The Observer view on India’s aggression over Kashmir

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and the ruling nationalist BJP stand accused of acting without proper legal authority by unilaterally revoking article 370 of the constitution, which guarantees Kashmir’s special status. Delhi’s arbitrary bifurcation of the state into two union territories (Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh) is also legally contentious. Opponents say Modi has opted for “raw power” over legitimacy.

Modi also ignored UN resolutions on the internationally recognised dispute with Pakistan over sovereign control of the Kashmir region and, notably, the 1972 Simla agreement, which stipulates that its final status must be settled by peaceful means. That point was made last week by the UN secretary-general while appealing for “maximum restraint”. To cap it all, Modi failed to consult Kashmir’s political leaders, whether pro-independence or pro-India, or the Kashmiri people. Quite the opposite, in fact. Political leaders were placed under house arrest. The population was placed under curfew. Means of association and communication were cut. And massive army deployments have been used to enforce Delhi’s diktat. [...]

Khan has limited options. His country is severely indebted. Modi has been clever in strengthening ties with Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia that traditionally bankrolled Pakistan. None of them spoke up on Islamabad’s behalf last week. Meanwhile, relations with the US have become strained, not least over Afghanistan.

read the article

The Observer view on Boris Johnson’s Brexit fantasies

When politicians can spread untruths with little accountability and few electoral consequences, an irreversible rot starts to set into the political system. There’s no greater indicator that this is happening in Britain today than the fact that a man within spitting distance of Downing Street is getting away with deploying utterly misleading information about what might happen in the aftermath of a no-deal Brexit, in order to strengthen his leadership bid. [...]

Johnson’s claims contradict the views of trade experts. The House of Commons library summarises it thus: “Trade law experts have repeatedly and authoritatively dismissed the view that the relevant rule offers an easy solution to UK trade with the EU in the case of ‘no deal’.” So Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, was entirely correct to reject Johnson’s assertion. If there is no withdrawal agreement when Brexit happens, Britain and the EU will have to trade under WTO tariffs, unless they choose to lift tariffs for other countries. [...]

A no-deal Brexit will have destructive economic and political consequences for the country. The government’s forecast is that it would depress GDP between 7.7% and 9.3% over a 15-year period and it is the least affluent areas of the nation that will be hit worst in terms of jobs and growth. Moreover, a no-deal Brexit risks the breakup of the UK; it would increase the pressure for a vote on Irish unity and fuel the campaign for Scottish independence. This does not seem to worry the Conservative members who will select our next prime minister. One poll last week suggests they are so ideological about Brexit that they are happy to countenance significant economic damage, the breakup of the union and the destruction of their own party in order to see it happen. Johnson is currently expected to secure a comfortable victory among them, despite the fact that 40% believe he cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

read the article

The Observer view on Theresa May’s calamitous Brexit strategy | Observer editorial

It is certainly the case that Donald Tusk, president of the council of ministers, caught Mrs May unawares with his blunt declaration that her Chequers plan was unworkable. For the past two years, Mr Tusk has played good cop to bad cop Michel Barnier, the chief EU negotiator. But while Mr Tusk is an anglophile, he is also an ardent believer in the European project, as befits a former Polish prime minister. He has been a candid friend to Mrs May, but he could not force her to listen, so in the end he mockingly cast her adrift. [...]

From the start, EU leaders insisted no cherrypicking of withdrawal terms would be allowed. But Mrs May ignored them. The complex issues raised by the Northern Ireland border were flagged up early on. But only in recent months, to the profound frustration of the Irish government, have Mrs May and her cabinet taken this question seriously – and she still lacks a solution. EU officials complain, with justice, that her inflexible negotiating stance revealed an ignorant disregard, or lack of understanding, of the basic principles upon which the EU is based, namely the single market, free movement of people and goods and a common regulatory and legal framework. [...]

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Mrs May’s performance last week was that the EU leaders’ multiple rebuffs clearly took her by surprise. Why so? They were merely reiterating positions they have maintained for the past two years or more. Does she now, finally, grasp the evidence of her own eyes and ears? Does she understand her Chequers plan, rejected at home and abroad, is doomed? And does she really still believe a no-deal outcome could be anything other than a catastrophe? Judging by Friday’s negative, aggressive Downing Street statement, she remains in denial. She has learned nothing – and has absolutely nothing new to offer. Mrs May is in a very deep hole, but she will not stop digging.

read the article

The Observer view on why Theresa May must stop the Brexit clock

The English, it is often said, lacking in language skills, have an unfortunate habit of shouting at foreigners when travelling abroad, assuming that by raising their voices and waving their arms, their needs will eventually be understood. This approach rarely works well. It tends to annoy those on the receiving end, while failing to assist mutual comprehension. Yet this, in sum, is what the hard Tory Brexiters have been reduced to as pressure grows to avoid a national “no-deal” catastrophe when the UK quits the EU next March. [...]

May’s cabinet colleagues, fanning out across the continent like Patton’s Third Army to advance her Chequers compromise, do not appear to have fared any better. Especially embarrassing are the efforts of Jeremy Hunt, the new foreign secretary. He gravely warned puzzled Europeans last week that Britain was heading for “no-deal by accident” by pushing itself off a cliff. The UK would not “blink first”, he added. Perhaps Hunt thinks he is Clint Eastwood. It matters not. On Brexit, this government has its eyes tight shut. It is blind to the consequences – and the waiting chasm. Blinking does not come into it. [...]

“The UK knows well the benefits of the single market. It has contributed to shaping our rules over the last 45 years. And yet some UK proposals would undermine our single market, which is one of the EU’s biggest achievements. The UK wants to keep free movement of goods between us, but not of people and services. And it proposes to apply EU customs rules without being part of the EU’s legal order. The UK wants to take back sovereignty and control of its own laws, which we respect, but it cannot ask the EU to lose control of its borders and laws,” Barnier wrote.

read the article

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.

read the article

The Observer view on the danger John Bolton poses to world peace

Despite the calamitous post-9/11 consequences of his neoconservative ideology, arrogant unilateralism and America First nationalism, Bolton has never acknowledged error. He continues, for example, to argue for forcible regime change in Iran and North Korea. Stuck in a unipolar quagmire of his own intellectual making, the louder he shouts, the deeper he sinks. The world has changed since 2003, but he hasn’t. As the New York Times declared last week, Bolton is a truly dangerous man. A worse choice as the US president’s senior adviser on global security affairs is hard to imagine. [...]  

A probable scenario now is that the US side will make demands it knows Kim cannot accept, such as halting his nuclear weapons programme and unilaterally disarming, and will then blame Pyongyang for the ensuing failure. “You see, we tried,” Bolton will say. “So now there is no alternative to bombing.” [...]

In Iran itself, hardline clerics who denounce Bolton as a “sponsor of terrorism” may privately be content to see the gloves come off with Israel and its US and Saudi allies. So, too, may Palestinians ghettoised in Gaza. Perhaps the Middle East was ever a powder keg. But by picking Bolton, and appointing Mike Pompeo, another pro-Israel hawk, as secretary of state, Trump has lit the blue touchpaper.  

read the article

The Observer: Democracy dies without transparency and fairness

The ability to spend large sums on micro-targeted advertising based on revealing data harvested from voters’ social media profile removes much of that transparency. If the material in question goes unseen by the vast majority of voters, it becomes harder to track exactly what a party is putting out, so easier to put out false claims, and for spending to go undeclared, particularly when the money is channelled through little-known intermediaries. Social media platforms are overtaking the national and local press as the channels through which politicians communicate with voters, but they perform that function without the same level of scrutiny, regardless of their own ideological or business interests. Anomalies abound. Broadcast advertising is banned; yet advertising on YouTube – where videos can garner more viewers than primetime television – is unlimited so long as it is within spending limits.  [...]

We don’t know how effective Cambridge Analytica’s efforts were at changing voters’ minds. We don’t know whether the extra spending Vote Leave channelled via BeLeave helped swing the referendum result. Clearly, the poll revealed deep schisms within Britain, fuelled by discontent with the status quo among the electorate. Those sentiments were not manufactured by malevolent actors deploying subterfuge.

The Observer has made no secret of its belief that Brexit is not in the national interest. But asking questions about transparency and fairness is driven not by a partisan wish to overturn a referendum result, but the desire for a critical debate about whether our electoral laws, and ultimately our democracy, remain fit for purpose. Left or right; remain or leave: this debate concerns democrats from all political traditions.

read the article

The Observer view on Theresa May’s Brexit speech

May’s speech, signalling a fundamental parting of the ways, was a defeat for the business people, trade unionists and community leaders who rightly fear for the country’s future prosperity, cohesion and jobs. It was a defeat for young people, British and European, who, more so than older generations, will perforce inhabit an ugly new world of harder borders, work permits, bureaucracy and pervasive state intrusion. [...]

Bad because, in overall terms, the proposed settlement is neither one thing nor the other. Britain will not have its cake and eat it, in Boris Johnson’s preposterous parlance. It will simply have less cake. May rejected the single market largely because of its freedom-of-movement provisions. Even though employers have been telling her for months that Britain relies on EU workers, the prime minister remains foolishly frit of Daily Mail spectres of invading foreign hordes.

Yet even as she rejected it, May recognised the benefits of the single market, sought continued, frictionless, access to it, and lamely admitted that we will all be the poorer for being outside it. What kind of leadership is this? Such self-contradictory thinking would give Descartes a headache. The same applies to her Through the Looking Glass “customs partnership” wheeze that, she said, would “mirror EU requirements”. If she means future customs arrangements will be reversed, back to front and inside out, she may well be right. What a nightmare of red tape is now in prospect from those who promised a liberating bonfire on the cliffs of Dover and will create, instead, a giant lorry-park.

read the article