British student Jack Buckby spearheads far-right political movement

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters

He’s an unlikely far-right trailblazer: neither old, nor angry, nor square. Jack Buckby, the 20-year-old founder of the National Culturists—a Tea Party-inspired youth movement that aims to reinvigorate Britain’s flagging far right—pairs John Lennon glasses with modish ties and ironic facial hair. He’s well-spoken. He blogs. He’s already a darling of the radical British National Party (BNP), which campaigns on the premise that immigration has put British culture in peril, and has plans to spread the word to campuses nationwide.

His political awakening occurred, he says, after realizing that “if you disagree with multiculturalism, you are deemed a racist.” Frustrated, Buckby came across the work of John Press, founder of the Brooklyn Tea Party. Press argues that “traditional majority culture” should be promoted over diversity, which, he feels, embraces “practices such as female genital mutilation and drug-running gangster culture.” In 2011, Buckby, who is partway through a political science degree at the University of Liverpool, founded the National Culturists. “We don’t have aspirations to be a street movement,” he says. “We want to be an academic organization.”

That may be just what Britain’s far-right needs: in 2009, a street movement known as the English Defence League attracted hordes of supporters to its anti-Muslim marches. But the group’s window-smashing, proto-fascist song-chanting members also alienated social conservatives.

Continue…

British PM David Cameron says talks over UK press regulation have broken down

By The Associated Press - Thursday, March 14, 2013 at 8:49 AM - 0 Comments

LONDON – British Prime Minister David Cameron says talks over how to regulate the country’s scandal-tainted press have broken down without agreement.

Politicians had hoped to come to a consensus as to what to do about the British media, which has been roiled by revelations of industrial-scale espionage, bribery, blackmail, and computer hacking at some of the nation’s biggest titles.

In a hastily-organized press conference Thursday, the U.K. leader said he would press ahead with his own plan for self-regulation and that a vote would be held imminently.

It was not immediately clear whether Cameron’s coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, would give Cameron’s plan the support it may need to pass.

Coming in 2026: A high-speed rail line that links London and northern England

By The Associated Press - Monday, January 28, 2013 at 4:45 AM - 0 Comments

LONDON – The British government on Monday unveiled details of new high-speed rail lines linking London to cities in northern England with trains travelling up to 225 miles an hour (360 kph).

The government says the project, known as High Speed 2, will be the first new railway built north of London for more than a century, and will be an economic and environmental boon. But opponents claim the plan is too expensive and will ruin tracts of picturesque countryside.

The first 140-mile (225-kilometre) stretch of the line, announced last year, will link London to Birmingham, England’s second-largest city. The Y-shaped section announced Monday will extend to the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds.

Continue…

Argentina wants to claim the Falklands, but Britain’s not having it

By Katie Engelhart - Monday, January 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

The British government’s latest military manoeuvre seems fresh out of a Monty Python sketch: 150 British soldiers who just returned from a tour in Afghanistan are being redeployed to the Falkland Islands, a land mass roughly the size of Connecticut, almost 13,000 km from Britain.

The saga began this month, when Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner published a letter in two British newspapers staking her claim on the Falklands (the Malvinas, as they are known there), which are just off Argentina’s coast. “In a blatant exercise of 19th-century colonialism,” she wrote, “Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas.” Fernández urged the UN to restore the islands’ “territorial integrity.” British Prime Minister

David Cameron didn’t miss a beat, quickly appearing on the BBC to declare his “extremely strong” resolve to keep the islands British. Already, military chiefs have drawn up plans to prevent hostile action by Argentina, London’s Telegraph reports.

Of course, we’ve been here before. And memories of 1982 are certainly guiding Cameron’s hand, says Graham Stewart, author of A History of Britain in the 1980s. That year, prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s firm action during the 10-week Falklands War—which cost 650 Argentine and 250 British lives—helped solidify her political support, and shape her legacy. “Cameron is clearly aware of the legacy,” says Stewart. Continue…

Britain’s PM shuffles team to focus on economy

By The Associated Press - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 5:46 AM - 0 Comments

LONDON – Britain’s prime minister says he has begun making major changes to his government team, in the hope it will sharpen focus on kick-starting the country’s stalled economy.

David Cameron confirmed Tuesday that International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell would become chief whip, to build support for the “mission to restore our economy to growth.”

Sayeeda Warsi, the first female Muslim to serve in a British Cabinet, posted a message to Twitter confirming she would leave her post as Conservative Party co-chairman.

Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan also announced she had lost her role.

Cameron is not expected to switch key ministers, retaining Treasury chief George Osborne to lead economic policy.

Osborne, responsible for sharp public spending cuts, faced a chorus of boos Monday at a Paralympic Games medal ceremony.

Will too much compromise split Britain’s coalition government?

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

British Labour Party and Opposition Leader Ed Miliband (left), British Prime Minister David Cameron (right). John Stillwell/Getty Images

They seemed so smitten with each other, standing side by side in the 10 Downing Street rose garden, so full of innocence and hope. David Cameron and Nick Clegg, leaders of Britain’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively, were forming a coalition government and were appearing together to announce it to the press. If there was any lingering bad blood—David Cameron was reminded of the time he had said his favourite joke was Nick Clegg—they laughed it off. They were united, said Cameron, by a desire to provide Britain with stable leadership. Added Clegg: “This is a government that will last.”

That was a little more than two years ago. The stability of their coalition today, however, looks far from certain. A chance for power can motivate opposing parties to put their differences aside. Watching that power slip away has a more divisive effect. Opinion polls since May show the opposition Labour Party with a consistent 10-point lead over the Conservatives. Support for the Liberal Democrats fell off a cliff shortly after the last election and has stayed there pretty much ever since.

Members of both parties worry that the coalition involves too much compromise. Left-leaning Liberal Democrats feel their party has sold out, notably by raising university tuition fees, despite an election promise to scrap them altogether. “There is a real sense of betrayal,” says Judi Atkins, a research fellow at the University of Leeds. Some Tories similarly believe Cameron panders too much to his Liberal Democrat partners.

Continue…

A red card for England’s coach

By Leah McLaren - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Rex Features

Apart from the country’s highest elected office, there may be no British job so heavily scrutinized and culturally significant as that of manager of England’s football team. Britain, like the rest of Europe, is obsessed by football. And while its domestic leagues attract the best international players, making it one of the richest and most powerful sports franchises on earth, its national team has failed to win a major championship since 1966. To say fans here are a tad bummed out about this is like saying Charlie Sheen has a bit of an ego problem. Indeed, when it comes to football, Britain is as much a nation defined by bitter disappointment and nostalgia for past victories as it is by an enduring love for its national game.

This swell of collective emotion is why, when Fabio Capello abruptly quit his position as team manager last week, England responded with a heavily qualified hip-hip-hurrah! Qualified, because the surprise resignation plunges the team even deeper into an ongoing leadership crisis just months before the next European championship in June. Hurrah, however, because Capello had long been criticized by fans and commentators alike on two counts: 1) he failed to take the team further than the second round at the last World Cup, and 2) after four years of earning $9.5 million per annum for coaching just a dozen or so games a year, his command of the English language showed little, if any, improvement.

To his credit, Capello resigned on principle. His dispute with the Football Association, over whether team captain John Terry should be stripped of his arm band pending a trial set for July over allegations of racist remarks, was a matter of professional integrity (though it didn’t make British fans any sorrier to see him go). Earlier this month, Capello gave a candid interview on Italian state television in which he declared he “absolutely” disagreed with his bosses’ decision to strip Terry of his captaincy pending his trial for racial abuse of another player, the Queens Park Rangers’ Anton Ferdinand. “I have spoken to the [FA] chairman and I have said that in my opinion one cannot be punished until it is official and the court—a non-sport court, a civil court—had made a decision to decide if John Terry has done what he is accused of.”

Continue…