TLDR News: Why Do Migrants Want to Come to the UK? The Appeal of Britain to Refugees Explained

 With footage of asylum seekers and migrants crossing the channel to get to Britain, some are beginning to question why they're making the trip at all. I mean, they've already made it to Western Europe, why then risk your life in a dinghy to attempt to get into Britain? In this video, we explain some of their motivation and if there truly are a lot of migrants trying to get into the UK.

Today in Focus: The end of the affair: how Britain walked away from the EU

John Palmer was the Guardian’s correspondent in Brussels in 1973 when the UK entered the European Economic Community. Now, 46 years later, Jennifer Rankin is in Brussels for the Guardian as British MEPs are packing up and leaving. They tell Anushka Asthana how membership has changed Britain. Plus: Dan Sabbagh on Huawei’s role in British infrastructure.

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The Guardian: How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party

Libertarian thinktanks in the US, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have had this sort of close relationship with incoming Republican administrations for years, furnishing them with staff and readymade policies. Thinktanks – non-governmental organisations that research policies with the aim of shaping government – have long been influential in British politics, too, on both left and right, but the sheer number of connections between Johnson’s cabinet and ultra free market thinktanks was something new. In the period immediately before the Brexit referendum and in the years since, a stream of prominent British politicians and campaigners, including Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, have flown to the US to meet with thinktanks such as the AEI and the Heritage Foundation, often at the expense of those thinktanks, seeking out ideas, support and networking opportunities. Meanwhile, US thinktanks and their affiliates, which are largely funded by rightwing American billionaires and corporate donations, have teamed up with British politicians and London-based counterparts such as the IEA, the Legatum Institute and the Initiative for Free Trade, to help write detailed proposals for what the UK’s departure from the EU, and its future relationships with both the EU and the US, should look like, raising questions about foreign influence on British politics. [...]

One key Atlas strategy involves using the media to shape the political debate. By encouraging the creation of more and more thinktanks – a never-ending production line of new “institutes”, “centres” and “foundations”, whose acronyms blur into each other – the network can generate a “constant river of commentary” from its experts, says Andrew Simms, a veteran of environmental thinktanks who has often debated against members of Atlas-affiliated organisations. A predominantly rightwing British media have been happy to give them space. This gives the impression of widespread support for what may be minority or fringe points of view. The thinktanks’ contribution to the post-referendum Brexit debate was a turbo-charged version of what they have long done on issues such as tax and climate, where they have disputed the scientific consensus, argues Simms. “It’s a belief system. They go very ‘big picture’ to shift the tide of opinion.” [...]

We asked Oliver Letwin, the former Conservative minister who helped lead the Tory backbench rebellion against a no-deal Brexit, how influential he thought the free market thinktanks were. He said that occasionally they had shifted the political terrain, but mostly the dynamic worked the other way round. Earlier in his career, he recalled, he had commissioned some of the UK ones to write pamphlets – but only to justify what he had already decided to do: “One alights magpie-like on these, if they tend to your argument. But 95% of the reports they produce are just junk.” He doubted they had played much role in Brexit policy. Why, then, did he think so many Conservative politicians had made trips to the US thinktanks? He seemed baffled by this. “Do they? I have no idea.” [...]

“The clique that think about Europe and nothing else now dominate every aspect of the party,” said Margot James, the former Conservative digital and culture minister. “It’s just different to the one I joined.” When James entered parliament in 2010, she became a member of the Free Enterprise Group and went to IEA events, but eventually found the thinktank’s views too rigidly ideological. James now feels that a number of MPs have adopted the IEA’s ideas “lock, stock and barrel” and that Johnson had surrounded himself with “dogmatic small-state” conservatives. “Oh, there are people at No 10 who would honestly make your hair stand on end,” she said.

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openDemocracy: Going back somewhere: nostalgia and the radical right

The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology. [...]

‘This country wants nostalgia’, mused the poet and musician Gil Scott Heron in 1981, reflecting on the election of Ronald Reagan. The American electorate had voted, he thought, ‘to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week’. In this analysis, the destination of our backwards gaze is less important to this type of politics than the fact that it’s backwards we’re facing. Indeed, for Scott-Heron, this gaze peered at a fictive, mythologized vision of America, one akin to the B-movie landscape in which Reagan had made his name. Yesterday was, for Scott-Heron, ‘the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment’, the ‘man in the white hat or the man on the white horse’. It is, tellingly, the ‘white’ cowboy that saves America at the last moment; the figure riding into our vision from out of screen shot is an idealized image of Anglo strength. ‘Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all American men were like Hemingway’. Hemingway’s projected vision of white masculinity – the great white hunter – has been undermined since, of course. Actually, it was undermined by Hemingway himself, in his own writing and career. Inscribed into the Hemingway mythos are the elements of its own collapse. It is a self-consciously stagey vision of the hard-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersman, a hammy performance of American maleness. [...]

In other words, the electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. ‘Put your orders in America,’ Scott-Heron proclaims, ‘And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes’. In a song that’s about cinema and authenticity, the Kodak reference speaks of a world in which value can be quickly and cheaply reproduced. Everything about this kind of politics, then, is fake, all is surface; and at some level its supporters know they are buying the cheap copy Rolex. ‘We’re starring in a B-movie, and we would rather have had John Wayne’, sang Scott-Heron in 1981. The point about the B-movie analogy is that the form makes no real attempt to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond its borders. [...]

Taken together, these seemingly innocuous emblems and rituals – foods, images, phrases – may hide a more sinister purpose, providing feel-good cover for dangerous new forms of ethno-nationalism, protectionism and racism. Neo-fascists are nostalgic nowadays; the Italian radical right group CasaPound have reconstructed fascism as what Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio have characterized as a ‘hybrid communication style’. Images of Mussolini and Fascist iconography mingle with references to cultural figures sympathetic to fascist ideas, or those who might be termed proto-fascist – Ezra Pound, obviously, but also Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Knut Hamsun, Yeats, and Nietzsche. The effect is a strange collage of nostalgic nods to the years of the Fascist ventennio and to ‘pop culture’.

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UnHerd: The battle for Brexit Britain

The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.

It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth. [...]

The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result. [...]

The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”

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The Guardian Politics Weekly: Is a no-deal Brexit back on the cards?

Heather Stewart is joined by Jonathan Freedland, Owen Jones and Rachel Wolf to discuss the latest Tory leadership pledges, the new intake of European MEPs and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

As Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt do their utmost to drive the country off a no-deal cliff edge, business leaders, fellow politicians and the rest of the world look on aghast.

While the Thelma and Louise of British politics wrestle over the steering wheel, we ask: are we really going to leave the EU without a deal?

Joining Heather Stewart are the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland and Owen Jones, and Rachel Wolf from the consultancy Public First.

Also this week: it was a lively start to the opening of the European parliament, with protests, back-turning and rude T-shirts. We talk to one of the new crop of MEPs, Caroline Voaden of the Liberal Democrats, and to the Guardian’s Brussels bureau chief, Daniel Boffey.

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Financial Times: How Donald Trump and Boris Johnson threaten democracy

FT chief political commentator Philip Stephens says the US president and the Tory leadership favourite share a common politics that ignores truth.

Financial Times: Donald Trump and the US-UK special relationship

FT's chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman and US national editor Edward Luce give their views on the president's first state visit to Britain. The special relationship is under pressure from Brexit, the China trade war and unilateralism.

Channel 4 News: Brexit Party comes out on top in EU elections - ahead of Labour and Conservatives

The results of last week’s EU elections are in: Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party topped the poll with nearly 32%. And the Liberal Democrats came second with 20%, their best ever result in a European Election.

But what does it mean? And how will these results affect Brexit?

UnHerd: How Farage outflanked everyone

Farage’s new vehicle, the Brexit Party, was only launched six weeks ago but is already a serious force. With more than 100,000 registered supporters, millions in funding and considerable potential in blue and red territory, Farage finally has something that he has never had before: a serious, professional, well-funded and well-organised movement. [...]

Farage’s return is a clear symptom of his opponents’ complete failure to make sense of our post-referendum world. As a result, they are baffled and wrong-footed by his return. Farage has outplayed them all. But rather than meet this moment with imagination, too many in our politics and media have shown that they have no imagination at all. Rather than chart a new course, many have sought shelter in the dusty attic from which they plucked the unsuccessful arguments of 2016.

Instead of meeting Farage-ism head on, his opponents have recycled uninspiring, managerial and incredibly weak arguments about process; about how parties are funded, about Arron Banks, about money. It is telling that this week a former Prime Minister, leader of the Labour Party and political heavyweight, chose to focus his attack against Farage on the issue of PayPal. Ideas have left the building. [...]

Most of them, as we know from several studies, share a cluster of intensely-held concerns; they care deeply about a loss of national sovereignty, the clear lack of control over immigration, a political system that no longer looks or feels responsive to citizens and a wider dismissal of the one thing that they cherish more than anything else: the national community.

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Quartz: Are the UK’s two leading political parties on the edge of collapse?

“I think it is fair to say that this is the return of at least three-party politics,” political scientist John Curtice told the BBC. “But I suspect that on 23 May”—or the date of the forthcoming European Parliament elections—”we will discover that there are more than three significant players. We may see the most fragmented British electorate since the advent of mass British democracy.” [...]

Since 2016, the year the UK voted to leave the European Union, more than 20 MPs have resigned from roles in prime minister Theresa May’s government over her handling of Brexit. Some of these ministers were literally tasked with its execution, but have found developing a plan that works for everyone, or even has majority appeal, an insurmountable hurdle. May’s repeated attempts to pass her own deal with the EU have been utterly unsuccessful. Now, with less than six months to go before the UK’s new leave date, the future of the party, and its leadership, is far from certain. [...]

The Brexit Party’s only policy is that Britain should leave the European Union, and that it should do so at once, without a withdrawal agreement. Since the party’s registration with electoral authorities in February, polling has gone from zilch to 17%. At the same time, Conservative party support has dwindled, leaving the party conclusively trailing Labour for the first time all year. [...]

But the party’s inconsistent messaging saw it punished at the polls in recent local elections. At present, Labour is pushing for a snap general election. If it wins, its job will be just as hard as the incumbent’s. With Brexiteers across the political spectrum, any deal requires bipartisan support to have a hope of being passed—including a no-deal Brexit. At present, there is no incentive for Corbyn to “sign off” on May’s Brexit. Any pro-Brexit Tory leader is just as unlikely to be prepared to compromise with Labour.

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The Guardian: How Ukip normalised far-right politics

Since the Brexit vote in 2016 Ukip is no longer primarily concerned with attacking the European Union. Now led by Gerard Batten the party has started to normalise far-right ideas and has given roles to figures including Tommy Robinson.

Today in Focus: How Ukip embraced the far right

With Brexit talks stalled and some of its supporters pushing a betrayal narrative, the Guardian’s Peter Walker charts how Ukip has begun rising in the polls again. But how did the party come to fully embrace the far right in Britain? And do its supporters know how extreme it has become? Plus: Helen Pidd on what young voters in Bolsover make of the Brexit deal paralysis.

When the UK Independence party was first formed in 1993, its aim was to mobilise a relatively small group of voters whose main focus was getting Britain out of the European Union. In 2016, the party achieved what its leaders had always dreamed of: a referendum victory for leaving the EU. Since then, however, Ukip has gone through a succession of hapless leaders after the post-referendum departure of Nigel Farage. Now led by Gerard Batten, the party has begun explicitly appealing to far-right figures, such as Tommy Robinson, for advice and support.

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openDemocracy: Lexit: The biggest unicorn of them all

But it would be a mistake to say that Godfather Hayek’s red-blooded neoliberalism has ever been implemented by the EU, as there are simply too many variables, or governments, to contend with. Think of the dirigiste tendencies of the French or the social-welfare commitments of the Scandinavians. A neoliberal utopia has simply never arrived.[...]

Monnet saw the proto-EU as a way for governments to pool sovereignty in limited ways, in specific sectors. This would then, it was believed, generate 'spillover' effects such as increased loyalty by elites. The Monnet-inspired Schuman Declaration of 1950, which first proposed the pooling of coal and steel production, was clear: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Integration would lead national governments to lay down their arms in return for economic security. The national Barzinis and Corleones would finally be at peace.[...]

In contrast, ‘unreformable’ is the critique thrown at the EU by the left. But this doesn’t explain how Nigel Farage and other Brexiteers leveraged EU institutions to gain power and hoover up EU cash; it doesn’t explain why the far-right sees the European Parliament as a beach-head for reconstituting nationalist mafias – while getting paid for doing it. And it doesn’t explain why staunch EU critic Yanis Varoufakis is running for the EU parliament this year on a platform of radical change.[...]

Without a proper account of the EU’s complexity and origins, the Lexiter position tends to fall into a self-made abyss of misunderstanding. And without having the class power to back up its position, a Lexit – just like Brexit – may condemn the UK to perpetual autarky and possible disintegration.

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The Guardian: Why we stopped trusting elites

A modern liberal society is a complex web of trust relations, held together by reports, accounts, records and testimonies. Such systems have always faced political risks and threats. The template of modern expertise can be traced back to the second half of the 17th century, when scientists and merchants first established techniques for recording and sharing facts and figures. These were soon adopted by governments, for purposes of tax collection and rudimentary public finance. But from the start, strict codes of conduct had to be established to ensure that officials and experts were not seeking personal gain or glory (for instance through exaggerating their scientific discoveries), and were bound by strict norms of honesty. [...]

At the same time, and even more corrosively, when elected representatives come to be viewed as “insider liars”, it turns out that other professions whose job it is to report the truth – journalists, experts, officials – also suffer a slump in trust. Indeed, the distinctions between all these fact-peddlers start to look irrelevant in the eyes of those who’ve given up on the establishment altogether. It is this type of all-encompassing disbelief that creates the opportunity for rightwing populism in particular. Trump voters are more than twice as likely to distrust the media as those who voted for Clinton in 2016, according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, which adds that the four countries currently suffering the most “extreme trust losses” are Italy, Brazil, South Africa and the US. [...]

“We didn’t really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn’t already presume to be true,” the philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in 2014. “But it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data.” The nature of all these scandals suggests the emergence of a new form of “facts”, in the shape of a leaked archive – one that, crucially, does not depend on trusting the secondhand report of a journalist or official. These revelations are powerful and consequential precisely because they appear to directly confirm our fears and suspicions. Resentment towards “liberal elites” would no doubt brew even in the absence of supporting evidence. But when that evidence arises, things become far angrier, even when the data – such as Hillary Clinton’s emails – isn’t actually very shocking. [...]

But what is emerging now is what the social theorist Michel Foucault would have called a new “regime of truth” – a different way of organising knowledge and trust in society. The advent of experts and government administrators in the 17th century created the platform for a distinctive liberal solution to this problem, which rested on the assumption that knowledge would reside in public records, newspapers, government files and journals. But once the integrity of these people and these instruments is cast into doubt, an opportunity arises for a new class of political figures and technologies to demand trust instead.

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The Guardian: Let’s be honest about what’s really driving Brexit: bigotry

Yet I think it is time to be a bit more honest and plain-speaking about those circumstances. For the most part, the debate about Brexit since the 2016 referendum has been framed primarily in economic terms. The leavers have spoken excitedly about the free-trade bonanza that supposedly lies the other side of 29 March. Remainers point out that Britain is cutting itself off from the largest single market in the world. [...]

Look at the evidence. In June 2017, a report collated from the British Social Attitudes survey showed that the most significant factor in the leave vote was anxiety about the number of people coming to the UK. A comprehensive study published by Nuffield College in April drew similar conclusions about the salience of immigration in attitudes to Brexit. “Take back control” was indeed the slogan of the leave campaign, but it was “control” with one purpose, above all others, at its heart. [...]

For decades there was something close to a political consensus that the most important metric was economic prosperity. A wealthy nation was essential both to the aspirations of individual households and the funding of public services. The Tories might give greater weight to the former, Labour to the latter. Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown had radically different visions of social justice and collective responsibility, of the relationship between taxation and public spending. But they were as one in their conviction that nothing much was possible without a strong economy. [...]

As long ago as January 2014, Nigel Farage was explicit about this: “If you said to me, would I like to see over the next 10 years a further 5 million people come into Britain and if that happened we’d all be slightly richer, I’d say, I’d rather we weren’t slightly richer.”

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Jacobin Magazine: What Is a Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Rees-Mogg’s background is comically elitist: the son of a former Times editor, William Rees-Mogg, he attended the private boarding school Eton, then studied history at Oxford. Rees-Mogg the Younger is fully aware of the class privilege he exudes; indeed, he emphasizes and plays it up: opting for anachronistic outfits, an Instagram account stuffed with photographs of himself in double-breasted suits, or his young children dancing on a Union Jack rug. In parliament and in media interviews, Rees-Mogg appears to have been invented purely to act as a living example of pleonasm: his speeches and remarks are long-winded and reliant on stuffy, antiquated and obscure vocabulary, deliberately obfuscating meaning in an attempt to appear more intelligent than his opponent.[...]

Class allows both Rees-Mogg and Johnson to propose outlandish right-wing ideas with less fear of repercussion: by playing into the stereotypes of the bumbling but erudite elite gentleman, they provide a necessary psychological distance between the ideas and the man beneath them. When they go too far, they’re merely dismissed as acting eccentrically; if others agree with them, the far-right thinking is whitewashed as mere upper-class fun, packaging it in far more palatable clothing. The messaging of Rees-Mogg rarely differs from that of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, but they speak to different people: Farage playing into the “man of the people” charade, and Rees-Mogg remaining aloof, playing a caricature of an English toff, and insisting his political stances are the result of both serious intellectual endeavor and straightforward common sense.

At first glance, Rees-Mogg appears to be little more than a complex joke: peel away the layers, and it becomes clear he has no plans to become Conservative leader — who would want to when the party and country are in such disarray? Instead, he’s playing a far longer game. As the far right — traditionally found in fringe groups like the British National Party, English Defence League, and recently formed Football Lads Alliance — gains ground in the UK, Rees-Mogg and his fellow travelers are working within the Conservative party to steer it further to the right, undoing David Cameron’s long appeal to the center. For Rees-Mogg, politics remains a low-stakes affair: he has nothing to lose, and a huge mountain of cash to support him should he retire early. That makes him all the more dangerous.

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The New Yorker: New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit

Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor of exiting the European Union. The U.K. narrowly voted for the so-called Brexit in June, 2016. The tumultuous fallout has roiled the U.K. ever since, threatening the government of the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May. [...]

The precise role played by foreign entities in promoting and possibly funding Brexit has been clouded in mystery and controversy. British law forbids foreign contributions to its political campaigns—just as U.S. law bars foreign campaign contributions. The laws are designed to prevent international manipulation of domestic affairs. Executives working for Cambridge Analytica, which filed for bankruptcy this spring, have categorically denied that the firm was paid to do any work for the Leave.EU campaign. The new e-mails do not contradict that, but show that, even if the firm was not paid for its services, it laid some of the early groundwork for the Leave.EU campaign. The e-mails show that Banks and others in the Leave.EU leadership met with Cambridge Analytica executives in 2015, and discussed what Banks called a “two-stage process” that would “get CA”—Cambridge Analytica—“on the team.” [...]

Whether foreign funds secretly supported the Brexit movement has become the focus of intense speculation and investigation in the U.K. The British probes, in many respects, are parallel to the Robert Mueller investigation of possible Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Banks has drawn particular scrutiny because his business spent some nine million pounds supporting the Brexit campaign, making him the country’s single largest political-campaign donor by far, despite questions about whether he had the personal wealth to contribute that much on his own. Banks has insisted that his contributions were legal, and that foreign sources, including Russia, contributed no funds. But multiple British agencies have launched inquiries, including a criminal investigation into Banks’s role by the National Crime Agency, the U.K.’s equivalent to the F.B.I. [...]

The American investigations into foreign interference in Trump’s election, and British probes into Brexit, have increasingly become interwoven. The role of the Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, has reportedly been the subject of interest both to Mueller’s investigators and to those in the U.K., who have examined his relationship to Banks. The role of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the far-right, Euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party, who has been an ally of Bannon and Trump, has also reportedly stirred the interest of investigators in both countries, especially after he was spotted in 2017 leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, in which Julian Assange has taken refuge. Assange’s media platform, WikiLeaks, published many of the e-mails stolen by Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election season.

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statista: The most popular political figures in the UK

In a time of political upheaval and uncertainty in the UK with key figures pulling in very different directions, where do the public's affections lie? Unsurprisingly, it is as split as the political landscape itself. According to the latest YouGov 'Ratings', Boris Johnson and Theresa May enjoy the most positive opinions from the public, both of which having a 32 percent favourability rating. The Labour leader Corbyn is in third place with 30 percent of respondents saying they view him positively.

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Politico: Merkel joins Macron in calling for EU army to complement NATO

“Jean-Claude Juncker already said that a common European army would show the world that there would never again be war in Europe,” Merkel said, referring to the European Commission president, who was in the Parliament chamber.

“This is not an army against NATO, it can be a good complement to NATO,” Merkel said. At the same time, Merkel noted that Europe faces numerous logistical obstacles to greater military and defense integration, including too many different weapons system — more than 150 by her count, compared to 50 or 60 in the U.S.[...]

“We have to create a European intervention unit with which Europe can act on the ground where necessary,” Merkel continued. “We have taken major steps in the field of military cooperation, this is good and largely supported in this house. But I also have to say, seeing the developments of the recent years, that we have to work on a vision to establish a real European army one day.”

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