The Daily Star
Monday, December 16, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Last time I visited The Daily Star’s comment pages, I predicted that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party would win the U.K. general election comfortably. Well, to be fair, Johnson had been ahead in the polls so it wasn’t a hard call. However, the huge parliamentary majority he achieved Thursday was not anticipated.
Johnson’s populist electioneering - U.S. President Donald Trump dubbed him “Britain’s Trump” - has handed the Conservative Party its largest majority since 1987 and the days of Margaret Thatcher. It is also the biggest majority for any prime minister since Tony Blair in 2001.
For all that though, it’s clear the U.K. remains divided, both between the nations that comprise it - the election saw a sharp rise in the number of separatist Scottish nationalist parliamentarians - and, despite Johnson’s overwhelming victory, between Brexiteers and those who wish to remain in the EU.
However, this election has now ended the Brexit argument. There will not be a second referendum on European Union membership, something promised by the opposition Labour Party. Meanwhile, the one party that promised to scrap Brexit, the minority Liberal Democrats, barely won enough seats to make up a football team.
Johnson’s huge parliamentary majority will ensure Brexit will now formally take place at the end of January, ending three years of deadlock. A 12-month-long transition period will then follow in which the U.K. and EU will attempt to hammer out a trade deal.
Much has been made of Johnson’s ability to appeal to working class (blue collar) voters, millions of whom abandoned their traditional party, Labour, for the Conservatives, traditionally seen as the party of the bosses.
Labour won its fewest seats since 1935 as its traditional supporters, those in the so-called Labour left-behind heartlands in the north of England, deserted it for Johnson’s populism.
But this was an election of populists. Johnson has promised to spend billions of pounds of largely borrowed money in Labour’s heartlands on infrastructure and across the country on the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service. Not to be outdone, the Labour Party committed itself to even bigger public spending programs, again based on borrowing, and promised to nationalise key industries, including energy, the train network, and even broadband services.
However, what Labour forgot, was that this election was about identity, first and foremost. Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the Labour Party, was seen by many of its traditional working class voters, as anti-British and what most people perceive to be British values.
Corbyn was better known in the U.K. for his long-standing links to Hamas and Hezbollah, and his support for nasty dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela. He is largely anti-Israel and anti-American, and even blamed NATO for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. He has also been accused of presiding over a culture of antisemitism within his party since he became leader.
At the same time as Johnson promised to sharply increase government spending and deliver the people’s 2016 vote on Brexit, he also promised to tighten immigration controls - the most significant factor in the Brexit vote - and be tougher on fundamentalist Islamist terrorism in the U.K.
Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Rutherford College, Kent University, succinctly summed up why Johnson’s populism beat Corbyn’s: “It is easier for the right to move left on the economy than it is for the left to move right on identity.”
So, what will this new populist Johnson government stand for in international affairs?
Well, Brexit has so diminished the U.K.’s standing internationally, no one seems to care all that much what the new government’s foreign policy priorities will be. This is perhaps just as well because Johnson doesn’t seem to have any beyond “getting Brexit done” and securing an increasingly unlikely, and certainly unfavourable, free trade deal with Donald Trump’s America.
And herein lies the rub. Whatever reputation the U.K. enjoyed, to borrow a phrase from Bismarck, as an “honest broker” in the middle east - straddling the largely pro-Israeli America and the largely pro-Palestinian European Union - has been in tatters since the Brexit vote. Post-Brexit, Johnson, like his predecessor Theresa May, is desperate to court the White House to secure that illusive free trade deal that will compensate for exiting the world’s largest trading bloc.
To that end, the Conservative Party manifesto for this election maintained its support for a “two-state solution” in the Middle East, and that was pretty much it. There was no mention of its policies toward Syria, Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Nor did it put forward a view on the merits or otherwise of the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement the White House despises.
Interestingly, Corbyn had pledged to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in protest at the kingdom’s war in Yemen. Labour also planned stop exporting arms “used in violation of the human rights of Palestinian civilians” to Israel. It was also committed to “immediately” recognize a Palestinian state.
More importantly, Johnson’s foreign policy looks set to be tailored to suit the U.K.’s trading needs, first and foremost. He has already announced plans to merge the U.K.’s Department for International Trade with the government’s business department to better facilitate potential trade deals with the U.S., Japan, and Australia. He also intends to merge the hitherto all-powerful Foreign Office with the Department for International Development to help” co-ordinate” the U.K.’s aid budget with the government’s foreign policy goals.
At any rate, the most immediate foreign policy problem facing Johnson will be the continuing trade negotiations with the EU that will begin once Brexit happens in January. If Johnson fails to broker a trade deal between the U.K. and the EU during the 12-month transition period, the U.K. could end up trading with the EU on World Trade Organization terms.
Moreover, regardless of the terms of the U.K.’s exit from the trading bloc, against the backdrop of a slowing global economy, Johnson will find it hard to deliver on all the public spending promises he made on the hustings. The U.K. economy isn’t pulling up any trees. GDP growth is expected to hit an 11-year low of 1 percent next year.
Small wonder then that immediately after his victory Johnson thanked those who, in his words, “lent us your vote.”
What this election has proved beyond doubt is that you can sell anything, regardless of whether you can deliver it. This has led to a worrying shift in our politics, to entrenched polar extremes. It remains to be seen whether Johnson is truly capable of reversing that shift and deliver more than just Brexit. Heraclitus famously said: “character is destiny.” The popularity contest is over. It is now time for him to govern.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on Monday, December 16, 2019, on page 4.
Monday 16 December 2019
Monday 2 December 2019
Terror attack raises heat in U.K. vote
The Daily Star
Monday, December 2, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut - Terror came to the streets of London again last week. Not for the first time, the murderer was known to police and the U.K.’s security services. British-born Usman Khan, who killed a man and a woman and wounded three others in a knife rampage last Friday, had been released from jail in 2018, less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence.
The atrocity has raised the temperature in an already fractious election in the U.K., with both the main political parties blaming each other for allowing a convicted terrorist back onto the streets to commit murder.
Khan was originally sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence - where no date is set for when the person will be released - in 2012 for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb both the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Embassy, as well as murder current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London.
However, in 2013 the Court of Appeal quashed that judgment, and replaced it with a determinate custodial sentence of 16 years. Khan was released just eight years into his sentence, but, because he was on what amounts to parole, had to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Clearly, no one appeared to be monitoring him all that closely.
Thus, last Friday, Khan, wearing a hoax suicide belt, showed up as an invited guest at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation being held in the City of London, at the historic Fishmongers’ Hall.
Once there he stabbed several people before being chased by members of the public, including a Polish chef who worked at Fishmongers’ Hall and who attacked Khan with a 1.5-meter-long tusk of a narwhal, which had previously been used to decorate a wall inside the hall. Khan was then shot by police. Video footage of his last moments show police dragging the last of the members of the public who intervened off Khan’s prostrate body before an armed officer fired several shots into him.
The stabbings happened near the site of the 2017 terrorist attack by Daesh (ISIS) supporters on London Bridge, in which eight people were killed.
There are two key issues here. One, why did this happen? Secondly, what impact will it have on this month’s general election in the U.K.?
In terms of the first, questions will be asked of the U.K.’s security agencies. A string of failings by MI5 and MI6 in the way both agencies monitor known terror suspects have been highlighted over the last decade. In 2015 I wrote that the U.K.’s intelligence and security services appeared incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to join groups in Syria and Iraq, but even known terror suspects. The Daesh executioner known as “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance by security agencies of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Adebolajo has even claimed MI5 tried to recruit him prior to the murder.
Further back, the leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
Indeed, in 2015, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee revealed a litany of security service failures when dealing with terror groups, but little seems to have changed.
Of course, terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife or a car is pretty much all you need to kill and maim people in busy cities. But it is surely worrying that so many of these so called “lone wolf” terrorists seem able to carry out their murderous attacks despite the fact that they are already on the radar of security agencies.
The attack could have significant impact on this month’s election, which many believe is the U.K.’s most important in living memory. Following the attack, Johnson said he would toughen sentences for people convicted of violent crime and terrorism if he wins the election. Yet it was his government, in the shape of Priti Patel, the combative right-wing pro-Israeli U.K. home secretary, who at the beginning of last month reduced the U.K. terror threat level for the first time in two years.
Meanwhile, a few days prior to the attack, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, refused to say whether he would give the order to “take out” (assassinate) a new Daesh leader if British security forces were in a position to do so. During a car-crash interview on BBC television, Corbyn said: “If it’s possible, and only if it’s possible, then you try to capture that person.” He later added that he would “take the appropriate decisions at that time when I knew the circumstances.” However, his reluctance to give a straight answer may come back to haunt him against the backdrop of Friday’s attack.
If all that wasn’t enough, U.S. President Donald Trump is coming to town later today. Trump disgracefully used the first London Bridge attack in 2017 to publicly criticize London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, part of a long-running feud between the two men. Khan refused to meet Trump during his state visit to the U.K. earlier this year.
Trump is also a big fan of Johnson, whom he has dubbed “Britain’s Trump.” In October he went so far as to warn that a Corbyn victory in the election would be “so bad” for the U.K.
However, Johnson is understood to have asked Trump to stop voicing his support publicly, amid fears his endorsement is actually boosting Corbyn due to the widespread antipathy most in the U.K. feel toward the U.S. president.
It may not matter. Johnson’s Conservative Party is ahead in the polls at the moment, and looks to win comfortably and finally implement the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Either way, whoever wins, the U.K.’s intelligence net is in need of urgent repairs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2019, on page 4.
Monday, December 2, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut - Terror came to the streets of London again last week. Not for the first time, the murderer was known to police and the U.K.’s security services. British-born Usman Khan, who killed a man and a woman and wounded three others in a knife rampage last Friday, had been released from jail in 2018, less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence.
The atrocity has raised the temperature in an already fractious election in the U.K., with both the main political parties blaming each other for allowing a convicted terrorist back onto the streets to commit murder.
Khan was originally sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence - where no date is set for when the person will be released - in 2012 for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb both the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Embassy, as well as murder current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London.
However, in 2013 the Court of Appeal quashed that judgment, and replaced it with a determinate custodial sentence of 16 years. Khan was released just eight years into his sentence, but, because he was on what amounts to parole, had to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Clearly, no one appeared to be monitoring him all that closely.
Thus, last Friday, Khan, wearing a hoax suicide belt, showed up as an invited guest at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation being held in the City of London, at the historic Fishmongers’ Hall.
Once there he stabbed several people before being chased by members of the public, including a Polish chef who worked at Fishmongers’ Hall and who attacked Khan with a 1.5-meter-long tusk of a narwhal, which had previously been used to decorate a wall inside the hall. Khan was then shot by police. Video footage of his last moments show police dragging the last of the members of the public who intervened off Khan’s prostrate body before an armed officer fired several shots into him.
The stabbings happened near the site of the 2017 terrorist attack by Daesh (ISIS) supporters on London Bridge, in which eight people were killed.
There are two key issues here. One, why did this happen? Secondly, what impact will it have on this month’s general election in the U.K.?
In terms of the first, questions will be asked of the U.K.’s security agencies. A string of failings by MI5 and MI6 in the way both agencies monitor known terror suspects have been highlighted over the last decade. In 2015 I wrote that the U.K.’s intelligence and security services appeared incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to join groups in Syria and Iraq, but even known terror suspects. The Daesh executioner known as “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance by security agencies of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Adebolajo has even claimed MI5 tried to recruit him prior to the murder.
Further back, the leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
Indeed, in 2015, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee revealed a litany of security service failures when dealing with terror groups, but little seems to have changed.
Of course, terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife or a car is pretty much all you need to kill and maim people in busy cities. But it is surely worrying that so many of these so called “lone wolf” terrorists seem able to carry out their murderous attacks despite the fact that they are already on the radar of security agencies.
The attack could have significant impact on this month’s election, which many believe is the U.K.’s most important in living memory. Following the attack, Johnson said he would toughen sentences for people convicted of violent crime and terrorism if he wins the election. Yet it was his government, in the shape of Priti Patel, the combative right-wing pro-Israeli U.K. home secretary, who at the beginning of last month reduced the U.K. terror threat level for the first time in two years.
Meanwhile, a few days prior to the attack, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, refused to say whether he would give the order to “take out” (assassinate) a new Daesh leader if British security forces were in a position to do so. During a car-crash interview on BBC television, Corbyn said: “If it’s possible, and only if it’s possible, then you try to capture that person.” He later added that he would “take the appropriate decisions at that time when I knew the circumstances.” However, his reluctance to give a straight answer may come back to haunt him against the backdrop of Friday’s attack.
If all that wasn’t enough, U.S. President Donald Trump is coming to town later today. Trump disgracefully used the first London Bridge attack in 2017 to publicly criticize London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, part of a long-running feud between the two men. Khan refused to meet Trump during his state visit to the U.K. earlier this year.
Trump is also a big fan of Johnson, whom he has dubbed “Britain’s Trump.” In October he went so far as to warn that a Corbyn victory in the election would be “so bad” for the U.K.
However, Johnson is understood to have asked Trump to stop voicing his support publicly, amid fears his endorsement is actually boosting Corbyn due to the widespread antipathy most in the U.K. feel toward the U.S. president.
It may not matter. Johnson’s Conservative Party is ahead in the polls at the moment, and looks to win comfortably and finally implement the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Either way, whoever wins, the U.K.’s intelligence net is in need of urgent repairs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2019, on page 4.
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