years, 10 years or 20 years.” British AI pioneer Demis Hassabis has said that Artificial General Intelligence could be achieved within a few years - Joy Malone
Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of the British AI lab DeepMind, has said AGI could be “just a few years away”.
Rishi Sunak’s AI safety summit in November is designed to address concerns among Government advisers that AI systems could become so powerful within a year that they could be used to make biological weapons or spiral out of control.
But Mr Al-Dahle said “nobody has anything that gets remotely close” to AI software that can improve itself, which is one of the key concerns of AI researchers who have warned about the technology.
His comments come after another Meta AI executive, Yann LeCun, claimed Mr Sunak had caught “AI delusion disease” by worrying about the technology’s existential risks.
Meta has been under fire from competitors over making its AI models free to download, which critics say could mean they end up in the wrong hands. ChatGPT creator working on mystery AI device with iPhone designer, report claims
Anthony Cuthbertson Thu, 28 September 2023 The first ever iPhone on display at MacWorld on 10 January, 2007 in San Francisco, California (Getty Images)
OpenAI, the company behind the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, is reportedly in talks with renowned Apple designer Jony Ive to create an artificial intelligence device.
The venture, which also involves SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, aims to build the “iPhone of artificial intelligence”, according to the Financial Times.
Several brainstorming sessions between Mr Ive and OpenAI boss Sam Altman have already taken place, while Japanese tech giant SoftBank is said to have pledged more than $1 billion towards the project.
Few details are given about what form the device might take, with possibilities ranging from a standalone ChatGPT-enabled smart speaker, to headphones that allow wearers to interface directly with the AI bot.
Mr Ive left Apple in 2019 after 27 years at the company to form his own design company, called LoveForm, which is involved in the latest collaboration.
Alongside the iPhone, Mr Ive played a crucial role in designing other Apple products like the iPad, iPod and MacBook. His latest creation is likely to forego a screen, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Independent has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
Reports of the partnership emerged in the same week that OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now has direct access to the internet, as well as the ability to “see, hear and speak”.
The addition of voice and image recognition tools gives the generative AI similar capabilities to virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
The internet connectivity feature also brings it in line with other leading AI tools like Google’s Bard.
“ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources,” OpenAI announced on Wednesday.
“It is no longer limited to data before September 2021. Browsing is particularly useful for tasks that require up-to-date information, such as helping you with technical research, trying to choose a bike, or planning a vacation.”
Meta also announced the launch of several new chatbots this week, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying the AI bots will come with different personalities based on real people.
The chatbots will work through Meta’s apps, which include Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. ChatGPT now has direct access to the internet
Anthony Cuthbertson Thu, 28 September 2023 The app for OpenAI’s ChatGPT on a smartphone screen in Oslo, on 12 July, 2023
The update comes just days after ChatGPT was given the ability to “see, hear and speak” through new voice and image recognition tools, building on its generative AI tools to bring capabilities similar to virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
Prior to the latest update, ChatGPT’s knowledge base was limited to a data training set that ended in September 2021.
“ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources,” OpenAI announced on Wednesday.
“It is no longer limited to data before September 2021. Browsing is particularly useful for tasks that require up-to-date information, such as helping you with technical research, trying to choose a bike, or planning a vacation.”
The web-connected version of ChatGPT is currently only available for paying ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise customers, but OpenAI said it has plans to expand it to non-paying users “soon”.
OpenAI briefly added internet connectivity features for premium ChatGPT users in July, however it was shut off after people exploited it to get around paywalls.
This issue appears to have been fixed, along with other ways to misuse the AI bot, through OpenAI’s evolving AI safety measures.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said at the company’s annual Meta Connect conference that the chatbots would be available through its applications Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
“This isn’t just going to be about answering queries,” he said. “This is about entertainment.”
Other social media and messaging apps have also introduced AI chatbots to their platforms, including Snapchat’s My AI tool.
How Las Vegas police caught Tupac’s alleged murderer after three decades
Bevan Hurley and Josh Marcus Fri, 29 September 2023 Tupac Shakur’s murder in a drive-by shooting in 1996 remains unsolved (Pat Johnson/Shutterstock)
According to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Duane “Keffe D” Davis was the leader of a plot by the Southside Compton Crips gang to kill Tupac, after the rapper and his entourage fought a member of the gang following a Mike Tyson fight on 7 September, 1996.
“Duane Davis was the shot-caller for this group of individuals that committed this crime,” homicide lieutenant Jason Johansson said during a press conference after the arrest. “He orchestrated the plan that was carried out.”
Police said Mr Davis, who has not yet entered a plea, and three others pulled alongside Tupac in a white Cadillac later on 7 September. Someone inside the car opened fire on the BMW where the rapper was sitting.
“At some point in time, as they were in the white Cadillac, Mr Davis took the gun that he had obtained and provided it to passengers in the rear seat of the vehicle,” the police official continued.
The arrests marks a huge development in one of the department’s – and entertainment history’s – most high-profile cold cases. Previously, no one had been charged in connection with the slaying.
“We never had the necessary evidence to bring this case forward and present it for criminal charges,” Lieutenant Johansson said.
That changed when Mr Davis began speaking openly about his role in the shooting around 2018, with his version of events closely matching the one described by police.
“This case was reinvigorated as additional information came to light related to his homicide, especially Duane Davis’s own admissions to his involvement in this homicide he provided to numerous different media outlets,” Lieutenant Johansson said.
Indeed, in the 2018 Netflix documentary Unsolved: The Tupac and Biggie Murders and in his book Compton Street Legend which he published in 2019, Keffe D claimed that his nephew Orlando Anderson fatally shot Tupac – and that he was in the car with him when he opened fire.
“Tupac made an erratic move and began to reach down beneath his seat,” Mr Davis writes in the book.
“It was the first and only time in my life that I could relate to the police command, ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’ Instead, Pac pulled out a strap, and that’s when the fireworks started.
“One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.”The arrest follows a police raid on Mr Davis’s house in Henderson, a city 15 miles southeast of the gambling mecca, that took place on Monday 17 July.
Although police have never made an arrest previously, a 2002 investigation by Los Angeles Times journalist Chuck Philips implicated several people in the killing, including Shakur’s hip hop rival Christopher Wallace, better known by his stage name Notorious BIG.
At the time of his death in September 1996 aged 25, Shakur was one of the most famous hip-hop stars on the planet.
The mythology surrounding the Changes rapper has only grown since then.
Who is Tupac Shakur?
Lesane Parish Crooks was born in East Harlem, New York, in 1971, the son of active members of the Black Panthers. He was renamed Tupac Amaru Shakur, taking his mother’s maiden name, at the age of one.
Shakur moved to Baltimore with his mother in 1984, and studied acting, poetry and jazz at the Baltimore School for the Arts.
His family relocated to Marin City, California, in 1988, and he began recording music under the stage name MC New York, according to a fan site.
Shakur signed to Interscope Records and released his first album, 2Pacalypse Now, in 1991.
The critically-acclaimed debut focused on themes of gang violence and police corruption, drawing a rebuke from then vice president Dan Quayle, according to an official biography.
He went on to release best-selling albums Strictly For My N.I.G.G.A.Z, Thug Life: Volume 1, Me Against the World and All Eyez on Me between 1993 and September 1996.
During this period, he also achieved plaudits for his acting in movies Poetic Justice, Gridlock'd and Gang Related.
Shakur had numerous run-ins with police. In 1993, he was charged with aggravated assault for the shootings of two off-duty police officers in Atlanta. The charges were later dropped, and Shakur settled civil lawsuits with both officers.
He and two friends were ambushed at Quad Studios in Times Square in November 1994, with Shakur being shot five times after trying to fight off the attackers.
He would later claim in an interview that he had been set up by Sean Coombs, better known as Puff Daddy, and the Notorious BIG.
The ensuing claims and counter-claims sparked the bitter East Coast-West Coast hip hop feud.
In December 1994, Shakur was convicted of first-degree sexual abuse and later sentenced to 18 months to 4.5 years in prison.
He served eight months in prison before he was released in 1995, pending an appeal.
Tupac’s death
On 7 September 1996, Shakur attended a boxing bout between his friend Mike Tyson and Bruce Sheldon at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.
After the fight, Shakur attacked Los Angeles Crip gang member Orlando Anderson in the lobby of the hotel to avenge a recent beating of one of his bodyguards, who was affiliated with the rival Bloods street gang.
According to Chuck Philip’s investigation, Anderson plotted with other gang members that night to immediately retaliate.
The gang members reportedly received a payment of $1m and the gun used in the shooting from Notorious BIG, whose record label Bad Boy Entertainment was embroiled in a war of words with Shakur’s Death Row label.
Three hours later at about 11pm, Shakur and record impresario Suge Knight were driving in a black BMW when they stopped at traffic lights on Las Vegas Boulevard.
As they chatted to fans, a white Cadillac pulled up alongside them and an occupant armed with a semiautomatic fired several shots, striking the hip hop star four times as he sat in the passenger seat.
Shakur died in hospital six days later from internal bleeding.
Anderson, who was considered the prime suspect in Shakur’s murder, was reportedly interviewed once by Las Vegas detectives, and maintained his innocence.
He was killed in an unrelated gang shooting in May 1998.
Notorious BIG strongly denied any involvement in the murder. He was killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles six months after Shakur’s death.
Shakur released 11 albums posthumously, and has sold 75 million records.
He has since received numerous honours and memorials. In 2015, the Grammy Museum paid homage to his music career with the “All Eyez on Me” exhibition.
He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.
And in June, Shakur received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
IMPERIALIST WAR
Putin says Russian-held regions in Ukraine endorse their choice to join Moscow
Reuters Fri, 29 September 2023 Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a televised address in Moscow
(Reuters) - Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin said early on Saturday that residents of Moscow-held regions in Ukraine expressed their desire to be part of Russia in recent local elections, reaffirming referendums last year that Western countries denounced as illegal.
In a video address released on the one-year anniversary of Russia's controversial announcement it was annexing four parts of Ukraine, Putin said the choice to join Russia was reinforced by this month's local elections that returned officials supporting Russia's annexation.
"Just as a year ago in the historic referendums, people again expressed and confirmed their will to be with Russia and supported their countrymen who, through their labour and real actions, proved worthy of the people's trust," he said in a video of just over four minutes issued at midnight.
Putin reiterated his stance that Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine saved people from nationalist leaders in Kyiv who had unleashed a "full-scale civil war" and "terror against those who think differently".
On Sept. 30, 2022, parts of four Ukrainian regions -- Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia -- were formally incorporated into Russia after referendums that Moscow said returned overwhelming majorities in favour.
Western countries dismissed the outcomes as meaningless and illegal annexation, underpinned by mass coercion of voters.
Russian forces do not control any of the regions in full.
Ukrainian forces, helped by Western arms, withstood initial Russian attempts to advance on Kyiv and the war shifted to areas held by Russia in the east and south. Ukrainian forces in June launched a counteroffensive to recapture those areas.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Europe’s richest man Bernard Arnault investigated for alleged money laundering
James Crisp Fri, 29 September 2023 Bernard Arnault, with his wife Helene Mercier, is known as 'the Pope of luxury' - Nathan Laine/Bloomberg
Europe’s richest man and a Russian oligarch are being investigated for alleged money laundering at an Alpine resort known as a playground for the super-rich.
Bernard Arnault is suspected of lending Nickolai Sarkisov, a Russian insurance billionaire of Armenian origin, nearly £16 million for an elaborate real estate fraud that is alleged to have made Mr Sarkisov more than £1.7 million.
The figures may seem paltry for the two tycoons, in particular for Mr Arnault, 74, the “Pope of luxury” whose personal fortune is $189bn, according to Forbes, making him currently the world’s second richest man behind Elon Musk.
Mr Sarkisov, 55, who with his brother Sergei has a controlling stake in insurance company RESO-Garantiya, had a personal wealth of $1.1bn in 2014, according to Forbes, before dropping off the billionaires list.
Yet the revelations are a source of embarrassment at the very least for Mr Arnault, who is at the helm of the largest luxury goods company in the world, with a market capitalisation of €407bn. LVMH’s portfolio of 75 fashion and cosmetic brands encompasses iconic handbag makers Louis Vuitton, jewellery brand Tiffany’s, suitcase line Rimowa and champagne maker Moet & Chandon.
Mr Arnault learned to ski there as a child and owns two hotels there, Cheval Blanc and White 1921. Mr Sarkisov is a major investor in the resort - he has pumped €50m into properties including four hotels - and his partner, celebrity influencer Ilona Kotelynkh has often been among the Moscow social set gracing its slopes. Nikolai Sarkisov may have borrowed £15 million for the La Fleche deal - East2West News
According to Le Monde, Mr Sarkisov bought 14 apartments in Courchevel from a single seller in 2018 for £13.8 million, in a complex deal involving companies based in France, Luxembourg and Cyprus.
Although he is believed to be the buyer, the Russian billionaire’s name does not appear on the books of the company carrying out the purchase.
The company, called La Fleche, is believed to have bought three more real estate units from a second company which, it turns out, also belonged to Mr Sarkisov.
The sale of the real estate to himself allowed the Russian to pocket a capital gain of just over £1 million, according to Le Monde.
Mr Arnault is suspected to have lent €18.3 million (£15.8m) to Mr Sarkisov for the deal before acquiring La Fleche and effectively becoming the owner of the real estate portfolio.
The ownership change could have been designed “to hide the exact origin of the funds”, Le Monde quoted a Tracfin document as saying, as well as the identity of the “ultimate beneficiary”.
Investigators believe Sarkisov made €2m from the operation, but they were still in the dark as to how much he had paid for the loan.
Preliminary investigations in France do not necessarily imply wrongdoing by those concerned. Tracfin, the French economy ministry’s financial intelligence unit, is leading the probe, but has not determined if a crime has been committed, said a source close to the investigation.
A Trojan horse sculpture in Courchevel, known for its luxury hotels - Gamma-Rapho
A LVMH spokesman told Le Monde that the deal had been “carried out with the strictest observance of the law” and was part of an operation to buy a building as an extension to Mr Arnault’s Cheval blanc hotel
Mr Sarkisov’s entourage told the paper that the capital gain was “just a few hundred of thousands of euros”, that the Russian had not been involved personally, and that he had “never met Mr Arnault”.
He made money because he had taken a “risk” in buying out individual owners of the building. Once completed, its overall value increased and thus he recouped a cut of the added value, they told Le Monde.
Long a hangout for Russian oligarchs - Vladimir Putin was said to be on its slopes in 1999 when he got the call from Boris Yeltsin to come and run the country - Courchevel has seen the usual Moscow crowd largely vanish since the invasion of Ukraine and European sanctions that ensued.
This is not the first time Mr Sarkisov - who owns an estimated €200m in property in France, including villas in Paris and Saint Tropez - has been hit by controversy in the country.
French prosecutors are currently investigating the Sarkisov brothers’ role in an alleged influence-peddling probe against former president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Judges are seeking to clarify why the brothers’ insurance firm chose to pay Mr Sarkozy €3 million in 2019 as an advisor.
They want to verify whether the former head of state - who has already been convicted of corruption - only acted as a consultant, which would be perfectly legal, “or if he engaged in potentially criminal lobbying activities on behalf of the Russian oligarchs”, according to Mediapart.
Brits regret Brexit but rejoining the EU is unlikely
Shona Murray Fri, 29 September 2023
Last Saturday around 20,000 people marched in London calling for political leaders to embark on yet another complex and highly contentious negotiating path with Brussels.
Around 62% of Britons believe Brexit is a failure according to British polling company YouGov.
The UK economy has been hit as a result of Brexit - in particular, prices rose by 25% from January 2021 until March of this year, as £6.95bn (€8 billion) was added to food costs - a consequence of the extra trade barriers from leaving the Single Market.
According to the report by the London School of Economics the impact has been felt most by the poorest in society who spend much more of their income on food.
In addition, researchers at the Centre for European Reform estimate that business investment was 23% lower than it would have been in 2020/21 due to Brexit.
Pro-EU activist Femi Oluwole says the draw Brexit once held is no more.
“We have Nigel Farage saying that Brexit has failed and it hasn't helped us economically at all.
"So the Brexiteers effectively have much abandoned, at least this version of Brexit. They keep coming out with things like 'Oh, we do Brexit differently'. But the public has kind of moved on from the idea that you can make Brexit work," he told Euronews.
He added that the ‘sovereignty’ argument is no longer prevalent in the discussion and the reality of the cost of Brexit is starting to bite.
“The debates that we had six years, seven years ago about all that sovereignty stuff of Britain standing on its own and all that sort of stuff. It's just come face to face with the fact that there are more important things in life. Can you feed your kids right now?
“Half of low-income families in the UK are skipping meals to feed their kids. We cannot afford Brexit if we can't afford food, we can't afford Brexit."
If the UK were ever to chart the course in rejoining the EU, it would be a vastly different club to the one it left.
Major fundamental shifts to a closer, interdependent union have resulted from the crises Europe has faced.
It's hard to know what role or position the UK would have taken in each of these decisions had it stayed. Would it have blocked, watered down or supported the Rescue and Resilience Facility (RRF) borne out of the COVID pandemic’s destruction of certain economic sectors?
For the first time, the EU borrowed money on behalf of the member states and distributed it in the form of grants and loans. This would have gone against the UK’s strongly expressed disapproval of the term ‘ever-closer-Europe’.
There has also been far stronger cooperation on security and defence, including the use of the Peace Facility to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine. And a serious, purposeful discussion on enlargement is underway.
Georg Riekeles, who was diplomatic adviser to the former EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier and is now executive director of the European Policy Centre says the EU has changed, and is on an even more monumental journey of change in the coming years. It would be impossible for the UK to continue when it left the EU in 2020.
“First and foremost, we’d be talking about an entirely new discussion. It will not be about the possibility of UK the rejoining on past terms.
“The EU is in an enlargement process now, not only about the Western Balkans, it's also about Ukraine, it's also about Moldova and potentially beyond.
“And that is in itself a very big challenge to the to the EU. I think current institutional political economic structures in the EU are not ready for this enlargement.
"If the UK used to go ahead" it will be a different discussion about what "membership means, of participation to the single market, to the euro," Riekeles told Euronews.
The current Conservative government has adopted a more pragmatic approach to EU relations following several years of belligerent, anti-EU sentiment. The recent rejoining of the EU’s Horizon science and research programme as well as a long-awaited agreement on Northern Ireland through the Windsor Framework have set the two sides on better footing.
The main opposition Labour Party currently has a strong lead in the polls ahead of next year's general election but its leader Keir Starmer, a firm Remainer and once a committed Europhile, has ruled out a return to the EU.
UK
LEFT WING DOWAGER
Vanessa Redgrave gives £4,000 to Bibby Stockholm legal fight
Diane Taylor Fri, 29 September 2023 Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Vanessa Redgrave has donated £4,000 to a legal fund challenging the Home Office’s use of the controversial Bibby Stockholm barge to accommodate asylum seekers.
The actor and human rights campaigner has been an outspoken critic of the government’s policy to house asylum seekers on the barge in Portland, Dorset.
The Bibby Stockholm has been empty since 11 August when asylum seekers, who had been onboard for just four days, were evacuated after the discovery of deadly legionella bacteria.
The mayor of Portland, Carralyn Parkes, is bringing a legal challenge against the barge being used as asylum accommodation, arguing the Home Office has breached planning rules.
She set up a Crowdjustice page to fund the legal fees for the current stage of the case, with a target of £25,000. More than 900 people had already donated but Redgrave’s £4,000 enabled the fund to reach its target.
Parkes said: “I’m particularly grateful to a large donation from Dame Vanessa Redgrave, a longstanding activist and defender of refugee rights, who got us across the £25,000 line. It’s just incredible to get support from somebody who has got such a long track record of campaigning for human rights.”
A permission hearing for the case will be held in the high court on 10 October. The judge will decide whether the case is “arguable” and if it should proceed to a full judicial review.
In a letter to the Financial Times about the “appalling Bibby Stockholm”, Redgrave, 86, recounted the first time she learned about the “horrendous British prison ships and the British penal system of the 1850s” when she was taken to see the film of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and read the book at the age of eight. She compared them with the Bibby Stockholm.
“Is today’s treatment of asylum seekers, housing them in a barge, cruel? Yes. Inhuman? Yes. Illegal? I hope it will be found to be so and believe it would be under international human rights law. A fire hazard? I fear so. A virtual prison. Yes,” she wrote.
On 8 September, Parkes asked the high court to declare that the Home Office’s decision to use the Bibby Stockholm barge as asylum accommodation constitutes “development” for the purposes of planning law.
This would mean the Home Office should have applied for planning permission and, since it did not, she has claimed this potentially breached planning control and could be subject to enforcement by Dorset council.
UK
Class war row erupts as Starmer accuses Sunak of saying state education is not aspirational
Nick Gutteridge Fri, 29 September 2023
Sir Keir Starmer speaking at a campaign event in Scotland on Friday
- GETTY IMAGES/JEFF J MITCHELL
A class war row has erupted between Labour and the Tories after Sir Keir Starmer accused Rishi Sunak of suggesting state schooling is not “aspirational”.
The Labour leader said the Prime Minister was “wrong” to have attacked his party’s plans to impose VAT on private schools as the politics of envy.
He hit back after Mr Sunak said the proposals would “punish” parents who want to “provide a better life for their kids” by making fees unaffordable.
The feud between the two men shows how the contentious policy has become a key Left-Right dividing line ahead of their party conferences.
Wading into the row, Sir Keir said on Friday: “Rishi Sunak is wrong to say that sending your children to state school isn’t aspirational.
“It’s the Government’s job to make sure schools set kids up to succeed. With Labour, they will.
“We will end tax breaks for private schools to invest in excellent state education for all.” Class war
He was responding to remarks made by Mr Sunak during a media round with local radio and TV stations on Thursday ahead of the Tory conference.
The Prime Minister told BBC South Today that Sir Keir’s plan showed he was trying to launch a “class war” against middle-class parents.
“Labour’s approach to that shows, illustrates, that they just don’t understand the aspiration of families, like my parents, who were working really hard,” he said.
“They wanted to do something for their kids that they thought would make a difference to them. Labour’s approach to that is to clamp down on it.
“They don’t understand the aspiration that people have to provide a better life for their kids. They want to punish them for that as part of some class war. I don’t think that’s right.”
Labour has calculated that its policy will raise £1.7 billion a year, which it would use to fund improvements to the state education sector.
But that claim has been disputed by experts who have said the party’s sums are flawed and the proposals may not end up raising any money at all. Schools becoming unaffordable
Analysis by The Telegraph has found that applying VAT will push up fees at a quarter of day schools to over £30,000, making them unaffordable for parents.
Sir Keir suggested in an interview this week that independent schools should absorb the costs rather than passing them on to parents.
But the headteacher at the school Sir Keir attended has also warned that the move will not provide the funding boost that state schools need.
Labour is “delighted” to keep the plans in the spotlight despite the criticism, a party source said, believing they will play well with the majority of voters.
In July a poll commissioned by the Independent Schools Council found that 48pc of voters thought private schools should keep their VAT tax relief.
UK Six cabinet ministers set to lose seats in Tory blue wall rout, new poll shows
Archie Mitchell Fri, 29 September 2023
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as the Conservatives come under assault in the so-called blue wall of safe Tory seats, a new poll shows.
The Labour party is expected to storm home with a majority of 90 seats, and 39 per cent of the vote, according to a poll by Stonehaven.
Welsh secretary David TC Davies is also expected to be unseated by Labour as well as chief whip Simon Hart and international development minister Andrew Mitchell, the poll says.
Senior Tories including former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg are also expected to lose out at the election.
The poll, conducted by The Times, highlights the vulnerability of the Tories in their traditional southern heartlands, with the party haemorrhaging support to the Liberal Democrats under leader Sir Ed Davey.
It shows Rishi Sunak on course to win the fewest seats of any Conservative leader since William Hague in 2001, with just 196 seats. Labour is set to win 372 seats, the poll showed.
With Mr Sunak lagging Sir Keir Starmer in the polls, fears are mounting that the Tories could be facing a 1997-like defeat.
In 1997, seven cabinet ministers including Michael Portillo and Sir Malcolm Rifkind lost their seats.
But, with key by-elections coming up,Labour and the Liberal Democrats could allow the Tories to win the Mid Bedfordshire by-election by splitting the vote, according to polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice.
Anti-Tory campaigners have called on opposition leaders Sir Keir and Sir Ed Davey to agree on a “non-aggression” pact in the blue-wall seat vacated by Nadine Dorries.
The Conservative Leadership Hopefuls On Manoeuvres At Tory Conference
Ned Simons Updated Fri, 29 September 2023
Rishi Sunak heads to Manchester this weekend to rally the Tory troops one last time before next year’s general election,
The prime minister can be expected to use his big speech on Wednesday lunchtime to set out his case for why the country should give the Conservatives yet another term in power.
But given the polls, many believe the election is already lost and all eyes will be on Sunak’s possible successor as party leader.
A study of the Tory conference agenda shows Kemi Badenoch - the grassroots Tory favourite - will be attending four events over the course of the four days.
The business secretary is due at a series of drinks receptions including one hosted by the Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank which influenced much of Liz Truss’ thinking.
And rather than lying low, Truss herself will be taking part in a rally during the gathering.
The former prime minister is unlikely to stand for party leader again, but is widely seen to be positioning herself to play a key role behind the scenes in the upcoming contest.
A Labour source said: “Sunak isn’t even in control of his own cabinet, let alone the country.
“He’s in the pocket of Liz Truss and her economy crashing wreckers because he is too weak stand up to them. The country is crying out for change - but all the Tories are focused on is their own internal contests.” Penny Mordaunt could fancy another attempt at the leadership of the party.
Penny Mordaunt could fancy another attempt at the leadership of the party.
Penny Mordaunt - who came close to pushing Sunak to a vote of the Tory membership in the last contest - is set to appear at three events.
The Commons leader is also attending a book signing and will speak from the main conference stage before Sunak on the final day of the conference.
Fresh from her high-profile anti-immigration speech in the US, Suella Braverman is only down to appear at one event - hosted by the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs. Suella Braverman is already making a pitch to the Tory right.
Suella Braverman is already making a pitch to the Tory right.
Michael Gove has a busy few days with five events in his diary. And while, like Truss, the levelling up secretary will likely not run to succeed Sunak, he will be an influential voice in any leadership race.
But Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is keeping a much lower profile, appearing at just one event.
Jon Ashworth MP, Labour’s shadow paymastergeneral, said the events showed “even Tory ministers know the game is up”.
“They’re pitching themselves to Tory members for the next leadership contest because they know weak Rishi Sunak hasn’t got what it takes,” he said. “While the Tories fight among themselves, Labour will give Britain its future back.”
Opinion
I’ve got news for Rishi Sunak: he no longer leads the conservative party
Jonathan Freedland Fri, 29 September 2023 Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
What would it be like if Britain had a conservative party? Odd to ask that now, on the eve of the Conservative party conference, but the coming week is only likely to make the question more pressing. Because the organisation that will gather in Manchester is, despite its name, something else entirely.
The mislabelling has been clear for some time, but fresh evidence came just this week. Start with the latest, first reported in the Guardian: a new “plan for motorists” that will limit the number of 20mph zones and favour drivers over those who use the bus.
The politics of this are not mysterious. Rishi Sunak is betting that, after an Uxbridge byelection win apparently fuelled by unhappiness among car owners at clean air measures, there’s a motorist vote to be exploited. It comes alongside Sunak’s weakening last week of the net-zero targets Britain had set itself – and Wednesday’s green light to the development of the biggest untapped oilfield in the UK, Rosebank in the North Sea, which Caroline Lucas called “the greatest act of environmental vandalism in my lifetime.”
Conviction conservatives should be as appalled by those decisions as the most committed green activist. The clue is in the name. Conservatives used to pride themselves on conserving not only long-established institutions – monarchy, church, military – but the natural world, too. The best conservative philosophers always regarded humankind as custodians of the Earth, with a responsibility – even a sacred duty – to protect it. Yet now, a single, narrow victory in Uxbridge, and the resultant hope of salvaging some votes from the expected wreckage of the next general election, is enough to prompt Conservatives to junk that obligation to the planet. So instead of encouraging more sustainable ways of getting around, they are going to push people back into polluting cars.
‘In Washington DC, Suella Braverman railed against migration and multiculturalism.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
And note the chosen method for this motorists’ plan, due for launch on Monday. Local councils are to be stripped of even the relatively modest power of making their own traffic arrangements. Yet localism, too, is meant to be a cherished conservative principle. There was a time when Conservatives couldn’t get through a speech without quoting, or misquoting, Edmund Burke’s affection for the “little platoons” and its imagined preference for local government over the central state. But today’s Conservatives are all too willing to trample over the local in pursuit of whatever electoral stratagem has been decided on at HQ.
Still, the most toxic departure from what should be unshakeable conservative values came in a speech delivered in Washington DC on Tuesday by Suella Braverman. The home secretary railed against migration and multiculturalism, describing the first as “an existential challenge” and the second as a failure. Naturally, liberals deplored it. But a genuine conservative would have been just as shocked.
Because Braverman had in her sights not just asylum seekers, but the European convention on human rights and the United Nations refugee convention of 1951. (She especially dislikes the way those documents protect gay people and women who fear discrimination.) These are binding agreements, treaty obligations entered into by the UK – and yet, when asked if the government would consider breaking from them if it did not get its way, Braverman refused to say that Britain would honour its commitments. Instead, she said the government would do “whatever is required”.
That violates what should be another core conservative principle: the rule of law. Talk to today’s disenchanted or former Tories and they’ll insist that even when Margaret Thatcher was at her least conservative, radically tearing up the postwar settlement, she had an unbending respect for the law.
She would hardly recognise this government, in which the likes of Braverman – like Thatcher, a lawyer herself – are ready to break commitments enshrined in law, domestic or international. Recall the unlawful prorogation of parliament or Brandon Lewis’s cheerful admission to the house that the internal market bill would “break international law in a very specific and limited way”. It’s tempting to think these were excesses of the Boris Johnson era, now passed. But Braverman’s speech – and Sunak’s indulgence of it – are proof that that sorry chapter has not ended.
Indeed, Sunak’s failure to defend the Commons, by refusing to cast a vote of censure against Johnson’s lies to the house, points to one more torching of conservative principle. Conservatives are meant to protect the sovereignty of parliament. Instead, they have made a mockery of it.
‘Essex MP Robert Halfon has suggested the Tories rebrand as the Workers party.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA
To be sure, the Conservative party has always adapted and evolved; that’s been the secret of its success. On economics, the party’s view of the state has shifted back and forth, between the shrink-the-state minimalism of a Thatcher or George Osborne and the big-spending activism of a Michael Heseltine or Johnson. But certain principles were meant to be enduring. And it’s those that have been abandoned.
What’s left is a new and different entity. It’s “become a kind of ersatz populist radical right party” is how professor Tim Bale, historian of the Conservatives, describes it. The old focus on economic management has given way to culture wars, with motorist v environmentalist the latest, supposedly anti-elite dividing line to be seized upon. Or as David Gauke, former justice secretary and editor of a new collection of essays, many by fellow Conservative exiles, put it when he and I spoke this week: for today’s Tories, “problems are there to be exploited, rather than to be solved”.
The simplest explanation for the shift is that politics in Britain – and across the democratic world – is in the midst of a realignment. If blue collar workers were once assumed to vote with the left for economic reasons, they might now just as easily align with the right for cultural ones. The hinge point in Britain was surely Brexit. For Bale, the Conservative party had long flirted with populism, but having spent much of the last decade defending itself from the party of the further right – first Ukip, then the Brexit party – something more serious has happened: “It’s become that party.”
All this creates a large void in the right half of the centre ground of British politics. That should be rich terrain for the Liberal Democrats, had they not chosen to pitch themselves as a second party of the centre-left. So Gauke and others sense an opportunity for Labour: to a disenchanted conservative, respectful of the planet and vigilant on the rule of law, Keir Starmer might just look the part.
As for the Tories themselves, honesty should surely compel them to rebrand. Not, perhaps, as the Essex MP Robert Halfon has suggested, as the Workers party – too Pyongyang – but as a People’s party, candidly admitting their own new, nationalist populist identity. Though maybe that would sound too European, too continental, to their ear.
In which case, here’s a more modest proposal: a change of logo, to an image that more accurately reflects the party they have become. The Conservatives should ditch the squiggly drawing of a tree, with its hint of reverence for nature, time and the past – and replace it with a bonfire, burning the whole lot down.
