The Guardian: Has nobody told Dominic Raab that Britain is an island?

In July 2016, on the eve of his appointment as secretary of state for Brexit, David Davis predicted that the whole thing would be a doddle. Brussels would cater to Britain’s needs and the prime minister would simultaneously negotiate “a free trade area massively larger than the EU”. Within a year, Davis had changed his tune. It was complicated, he conceded. In June 2017, he told an audience of business leaders that the intricacies of the negotiations “make the Nasa moonshot look quite simple”. In July 2018, Davis resigned. [...]

Last night, at a tech industry event, Raab admitted that his grasp of the detail had been upgraded with some salient facts – such as the importance of the Channel to commerce with Europe. “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this,” he said. “But if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.”[...]

A remain-supporting former cabinet minister once told me of frustration in dealing with pro-leave ministers in the early months of the May government. When presented with technical Brexit-related issues in their departments, the true believers would cry foul, saying obstacles were being blown out of proportion, or that the real problem was a lack of will and the solution was more faith. Thus the ludicrous situation arose where the people most seriously engaged in trying to imagine a way forward – the prime minister and the chancellor – had both voted remain. David Davis was the exception, since his job allowed no ducking of difficult questions. He had to confront facts and, when he resisted, the facts won.

read the article

New Statesman: British politics is being destroyed by a total lack of shame

The Conservative Party has said, rightly, that the ongoing problems with anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks are a scandal. But its correct criticisms of the Labour Party, ought to, if she had any sense of shame, mean that Kemi Badenoch wouldn’t have felt able to say that when the Muslim Council of Britain says there are institutional problems with Islamophobia in the Tory Party, it does so for a “political motive”. [...]

Scruton’s thesis is that the problem with the European project is that it has become an empire, that while there are good and bad empires, good empires seek to “protect local loyalties and customs under a canopy of civilisation and law”, but bad empires have no respect for the need for nations and their traditions. The European project sees national pride only through the prism of the destructive conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. Although he is more rhetorically sympathetic to Hungarian Jews’ inability to distinguish between positive and negative forms of nationalism, it is impossible to rescue this section from the charge of repeating a series of anti-Semitic tropes: that Jewish intellectuals and George Soros in particular form part of a supra-national project, and the classic “divided loyalties” trope that Jews are uneasy with their own nations. The rhetorical acknowledgement of existing problems of anti-Semitism in Hungarian society should be taken no more seriously than the same in the god knows how many rhetorical flourishes made by Labour politicians on the issue. [...]

This lack of shame allows MPs to, with a straight face, retain ministerial office in the face of scandal, defend the indefensible and powers the breakdown of our political norms. As so often when politics breaks down, the first victims are those least able to defend themselves: in this case, the poor and people with Jewish and Muslim cultural heritage. While we ought to care about this in its own right, history should teach us that what starts with bad treatment of minorities very rarely ends without bad treatment of everyone else.

read the article

CityLab: Mapping Where Americans Don't Vote

Even in the last presidential election, just 56 percent of could-be voters showed up to the polls. In fact, in hundreds of counties around the U.S., the number of eligible individuals who did not vote far outweighed the number of ballots actually cast for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016. If those millions of no-shows had picked “nobody” on the ballot—the effective choice of their abstention—“nobody” would have won in a landslide.

That is the message of a striking map created by amateur cartographer Philip Kearney in April 2018, which was expanded upon by Jim Herries, an Esri cartographer, last week. Drawing on Census Bureau data and election results, “United States of Apathy” compares those no-show votes to the actual turnout for both presidential candidates in the 2016 election, and adds up the electoral votes that would have been produced. “Nobody” wins 445 electoral votes, a victory of several factors over Trump’s 21 and Clinton’s 72. (Again, that’s if they were actually running against a no-show candidate. In reality, Trump won the electoral college with 304 votes while Clinton lost it with 227, despite winning the popular vote.) In the updated version, Herries has added a series of interactive maps that detail where the pluralities of “apathetic” voters played to the advantage of both candidates, and by what margin, across the 50 states. Dive in here.

While surveys of no-show voters in 2016 indicate a lack of interest in the candidates or issues at hand, it may not be fair to pin the cause of America’s low turnout rates entirely to apathy. Some voters are disillusioned with what they see as the inefficacy of the political system; others may live far from polling places and lack transportation access; still more may prefer to prioritize their jobs or families. And voter suppression efforts—be they photo ID requirements, late registration penalties, last-minute poll closures or schedule changes, or voter roll purges—keep an untold number of Americans away from the ballots. So do problems that arise when people do show up to vote, including long lines and malfunctioning machines.

read the article

Deutsche Welle: German parliament rows over UN Migration Compact

"Millions of people from crisis-stricken regions around the world are being encouraged to get on the road," said AfD leader Alexander Gauland. "Leftist dreamers and globalist elites want to secretly turn our country from a nation state into a settlement area."

Though the motion was swiftly rejected once the debate was over, the AfD considered it a victory to get it on the agenda at all, since the German government is under no obligation to ask for the parliament's approval to ratify the non-legally binding compact. [...]

"It should have been the task of the government long ago to explain the migration compact factually and publicly. You were silent for too long, and that allowed these conspiracy theories to start in the first place," said Stamp, a member of the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP).

read the article

Jakub Marian: Number of top-ranked universities by country in Europe

The map below shows the number of universities that are in the top 500 on the 2019 list. It should be noted that other university rankings (e.g. the QS World University Rankings) may use a different methodology, which may lead to different results. [...]

The map below solves this problem by calculating the number of students studying at top-500 universities divided by the population in thousands. For example, the figure 13.6 in Germany indicates that there are 13.6 students studying at a top 500 university per 1,000 people. [...]

As you can see, the playing field is much more level here, the champion being Iceland, which, despite its tiny size, has two top-500 universities.

read the article and see the maps