Protesters flooded downtown Hong Kong over the weekend, winning concessions and even adding to their demands. Experts say protests like these have proliferated around the world in recent years. But can they lead to lasting change? On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, Richard Youngs, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and and the author of “Civic Activism Unleashed: New Hope or False Dawn for Democracy?,” discusses what the explosion of civic activism says about the state of citizen discontent with Co-Host Ray Suarez.
16 July 2019
Today in Focus: The real Boris Johnson: politician or journalist?
Before entering politics, Boris Johnson made his name first as a reporter and then a columnist rising to fame with the Daily Telegraph and then the Spectator. But it was not always a smooth ascent: he was sacked from the Times as a graduate trainee for making up a quote and as a Brussels correspondent generating dozens of controversial stories that poked fun at the EU institutions and refashioned Euroscepticism in the UK years before the Brexit vote.
But one particular incident stands out: so-called ‘Guppygate’. In 1990, Johnson was secretly recorded agreeing to provide the address of the News of the World reporter Stuart Collier to his friend Darius Guppy, who wanted to arrange for the journalist to have his ribs cracked as revenge for investigating his activities. Collier has told the Guardian he wants a full apology from Johnson.
Attempting to separate fact from fiction in Johnson’s journalistic career has not been easy: his biographers Andrew Gimson and Sonia Purnell both worked with him and between them have spoken to hundreds of his former colleagues. They describe to Anushka Asthana the rise of a highly ambitious man who once wrote two opposing columns before the EU referendum campaign before choosing to back leave.
Also today: Sabrina Siddiqui on Donald Trump’s weekend tweets, which have been widely condemned as racist.
TLDR News: 5 Reasons Trump Will Be Re-Elected in 2020
In 2016 a lot of people were shocked to see Trump win the US Presidential Election. This time around we wanted to be a bit more prepared, so in this video, we explain the 5 reasons we think Trump hs a good chance at getting a second term.
TLDR News: What Boris Johnson Doesn't Understand About Brexit
In a recent interview, Boris Johnson admitted to not understanding GATT Article 24 Paragraph 5(c). Now that sounds very very niche, but it's actually fundamental to his Brexit plan. In this video, we explain what it is that Johnson doesn't understand and what this means for him and his plan.
UnHerd: Could homophobia be on the rise?
Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all. [...]
Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.[...]
Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.
Bloomberg: Populist Voters Don’t Mind Putin’s Help
As in February, there’s still no evidence that the deal actually took place, that the League received any Russian money or that Salvini even knew about the negotiations. An Italian lawyer, Gianluca Meranda, has since come forward claiming that he’d been present at the meeting and that the transaction hadn’t been completed. And Salvini has said that he’s “never taken a ruble, a euro, a dollar or a liter of vodka in financing from Russia.” [...]
As I’ve written before, European populists are perfectly aware of the toxicity of accepting Russian money in any form. In some countries, Italy among them, political slush funds are not unheard of – but Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has drawn so much attention, including from intelligence services, that accepting the Kremlin’s financial aid increases the probability of getting caught. That explains Salvini’s obvious caution – and that of Brexit campaign funder Arron Banks, who apparently turned down offers of lucrative Russian deals. [...]
The League’s polling numbers are on the rise despite the Russia scandal. It’s conceivable that populist voters simply don’t care about the Kremlin scare, either because they’re generally sympathetic toward Russian President Vladimir Putin (who cleverly echoes hard right rhetoric as he seeks allies in Europe) or because they write off media reports of Russia scandals as fake news. The more Russia scandals hatch and pass without consequences, the more the latter perception will be reinforced: one can’t cry wolf too many times. Voters also know these parties have a harder time gaining funding and may simply be willing to ignore such freelancing if it helps their larger anti-establishment cause.
The Guardian: I’ve seen British attitudes to gay people change. But the battle is not yet won
As the latest edition of the British Social Attitudes survey shows, views have changed as well. Yes, there’s been a tiny dip in the percentage of people in the UK who think it’s OK to be gay – more or less within the margin of error – but still the vast majority are cool with gays. It seems that changing the law has helped change attitudes, and politicians have led where others were at first reluctant to follow. And when it came to Northern Ireland legislation this week the Commons delivered the largest majority ever in favour of gay equality – 383 to 73 – even though some fellow gay MPs and our allies felt it more important to leave it to Northern Ireland’s own politicians to introduce equal marriage. [...]
From 1880 to 2001 we had tough anti-homosexuality laws. Men were sent to prison for seven years with hard labour. They were arrested, convicted and flogged for “importuning”, that is to say, chatting up a stranger. They were convicted on the flimsiest of evidence – a touch of mascara or a powder puff in their pocket. They were subjected to intimidation, abuse and blackmail. They never dared report a queer-bashing lest they be the subject of the police investigation.
But that would never happen again, I hear you cry. We’ve turned the page. All I say is let’s not forget that the most liberal city in the world in the 20th century was Berlin, during the Weimar Republic. Rich gay men travelled from England to enjoy the pleasures of dozens of bars and clubs that catered for every purse and every preference. But in 1934 Hitler killed off gay Nazis such as Edmund Heines and Ernst Röhm in the Night of the Long Knives, and started sending gay men to Dachau and other concentration camps. Thousands were murdered without a memorial.
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