Latest from New European
New European
04-06-2025
- Business
- New European
The chancellor has the worst job in government
Rachel Reeves is undoubtedly doing the job at a difficult time. Fourteen years of Conservative government left both the public finances and public services in a parlous state. Fixing the former requires a tight grip of the purse strings, while fixing the latter necessarily means loosening them. To make things worse, the disastrously brief reign of Liz Truss showed the perils of testing whether markets would tolerate a chancellor taking a chance with the public finances – and the markets resoundingly said 'no'. It is a wonder that anyone wants to be chancellor – and have no doubt, hundreds of MPs would chop off several fingers, perhaps even their own, for a chance at the job – because it is surely the worst job in government. You are near the apex of political power in the UK, and your job is to say 'no' to all of your colleagues and then explain to the public why they can't have nice things. That leaves the chancellor walking a dangerously narrow path, trying to find enough money to deliver the improvements her government has promised the public, without allowing the public finances to tip into a fresh crisis. Thanks to changing the fiscal rules, next week she will announce some £100bn in new investment over the next five years – new roads, rail, infrastructure of all sorts, as well as new defence spending. But this is likely to be overshadowed by reports of fresh rounds of austerity in key spending departments in their day-to-day finances. Labour is fighting mightily to make sure no-one uses the 'austerity' word, but this will surely be in vain. Spending cuts by any other name land just as uneasily with Labour MPs who feel this was the opposite of what they came into politics to do. No-one should suggest Rachel Reeves has an easy job, nor that she's been doing nothing – but a week out from revealing her spending plans, she has certainly made it easier for those who can't see any sense in what she is doing. Speaking on Wednesday, Reeves recommitted herself to her fiscal rules, to not raising VAT, income tax or national insurance, and to promising that the major tax hikes of her first budget are a 'one off' – and by implication, she committed herself to budget cuts across the next few years, too. This is certain to cause despair in policymaking circles, as well as on her own benches. Reeves's plans barely meet her rules, to the point that even just six months after her first budget she had to scrabble to find billions more in cuts or extra spending to meet the updated forecasts. Even in normal times, Reeves could expect to have to do the same twice a year for the rest of parliament, but these are not normal times. For one, the US president attempts to upend the rules of world trade several times a month. Despite all this abnormality, Reeves is trying to govern like a peacetime chancellor during a period of steady growth. More than that, if politics is the art of the possible, Reeves seems determined to ensure the range of what is 'possible' is narrow: in the first year of a government with a landslide majority, she has ruled out any kind of major tax reforms. Council tax doesn't work, isn't fair, and hasn't been reassessed since 1991, but Labour won't touch it. National insurance is unfair and benefits rich pensioners at the expense of poor working age adults, but it won't be touched. The interaction of the income tax and benefit systems is a complicated mess, and again will be left unreformed. Social care has been punted until the next parliament. Labour will never have an opportunity like this to fix some of the big challenges facing the British state, and Reeves and Starmer are making a deliberate decision to duck every hard decision. That leaves them tinkering around the margins, trying to make the sums add up, without changing anything fundamental. That is a choice they are free to make, of course, but it is the exact same choice as was made by their predecessors in government, and is likely to turn out just as badly. There is a truism in Westminster that Labour has no shortage of policies, but no overarching vision. With her approach to the Treasury, Reeves is ensuring that no vision can emerge, either – ministers will have to dream small, and hope they can do better than the last government with good intentions, and a little more capital spending. If there is such a thing as Reevesism, it is putting your head down, trying to make no mistakes, and hoping something comes along to make things better. There are surely worse philosophies, but it is not the stuff of which history is made. Unless Reeves is very lucky, it will not be enough to keep her in the Treasury for five years, either.
New European
04-06-2025
- Business
- New European
Geert Wilders: the fall of an extremist
Wilders has long been at odds with the government that he helped form, after his party, the PVV, won elections in 2023. On several occasions he clashed publicly and spectacularly with Dick Schoof, the non-party-aligned prime minister. And last week he presented the cabinet with a list of demands on asylum that even anti-immigration media outlets thought were unrealistic. The bizarre, 11-month-long sock puppet show that called itself the government of the Netherlands has come to an end, thanks to the puppet master himself. Geert Wilders, the 62-year-old, far-right anti-Islam Dutch leader, has pulled his party out of the ruling coalition, saying he now wants to be prime minister himself. But with elections scheduled for the autumn, he could end up frozen out of power. Schoof, now caretaker prime minister, labelled Wilders's withdrawal from the coalition 'unnecessary and irresponsible' during a debate in parliament on Wednesday. While the outgoing prime minister is unlikely to play a role in the upcoming campaign, his remarks signal a line of attack on Wilders that the other parties have already taken up. This is now the second time that Wilders has brought down a government dominated by the right, the type of government he has always said he wanted for the Netherlands. Former prime minister Mark Rutte called Wilders a 'quitter politician' in 2012, after the far-right frontman withdrew support for the minority government he was leading at the time. In the subsequent elections, the PVV paid a heavy price, and the party was left out in the cold for over a decade. The other parties are bound to highlight Wilders's apparent unreliability to end his dream of leading the country – for good this time. The fractious coalition between the PVV and three more centrist right-wing parties managed to last for almost a year, but the end was never far away. Three of the four parties, the PVV, the farmers' party BBB, and a largely Christian Democrat offshoot, NSC, had no previous government experience, and neither did Schoof. From the start, negotiators were hit by ethics scandals, as were ministerial candidates. Trust and approval ratings among the electorate were low almost from the start. In contrast to some other right-wing European leaders, such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy and lately Bart de Wever in Belgium, the PVV-led coalition was never able to project competence, or stability. Rumours abounded in The Hague about the inefficient and unprofessional ways in which ministers ran their departments. Suggested Reading The right spells trouble for von der Leyen Ferry Biedermann Beside inexperience, the root cause of public disenchantment, and falling PVV polling numbers, might well have been the string of unrealistic promises the party made. In quitting the coalition, Wilders made much of the government's inability to fulfil his election promise of an 'emergency law' to limit asylum seekers. Instead, the government worked on a 'fast-track' law that complied with Dutch and EU rules. On other key issues, such as easing the increasingly onerous nitrogen requirements for Dutch farmers, the coalition saw its approach blocked by the courts that forced it to stick to European targets. On broadly supported socio-economic initiatives, such as free childcare, the coalition ran into logistical and budgetary constraints. In the end, Wilders was unable to make the transition from firebrand opposition leader to responsible statesman. He did, as demanded by his coalition partners, damp down his anti-Islam rhetoric while the PVV was in power. Wilders has been living under police protection and in safe houses since 2004, after receiving death threats following some of his remarks on Islam. Asked during the parliamentary debate on the fall of the coalition whether he would now resume his diatribes against Islam, he said it had not been foremost on his mind. The question is whether Wilders will continue in his more moderate guise, in order to maintain his viability as a future coalition partner. But this seems unlikely and unnecessary. His current coalition partners had no issue doing business with him after the previous campaign, in which he was clear about wanting 'less Islam' in the Netherlands. And voters rewarded him by making the PVV the largest party. Despite the decline in the polls, there is no reason why he shouldn't be able to repeat that feat in the upcoming elections. While many might blame him for bringing down the most right-wing government since the end of the Second World War, his base might applaud him for putting a clearly outmatched team out of its misery. Still, other movements in the polls, particularly the revival of the Christian Democrats, could mean he'll be left without coalition partners. While Wilders could triumph once again, his path to power might well be blocked.
New European
04-06-2025
- General
- New European
Has Reform's newest MP already gone off message?
Pochin, elected as MP for Runcorn and Helsby in May's by-election caused by the nocturnal activities of Mike Amesbury, asked her first question of Keir Starmer today – and it took a turn which few, least of all her leader, seemed to anticipate. Has Sarah Pochin, Reform's newest MP, gone off-piste already? It certainly seemed so from a first-ever appearance at Prime Minister's Questions which was unlikely to have been signed off by Nigel Farage's office. 'Given the prime minister's desire to strengthen strategic alignment with our European neighbours, will he, in the interests of public safety, follow the lead of France, Denmark, Belgium and others and ban the burqa?'. Farage's face, which was staring towards the chamber's ornate ceiling, was not caught by cameras. For, for all his many, many faults, overt Islamophobia is one rabbit hole he has studiously avoided getting sucked down – less, perhaps, for ideological reasons than for seeing how an obsession with it once he stepped down as UKIP leader damaged that party's standing (when, in 2017, the party's general election manifesto included a ban on face coverings, leader Paul Nuttall endured the best part of week fielding questions as to whether it would apply to beekeepers' outfits). Pochin already looked a slightly troublesome choice, being a former councillor with the dubious distinction of having been kicked out of both the Conservative and independent groupings on Cheshire East council since being first elected in 2015. Keir Starmer, for his part, had some fun with Parliament's newest MP, asking whether she would tell her new leader that 'his latest plan to bet £80 billion of unfunded tax cuts with no idea of how he is going to pay for it is Liz Truss all over again – although considering I think she was a Conservative member when Liz Truss was leader, she probably won't'. But might Pochin be a bet Farage is already having gambler's remorse about?
New European
04-06-2025
- General
- New European
Matt Goodwin's curious definition of ‘white British people'
Goodwin's report claims that 'an analysis of migration, birth and death rates up to the end of the 21st century' predicts that 'white British people' will decline from their current position of 73 per cent of the population to 57 per cent by 2050 before becoming a minority by 2063. Matt Goodwin – the academic turned hard right rabble-rouser – is out stirring things up again, this time with an article in the (inevitably) Daily Telegraph claiming that 'white British people will be a minority in 40 years'. For the purposes of the report, Goodwin defines 'white British people' as 'people who do not have an immigrant parent' – a definition which not only has nobody actually ever used before, but is so broad as to include Winston Churchill, Nigel Farage's children (two born to his Irish first wife, two to his German second), England football captain Harry Kane, England cricket captain Ben Stokes, former ERG chairman Mark Francois, right-wing 'comedian' Jim Davidson, Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath and the actual King. Suggested Reading Matthew Goodwin finally sees the light Rats in a Sack Illustrating his findings with a back-of–a-fag-packet graph of when we will all be subsumed by alien races – the sort popular with 'great replacement' conspiracy types, and which does not add up to 100%, because he's strangely not included non-British white people – Goodwin dons his Morris dancer's uniform to bemoan 'the symbols, traditions, culture and ways of life of the traditional majority group'. 'By the year 2100, and again unless things change, our immediate descendants will be living in a country in which the white British will only comprise one third of the population,' writes Goodwin, fretting about the country he will live in when just 119 years old. Goodwin's Law of the 'white British people' is obviously complete racist nonsense, although its broad sweep has just single-handedly upped the diversity of a Last Night at the Proms audience. And if it allows us to deport Prince Andrew…
New European
03-06-2025
- General
- New European
Trump's war against the law
The earliest source is the newspaper editor and publisher Horace Greeley's book The American Conflict (1865), which reports Old Hickory's alleged declaration on the basis of a former congressman's recollection. According to Jackson's best biographer, Jon Meacham, the claim was 'historically questionable but philosophically true'. As far as historians can tell, President Andrew Jackson never uttered the threat to the chief justice that is still so frequently attributed to him. In 1832, after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Cherokee nation in Worcester v Georgia, Jackson supposedly said: 'John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.' What Jackson did say to his longtime associate, John Coffee, was: 'The decision of the Supreme Court has felt still-born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate'. All of which matters because the spirit of Jackson is now routinely invoked by the MAGA movement as Donald Trump wages a fast-escalating war with the courts. As far back as 2021, JD Vance said that his advice to his future boss would be to fire all civil servants: 'And when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'' More recently, on February 9, the vice president posted on X: 'Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power'. In a podcast released on May 21, he warmed to his theme in conversation with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. 'I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people'. Chief justice John Roberts, Vance continued, was failing in his supervision of the judiciary: 'You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for. That's where we are right now.' The Democratic Party is in a state of aphasic shock, paralysed by the electoral disaster of November 5. Both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republicans, who, with a tiny number of exceptions, are craven in their obedience to Trump. That leaves journalists, a great many of whom continue, valiantly, to speak truth to power; but do so in the face of increasing intimidation and, in some cases, knowing that their proprietors have business exposure outside the media sector that makes them fearful of Trump. So – in practice – the line that stands between the republic and authoritarianism is judicial. At the time of writing, there have been 251 legal challenges to this administration, whose actions have been halted in at least 181 cases. Time and again, Trump and his senior officials have found themselves obstructed by judges from all over the country whose orders have nationwide force. As the solicitor general, D John Sauer, has complained, this means that the government has 'to win everywhere, while the plaintiffs can win anywhere'. Last Wednesday, the US Court of International Trade ruled against the president's tariff regime, finding that 'the Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises' and that 'any interpretation of IEEPA [the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act] that delegates unlimited tariff authority [to the president] is unconstitutional.' Helpfully reposting photos of the three trade court judges, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, claimed on May 29 that 'We are living under a judicial tyranny'. A federal appeals court last week granted a suspension of the order, meaning that, for now, Trump can pursue his deranged tariff strategy, pending further legal action. On Truth Social, he posted that he hoped 'the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY.' But will it? On Friday, the highest court in the land gave the administration interim approval to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian programme to grant temporary residency to more than 500,000 migrants facing political turmoil or warfare. This 'humanitarian parole' system is intended to help people from countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. On May 19, the supreme court also gave emergency approval to the government to lift the separate 'Temporary Protected Status' from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan migrants. The case is still subject to appeal. But immigration officials may now proceed with mass deportation – perhaps to the Salvadoran gulag. Yet the president and his allies remain furious with the general response of the judiciary to MAGA's egregious 'remigration' plan. On April 7, the supreme court ruled that the government must give 'constitutionally adequate notice' to individuals before their removal under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act; 12 days later, it intervened again, this time in the middle of the night, to block deportations of Venezuelans from Texas under the same antiquated legislation. The court has also ruled that the administration must 'facilitate' the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the 29-year-old migrant who had been living in Maryland for 13 years, sent back to El Salvador after what the government has admitted was an 'administrative error'. In this case, as in many others, Trump and his team have opted for what the US legal scholars Leah Litman and Daniel Deacon refer to aptly as 'legalistic noncompliance': quibbling over what 'facilitate' means precisely, resorting to pedantry and slow-walking action mandated by the courts. With characteristic indifference to the responsibilities of his office – not to mention the oath that he took – the president himself has become an expert in non-expertise, claiming to have insufficient legal knowledge to offer an opinion on even the most basic juristic questions. Asked on NBC's Meet the Press on May 4 whether citizens and non-citizens alike deserved due process, Trump said, 'I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a lawyer.' Pressed by Kristen Welker on the substance of the Fifth Amendment which refers to the rights of the 'person', the president replied: 'It might say that – but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or two million or three million trials.' In an interview with the Atlantic to mark the first 100 days of his second presidency, Trump insisted that he would abide by any supreme court ruling – but went on to complain that 'we have some judges that are very, very tough. I believe you could have a 100% case – in other words, a case that's not losable – and you will lose violently. Some of these judges are really unfair.' His language was less restrained in a special Memorial Day post on Truth Social in which he attacked 'JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER AND RAPE AGAIN – ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY'. Which shows that this is a temperamental as well as a constitutional clash. Trump demands instant gratification; the courts exist to deliberate. This incompatibility is now becoming perilous for the republic. Miller, meanwhile, has said that the administration is 'actively looking' at suspending habeas corpus for migrants – the individual's fundamental legal right to challenge his or her detention. In this context, it is worth noting that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, revealed in a senate committee hearing on May 20 that she completely misunderstood this most basic legal doctrine, defining it as 'a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.' Even more revealing was what Miller went on to say: 'Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.' In other words, the government will abide by judges' decisions – as long as they do what the administration wants. Suggested Reading Why do they hate us so much? Jay Elwes In Federalist No 78 (1788), Alexander Hamilton, writing as 'Publius', expressed fears that have rarely seemed more pertinent. The judiciary, he said, was by far the weakest of the three supposedly co-equal branches of government (the other two being the executive and the legislature); having 'no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment'. What were once abstract issues for constitutionalists to debate in the lecture hall are now all too practical and menacing. To start with, Mike Johnson, the House speaker, threatened in March to use the congressional 'power of funding' to 'eliminate an entire district court'. Founded in 2019, the Article III Project (A3P) mobilises thousands of phone calls, emails and social media messages to members of Congress to back Trump against the judiciary and is supporting bills introduced by senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and representative Darrell Issa of California to stop federal district judges from issuing nationwide court orders. More alarming is the surge in outright intimidation of the judiciary. Since Trump's return, unexplained pizza deliveries have been made to federal judges and their families – a way of telling them that their enemies know where they live. Deplorably, many have been made under the name of Daniel Anderl, the son of a federal judge who was murdered in 2020 while protecting his parents from a furious litigant. Judges considered hostile to Trump have also been 'swatted', where a hoax call is made to summon a SWAT team to a particular address – in the hope that heavily armed police officers, following procedure, will inadvertently traumatise whoever is at the location in question. On April 25, Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin circuit court judge, was arrested and has now been indicted for allegedly assisting an undocumented immigrant in evading arrest. On Friday, 138 former judges filed a legal argument warning that Dugan's indictment 'threatens to undermine centuries of precedent on judicial immunity, crucial for an effective judiciary.' Pam Bondi, the attorney general, takes a different view. 'The [judges] are deranged is all I can think of,' she said on the day of Dugan's arrest. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today. If you are harbouring a fugitive, we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.' Most shocking of all are the formal discussions among senior judges, revealed by the Wall Street Journal, about forming their own armed security force. At present, the Supreme Court is protected by a special police service which it also oversees; other courts, in contrast, deploy US marshals. Notionally, these officers have a statutory duty to follow the judiciary's instructions. In practice, they work for the Department of Justice, and therefore for Bondi. What, in practice, would happen if the Trump administration flagrantly defied the Supreme Court? Thanks to the court's own landmark ruling last July, the president himself enjoys immunity; he could also pardon officials accused of criminal contempt. Another option is civil contempt, which seeks to enforce future compliance (the person in contempt of this kind is said to 'hold the keys to his own cell'). The advantage here is that the courts can deputise other agencies to enforce their rulings. But which agencies, precisely? Which, in this climate of fear, would be willing to risk retribution from MAGA? Chief Justice Roberts is an 'institutionalist' which means that his highest allegiance is to the preservation of the system that protects the constitution. In the words of his biographer Joan Biskupic, 'he elevated the institutional integrity of the Court above all'. And, to be fair to Roberts, he wrote in his most recent end-of-year report: 'Within the past few years… elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the spectre of open disregard for federal court rulings'. When Trump posted in March that a judge frustrating his deportation plan 'should be IMPEACHED!', the chief justice issued a direct rebuke, declaring that this was 'not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.' Yet it is precisely this value-system that may deter Roberts from a direct confrontation with the president. For the institutionalist, the prospect of the Supreme Court appearing impotent before an autocratic president is intolerable. Paradoxically, because such a defeat would shatter his worldview, he will postpone the moment of reckoning as long as he possibly can. But he cannot do so indefinitely. High Noon is approaching, and only one of the gunfighters – president or Supreme Court – can prevail. The outcome of that contest depends on a question of global consequence: whether the US remains, as it has long been, a nation of laws; or becomes something altogether more dangerous.
