#former uk prime minister rishi sunak

[britishtophatwithlondon]

Ok....

Stressed Rishi Sunak

[mapsontheweb]

2024 United kingdom Genedal Elections

Labour leader Keir Starmer has officially become the UK’s new prime minister with his party winning more than 400 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons – the lower house of Britain’s parliament: a historic victory in the U.K. general election, ending 14 years in the political wilderness and sending the ruling Conservatives crashing to their worst defeat in history. Conservative Leader Rishi Sunak conceded defeat in the early hours of Friday morning. Labour gained its second-largest majority after former Prime Minister Tony Blair's 179-seat majority in 1997. The Conservative Party, meanwhile, slipped to its worst-ever result in terms of seats.

by italesia_mapper_

[zvaigzdelasas]

Jeremy Corbyn said he had instructed lawyers to take legal action against Nigel Farage over remarks in which the right-wing commentator accused the former Labour party leader of subscribing to an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

On Wednesday, Farage took aim at Corbyn on his GB News show while hitting back at Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer.

Starmer had earlier claimed in parliament that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government was "dancing to the tune" of Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party and Brexit party.

Farage then sought to discredit Starmer by noting that he served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet until 2019, making disparaging remarks about the former Labour leader that his team said "accused Jeremy Corbyn of subscribing to an antisemitic conspiracy theory".

“I have asked my lawyers to take the first steps in commencing legal proceedings against Nigel Farage, following a highly defamatory statement about me,” Corbyn posted on X on Monday.

4 Mar 24

[mariacallous]

A record number of Cabinet ministers lost their seats on Friday in Britain's general election, leaving only a couple of obvious contenders for the party leadership if Rishi Sunak resigns.

Nine members of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's top team failed to be re-elected, beating the previous high of seven who lost out in 1997, as the ruling Conservatives suffered a mauling at the hands of the main opposition Labour party.

Grant Shapps, the UK's defence secretary for nearly a year, was the most high-profile casualty, losing his Welwyn Hatfield seat north of London.

Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt, who shot to international attention as a sword carrier at King Charles III's coronation last May, lost in Portsmouth North on England's south coast.

A former defence secretary, she tried twice to become Tory leader, and was tipped to try again after Thursday's election, with Sunak expected to stand down.

Other Tory casualties included Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer, Transport and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan.

Veteran minister Johnny Mercer and Brexit champion Jacob Rees-Mogg also lost out, as voters grew fed up with the Conservatives after 14 years in power.

The defeats have already sparked soul-searching among re-elected and departing Conservatives, who said the party had been punished for a series of scandals and infighting in recent years.

"I think that we have seen in this election an astonishing ill-discipline within the party", said former Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, after losing his seat.

Shapps, an MP since 2005, criticised the Tories' "inability to iron out their differences" amid an endless political "soap opera" that saw five prime ministers since the 2016 Brexit vote.

"What is crystal clear to me tonight –- it is not so much that Labour won but that the Conservatives lost," he added.

Right-winger Suella Braverman, sacked as interior minister by Sunak late last year for a series of incendiary comments, was re-elected and finance minister Jeremy Hunt survived a major scare to squeak victory.

Current interior minister James Cleverly also held on to his seat.

Secretary of State for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch and security minister Tom Tugendhat also won their races.

Most of those high-profile survivors are expected to challenge for the leadership.

Braverman apologised to voters in her victory speech, saying the Tories had failed to listen to voters.

"The Conservative party let you down... we have got to do better and I will do everything in my power to rebuild trust. We need to listen to you. You have spoken to us very clearly," she said.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Over the last few months a troubling narrative has steadily been gathering strength in British politics. It goes: radical Islamists are taking over the streets of London. They are using their muscle to intimidate politicians, and are destroying the authority of parliament. As a result, democracy itself is under threat.  Over the past 24 hours, this narrative that British Muslims are corrupting the British political system has gone viral. Robert Jenrick, a former cabinet minister, speaking in the Commons on Thursday, said that Britain has "allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists". He spoke of "a pattern of Islamist extremists intimidating those they disagree with, backed by the prospect of violence". Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House of Commons, replied that she "could not agree more". On Thursday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fanned the flames, warning that "we should never let extremists intimidate us into changing the way in which parliament works."

[...]

It is important to remember that this is not the first time false aspersions and innuendo have been made about opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza. Remember Home Secretary Braverman’s demonisation of protests as "hate marches", and her attempt to ban one London march on the Armistice weekend.  Yet Open Democracy reported in early February that arrests at pro-Palestine marches were at a lower rate than at the Glastonbury music festival last year. It estimated that an average of 0.5 demonstrators at Palestine protests were arrested for every 10,000 attendees.  Between October and December - during which time millions protested - there were 153 arrests at the protests. Of those, 117 arrestees were released without charge. Mainstream British politicians are claiming that British Muslims are a security threat and are subverting British democracy. This is a deadly serious and inflammatory claim. 

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

UK government lawyers say Israel is breaking international law, claims top Tory in leaked recording

UK government lawyers say Israel is breaking international law, claims top Tory in leaked recording https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/30/uk-government-lawyers-say-israel-is-breaking-international-law-claims-top-tory-in-leaked-recording?CMP=share_btn_url

The British government has received advice from its own lawyers stating that Israel has breached international humanitarian law in Gaza but has failed to make it public, according to a leaked recording obtained by the Observer.

The comments, made by the Conservative chair of the House of Commons select committee on foreign affairs, Alicia Kearns, at a Tory fundraising event on 13 March are at odds with repeated ministerial denials and evasion on the issue.

On Saturday night, Kearns, a former Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence official, who has repeatedly pressed ministers, including foreign secretary David Cameron, on the legal advice they have received, stood by her comments and called for the government to come clean.

“I remain convinced the government has completed its updated assessment on whether Israel is demonstrating a commitment to international humanitarian law, and that it has concluded that Israel is not demonstrating this commitment, which is the legal determination it has to make,” she said. “Transparency at this point is paramount, not least to uphold the international rules-based order.”

The revelation will place Lord Cameron and prime minister Rishi Sunak under intense pressure because any such legal advice would mean the UK had to cease all arms sales to Israel without delay.

Legal experts said that not to do so would risk putting the UK in breach of international law itself, as it would be seen as aiding and abetting war crimes by a country it was exporting arms to.

[ukrfeminism]

A key crime measure routinely quoted by ministers excludes many crimes that affect women more often than men, the BBC can reveal.

The headline figure from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows "total" crime has halved since 2010 - but excludes sexual assault, even rape.

The ONS says it is more challenging to collect accurate data on these kinds of crimes.

But critics say the omission hides the extent of violence against women.

Hard to measure

Not all incidents are reported to the police, so the ONS surveys 30,000 randomly selected people in England and Wales each year to work out how many crimes actually take place.

The results of the latest survey will be published on Thursday.

It says it has to treat some crimes differently.

The ONS's Helen Ross said: "In face-to-face interviews, victims - most commonly women - can be unwilling to respond if their abuser is in the room or if their family is unaware of previous abuse."

And it is hard to say what counts as a single crime of, say, stalking or harassment.

Because of these factors, separate analyses are published on sexual assault, domestic abuse, stalking and harassment.

However, these crimes, all of which happen more often to women than to men, are left out of the headline measure: the number of crimes that take place.

It only includes violent crimes, theft, robbery and criminal damage.

But this is the figure that has been used by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, as well as in Conservative Party posts on X, formerly Twitter.

Violent crime statistics do not give a picture of trends in sexual assault because these crimes are classified as sexual offences and counted separately.

Scottish official statistics follow a similar approach for categorising crimes but often refer to their "violent crimes" as "non-sexual violent crimes".

The ONS has told the BBC it will add notes to charts in its reports on crime to highlight which offences are counted and which are left out.

Ms Ross also warned that any "broad assessments" on long-term crime trends based on a single metric "should be made with caution".

Sexual assaults are actually increasing, affecting just over 4% of women aged 16 to 59 in the year to March 2023, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2014.

The rise is mainly driven by an increase in unwanted sexual touching but rape, and attempted rape, are increasing too.

Stalking has also been on the rise since 2015, reported by just under 6% of women.

However, domestic abuse now affects 6.5% of women, as opposed to just over 11% in 2005.

Harriet Wistrich, of the Centre for Women's Justice, said relying on a definition of "crime" or "violence" that excludes what many women experience and worry about "gives a distorted picture of how much safer 'the general public' are".

"Women are 'the general public'. But their experience of violence is different from men's".

Labour's Dame Diana Johnson, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, said not being clear whether data about falling crime includes or excludes "key forms of violence against women undermines efforts to combat it".

She added: "The government must make the scale of violence against women visible when they talk about crime in the UK."

The Home Office was asked about its use of the crime survey headline measure.

In response, it highlighted its plans to tackle domestic abuse and violence against women and girls, and efforts the government is making to speed cases through the courts.

Labour says it would get experts to agree on a single measure summarising violence against women and girls and then commit to halving those crimes.

Additional reporting by Megan Riddell, Sana Dionysiou and Rob England

[britishtophatwithlondon]

What Rishi Sunak did all the time when he was Prime Minister:

OMG , HE IS DANCING!😱

[thoughtlessarse]

The Conservative government left the UK wide open to the far-right violence erupting across parts of the country by ignoring red flags and stoking fires with a culture war agenda, a senior adviser on extremism to Tory prime ministers has said. Dame Sara Khan, who was Rishi Sunak’s independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience until May this year and acted as counter-extremism commissioner under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, said the recent administrations had failed the British people. Repeated and urgent counsel that far-right extremists were exploiting gaps in the law to foment violence on social media had been ignored while top-rank politicians in a series of administrations sought to gain advantage by waging culture wars, Khan said, in a damning intervention. “The writing was clearly on the wall for some time,” Khan said. “All my reports have shown, in a nutshell that, firstly, these extremist and cohesion threats are worsening; secondly, that our country is woefully unprepared. We’ve got a gap in our legislation which is allowing these extremists to operate with impunity. “Previous governments have astonishingly failed to address these trends, and they’ve taken instead, in my view, approaches that have actually been counterproductive and actually just defy any logical rationale. “They scrapped the counter-extremism strategy [in 2021], including all the resources and funding for local areas across the country who are struggling with extremist activity and extremist actors. And the government, at that time, did not replace it with anything. They left local authorities struggling to deal with consistent extremist challenges in their area. “Political leadership is really important and how our politicians behave is really, really critical, because I’ve seen, and I’m sure other people have seen, politicians who have actually, indirectly or directly undermined social cohesion because they’ve used inflammatory language.” Khan, who has previously criticised those who described the pro-Palestine protests as “hate marches”, a formulation of words used by the former home secretary Suella Braverman, said the rhetoric used by some senior politicians in recent years had given a green light to those holding racist views. She said: “I went to parts of the country where they were very upfront with me and just said: ‘Look, because of some of the inflammatory language used by politicians, the same language would then be co-opted by, you know, far-right extremists and others, who would then use that to undermine cohesion in a local area.’

continue reading

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marita Vlachou at HuffPost:

Conservatives in the U.K. are projected to get wiped out in next month’s general election. The party of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, which has led the country for more than a decade, is faced with a historic defeat, as voters have grown frustrated by the state of public services and by political scandals that have plagued the Tories in recent years, among other things. While the center-left Labour Party is on track to win a huge majority, everyone seems to be focused on the Conservatives. “We’re so used to thinking about elections in terms of who’s going to win, but this one, it’s much more about actually the state of the loss and who is going to be in opposition,” Louise Thompson, a senior lecturer in politics at The University of Manchester, told HuffPost. Bad news has been piling up for Sunak. On July 4, he could become the first sitting prime minister to ever lose their seat in a general election, while his party may not even win enough seats to become the official opposition, according to a recent poll conducted by market research company Savanta for The Daily Telegraph, which forecasts the centrist Liberal Democrats winning just three fewer seats than the Tories.

The findings illustrate “the risk of electoral extinction that the Conservative Party is now having to contemplate,” Savanta’s political research director wrote in an op-ed. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll released last week showed Reform UK — the populist right party of Nigel Farage, who’s an ally of former President Donald Trump — overtaking the Conservatives for the first time, spreading even more alarm in Tory circles. “No other poll reported the same finding, though every poll has reported a fall in Conservative support and nearly all a narrowing of the Conservative lead over Reform,” polling expert John Curtice noted on the BBC. “Standing at just 20%, Conservative support is now at its lowest ever in British polling history,” Curtice added.

The Tories in the UK are likely headed for a massive defeat come July 4th, and may end up 3rd or lower, meaning that they have the possibility of not even being the official opposition.

[zvaigzdelasas]

She's out, He's back. [13 Nov 23]

[tomorrowusa]

Things are only getting worse for Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party in the UK. These are self-inflicted wounds and they're happening just two weeks before a general election in which the Tories are predicted to have their worst showing since World War II (if lucky) or the Napoleonic Wars (if unlucky).

One of Rishi Sunak’s close protection officers has been arrested over alleged bets about the timing of the election. The officer was arrested on Monday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, the Metropolitan police said in a statement. The news comes a week on from the Guardian’s revelation that Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, Craig Williams, had placed a £100 bet on a July election just three days before the prime minister named the date. As a result of that incident, the Gambling Commission conducted a wider investigation and found information that led to the decision to investigate the officer. The Metropolitan police said it was contacted last Friday by the Gambling Commission, which informed the force that it was investigating alleged bets related to the timing of an election by a constable from the Met’s Royalty and Specialist Protection Command.

There's also a scandal involving the wife of Chris Philp – Sunak's Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire. Philp takes a hard line on law and order but apparently his wife is engaged in corporate espionage.

Policing minister’s wife reported to CPS over corporate espionage claims

A leading businesswoman who is married to the policing minister, Chris Philp, has been reported to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) by a former employer and is being sued in the high court over allegations of corporate espionage. Elizabeth Philp, 40, whose husband has called for “zero tolerance” to all crime, is accused of data-handling offences and unlawfully using confidential information from her former employer to set up a rival business. She denies the allegations and is countersuing her former employer, whom she accuses of cyber-attacking the website of the company she subsequently founded.

The pro-Conservative Daily Telegraph on its front page placed a map of 2019 election results next to its projections for the July election. On the UK political color palette: Red = Labour, Blue = Conservatives, Orange = Liberal Democrats, Yellow = Scottish National Party, Light Green = Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales), Medium Green = the Greens.

Wipeout indeed! Savanta, which conducted the poll the Daily Telegraph based its 2024 map on, projects between 481 and 516 seats for Labour (depending on how results are analyzed) in the 650 seat House of Commons.

Sunak may see the writing on the wall and could be thinking of moving to California if he personally gets booted from his seat in the constituency of Richmond and Northallerton. Richmond and Northallerton is currently considered a tossup.

Rishi Sunak’s California escape hatch: His $7.2 million beach home

[mariacallous]

People who don’t join political parties imagine that membership is an expression of opinions held in common. It starts that way, but over time, party loyalty comes to be defined at the threshold of tolerable extremism. What ugly attitude can you rub along with without recoil because, politically speaking, it’s family?

That is the question that Lee Anderson, a former deputy chair of the Conservative party, forced on fellow Tories with his assertion that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.

The whip was withdrawn. Rishi Sunak saw a line being crossed but struggled to name the crossing point, observing only that Anderson was “wrong”, not racist or Islamophobic. There was an awkward void in the place where the Conservative leader located the wrongness.

The transgression was severe enough to merit expulsion from the parliamentary party, but it can’t be defined by words that are applied without hesitation by anyone who really understands the offence.

The prime minister doesn’t want to call it Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hate because that would cast a net of opprobrium over everyone in his party who agrees with Anderson. They are too numerous to anathematise. It would drag in Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, who has written that Keir Starmer is “in hock” to Islamists who have nobbled parliament and “bullied our country into submission”.

Some Conservative MPs reject such paranoid hallucinations for what they are. Most finesse the question as a matter of rhetorical taste. “Not the words I would have chosen,” is a standard non-repudiation. It avoids naming the ingredient that is too spicy for more subtle Tory lips.

Press for clarity and the conversation is diverted on to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, antisemitic placards appearing in the throng, chants celebrating a Middle East with Israel erased and, since Hamas pursues that goal by indiscriminate murder, a shadow of intimidation felt by many British Jews.

Those are not imaginary issues, but they can be raised without plunging into the murky water where Anderson and friends swim. “Control” is the keyword. It unlocks the insinuation that Khan is a cipher, a sleeper agent. He might sound like a mainstream politician of the centre-left, but that is a front. He might have a commendable record of running a multiethnic capital with respect for the cultural sensibilities of its diverse communities, but his true agenda is sectarian.

That is not a plausible depiction of the actual Sadiq Khan. But Anderson speaks to an audience (mostly outside London) that doesn’t see beyond the mayor’s Muslim faith and the colour of his skin, taking them as proof of ulterior and unsavoury allegiance.

Encoded in the attack on Khan is the old “cricket test”, formulated by Tory grandee Norman Tebbit. Tebbit’s question: do immigrants and their children cheer for England in the Test match, or do their non-native hearts crave victory for some other land? The cricket test sets a cruel bar for belonging in Britain. It can only be cleared by jettisoning intimate components of identity. That is nationalism doing what nationalism does – narrowing the criteria for who counts as part of the nation and policing the boundary with menaces.

The left traditionally rejects that way of thinking, with one exception. A socialist variant of the cricket test applies to Jews who feel some cultural, religious or family affinity to Israel, which is most of Britain’s Jewish community.

Formally, the test is not racial. The passport for admittance to left virtue is repudiation of “Zionism”, which is a polyvalent word, narrower than Jewishness, wider than Israeli. It has a complex history, disputed among Jews themselves, which is what gives it utility in laundering the ancient animus. Much of the “anti-Zionism” that exonerates itself from racism replicates the imagery and idiom of what, a century ago, was denounced as “International Jewry”.

The progressive Geiger counter that crackles on contact with most particles of racist radiation passes silently over talk of “Zionists” exerting control over the media, finance and British foreign policy.

No alarm was raised at the Labour meeting in Rochdale where Azhar Ali, then the party’s candidate in a local byelection, said that the Israeli government had knowingly permitted the Hamas atrocities of 7 October as a pretext for military aggression in Gaza. It took a few days for Ali to lose Keir Starmer’s endorsement.

Many were dismayed by the propagation of a wild conspiracy theory while doubting that antisemitism was in the room. But it takes irrational fixation on the evil of a Jewish state, and intuitive reluctance to empathise with a narrative of Jewish victimhood, to embrace the idea that Israel organised a blood sacrifice of its own people to facilitate conquest of Palestinian land.

Conspiracy theory as conduit into the mainstream is a common factor in the spread of antisemitism and Islamophobia. It is the difference between conversations about “Islamism” or “Zionism” as terms that Muslims and Jews might recognise, and the deployment of those words as pseudoanalytical camouflage on blanket vilification of a minority community.

Purported vigilance against “Islamism” is a bridge between the mainstream right and the morbid ultranationalist fantasy where Muslim communities in “no-go areas” wage demographic war to replace Christian populations. “Anti-Zionism” causes a blurring of vision on the mainstream left that makes it hard for some people to distinguish between the struggle for Palestinian justice and railing against inveterate Jewish bloodlust.

I have written this far without a personal expression of horror and despair at the plight of Gaza. Does a Jewish journalist have to declare non-affiliation to the Israeli government, and confess to a sickening dread of every news bulletin, as his licence to participate in conversations about the Middle East?

We are not all freelance ambassadors for a foreign state. We are often made to feel like it, which induces an impulse of resentful emotional retreat. I imagine something similar is felt by British Muslims after terrorist attacks carried out in the name of jihad. It is hard not to resent the suspicion of complicity, the unspoken charge of guilt by cultural adjacency, that flickers in a stranger’s eyes.

None of these experiences is exactly equivalent. Antisemitism on the left and Islamophobia on the right can’t be formulated as a balanced string of political algebra. But there is a grim symmetry of blind spots, self-righteous denial and selective outrage. There is an unhealthy division of vigilance with partisans from each end of the political spectrum appointing themselves arbiters of the prejudice they have decided belongs to the opposite side.

Jewish and Muslim identities are not signifiers of ideology or party loyalty. But British politics, in its relentless polarising vortex, seems unable to treat them, treat us, as anything other than potential recruits for a dangerous round of mutual antagonism. And we are tired, I am tired, of having personal identity, family attachment, culture and innermost anxiety scored and folded into darts for other people to hurl across party lines. So very tired.

[master-john-uk]

This makes me a trifle agitated!

Rishi Sunak has once again back-tracked on promises made by our former temporary Prime Ministers!

While I do not agree that EV technology is the right way forward (at this time), this has thrown UK based car manufacturer's into turmoil, who have made plans for the 2030 cut-off date for new internal combustion engine vehicles.

Yes, I agree that battery-electric cars are currently overpriced, and the UK has underinvested in charging points (another UK Gov failing)... but, the only way prices of EV's are going to come down is by there being no alternative. Delaying this will only inflate prices of all cars. Am I wrong?

And now, shall we talk about the environmental impact of this decision... ?