World

Sunday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Xi has made his choice: he is sticking with Vladimir Putin

Xi Jinping has made his choice. He is sticking with his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin, and no end of Russian atrocities or wishful thinking in the west is going to alter that. Their axis of autocracy presents a far-reaching challenge to western democracies, which the UK in particular is struggling to come to terms with. There has been a chorus of western voices calling on China to act ‘responsibly’, exercise its influence with Putin, and generally live up to its supposed commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. That will not happen. Those principles were always a myth, but fundamentally Xi and Putin have too much in common.

Saturday

Stephen L. Miller

The truth about Biden’s new disinformation tsar

The Biden team is following in Barack Obama’s footsteps by launching a Disinformation Governance Board. And the current administration is even one-upping the former president by employing the Department of Homeland Security to combat what it calls ‘misinformation’. Obama created a website in 2011 called ‘Attack Watch’ to counter what his 2012 campaign would label as smears and lies. In 2013, his advisor Stephanie Cutter was appointed head of his Organising for Action ‘Truth Team’. Just last week, Obama waded back into the debate about ‘disinformation’ without any sense of self-awareness or irony. Biden’s disinformation board is, however, less forthcoming with its own information. Will the department have cabinet members?

Yuan Yi Zhu

Why is Canada euthanising the poor?

There is an endlessly repeated witticism by the poet Anatole France that ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ What France certainly did not foresee is that an entire country – and an ostentatiously progressive one at that – has decided to take his sarcasm at face value and to its natural conclusion. Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The Biden Bust is here

A wave of government spending would reboot the economy. Fairer taxes would pay for restored infrastructure. Skills would be improved, productivity raised, and new digital champions would emerge. When Joe Biden was elected, he promised the most radical programme of economic reform since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, and, to his army of cheerleaders at least, the American economy was about to be completely transformed. But hold on. Only a year into his term, the reality is very different from the promises. In reality, the Biden Bust has arrived. Donald Trump may have been personally obnoxious, but he bequeathed an economy in perfectly good shape The US GDP figures

Sebastian Burduja

Putin’s war is uniting eastern Europe

When president Zelensky spoke to us in the Romanian parliament, it was his first international address after the horrors of Bucha had come out. As he recounted the abominable crimes of the Russian military, it was surreal to see such atrocities happening in this day and age, in a country just next door to my own. ‘I apologise for these tough images’, Zelensky said during the address earlier this month, ‘but this is the reality, as tough as the images’. Every country has a unique place in history. But a truly great nation is now being forged on the battlefields of Ukraine. The country has already marked an outstanding moral

Nicholas Sheppard

The cruelty of Jacinda Ardern’s immigration policy

‘Kindness and not being afraid to be kind,’ says New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, is the key to her leadership. Try telling that to the family of a 12-year-old from the Philippines, who has been banned from moving to New Zealand due to potential costs to the country’s healthcare system associated with her autism. For half of her life, Arianna Alfonzo has lived away from her father, a construction industry worker in Auckland. Her mother, Gail Alfonzo, has stayed with Arianna overseas. Both parents have permanent residency status in New Zealand. A #LetAriannaStayNZ petition, which has got over 2,000 signatures, follows a nearly 35,000-signature petition submitted to Parliament last year. But still Ardern’s

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU is trying to bring Hungary to heel

If there was a word in Euro-speak for ‘Move on, nothing to see here,’ the EU would undoubtedly have used it in its announcement yesterday about Hungary. Brussels has formally notified Budapest that it is invoking the so-called ‘conditionality mechanism’ against it, meaning a supermajority within the EU can vote to withhold funds from a member state where there is a threat to the rule of law coupled with direct effects on the sound financial management of the EU budget or other EU financial interests. The notification itself has not been publicised; but everything, the EU says, is in order. A letter was sent last November outlining allegations of graft,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Liz Truss’s foreign policy pivot

How long will the war in Ukraine go on? Speaking last night at Mansion House, Liz Truss suggested that western allies would be in it for the long haul when it comes to supporting Ukraine – suggesting the only acceptable outcome is for Russian forces must be pushed out of ‘the whole of Ukraine’. The Foreign Secretary said western allies needed to ‘double down’ in their support for Ukraine – saying Putin’s invasion ‘must fail and be seen to fail’.  Her comments were echoed by the Defence Secretary this morning. Speaking on the morning media round, Ben Wallace agreed that Russia must be pushed out of the whole of Ukraine. When pressed on

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Disney vs DeSantis

Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO, was paid $32.5 million last year. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone on that sort of money. Poor Bob, though. He’s caught in the middle of a vicious fight between Florida’s conservative governor Ron DeSantis and Disney’s LGBTQ+ activists and he’s being pummelled from both sides. It’s nasty. Children probably shouldn’t watch. The story begins with DeSantis’s Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, which passed in March and banned Floridian schoolteachers from discussing sexuality and mutable gender-identities with very young children. America’s progressives despise DeSantis and, it seems, the notion that parents should have more control over what their sprogs are told about sex. They

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

America has betrayed its young

Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the 20th century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to 24 rose by 60 per cent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 per cent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to 19 doubled for both sexes; for girls, they

James Bartholomew

My stock has soared since I’ve taken in two Ukrainians

I have temporarily taken in two Ukrainian refugees and suddenly find that, for very little sacrifice, my stock has soared. People who have regarded me as a hard-nosed, right-wing bastard are suddenly confused and struggling to readjust. A woke young relative who has despaired of my ignorant, reactionary views on Black Lives Matter, climate change, gender and so on suddenly sees a halo above my head. My mother-in-law on the Costa Brava reports mentioning that her daughter and son-in-law have Ukrainian refugees is like being sprinkled with gold dust. Her social circle is in awe. Never have I received so much praise for doing hardly anything at all. It started

Douglas Murray

Fractured: can the West fix itself?

There are many ways to fracture a people. But one of the best is to destroy all the remaining ties that bind them. To persuade them that to the extent they have anything of their own, it is not very special, and in the final analysis, hardly worth preserving. This is a process that has gone on across the western world for over a generation: a remorseless, daily assault on everything that most of us were brought up to believe was good about ourselves. Take our national heroes – the people who used to form the epicentre of our feelings of national pride. Twenty years ago, Winston Churchill easily won

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Can Mélenchon unite the French left?

Paris Shortly before the first round of the French presidential election I was handed a campaign flyer by one of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s activists. On one side was his photo and on the reverse the headline: ‘With Jean-Luc Mélenchon another world is possible.’ What sort of world? A leftist utopia in which the minimum wage would be raised from its current €1,302 to €1,400 net per month, new hospitals would be built, the retirement age would be lowered to 60, and there would be a fixed price for petrol, food and energy prices. Oh, and there would also be a Sixth Republic. Quite how Mélenchon would pay for all this, given

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Twitter takeover, late nights for pubs and a row over leg-crossing

Home Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, said Britain assessed that 15,000 Russians had been killed in the war against Ukraine and at least 530 Russian tanks, 530 armoured personnel carriers and 560 infantry fighting vehicles had been lost or captured. Sixty Russian helicopters and fighter jets had also been lost. He told the House of Commons that Britain was sending to Ukraine some Stormer armoured vehicles, with launchers for Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles. Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, called for aircraft to be sent too. In the seven days up to 23 April, 2,207 people had died with coronavirus, bringing total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 173,693. In

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Macron pelted with tomatoes on Paris walkabout

Emmanuel Macron vowed to unite France following his decisive election triumph over Marine Le Pen – but it seems not all voters are willing to embrace their re-elected president. On a walkabout in Cergy on the outskirts of Paris, Macron was pelted by a bunch of cherry tomatoes. Luckily for Macron, the vegetables didn’t reach their target: Macron’s team of bodyguards were promptly on hand to protect him – by putting up an umbrella. The visit – which was intended as a chance for Macron to engage with those living in a working-class district of the capital – was promptly cut short.  This isn’t the first time Macron has been targeted by protestors

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why Brussels fears Elon Musk

Thierry Breton, the European Commission for the internal market, lost no time in rattling his sabre at Twitter as soon as it was announced that the company had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy it. Even though Musk had made no announcement on how he intends to run the company, beyond stating his belief in free speech, Breton felt it necessary to warn Twitter that if it ‘does not comply with our law, there are sanctions – 6 per cent of the revenue and, if they continue, banned from operating in Europe.’ There is a reason, of course, for the failure of Europe to produce a tech giant Is Breton’s

Charles Lipson

Will Ron DeSantis run against Donald Trump?

Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis took two big steps to solidify his popularity with the Republican base, not only in his home state but across the nation. First, he won the hearts and minds of conservative voters and many independent parents by passing a law that prevents teachers from discussing the sensitive topics of gender and sexual orientation with young students (grades three and under). Second, he confronted and defeated one of Florida’s largest and most influential employers, Disney World, on a vital issue. He stripped Disney of its special privilege to govern the vast territory it owns near Orlando. Both moves are popular in their own right —

Professor Jonathan Haslam

Why Russian sanctions won’t topple Putin

Are sanctions against Russia working? Two months on from the first targeting of Russian banks and oligarchs, Putin’s grip on power remains as firm as ever. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: restrictions on Iran, Venezuela and North Korea have impoverished their populations, but haven’t led to political revolutions. So how successful can sanctions be against Russia today? And even if they do work, will the cost to the West be too much to bear? The full impact of sanctions on the Russian economy isn’t yet clear. In the short-term, they have created severe food shortages in shops. This, combined with a high rate of existing inflation at 16.7 per cent (expected to reach 30-40

John Smith

How Russia is splitting the EU

Russia is turning off the gas to Poland; the country’s state-owned gas supplier has refused to pay Gazprom in roubles. Bulgaria has also said that Russia would shut off their gas supplies. This is a serious escalation and raises questions about how other countries will respond to the demand. The risk of EU unity fracturing is growing. For Vladimir Putin, the rouble demand serves an important geopolitical purpose: splitting the West. What Germany and its energy buyers will do is critical. Circumventing the sanctions, as it seems Germany is doing, especially while other EU countries are having their gas shut off for adhering to sanctions rules, will break EU solidarity. And

Dalibor Rohac

Is Putin about to invade Moldova?

‘If you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table,’ said Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian character played by Kevin Spacey in the US version of House of Cards. One needs to look no further than Vladimir Putin’s body language in his recent meeting with defence minister Sergei Shoigu to conclude that Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is not going according to plan. While that is good news, the Russian dictator might be moving to turn over the table in the neighbouring Moldova. On Tuesday morning, two explosions destroyed a radio tower re-broadcasting Russian stations into Transnistria and Ukraine and a ‘terror attack’ targeted a military unit near