Latest news with #Putin-esque
Telegraph
09-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Rupert Lowe: Reform tried to silence me on migration
Rupert Lowe has said Reform tried to silence him over his 'outspoken' views on migration. The suspended Reform MP said he had been 'warned' by the party's leadership but had refused to listen, and was making 'no apologies' for his comments. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday, Mr Lowe also called for one million illegal immigrants to be deported, saying Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, might not agree with him but that it was 'the right thing to do'. It comes after a blazing row broke out in Reform as Mr Lowe was suspended over a string of bullying allegations, which he has categorically denied. Sources close to Mr Farage claim that Mr Lowe has drifted politically and has been ' captured by the online radical Right ', making myriad X posts about 'mass deportations' and other preoccupations. But the suspended MP said he stood by 'every single word' he had said, however 'uncomfortable' that might feel to some. Mr Lowe claimed he was being targeted in retaliation for criticising Mr Farage's leadership, having publicly attacked his approach in recent days. But Reform insisted it was necessary to take action against the MP in light of the alleged misconduct. On Sunday, Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, denied that the suspension of Mr Lowe was 'Putin-esque', telling Sky News that was a 'completely inappropriate' description. 'The reality is, behind the scenes, there have been a number of difficulties and challenges, and you get to the point where you say enough is enough,' he said. Earlier, Mr Lowe suggested he had been frozen out in part over his calls for mass migrant deportations. He wrote on X: 'It has been reported in today's Telegraph that sources in the Reform leadership 'close to Nigel Farage' are upset with me because I have been outspoken on the need for a large number of deportations. 'This is not new information to me.' He continued: 'Just so that everyone is crystal clear – I stand by every single word I have said on the subject. 'If you are here illegally, you should be deported. That has to be the objective. If that results in one million plus deportations being the eventual aim? Then so be it. It may be uncomfortable to some, but there is no other way. 'Nigel may not agree with that, but it's the right thing to do and it's a perfectly reasonable policy discussion to raise.' Mr Lowe said he had made attempts to persuade Reform to 'invest in a serious policy machine to present credible plans' on deportation and stop trying to 'appease the unappeasable'. 'I do not want unvetted, unchecked, unknown young men roaming our streets, harassing women and loitering around schools. I want them deported, as do the vast majority of the British people,' he said. 'If that upsets people, so what? Honestly, who cares? We need to stop worrying about what the woke Left think of us. They will never approve. We must stop watering down sincerely held opinions to appease the unappeasable. 'If you come here illegally, you will be deported. If you are here illegally, you will be deported. 'Of course proper policy needs to be fleshed out around that (offshore processing, transfer agreements, foreign aid withdrawal, visa suspension, ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights] withdrawal, legislation repeal, scrapping the asylum system and so on). 'I have attempted to explore some of this detail myself publicly, and encouraged Reform to invest in a serious policy machine to present credible plans. That did not happen.' Mr Lowe added: 'I have been warned by those at the top of Reform about my position on deportations. As you likely know from reading my extensive output on the subject, I did not listen to a word said. 'We need deportations, and lots of them. I make no apologies for stating that.' His comments come after Mr Farage stressed the importance of good behaviour in the party and said the allegations had 'dented' the 'sense of unity' it had been building. Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Farage said: 'If the last general election taught us anything, it is that the public does not like political parties that engage in constant infighting.' He said he was 'acutely aware' that the 'never-ending civil war that came to define the last Conservative government' had contributed to Labour's majority. Mr Farage added: 'Reform UK matters more now than it has ever done before. 'That is why it is so important that our party – and every single one of its representatives – behaves responsibly at all times. Nothing less will do.' Physical threats accusation As well as the allegations regarding bullying in Mr Lowe's offices, Reform accused him on Friday of making threats of physical violence at least twice to Zia Yusuf, the party chairman. Scotland Yard said on Friday that a complaint of 'verbal threats' made on Thursday about an alleged incident last December was being assessed by officers. In the same piece in The Telegraph, Mr Farage said Reform had 'a duty of care to every single member of staff' and the chairman was 'entirely right' to appoint a KC to 'conduct an independent inquiry' into the bullying complaints. In a post on X, Mr Lowe said 'the process has been handled so appallingly', and accused Mr Farage of 'an entirely false and poisonous narrative'. Splits in the party appeared on Thursday after Mr Lowe told the Daily Mail that Reform remained a 'protest party led by the Messiah' under Mr Farage. Asked whether the former Ukip leader had the potential to become prime minister, as his supporters have suggested, Mr Lowe said: 'It's too early to know whether Nigel will deliver the goods. He can only deliver if he surrounds himself with the right people.' On Sunday, Mr Tice was asked by the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg whether the public was expected to 'believe' that there was no connection between Mr Lowe's criticism of Mr Farage and the allegations against him. 'People will believe that because there is no truth in that suggestion,' he said. 'The sad reality is, Rupert's been doing some great work, but there have been too many instances where we've seen a different character, and it's become really challenging.'
The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump chairing a major arts institution would be laughable if it weren't so deeply troubling
Donald Trump's announcement that he was installing himself as the chair of the John F Kennedy Center, Washington DC's temple to the performing arts, might have been mistaken for something petty or trivial – another random, Pollock-esque splatter of the policy paintbrush against the canvas of the world. On his favoured social media site he posted an image, presumably AI-generated, of himself as a dinner-jacketed orchestral conductor – the macho maestro of the US. But this is more than personal: it is political, and points towards the president's wider project. To understand what is going on, it is necessary to consider Trump's favourite European authoritarian, Viktor Orbán. Hungary's prime minister has chipped away at his country's constitution and judiciary. But a no less powerful tool has been his attention to parts of society often regarded as unimportant compared with a country's constitution. Alongside crushing independent media, Orbán's government has co-opted the arts, appointing right-leaning directors to theatres, and instigating nationalist art exhibitions. Orbán understands that culture creates the climate for emotion and memory, imprints national myths, and – often intangibly – acts on politics. The Kennedy Center is low-hanging fruit for Trump, in that he has some direct power over it. Trustees are presidential appointees, and federal funding is allocated for the upkeep of its building. It was founded as a bipartisan institution, and has normally had a mix of political views on its board – but that principle is capable of being abused, and it is being so right now. A statement, emphasising this bipartisan history, appeared and then vanished from the centre's website this week. Over the past few days, board members have been fired and 13 compliant ones – including Usha Vance, the wife of the vice-president, JD Vance – appointed. The president of the centre has been sacked, and a new interim (and unqualified) executive director announced: the foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell. 'NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA', was Trump's salvo. (The centre had staged a minuscule number of events featuring drag acts, among the vaster diet of Shostakovich, Beethoven and Stravinsky.) On Wednesday, Trump was formally voted in by the board. 'Unanimously', his social media post said: a nice Putin-esque touch. 'There's no more woke in this country,' Trump told reporters. On Thursday morning, the entire Kennedy Center website was down, with 'technical difficulties'. Other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, DC's consortium of national museums, are also vulnerable. After Trump's executive order of 20 January, they have said they will be closing their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices. It's a similar story with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the federal body that offers funding to arts organisations. A document that I have seen warns that NEA arts grants now need to be reviewed for the presence of 'certain ideological terms', including 'climate change', 'environment', 'immigrant', 'lesbian', 'gay', 'trans', 'drag' and even 'equal rights'. Applicants are being told that patriotic proposals relating to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will be prioritised. The NEA is a very different entity from Arts Council England. It does not give revenue funding for organisations – it has a limited budget that offers support to individual projects. Nevertheless, it is a respected body, and it has just received a full-fronted ideological assault on its operations. These are some of the direct results of Trump's first three weeks. Indirect consequences will take longer to crystallise. US arts institutions rely on corporate sponsorship, but corporates who want anything from the government are moving smartly in line with Trump. The administration has insisted that the stop on DEI initiatives must also be observed by government contractors. Among such firms is the consultant Booz Allen Hamilton, which had long boasted of its inclusive policies for LGBTQ+ employees. In the past few days it has withdrawn its sponsorship from this spring's WorldPride in Washington DC. Again, webpages have simply vanished, or, in the case of a PR agency connected to Booz Allen Hamilton, remain ghostlike in the form of 404 error messages. The speed and extremity of these measures is sending Washington reeling. There is the bizarre prospect of Trump exerting his personal programming ideas on the national performing arts institution (will it be the Village People, Kid Rock and Carrie Underwood from now on?) Nothing is too minor for his scattergun attention, after all: an idea for a 'national garden of American heroes' was instigated in an executive order of 29 January. I will leave to your imagination the full horror of the kitsch bronzes that might spring up as a result of that initiative. The great bulwark against all of this, though, is the US tradition of philanthropists and trusts as the primary funders of the biggest arts organisations. Few receive federal funds. Powerful foundations such as Getty are – at least at present – sailing smoothly on despite Trump's agitations: see also powerful grant-giving bodies such as the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation (the latter's website still states that 'diversity, equity and inclusion are core to our mission and to who we are'). Some of Trump's measures will be legally challenged. Resistance will be mounted at the level of the state and the city. Los Angeles and Chicago are a long way, physically and spiritually, from DC. From the perspective of the UK, Trump's coup at the Kennedy Center may look clumsy, outlandish and an impossibility here. A month ago, though, his actions might have looked impossible in the US. A brief glance at Britain's recent history should act as a warning. The Tories made a concerted attempt to pervert independent appointment processes in order to insert ideologically aligned people into positions of cultural power. Their success at so doing, however limited, illuminated the fact that the guardrails of liberal institutions are a tradition of shared values, rather than enforceable rules. The former culture secretary Nadine Dorries blatantly broke the British principle that government should be at arm's length from the arts when she intervened in a funding process to insist on her own policy priorities. This looks subtle when compared with Trump's brash interventions – but it's a sign of the fragility of the arm's-length principle and of how fiercely it should be protected. John Maynard Keynes set up what was then called the Arts Council of Great Britain after the second world war for two reasons: to ensure the provision of culture across the country and to protect artists from direct political influence. You needed only look to Germany or Italy, or the Soviet Union, to understand how important that was. EM Forster, in a series of wartime broadcasts, laid out how political and artistic liberty were inextricably connected, and that there would need to be a fresh, postwar struggle 'for the restoration and extension of cultural freedom'. As the memory of the war receded, the threat to the arts from fascism looked fanciful and distant. Now, maybe not so much. Where to find hope in all this? I find plenty. Artists – history tells us – will turn out to be the most creative and subversive documenters of the historical moment, and among the most nimble resisters of society's corruption. Trump will not win this fight. Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian's chief culture writer
