The Guardian: Brexit Britain is out of options. Our humiliation is painful to watch

We have been vindicated on every point. The Trump visit ought to be a moment of national awakening. Instead, it has been a national humiliation. A government and an opposition with an ounce of self-respect would have responded to Trump’s ultimatum that he would not allow a trade deal unless we delivered the Brexit he wanted by reassessing our decision to leave the EU. A Conservative party that still respected itself and the country would have revolted at the impertinence of the leader of an increasingly hostile foreign power telling them to see Boris Johnson as “a great prime minister”.

Instead, Theresa May’s government allowed the special relationship to become an abusive relationship. Like a battered wife lying to the police, it pretended that Trump had not insulted May and that a trade deal would go ahead and then waited for a pathological liar to lie that he had never said what he had said, on the record and on tape.   [...]

A second defeat is worth noting. To its proponents, Brexit was never meant to threaten Britain’s security. By last week, it was clear that Trump’s America, on which the Tory right has gambled our futures, is a clear and present danger to Nato. With a wonderful serendipity, as Trump was meeting the Queen, the US Department of Justice indicted 12 alleged Russian spies for helping Trump to power. We already know that Russia wanted Trump because he was against Nato and because, in all his foul harangues, has never once uttered a bad word about Putin.

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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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Quartz: Europe keeps setting clean-energy records

The UK’s electrical grid has not burned any coal for about 1,000 hours so far this year. Though it’s just a symbolic achievement, the pace at which the UK is reaching such figures shows the pace of the energy transition. In 2016 and 2017, the comparable figures for the full year stood at 210 hours and 624 hours, respectively.

There are two reasons for the shift: a carbon tax on coal has made cleaner natural gas more attractive, and subsidies for solar and wind power have ensured wider deployment of new clean-energy technologies [...]

But as the costs of renewable energy have come down, change is finally showing. In 2018 so far, coal generated about 35.1% of the country’s electricity. In comparison, renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and biomass, generated about 36.5%. At the half-year mark, it’s the first time in Germany’s history that renewables sources have generated more electricity than coal.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Montesquieu

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) whose works on liberty, monarchism, despotism, republicanism and the separation of powers were devoured by intellectuals across Europe and New England in the eighteenth century, transforming political philosophy and influencing the American Constitution. He argued that an individual's liberty needed protection from the arm of power, checking that by another power; where judicial, executive and legislative power were concentrated in the hands of one figure, there could be no personal liberty.

With

Richard Bourke Professor in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary, University of London

Rachel Hammersley Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at Newcastle University

Richard Whatmore Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History

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Social Europe: The New EU Budget Under The Constraints Of Brexit And The Debt Brake

At the same time, a reform is overdue: Many challenges require European solutions: climate change, shortage of resources, high unemployment in many parts of Europe, social and economic inequalities as well as digitization and global instability. Keeping the status quo intact would send a bad signal about the effectiveness of the political union. Within this context, Brexit has come like any other unexpected event at a bad time. [...]

The policy-making power of the EU depends on the readiness to boost its sovereignty and on its financial provisions. Now the UK is leaving this comes over more as a ‘spending watchdog’ than as a committed protagonist of a political union. But other member states might take over the UK role. The ‘frugal four’ – Austria, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands – reject any increase in their contributions.  [...]

Looking at challenges as set out above, the strengthening of the social dimension of Europe must take first place. The EU Budget must aim for the perceptible improvement of living and working conditions of European citizens and the fight against increasing economic and social inequalities as well as the unacceptably high youth unemployment rate of up to 50%.

The most important instruments of European convergence policy, European Regional Development Fund and Cohesion Fund, are set at €273bn, the European Social Fund+ at €101bn. According to the Commission, both should be more strictly connected to the European Semester. ESF+ should be increased. However, its share of structural funds still remains too low in order to combat unemployment and poverty in an efficient manner. A shift of the Budget from direct payments to rural development (EAFRD) is the order of the day to combat rural migration.

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