Al Jazeera: Will the Scottish National Party lose to Corbynism?

At the UK's snap general election on June 8, the SNP shed 21 of its 56 Westminster seats and saw its share of the vote slump by 13 points. Angus Robertson, the party's chief strategist, and Alex Salmond, its former leader, both lost their once rock-solid constituencies in the rural north-east. Towering nationalist majorities across Glasgow and the central belt crumbled. Even the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a modest Caledonian revival, adding three new Scottish MPs, in Edinburgh, Dunbartonshire, and Caithness, to their previous, solitary total of one. [...]

Remarkably, given the scale of its losses, the SNP hasn't collapsed into acrimony, nor is Sturgeon's leadership in any serious trouble. However, a debate is starting to brew within nationalist circles about the exact nature and purpose of SNP strategy - a strategy that is clearly no longer working.

The most urgent criticisms are coming from the left. Some senior nationalists, such as Tommy Sheppard, the MP for Edinburgh East, want the party to embrace a more radical social democratic identity. They are worried that the appeal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn runs much deeper in Scotland than anyone had initially anticipated and that, in the event of another election, the SNP could haemorrhage seats in its urban and working-class heartlands.  [...]

Davidson's unexpected success capped the resurgence of a party that had been relegated to the fringes of Scottish political life in the late 1990s, but has now navigated its way back into the mainstream on a wave of unionist frustration. For the first time since Holyrood was created 18 years ago, the Scottish right is brimming with confidence. Davidson has cast Sturgeon's referendum U-turn as a personal victory, and is pressing the SNP for additional concessions, notably, that any talk of independence is suspended until at least the next Scottish election in 2021, and that the nationalists get back to their "day job" of running Scotland within the constraints of the current devolutionary settlement. [...]

The numbers are stark. At the 2014 independence referendum, 1.6 million Scots voted "Yes" on a record-breaking turnout of 84 percent. The following year, at the 2015 UK election, the SNP soaked up most of that base, winning 1.4 million votes. At the 2016 Scottish devolved election, the SNP vote dipped to just over one million. In June, it dipped again, to 980,000, on a massively reduced turnout of 66 percent.

read the article 

CityLab: Confronting the Myths of Suburban Poverty

A lot of our discourse around suburban poverty says, “Well, suburban probably is really a problem for old inner-tier suburbs that are bordering higher poverty neighborhoods in cities.” But poverty is pervasive across the suburban regions of all metro areas, whether they’re new or old. In fact, the rates of change have been more severe in newer suburbs—those built after 1970—than in older suburbs. When you break out the suburban regions, there are more poor people in the newer suburbs combined than in the older suburbs. That’s an important finding. [...]

There are a couple of other demographic changes that are important to realize here, too. One is the increase in the share of households in suburbs that are single-parent households. And we know those households are are most vulnerable to falling into poverty. The places in suburbs where poverty problems have become particularly acute are where a larger share of the population doesn’t have advanced training or education past high school. [...]

One of the common narratives around rising poverty problems in the suburbs is that this is the result of poor families moving from the central city out. Sure, in some places, increases in poverty are related to out-migration from the cities. But those migration trends have been present for more than 50 years. For decades, middle-class and lower-income households have been moving from cities to suburbs, looking for more affordable homes, safer neighborhoods, better schools, and more community amenities. That pattern persists today, but is not likely to be the largest or most important factor in many places. In fact, the most important factor is change in the labor market—the decline of the number of good-paying low-skilled jobs. [...]

One of the false narratives I push back against in the book is that poverty is a problem for cities, and in particular for people of color. That’s a big element of the political rhetoric of this administration. Poverty problems are in all our communities. They affect all types of families of all races and ethnicities. That rhetoric creates an “othering” of poverty, and it undermines our support for safety net programs and services. Rhetoric really matters—it directly shape how we think of our responsibilities and who we think of as deserving of help.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Will Trump strike North Korea?

However, Kim Jong-un has presented himself a hothead in the past, especially during the crisis of 2013, so there is a good chance that he will order a general mobilisation of the North Korean military following the very first strike. He can even order the use of his military's ballistic missile capabilities before the US forces in South Korea are able to persuade their South Korean counterparts that it's time to march north.

How will China respond to all this? Probably not as they did during the first Korean War, but they are unlikely to welcome US forces crossing the demilitarised zone. Indeed, they may well begin supplying their North Korean "allies" with intelligence, satellite imagery, radar data and radio intercepts in order to prolong the conflict and perhaps prevent the final collapse of the North Korean regime on American terms. We do not know how Beijing will respond, but hedging and some assistance to Pyongyang absolutely remain distinct possibilities. [...]

So for all these reasons, and mainly because the US does not want the bloody mayhem that is likely to ensue in the event of strikes, the Trump administration should not hit North Korea. There is still the vague hope that China can be persuaded to heavily sanction North Korea and thus force Pyongyang back to the negotiating table on the nuclear question. Also, China and Russia do not support and are unlikely to ever support US strikes on North Korea.

read the article 

Motherboard: France Wants to Ban Diesel and Gas Vehicles by 2040

France could clear its roads of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, according to the country's environment minister Nicolas Hulot, who on Thursday announced radical environmental directives as part of President Emmanuel Macron's Paris Agreement agenda.

"The threat to our fellow citizens is diffuse, unpredictable, and the exact timeline can not be scientifically determined," Hulot said in a prepared statement from France's Ministry of Ecology, according to France's largest newspaper Le Monde. "Our responsibility is to make this subject dominant over all others."

Between now and 2040, the French government will reduce sales and advertising of petrol and diesel vehicles, seeking to enforce a complete ban on 100 percent diesel, and petrol-reliant vehicles, within 22 years. France joins Germany, India, Holland and Norway in seeking to ban vehicles that rely on diesel and petrol combustion. [...]

To start France's transition, Hulot said that owners of high pollutant vehicles will receive government incentives whereby they will be eligible to trade what they have for cleaner cars. [...]

Other initiatives announced by Hulot include reducing France's usage of nuclear energy to just 50 percent of the country's entire energy mix by 2025, closing excess nuclear reactors in the meantime. Hulot also announced that France would end all coal energy production by 2022, hoping to achieve complete carbon neutrality for the country by 2050. In 2015, 2.2 percent of France's electricity production came from coal.

read the article 

Politico: EU identifies the ultimate European city

A new index by the EU Joint Research Centre published Thursday measures 168 cities in 30 European countries and ranks how they perform in 29 areas of culture and creativity.

The ideal city would have the cultural venues of Cork, the cultural attractiveness and knowledge-based jobs of Paris, the innovation of Eindhoven, the new creative jobs of Umeå, the education system of Leuven, the openness, tolerance and trust of Glasgow, the connectedness of Utrecht and the good governance of Copenhagen. [...]

EU researchers found that while capital cities fly high, smaller cities often do better. The capitals of Austria, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Netherlands and the U.K. all finished in second place or worse within their country.

Amsterdam and Łódź are at opposite ends of the index’s “cultural vibrancy” ratings despite having a similar population. Meanwhile, tiny Weimar in Germany achieved the same score as London and Berlin.

The index represents a major effort to inject “soft” issues such as culture into political debates about the future of Europe. It builds on emerging academic and economic consensus that the “creative economy” is an important foundation for thriving economies.

read the article