The Guardian: Labour councils launch slavery statue review as another is removed

All statues in Labour councils across England and Wales, and across London, will be examined for links to slavery and plantation owners, their leaders have said, as an east London authority took one down off its plinth on Tuesday evening. [...]

Earlier, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the capital’s landmarks – including street names, the names of public buildings and plaques – would be reviewed by a commission to ensure they reflect the capital’s diversity, with a view to removing those with links to slavery after Black Lives Matter protesters tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.

In Manchester, the council announced a city-wide review of all the statues in Manchester “to understand their history and context”. Councillor Luthfur Rahman said members of the public would also be asked for suggestions on “missing” statues. [...]

Pressed on Sky News about where to draw the line, given Winston Churchill held some racist views, Khan said the cases of Churchill, Gandhi and Malcolm X showed that many great historical figures were not perfect and history should be taught “warts and all”. But there were clear-cut figures such as those actively involved in the slave trade and ownership who should not be celebrated, the mayor said. [...]

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has said it was “completely wrong” for protesters to pull down the statue of Colston and dump it in the harbour in Bristol – putting him at odds with some MPs on the left of his party – while emphasising the monument should never have been there in the first place.

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The Huffington Post: This Is London's Murder Rate Compared To Major US Cities

In 2018, the UK capital saw 1.8 murders per 100,000 people, fewer than New York, Austin and San Diego. [...]

The murder rate in Baltimore is a whopping 31 times higher per capita. New Orleans is 22.4 times higher and Detroit 22 times.[...]

Khan’s spokesman released a scathing rebuke, pointing out the comment was taken out of context. 

The mayor had “more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet”, he said.

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UnHerd: Just how English is London?

‘English’ is both an ethnic and national designation. The English, for example, are the largest ethnic group in most of the more populated parts of English-speaking Canada, in the American state of Utah and in northern New England (see light purple shades on the linked map). They are also an overwhelming majority – around 70% – of the population of England. In London, however, they make up no more than 45% of the total. [...]

Equally, those of English national identity are also a majority in England, but not in London. Of England’s residents, 60% said they were ‘English Only’ in the 2011 census. In London, this was only 37%. This is because more than any other groups, ethnically English people also claim their national identity to be ‘English’.

Even though, according to the ONS Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), minorities under 30 are increasingly identifying as ‘English’, it is still accurate to claim that London is not an English-majority city in either ethnic or national terms. [...]

If this is the case, then a good test of what nationality ‘British not English’ Londoners hold deep down would be to see if they back the English football team, or feel defensive about the anti-English barbs levelled by relatives in Wales or Scotland, or care when they hear that Scotland gets more out of the Treasury than England. If they do, they quite possibly do have an English national identity. Though because they imagine a white, traditional Englishness, rather than the more modern version, they consciously reject it. On this measure there are only a few Londoners who aren’t English – unconsciously or otherwise.

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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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The Observer view on how Trump’s scorn has laid Britain’s isolation bare

Britain’s response to this global uncertainty beggars belief. On the one hand, we are turning our backs on the European Union, trying and failing to figure out how to disentangle ourselves from the world’s most successful – even if imperfect – diplomatic and trade alliance. On the other, we are putting ever greater store in the “special relationship” with the US, just at the very moment Trump is undermining multilateralism and co-operation in the west. [...]

Second, Trump’s values fundamentally clash with those of modern Britain. Attitudes to immigration in Britain have become more, not less, positive in recent years; where issues about immigration exist, they are driven mainly by pragmatic concerns. The proportion of people whose hostility to immigration is driven by opposition to other ethnicities or religions shrank from 13% in 2011 to 5% today. The president, on the other hand, was comfortable using his visit to sound his anti-immigration dog whistles and to continue his hateful attacks on Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor. On Thursday, it emerged that one of Trump’s envoys complained to the British ambassador to the United States about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, for disrupting a British trial. [...]

But there is one big difference: while the global might of the US imbues Trump with the power to act unilaterally, the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have an utterly inflated view of Britain’s place in the world that harks back to Britain as a 19th-century colonial power. They want us to leave a trading bloc, whose rules and regulations we have had a powerful role in shaping, in order to become a rule-taker through free trade deals with economies much bigger than ours. The US would undoubtedly dictate the terms of a trade deal with Britain – a race to the bottom on regulatory standards.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Says Europe Is ‘Losing’ Its Culture Because Of Immigration

“And I don’t mean that in a positive way,” Trump told the paper in a sit-down interview. “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you’re losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.” [...]

“You have a mayor who has done a terrible job in London. He’s done a terrible job,” Trump said of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, with whom the president has had a long-running feud. “Take a look at the terrorism that’s taking place. Look at what’s going on. He’s done a terrible job.”

Trump continued, “I think that all of this immigration has really changed the fabric of Europe. Now, I speak as an outsider when I say that, but I speak as somebody who loves Europe, and I think it’s too bad. I think he’s done a very bad job on terrorism. I think he’s done a bad job on crime.”

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Politico: Europe tries to clear the air

Bulgaria, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council for the first half of 2018, said it would make air quality “a focus” of its presidency. The country has experienced the problem first hand: It has the highest death rate related to air pollution in the bloc, with over 13,000 premature fatalities a year linked to fine particulate pollution — out of nearly 400,000 for the whole EU. [...]

Dirty air is a Continent-wide problem. Central and Eastern European countries struggle with dust and fine particulate pollution, where low-quality domestic heating units are often a major source of those pollutants. And Western European countries are recording high levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant closely linked to diesel vehicle exhaust, in their cities.

Five of them — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. — were given a final warning in early 2017 by the Commission, the last step before being taken to the European Court of Justice. [...]

In one of them, France’s highest court gave the government until March 31 to come up with tougher measures to tackle high levels of nitrogen dioxide. In the U.K., the leading NGO on this issue, ClientEarth, launched its third legal challenge against the government’s air-quality plans in November, with a decision expected in the coming months.

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Bloomberg: Here's Why Theresa May Is So Furious at Trump

The Dutch political scientist Cas Muddle says that right-wing extremist movements advocate at least three of the following five doctrines: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, opposition to democracy and support for strong states. Using this definition, researchers from the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue recently analyzed over 5,000 pieces of far-right content gathered from over 50 different platforms used by these groups. Their findings are striking.

What's new is the level of cooperation and cross-pollination among groups that gather for crowdfunding on alternative platforms such as the Twitter-like Gab.ai and Hatreon, and on Discord, a chat application originally developed for gamers. The research suggests that the Daily Stormer — the neo-Nazi website associated with the alt-right — made the fourth-most-frequent use of the hashtag #MGGA (Make Germany Great Again) to help promote the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party that just entered the German parliament. The alt-right hacker Andrew Auernheimer (best known by his pseudonym weev) reached out to French and Germans to build troll armies that could influence European elections. [...]

The U.K. has experienced a rise in hate crimes (which also spiked during the 2016 campaign that preceded the vote to leave the European Union) following terrorist attacks on Manchester and London Bridge in May and June this year. The U.K. government reports a 27 percent increase in hate crimes this year over last year. [...]

Trump's retweets and his subsequent defense of them undermined British policies to counter far-right extremism at home. They have thus  prompted the most serious diplomatic row between the two allies since Ronald Reagan had to apologize for leaving Margaret Thatcher out of the loop in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. That was short-lived. Thatcher and Reagan had a strong friendship and working relationship and were united against a common enemy. Trump and May have no friendship, a strained working relationship and now Trump seems to have taken up with the enemy. No wonder May is struggling to find common ground.

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CityLab: London's Future: More People, Fewer Cars

The most eye-catching feature of the report is a near-blanket ban on new parking across much of the city. In Central London and in a constellation of new development zones grouped around outer transit hubs, new car parking spaces will be forbidden altogether. In the few, less central areas of inner London where new parking will be permitted, it will be at a rate of no more than 0.25 spaces per new housing unit.

This zero-tolerance policy may sound strict to future motorists, but it’s also part of a wholesale reimagining of London as a city where the automobile is an endangered species. (Already, private cars no longer dominate city streets.) There are major new transit links on the way, mentioned in the London Plan although not introduced by it. Beyond Crossrail 1— a major east-west heavy rail link due to start service next year—the plan predicts the approval of Crossrail 2, a new north-south counterpart that will ease access to central London from the suburbs and exurbs. Meanwhile, an extension of the existing Bakerloo tube line out to southeast London is also in the cards. [...]

The Draft London Plan shows awareness of this. In fact one of its key priorities is the development of smaller housing plots, of a scale that can house between one and 25 homes. The plan stipulates a target of 245,000 new homes on such sites, more than a third of all homes planned for the city. This seems prudent. Bar a few brownfield sites, there aren’t many large unused pockets in the outer boroughs, but there are many areas scattered with low-rise homes with large gardens that could be filled in with small homes, or parades of shops that could see upper floors added. Such efforts to cram in affordable units would be likely to meet some resistance, but the sheer value of space in London has already seen many homeowners adding as much extra space as they can within existing planning laws, extending kitchens and family rooms into their gardens, squaring out lofts into full rooms, and installing guest cabins or offices in gardens.  

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Politico: Donald Trump and the wrath of Khan

Britons with living memories of past American presidents have been startled by Trump’s attack on the mayor of London at a time when the city was “reeling” — to quote a New York Times headline that was widely, and deservedly, pilloried. The morally upright Carter, the avuncular Reagan, the courtly George H.W. Bush, the folksy Clinton, the gregarious George W. Bush, the eloquent Obama — all of them, to be sure, would have responded to Britain’s grief with vigorous words of support and offers of assistance. They would have invoked the special relationship. [...]

Bafflement quickly gave way to anger as Trump showed no signs of remorse. It was left to Lewis Lukens, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in London — Trump has yet to put an ambassador in place — to soothe inflamed British public opinion. “I commend the strong leadership of the mayor of London as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack,” he tweeted. The tweet was sent from @USAInUK, the embassy’s Twitter account, but Lukens bravely added his own signature to the text. [...]

Khan troubles Trump spiritually. He cannot comprehend him as a political type. Khan is a devout Muslim who has repeatedly spoken out against radical Islam. He is a bus driver’s son who is the precise example of the integrated Muslim that many in the West clamor for in this age of Islamism and religious separatists. He is the mayor of the world’s most important city (alongside New York) and his popularity has soared after his brushes with Trump, whose inability to digest the existence of a mainstream Muslim politician in Britain is a result of his instinctive dismissal of Muslims as a people of civic consequence.

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