What’s going on in Portland?
19 min listen
Freddy Gray talks to the journalist and author Nancy Rommelmann about the ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon as Trump begins to send in federal forces.
World
Friday
Thursday
What is Russia’s plan to unleash chaos?
39 min listen
As the long-awaited Russia report is released this week, we discuss Russia’s plan to unleash chaos (00:45). Plus, does Boris Johnson have a management problem with his new MPs? (14:30) And last, the pains of dating during lockdown (28:30). With Russia journalists Owen Matthews and Mary Dejevsky; the Spectator’s deputy political editor Katy Balls; Conservative Home’s editor Paul Goodman; Sunday Telegraph columnist Madeline Grant; and author James Innes-Smith. Presented by Cindy Yu. Produced by Cindy Yu and Pete Humphreys.
How Lebanon unravelled
Lebanon will be 100 years old on 1 September. But the joke circulating in Beirut is that the country may not be around for the party. Eye-watering hyper-inflation, not helped by the Covid pandemic, has brought the country to its knees, just as famine and extreme poverty sparked its creation after the end of the Great War. Lebanon eventually won full independence from the French in 1943, and became an impossibly glamorous, multilingual entrepôt with a rare facility for doing business. According to Major General Sir Edward Spears, the British minister to Syria and Lebanon, the country ‘sprang from a far older and higher’ civilisation than the French. Even so,
Putin plans to make the West destroy itself
There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom, unknowable menace, and this will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories far more corrosive and confusing to our politics than any Moscow-generated Twitter-storm or document leak. There’s no smoking gun on Brexit. Yet the government-induced delay in publication allows anyone that way inclined to imagine a cover-up. Even the insistence that the state should do more
How Britain can tame China
Chinese leaders love to use the phrase ‘win-win’, but they actually hope to win twice and leave other nations in positions of relative disadvantage. The Chinese Communist party’s behaviour during the Covid-19 crisis is a case in point. In the midst of the global pandemic, the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security have conducted cyber-attacks against hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and medical research facilities developing Covid-19 therapies and vaccines. Triumphing in the race for a vaccine would help China emerge from the crisis in a position of relative advantage economically and psychologically, while reinforcing the idea that China’s authoritarian mercantilist system is superior to democratic free market systems.
Wednesday
Why Putin wants Scottish independence
The Russia report was supposed to prove once and for all that the Kremlin rigged the EU referendum, Boris Johnson is an FSB asset and Dominic Cummings a bot operated from Saint Petersburg. Anything but the glum reality that the Leave campaign was more effective than its rival. That is not to say Vladimir Putin’s regime did not attempt to influence the 2016 vote. It is almost inconceivable that it didn’t, but the government’s complacent attitude towards democratic security means there was insufficient monitoring to know for certain. Ministers and intelligence agencies should have been alive to the threat of Russian interference because, as the report confirms, the Kremlin intervened
Tuesday
Europe’s coronavirus rescue fund is dead on arrival
Just imagine what would happen if real money was at stake. Over the last four days, the leaders of the European Union have been furiously haggling over their Coronavirus Rescue Fund. France’s President Macron has been banging the table angrily, the Dutch have taken on the role vacated by the British of the ‘bad Europeans’, and the Germans have been cautiously digging into their wallets to pay for the whole thing. In the end, however, they came up with a deal. Arch-federalists will hail this as a ‘Hamilton Moment’ – a decisive step towards a more united Europe where the richer states help rescue the poorer, distributing money around the
Monday
Are Chinese companies arms of the state?
37 min listen
The days of tightly controlled state economy are gone in China – but are they returning? In recent months, Chinese companies from Huawei to TikTok have caused concern in the West for fear that they don’t really work for shareholders or themselves – but for Beijing. On this episode, I speak to Duncan Clark, a China expert who advises western investors on the Chinese economy, and author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. So how independent are Huawei, TikTok and even Alibaba? More than you may think – but less and less so these days.
Spain faces its own Brussels conundrum
The north tower of Malaga cathedral stands nearly 300 feet high. The south tower doesn’t. According to the plaque at its foot, the funds originally destined for its completion were instead diverted to help the rebels fight against the British in the American war of independence. Whenever I look at that south tower – well, what there is of it – I’m reminded of the anti-Brexit tirades of El País. El País is one of Spain’s leading national dailies. Founded in 1976 as democracy was returning to Spain, it prides itself on being a serious, centre-left newspaper which, like Spain itself, has always been staunchly pro-EU. Usually warmly appreciative of
Chilling stories from inside China’s Muslim internment camps
Vegetable-seller Kairat Samarkhan didn’t know why he had been summoned to the police station. ‘I had to empty my pockets and hand over my belt and laces. Then they started to ask questions,’ he says. After days of interrogation, during which he was hardly allowed to sleep, officers pulled a sack over his head and drove him to a camp near the city of Altai. Samarkhan, a Muslim Kazakh, told me about his experience in the camp: ‘Every day, we had to renounce the Muslim faith and confirm that we respect the laws of China. Before every meal, we chorused: “Long live Xi Jinping!” ’ In the past two years
Friday
A brief history of anti-populism with Thomas Frank
69 min listen
Freddy Gray interviews Thomas Frank in Spectator USA’s second online event. Frank argues that populism isn’t frightening, but rather an account of enlightenment and liberation; it is the story of American democracy itself, of its ever-widening promise of a decent life for all. To catch Freddy’s next event, subscribe to Spectator USA now.
Is Yuriko Koike the Nicola Sturgeon of Tokyo?
Few politicians have come out of the corona crisis as well as Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. As the face of the metropolitan area’s official response to the pandemic, the 68-year-old former cabinet minister has won plaudits for her nightly face-masked updates and guidance briefings. For her efforts, she was rewarded with a landslide in last week’s gubernatorial election. But with a recent surge in cases in the Tokyo area, Governor Koike has become embroiled in a war of words with the national government that could have long-term implications. The latest infection figures in Tokyo (which have risen to around 150 cases a day) have alarmed many, but as ever with
Macron’s Faustian pact with the EU
On Wednesday, the new French Prime Minister Jean Castex made his general policy statement to the National Assembly. We know things are getting serious in France because the new Prime Minister was wearing a proper suit: charcoal-grey, well-cut, elegant. No more of the boyband blue drainpipe little numbers sported by his predecessor, tailored to Macron’s foppish programme of France as a ‘start-up nation’. Castex’s audience of face-masked députés – including the communists to the left of him, wearing bright red face coverings – barracked him throughout. Unperturbed, his southern singing accent cut through the catcalls with repeated appeals to the ‘Republic’, ‘France’ and ‘unity’ in the face of the worst recession
Thursday
Why Jeff Sessions lost to a Trump-backed candidate
32 min listen
With Daniel McCarthy, contributor to Spectator USA and editor of Modern Age. On the podcast, he talks to Freddy Gray about how Sessions was defeated by the new cyborg that is the Republican party — half-Trump, half-GOP machine of old, and what this means for Trump’s re-election prospects.
The lost boys: the white working class is being left behind
You can argue about the merits of pulling down statues, but it’s hard to make the case that mass protests serve no useful purpose. At the very least, they provoke debate and draw attention to uncomfortable topics that it might otherwise be easier to ignore. The recent protests have forced everyone to have difficult discussions about race, class, poverty and attainment. Any serious examination of the statistics shows that we’re pretty far from equal, but what the figures also show is that it’s wrong-headed and damaging to lump very different groups together. In these discussions politicians often lazily assume that all BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) people are the
We’ll never know whether Huawei is still listening
This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded presence in the UK won what I described as ‘grateful applause from David Cameron’ back in 2012. I have deployed everything from serious intelligence sources to laborious knock-knock jokes (‘Huawei who?’ ‘Who are we kidding, prime minister? We don’t need to knock on your front door when we’ve already got a backdoor device in the Downing Street switchboard’) to make my point that the proliferation of Huawei kit in UK telecoms networks represented an obvious but unquantifiable security risk. Which means I can’t disagree with the government’s belated decision to
There is no justification for turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque
It is official: Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years the world’s largest cathedral, and since 1934 a museum, is to be turned back into a mosque. Ever since I heard of the possibility, I have been praying it would not be so because of the impact it will have on Muslim-Christian relations in Turkey, the Middle East and beyond. A suitably purged and compliant judiciary, however, has bowed to the wishes of the authoritarian President Erdogan that Turkey should become more Islamic and less secular. There has been a church on the site since 360 ad and the present building dates from the reign of Justinian in the mid-sixth century.
Wednesday
Is it wise to treat China as a pariah state?
Death and disruption breed anger. A lot of people are now looking for someone to blame for the pandemic and China is an obvious target. It has a leadership which is authoritarian at home and menacing abroad. Its human rights record is deplorable. Western memories still encompass the invasion of Tibet. Today, its wet markets offend Western sensibilities – they sound like a cruel and unhygienic way of threatening endangered species. Above all, there is Wuhan. Many people are now convinced that something went wrong in a biological research laboratory and that the wet markets may well have given a further impetus to the spreading virus. If the Chinese had
Apple has struck a blow against the EU’s out-of-control federalists
A massively profitable American technology giant that pays small amounts of tax on vast profits, while massively over-charging for products that quickly become obsolete. Apple is a hard company to love, and an unlikely champion of anything apart from its own bottom line. And that might explain why many people instinctively cheered when the European Union slapped a massive 13 billion euro (£11.8bn) tax bill on Apple. Surely it was about time the company was cut down to size? Well, hold on. It now turns out the EU was wrong. The General Court of the EU today overturned the decision after the Irish (and Apple) appealed against it. It will probably go
How to deal with an aggressive China: lessons from Australia
What can the UK learn from Australia and its occasionally rocky relationship with China? The welcome decision to ban Huawei from Britain’s 5G network has prompted concerns that China will find a way to hit back. This is hardly surprising, as the Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, has warned Britain that ‘if you want to make China a hostile country, you will have to bear the consequences’. Australia is perhaps further down the same road. It has not gone out of its way to anger China but decisions the Australian government has taken over the last six or seven years have nonetheless had that effect. First, there was the decision to