World

How to win over vaccine sceptics

We have a vaccine. In fact, we have three — and more are on the way. While we still need to scrutinise the full data from the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca trials, the initial reports are stunning: vaccines that in some cases exceed 90 per cent effectiveness, and might be ready within weeks. Previous surveys showed a big appetite for the vaccine, but more recent ones are concerning. According to YouGov, only 67 per cent of British people say they’d be ‘likely’ to get the Pfizer virus, with 21 per cent saying they’d be ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ unlikely to. Other polls also find that scepticism towards the vaccine is increasing.

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s Covid war goes from bad to worse

Politicians whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make ridiculous. On Tuesday evening, as the deaths attributed to Covid-19 reached 50,000, Emmanuel Macron, president of the Republic, again commandeered French television channels to announce his latest strategy to end the national lockdown. He claimed to be making himself perfectly clear as his timetable for ending lockdown was conditioned by the subjunctive. The big give was that from Saturday, we are to be allowed to spend three hours daily outside, and to venture 20km (no more) from our front doors. (This will be a relief to a friend in the Dordogne who was ‘verbalisé’ by the flics last week when

Pakistan’s fight with Macron has taken a humiliating turn

The war of words between Pakistan and France – sparked by president Macron’s comments about radical Islam – rumbles on. But the latest skirmish has led to an embarrassing climbdown from one of Pakistan’s top politicians. ‘Macron is doing to Muslims what the Nazis did to the Jews – Muslim children will get ID numbers (other children won’t) just as Jews were forced to wear the yellow star on their clothing for identification,’ wrote Pakistan’s federal minister for human rights Shireen Mazari. Mazari’s tweet was quickly picked up by those who have suggested there is something sinister to Macron’s recent interventions. But there was a problem: it was nonsense. France soon hit back,

Dominic Green

Biden would be a fool to reverse Trump’s foreign policy wins

‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone. Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, once one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is going to be Biden’s national security adviser. John Kerry, the disastrous diplomat who gave us the Iran nuclear deal, is Biden’s climate emissary. And it was all going so well. Trump might not have built his wall, but he had the first successful

Jake Wallis Simons

Arab states are fighting back against Turkey’s ‘neo-Ottomanism’

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems determined to reinvent the secular Muslim country he inherited as a sort of Sunni Iranian ‘Mini-Me’: draconian, Islamist and with vaunting regional ambitions. For Western powers and their allies, the urgent question is how to deal with the mutation of a Nato ally into a ‘neo-Ottoman’ threat. A hundred years ago, the Turkish Republic was founded on secularism. Ataturk banned religion from the public realm, prohibited the Arabic call to prayer, and encouraged men and women to mix. But for years, Erdoğan has done all he can to reverse the Turkish liberal consensus in favour of a new authoritarianism – and is taking on muscular adventurism

Cindy Yu

Has China really beaten Covid?

60 min listen

As the UK and much of the West continues to struggle against Covid, in China, things largely seem back to normal. Pictures from the ‘Golden Week’, a week of state holidays to celebrate the People’s Republic’s founding, showed mountains and seas of people. On this longer episode than usual, I take a deep dive into China’s Covid response – finding out about life in China right now, China’s ‘Zero Covid‘ strategy and the economic ramifications. Chinese Whispers is a fortnightly podcast on the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more. Presented by Cindy Yu. Listen to past episodes here.

Donald Trump is now the Republican party’s kingmaker

As Donald Trump continues to insist that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, speculation has grown about how the president will spend the next four years. Trump’s political future isn’t over, even if he did become the first president to lose re-election since 1992. Trump is a notoriously prickly man who can make three different decisions on one topic in a span of an hour. Not even his closest advisers and family members know what he is going to do after vacating the White House in about two months. Trump is reportedly mulling a 2024 presidential run to avenge a loss he considers fraudulent; one campaign adviser told the

Was 2008 the year China triumphed over the West?

Although China’s economy remains smaller than the United States’s in terms of nominal GDP (albeit ahead of the US in terms of GDP on a purchasing power parity basis) has it already surpassed it in another sense? Since 2008, China’s energy and momentum has arguably led to it overtaking its rival. A hundred years from now, historians are likely to look back at the financial crash as the turning point in the balance of power between the West and China. The sub-prime mortgage crisis of that year, followed by president Obama’s high-tax, over-regulated economic management, saw America cast into a prolonged recession and an anaemic recovery. At the same time,

The EU’s muddled approach to encryption

The EU would like you to know that it doesn’t want to ban encryption. In fact, it correctly recognises that encryption is absolutely essential for our privacy and financial safety on the internet. That’s why a draft resolution – due to be tabled in front of EU leaders at a pivotal summit later this month – spends paragraphs extolling the virtues of online encryption, before setting out the EU’s complaint: they would really like to be able to read encrypted messages. And they want technology companies to do something about it. On the surface, the EU’s argument might seem quite reasonable: most of us would generally believe that with warrants

Things fall apart: Ethiopia’s terrifying descent into civil war

The world’s first conflict triggered by Covid-19 exploded on 4 November in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. Before your eyes glaze over at news of fresh African horrors — hundreds dead in battles and air strikes, ethnic massacres, civilians fleeing, charities calling for food aid — consider this frightening new reality. For the first time in modern history, wars and insecurity now ravage a continuous line of African states from Mauretania’s Atlantic shores to the Red Sea — a 6,000km Sahelian suicide belt of jihadis, state failure and starvation. Intervene too hard in this mess and you get David Cameron’s ill-conceived 2011 Libyan bombing raids. Gaddafi gets butchered in a

Donald Trump won’t leave me alone

Ever since I saw him in Pensacola, Florida the other week, Donald J. Trump will not leave me alone. Each morning I wake up, turn on my phone and find more messages sent overnight. On just one morning this week I rolled over to find emails from him titled ‘Chaos’, ‘Rigged’ and ‘We’re gaining momentum.’ Another said ‘The left hates you, Douglas.’ He doesn’t know the half of it. Clearly my email address has been shared. Because in just one morning I also got emails from Mike Pence (‘We’re closer than ever’), Eric Trump and bewilderingly — for I cannot see what fresh constituency she brings — Eric’s wife, Lara.

How the UK can help Hong Kong

Those of us who spent our formative China-watching years reading Chinese Communist party publications learnt early on that the word ‘basically’ was a synonym for ‘not’. ‘The party has basically succeeded in…’ meant that there was a problem. Hong Kong is basically an autonomous region. Xi Jinping is satirised by liberal Chinese as the ‘Accelerator-in-Chief’, whose policies are hurtling the CCP’s regime towards collapse. This could be wishful thinking on their part. Certainly, he has sped up the demise of the ‘one country, two systems’ concept. Article Five of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, promises ‘50 years without change’, implying that the city would be governed differently from other

Steerpike

Macron vs the New York Times

Fresh from sparking protests around the world with his comments on Islam, Emmanuel Macron now has a new adversary to add to the list: the New York Times. ‘The president has some bones to pick with the American media,’ read a piece by the NYT‘s media editor Ben Smith, published this week. ‘So president Emmanuel Macron of France called me on Thursday afternoon from his gilded office in the Élysée Palace to drive home a complaint’. The interview made it sound as though Macron, infuriated by the hostility of the Gray Lady, had taken it upon himself to suddenly phone Smith up out of the blue to give him a piece of his

Fraser Nelson

Sweden’s rule of eight marks a change of strategy

Sweden has been pretty much the only country in the world to have responded to coronavirus using a voluntary system: advising, rather than instructing, the public. But this has changed today with Stefan Löfven, the Prime Minister, saying he will pass a law to introduce a ban on gatherings of eight people or more.  ‘Do your duty. Do not go to the gym, do not go to the library, do not have parties. Do not come up with excuses that would make your activity OK,’ he said in a press conference. ‘It is your and my choices — every single day, every single hour, every single moment — that will now

Ross Clark

Covid-19 is distracting us from another medical emergency

If the first victim of war is truth, then the first victim of Covid-19 was a sense of proportion. The pandemic continues to dominate the news every waking hour, as well as continuing to restrict our lives in ways not seen since wartime – in some ways even more severely. Yet how many people even noticed this week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the estimated number of deaths globally from measles climbed to 207,500 in 2019, a 50 per cent increase on 2016? The news was hardly reported. Unless you happened to be visiting the CDCs, or the WHO’s website you were unlikely even to

John Keiger

Is Macron following in the footsteps of de Gaulle?

It can’t be much fun being a national leader these days. Be it the US, the UK, all are assailed on myriad fronts by coronavirus, widespread societal division and impending economic ruin. But being president of France takes the biscuit. Since 2014, France is fighting a war against Islamist extremists in the Sahel. 5,100 French troops are battling insurgents across five states in an area several times the size of France. France is doing so to hold back the tide of northward advancing Islamist extremists and to block them reaching the shores of the Mediterranean. Despite this being in the interests of the European Union, France fights on with a death toll

Trump 2024! He definitely lost – but he’s not finished yet

Donald Trump’s increasingly outrageous attempts to contest the results of the US presidential election were given their absurd symbol early on with what one commentator called The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco.  A week ago, with the decisive votes being counted in the last, critical states in the election, with Trump making a forlorn attempt to persuade Americans he had been cheated out of victory, someone on the campaign blundered. They were supposed to book the Four Seasons in Philadelphia for a press conference by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Instead, they booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a gardening company in an industrial area of north-east Philly, somewhere out

South Dakota’s failed Swedish-style Covid experiment

Nothing much happens in South Dakota. It is a long way, in almost every sense, from the bright lights of New York, which was the epicentre of the spring coronavirus outbreak in North America. Now, however, the midwestern state, which was previously hailed for taking the ‘Swedish approach’ to coronavirus, is facing a virus rampaging out of control. So what went so badly wrong? And is there a lesson for the rest of us? When the pandemic first hit the US, the ‘Plains States’, including South Dakota, escaped relatively lightly. On 15 April, coronavirus daily diagnoses in South Dakota peaked at 181. The daily death count topped out on 6

Macron is preparing for intellectual battle against Islamism

It’s easy to see why so few western leaders have come to Emmanuel Macron’s defence: when they scrutinise extremists, they are accused of being ‘Islamophobes’. Since the French President’s speech last month about Islam in the West, he has been accused — by populist Muslim politicians such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Imran Khan, as well as publications that should know better, such as the New York Times — of being anti-Muslim. Yes, he was frank about the dangers of Islamism, but his speech was also a defence of what he called the ‘Islam of the Enlightenment’. Rarely for a political leader, he was able to point not just to