New military base in Iqaluit part of Poilievre's Arctic defence plan
The Conservatives have pledged to build a military base in Iqaluit if they form government. Leader Pierre Poilievre made the announcement at the airport. As Samuel Wat reports, some Northerners have questions about how it would work.
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20 hours ago
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Reform UK struggles to find friends to share council power
Reform UK's success in the recent local elections has propelled many councillors with limited or no political experience into council chambers across England. While Reform UK's rise was the big story of those elections, almost half of the councils up for grabs were not won outright by any single party. That means many of those newbie councillors are now navigating so-called hung councils, where parties with little in common often work together to get the business of local government done. But so far, it hasn't panned out that way for Reform UK, which isn't involved in any formal coalitions, pacts or deals in areas where there were local elections this year. This was despite rampant speculation about Reform-Conservative coalitions ahead of the polls, with party leaders Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage not ruling out council deals. So, what's going on? In some places - Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Leicestershire - Reform UK has enough councillors to form minority administrations and is attempting to govern alone. In other areas where coalitions were possible, Reform UK has either shunned co-operation or vice versa. Where Reform UK has explored potential partnerships locally, its policies have been viewed with suspicion by the established parties. In Cornwall, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives refused to work with Reform UK, even though it was the biggest party and had won the most seats. Instead, the Lib Dems teamed up with independent councillors to run Cornwall Council as a minority administration. That infuriated Reform UK's group leader in Cornwall, Rob Parsonage, who branded the coalition deal "undemocratic" and "a total stitch-up". Did other parties contrive to exclude Reform UK? The newly minted Lib Dem council leader, Leigh Frost, does not think so. "The reality is our core values at heart of it just stand for two very different things and it makes working together incompatible," Frost told the BBC. "And then Reform was given two weeks to try to form an administration and chose not to." Frost said Reform UK's Cornwall candidates mainly campaigned on immigration. This was echoed in conversations with other local party leaders across the country. The BBC was told Reform's candidates had little local policy to offer and mostly focused on national issues, such as stopping small boats crossing the English Channel. Slashing "wasteful spending" by councils, like Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in the US, was also a common campaign theme. In Worcestershire, where Reform won the most seats but fell short of a majority, the party's supposed lack of local policy was a major sticking point for the Conservatives. "They haven't got a local prospectus and that was part of the problem," said Adam Kent, Tory group leader on Worcestershire County Council. "They didn't stand on any local issues. It was on national politics. How can you go into coalition with somebody if you don't even know what they stand for?" Joanne Monk, the Reform UK council leader in the county, said she only had "a brief couple of chats" with other party leaders but was uncompromising on coalitions. "I'm damned sure we're not on the same wavelength," she said. She followed the lead of Farage, who ruled out formal coalitions at council level but said "in the interests of local people we'll do deals", in comments ahead of the local elections. In Worcestershire, Reform UK's minority administration may need to do deals to pass key decisions and avoid other parties banding together to veto their plans. Recognising this, she acknowledged other parties were "going to have to work with us at some point". In Northumberland, the Conservatives retained their position as the largest party and gave the impression they were willing to entertain coalition talks with Reform UK, which gained 23 seats. "I said I would work with anyone and my door is open," said Conservative council leader Glen Sanderson. "But Reform the next day put out a press release saying the price for working with the Conservatives would be extremely high. So on that basis, I assumed that was the door closed on me." No talks were held and the Conservatives formed a minority administration. Weeks had passed after the local elections before Mark Peart was voted in as Reform UK's local group leader in the county. As a result, he wasn't in a position to talk to anybody. "Everything had already been agreed," Peart said. "It was too late." Reform UK sources admitted the party was caught a bit flat-footed here and elsewhere as many of its new councillors got the grips with their new jobs in the weeks following the local elections. A support network for those councillors, in the form of training sessions and a local branch system, is being developed by the party. But this week Zia Yusuf, one of the key architects behind that professionalisation drive and the Doge cost-cutting initiative, resigned as party chairman, leaving a gap in the party's leadership. Reform UK's deputy leader, Richard Tice, said the party's success at the local elections "was partly because of the significant efforts and improvements to the infrastructure of the party" spearheaded by Yusuf. Though Yusuf is gone, the party has considerably strengthened its foundations at local level, after gaining 677 new councillors and two mayors. A Reform UK source said party bosses will be keeping an eye out for stand-out councillors who could go on to become parliamentary candidates before the general election. They said in areas where Reform UK runs councils as a minority administration, it's going to take some compromise with other parties and independents to pass budgets and key policies. In the messy world of town halls and council chambers, that could be a tough apprenticeship. Reform UK prepares for real power on a council it now dominates Sir John Curtice: The map that shows Reform's triumph was much more than a protest vote Reform UK makes big gains in English local elections
Yahoo
a day ago
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What Washington can learn from a legendary London meltdown
In a city where allegiance and proximity to power is everything, the leader's closest adviser portrayed himself as an outsider. He began the year by hiring a bunch of 'weirdos and misfits' and ordering them to rip up the entire 'rotten' system of government. The adviser loved to put noses out of joint and 'own the libs,' while building up his profile in the media as the real power behind the throne. Then, having realized that his easily-distracted and impulsive politician boss wasn't actually committed to building a tech-heavy, libertarian future, the disillusioned adviser quit — dedicating himself to publicly destroying his former employer. If you're British, watching the collapse of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's uncomfortable marriage has echoes of the end of the relationship between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings in 2020. How that psychodrama played out in the UK could have lessons for the US — not least because Cummings eventually succeeded in undermining Johnson's political career, ultimately defenestrating the prime minister through relentless briefings and leaks. When someone who was inside the room and was perceived to be central to a political project says it's all a sham, the damage can be significant. For those who don't know, Cummings was the chief strategist of the successful Brexit campaign in 2016 but then largely disappeared from view when it came to actually defining what Brexit should look like. Unlike Musk, Cummings was a lifelong political operative, albeit one who cultivated a reputation for actually reading books. Three years later, with his political standing inflated by a film in which he was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch as an insane genius, Cummings returned to maneuver Johnson into Downing Street. Once inside government, Cummings broke all the standard operating procedures of the British state to finally 'get Brexit done' and sever the UK's relationship with the EU in January 2020. When I look back at my occasional text exchanges with Cummings from that era, usually while trying to check stories about the funding of the Brexit campaign or his desire to defund the BBC, they mirror what he said in public. He held a seemingly sincere belief that most of the British media was fake news, that the British state was not fit for purpose, and that the political party he was nominally working for, the Conservatives, was little more than a helpful vehicle for an insurrection. One ally approvingly described the chief of staff of a Conservative government to the BBC as a 'Leninist.' Ultimately, both Musk and Cummings believed that you can run the government as a high-performance start-up and that the defining failure of past civil service reforms was that they hadn't smashed enough things quickly enough. Both also have the fatal flaws of being undisciplined, delighting in picking public fights and getting bored easily. Their independent means also meant they were not as beholden to their political masters as other advisers. Cummings might not have Musk levels of money but he was wealthy in British terms (his father-in-law Sir Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield, owner of a 13th century castle, would write letters in support of his proto-DOGE policies) and connected (his wife was deputy editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine). The overwhelming impression Cummings gave was that politicians were the useful idiots who should give him the runway to remake the state. Iconoclasm was the point. When Cummings quit he took to publishing lengthy Substack posts portraying Johnson as a broken supermarket 'trolley' who veered all over the place based on the last thing someone said to him. Even more effectively, Cummings helped to leak stories about Johnson's pandemic lockdown-busting in a scandal known as Partygate. In an echo of what's happened with Musk, left-wingers who previously thought Cummings was the devil incarnate began cheering him on as he stuck the knife into Johnson. The attacks rang true among Tory MPs and Johnson's ratings never recovered, ultimately leading to his early departure from politics. Many people leaked against Johnson and his circle, but when Cummings did, the pair's previous closeness gave it the ring of truth. Musk and Cummings got opportunities because they went in to bat for fundamentally untrustworthy but opportunistic politicians, in the hope that they would be given the freedom to enact policies with limited scrutiny. The two men have even exchanged notes and acknowledged the similarity of their programs. Ultimately, these were political shotgun marriages — the very thing that made the attachments so powerful at a particular moment in time was ultimately their undoing: In each case, the leader learned that there was no real love there. As Cummings and Musk found, if you hitch yourself to an anti-establishment hero who eschews patronage and loyalty then it's only a matter of time before you find yourself the target. There is a case that a less bellicose, less in-your-face flavour of DOGE could work better — and that such changes are easier when they're not associated with a controversial figure. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year, is pinning its hopes on widespread use of AI technology to improve productivity, for person. And there are even people in Downing Street who quite envies the idea of taking a Musk-style wrecking ball to parts of the state; Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently abolished one of the main administrative levels of the National Health Service in an overnight raid. Attempts by the insurgent, right-wing populist Reform party — headed by Nigel Farage, who has courted Musk's funds — to launch a 'British DOGE' and find excess spending in local government have hit the rocks. Announced on Monday, the program's first leader had quit by Thursday. Cummings said in November that he was hopeful Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley. Cummings was long on diagnosis but short on prescription, the London-based Institute for Government think tank wrote in November 2021. It sought to fill the gap with ideas of its own for civil service reform.
Yahoo
a day ago
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Kemi Badenoch refuses to kick Liz Truss out of Conservative Party
Kemi Badenoch has refused to kick former prime minister Liz Truss out of the Conservative Party. The Tory leader suggested such a move would be 'neither here nor there' for voters' perception of the party. In a speech on Thursday, shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride sought to distance the Conservatives from Ms Truss's mini-budget, saying the party needed to show 'contrition' to restore its economic credibility. In a furious response, Ms Truss accused Sir Mel of having 'kowtowed to the failed Treasury orthodoxy' and being 'set on undermining my plan for growth'. Asked by the BBC on Friday whether she would consider throwing former prime minister Ms Truss out of the Conservatives in a symbolic break with her short-lived, turbulent time in No 10, Mrs Badenoch replied: 'Is she still in the party?' Ms Truss, the former Conservative MP for South West Norfolk, is understood to be a Tory party member still. Speaking to the BBC, Mrs Badenoch said: 'What is really important is what Mel was saying yesterday. What he was saying was that the mini-budget did not balance. It wasn't tax cuts, it was the … £150 billion of spending increases on energy bills that did not make sense.' Pressed whether she believed the mini-budget had damaged the Conservative brand, Mrs Badenoch said: 'Well, look at what happened, people didn't understand why we had done that, and so our reputation for economic competence was damaged.' When asked again why she would not consider kicking Ms Truss out of the party, the Tory leader said: 'It is not about any particular individual. I don't want to be commenting on previous prime ministers. 'They've had their time. What am I going to do now? Removing people from a political party is neither here nor there in terms of what it is your viewers want to see.' After insisting Ms Truss was not in Parliament anymore, Mrs Badenoch said her party needed to 'focus on how we're going to get this country back on track'. 'What we have right now is a Labour Government, it's Keir Starmer. We need to stop talking about several prime ministers ago and talk about the Prime Minister we've got now and what he's doing to the country,' the Tory leader said. Ms Truss this week appeared in a video to promote the Irish whiskey brand of bare-knuckle fighter Dougie Joyce, who was once jailed for attacking a 78-year-old man in a pub in 2022.
