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New Statesman
20 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The public doesn't like Brexit. Has anyone told the media?
Illustration by Michael Villegas / Ikon Images Such were the headlines that you'd imagine the EU reset to be the Suez Crisis, Munich Conference and loss of the Thirteen Colonies all rolled into one. 'STARMER'S SURRENDER' howled the Mail in all caps, like a furious text from your dad. 'DONE UP LIKE A KIPPER', agreed the Sun, which knows a good pun about fishing regulations when it sees it. The Telegraph instead used a picture of Starmer greeting Ursula von der Leyen to justify its more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger effort, 'Kiss goodbye to Brexit'. I'm not going to quote the Express. I just don't have the word count. Not everyone was quite so hysterical. The Guardian led with Starmer's claim that the deal 'puts Britain back on the world stage', and left suggestions of surrender from little-known opposition leader Kemi Badenoch to the subheading. The FT even flirted with positivity. But browsing the newsstands that morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only person who backed the deal – which would, among other things, make holidaying in Europe a whole lot less annoying – was Keir Starmer. You'd get the same impression from the BBC. One surprising group who might disagree with this rather downbeat assessment were the actual British electorate. According to YouGov, reported a visibly baffled Times, there was backing for the deal, including overwhelming support for the youth mobility scheme. ity scheme that everyone had confidently predicted would be its most controversial element. Another YouGov poll, just days earlier, had found that 66% of the public support, and just 14% oppose, a closer relationship with Europe so long as it didn't involve re-joining the EU, single market or customs union – pretty close to overwhelming support. Over half (53%) were in favour of undoing Brexit altogether. Remember when newspapers cared about the will of the people? How times change. The traditional explanation for why newspapers are so out of touch with their readers was that the press don't merely reflect public opinion but attempt to shape it. Owners and editors have, in every sense, different interests to the general public: it's not as if the range of press opinion in the 20th century reflected the range of public opinion either. There's also the problem that reliance on advertising – an industry inevitably keener on some bits of the public than on others – has pushed papers in certain directions, too. But there's another thing which has kicked in these last few years, which I'm not sure everyone has internalised: the general public and newspaper readers are not the same thing. They never perfectly aligned, of course; but now the group that reads newspapers is a fraction of the public as a whole. How small a fraction is surprisingly hard to pin down. Claimed national newspaper circulation slid by a third, from around 11 million copies a day in the early 1990s to around 7 million by 2020. Exactly what's happened since is hard to know, as a bunch of the main papers have since stopped reporting the figures – but sales of those which still do so have fallen by half. In five years. We can probably assume that those which keep the numbers to themselves don't do so because sales are surging. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe However many people are still buying papers, something we know about them is that they are not a representative slice of the country as a whole. According to a 2024 Ofcom report, just 10% of 16-24 year olds today get their news from newspapers (rising to 24% including online). Even among the 35-44 group, a distinctively generous definition of young, those numbers were just 19% and 32% respectively. Once you hit retirement age, though, things look much rosier for the subscriptions department. Among 65-74 year olds, it's 33% (45% including online); among the over 75s, it's 47% (53%). It's not a big leap to assume that the issues explored and positions taken by newspapers are likely to reflect this ageing readership. This is not to say younger people are not engaged with the news: but they get theirs from relatively new online or social media, sources which are by definition more fragmented. It's harder to tell what they're reading, what they're interested in or what they think. But the agenda of politics, the sense of what the nation cares about, still has to emerge from somewhere – and in the absence of an alternative, it's still set by the newspapers. Broadcast producers scan the front pages every morning. Ministerial teams use them to determine which stories they need a line on. Old fashioned print media is in decline everywhere but in the mind of the nation's political class. The result is that our leaders are getting a very warped sense of what the average voter thinks, reads and cares about. This may, if you squint, explain rather a lot. Not just why ministers are still being exhorted to defend a Brexit the nation no longer supports, but why benefits for older people are treated differently to ones for those of working age or children. Every day, MPs are told that these are the real issues facing the newspaper readers of Britain. The problem is that is not the same thing as 'the voters'. [See more: Robert Jenrick is embarrassing himself] Related
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
India-Pakistan Hostilities Complicate India's Diplomatic Options
The dust is settling, slowly, from India and Pakistan's military collision as a delicate U.S.-brokered ceasefire took hold May 10. The origins of the conflict are clear enough: India sought to severely punish Pakistan for alleged links to a barbarous Islamist terror attack in late April in Kashmir, a region that both countries claim and have previously fought wars over. But the details of the fighting thereafter remain hazy at best, obscured by the two governments' reluctance to admit losses, rampant misinformation on social media, and hypernationalist 'news' shows fabricating everything from military coups to cross-border invasions on live TV. Even without total clarity, what is known about the eruption of hostilities between the two nuclear powers was enough to unnerve world leaders: massive aerial dogfights, relentless shelling, and the deepest strikes into each other's states in the last half-century. While confusion reigned on the battlefield, the fighting simultaneously brought into much sharper focus broader trends in the geostrategic environment, especially the dramatic changes reshaping India's foreign policy options. India has historically held to a strategy of 'nonalignment,' avoiding alliances with great powers to preserve its diplomatic independence. Yet this proud tradition—initially designed to protect against the pitfalls of taking sides in the Cold War—has grown increasingly difficult to sustain in a world increasingly divided again, now by U.S.-China rivalry. The United States faces a delicate balancing act: how to deepen cooperation with India as their strategic interests converge, while respecting India's deeply rooted commitment to diplomatic autonomy over formal alliances. For a country that had just achieved hard-fought independence from Britain, a receding global superpower, asserting uncompromising independence from—and skepticism toward—the intrigues of the new superpowers was as much an innate reflex of the new republic as a calculated policy decision. The approach allowed India to take firm stances on international affairs in seemingly contrary directions. In 1956, for example, India both condemned the Anglo-French-Israeli incursion into Egypt during the Suez Crisis and criticized Soviet intervention in Hungary's anti-Soviet uprising. Building on Gandhi's moral vision and international fame, India bundled idealistic commitments like support for decolonization, peaceful resolution to disputes, and 'non-interference' in internal affairs with its nonalignment brand to garner moral authority in a world riven by conflict and international meddling. India's approach helped it to punch above its weight globally as a leader among developing nations, instrumental in founding the broader Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a forum which today includes 120 countries. India's nonalignment brand was so successful, in fact, that some India watchers express exasperation that India can't shake its association with it, despite shifts in its approach since the policy's heyday in the '50s and '60s. Pressure from India's wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 forced the country to tilt toward the Soviet Union in the later Cold War, despite retaining nonalignment rhetoric. The Soviet Union's collapse naturally also forced a redefinition of 'nonalignment'—resisting taking a side is hard when one side has disappeared. India shifted to stressing 'strategic autonomy' instead, suggesting that it could still avoid joining military alliances or picking permanent friends, while being more practical in how it dealt with powerful countries. And in the early- to mid-2000s, 'multialignment' became the new buzzword, emphasizing India's ability to juggle active relationships with (sometimes conflicting) groups and powers—an approach that probably wouldn't fit with nonalignment's original meaning. U.S. policymakers used to managing groups of friends or foes often become frustrated with what they perceive as stubborn Indian duplicity. To American sensibilities, it's scandalous that India can simultaneously play a key role in the Quad—a grouping of the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan designed to counter Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific—as well as in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, two bodies that include China and Russia as founding members and aim to act as counterweights to Western-led institutions. At its worst, American policymakers complain, India's nonalignment tradition is simply an excuse to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with whomever it wants—without regard to any other relationships. Still, there is a certain respect for such dogged insistence on one's own interests and independence that India's approach can command even among those who have felt crossed by it. Henry Kissinger once lambasted Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for her perceived intransigence with Richard Nixon. Decades later, however, he praised her statesmanship and expressed admiration for India's unyielding strategic mindset that once drove him up the wall. Whether one admires or resents India's nonalignment tradition, America's ability to effectively engage with it hinges on both nations' capacity to adapt nimbly to the world's changes. Nothing clarifies geopolitics quite like military confrontation, which cuts through diplomatic pretenses to show who really stands where, and why. India's clash with Pakistan is no different. Most obviously, the conflict showcased how much new Cold War-like dynamics have seeped into the ever-persistent Indo-Pakistani rivalry. A barrage of coverage about the conflict as a litmus test of Chinese military technologies' prospects against Western equivalents unmistakably echoes Cold War technological rivalries, with one New York Times headline declaring that 'India vs. Pakistan Is Also U.S. vs. China When It Comes to Arms Sales' as each South Asian country has rejigged its weapons suppliers in recent years. Much has been made of U.S. officials' confirmation that a Chinese-made J-10 jet from Pakistan shot down at least one of India's French-made Rafale fighter jets. No less notable is India's touting of its successful use of kamikaze drones manufactured in India using technology from Israel, one of America's closest allies. That level of collaboration is particularly remarkable given that India's nonaligned posture historically strongly favored Palestine over Israel. Diplomatically, too, the onset of the crisis further solidified years of growing U.S.-India and China-Pakistan ties, respectively. Many officials in Delhi took the robust support expressed by both President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the wake of the Pahalgam terrorist attack as approval for a strong retaliation against Pakistan, a country whose strategic relevance to the United States has diminished still further since the United States' withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan in 2021. China has meanwhile spearheaded support for Pakistan in the face of India's response, confirming that the country is an 'ironclad friend and all-weather strategic cooperative partner,' not to mention a leading recipient of Chinese investment and advanced weaponry. India finds itself on the other side of this conflict needing to recalibrate its fiercely independent diplomatic tradition. The world—and especially its region—is rapidly realigning around Sino-American rivalry. Meanwhile, India continues its ascent as a global power in its own right, evolving into the kind of major player its nonalignment principles initially cautioned against allying with. Recent conflict dynamics are a case in point: India's conventional military and economic dominance over its fragile archenemy appears decisive, with India dwarfing Pakistan's GDP by an order of magnitude. However, its neighbor to the north maintains an economy now five times the size of India's, unambiguously supports its archnemesis in conflict, and still harbors territorial disputes with India of its own. These realities—and emerging allegations that Beijing provided direct intelligence and air defense support to Islamabad in advance of the clash—would seem to demand still closer collaboration with the United States, fast. Given India's diplomatic tradition, these facts won't translate into the typical alliance model that the United States is accustomed to and longs to see from the only country with the long-term potential to counterbalance China in the Indo-Pacific. It's not just that India's prior history of colonialism grates against such a commitment. Equally, India's forward-looking ambition to become an independent pole of an emerging multipolar world makes it allergic to becoming one among the U.S.'s many allies, expecting instead a unique working relationship of equals, commensurate with its status as the world's largest nation and one of its oldest civilizations. If India's legacy of nonalignment inhibits its consistency in growing the U.S.-India relationship, America's lack of recent experience partnering with a peer power complicates its ability to engage well with India. The best chance of balancing the Indo-Pacific in the 21st century may ride on how well, or poorly, each nation addresses these tendencies. The violence we witnessed in early May should drive home the need for India and the U.S. to collaborate more closely. But the aftermath of the conflict has demonstrated how a lack of attentiveness threatens to derail that imperative: The Quad missed its opportunity to express support to India on a comparable level to China's support for Pakistan; India neglected to even mention the United States' role in brokering a ceasefire in its initial public statement, underscoring the country's insistence on strategic independence; and President Trump's repeated descriptions of the negotiation process have been deeply offensive to India's nonalignment tradition. Much as the recent violence has highlighted the need for greater U.S.-India cooperation, there remains much space for improvement.
Metro
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
'Sexy' Netflix period drama with near perfect rating has just days to stream
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video BBC political thriller The Hour which has been praised as 'outstanding' is imminently leaving Netflix UK. The 2011 drama which ran for two seasons is a star-studded affair featuring Dominic West, Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai and Peter Capaldi. Set in June 1956, the six-part drama, 'focuses on the launch of a new BBC program as the Suez Crisis is unfolding in the Middle East.' There's political intrigue, high-stakes reporting and messy romances – essentially all the ingredients which make a short BBC drama tick. And critics would agree with The Hour securing 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. As The New Yorker put it: 'With its casting, its look, its unfolding mysteries, its attention to important historical events, its sexiness, The Hour hits every pleasure center.' Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. And The Spectator added: 'The dialogue brims with zingers and has the velocity of an assault rifle, like the West Wing in its pomp, while the plot zooms along, twisting this way and that, oozing corruption, sex and ambition. And all against a setting best described as nostalgia on heat.' Den of Geek had nothing but love for the high-caliber cast, reflecting: Ben Whishaw is great as bitter, passionate hack Freddie, as is Romola Garai as Bel, an ambitious woman seemingly decades ahead of her own time. Both are upstaged, however, by the towering presence of Dominic West.' As for fans, one anonymous RT user said: 'Outstanding show: fantastic script by Abi Morgan who also did River and The Split and outstanding performances. Season 2 was even better than season one. The best show we saw this year!' 'Incredible cast and well written series, the historical setting is brilliant. Definitely worth a watch,' Debbra W echoed. In an interview with Uproxx at the time, writer Abi spoke about her approach to portraying women in the newsroom in this era. More Trending 'Well, Bel was inspired by a handful of women who were working at the BBC, most notably Grace Wyndham Goldie, who was a female producer of Panorama Tonight, which is like 60 Minutes. 'And so I knew those women existed, although they were a minority. But I think also what was kind of exciting for me also about Bel was I wanted to write about women in a post-war culture,' she said. She later added: 'I feel like this was a show that had a lot of women on it. Yet I'm still only one of a handful of female writers around. And invariably that sexism is still prevalent, still quite relevant to today.' View More » The last day to stream The Hour on Netflix is June 4. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: 'Chilling' true crime documentary takes Netflix charts by storm MORE: 7 shows Eurovision haters can watch tonight if they can't face the music MORE: Forgotten sequel to Denzel Washington thriller becomes surprise Netflix hit
Spectator
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The overlooked brilliance of BBC's The Hour
With reluctance – but enticed by its surprisingly starry cast and the fact that it had landed, ironically enough, on Netflix – I recently tuned in to The Hour, the BBC's 2011 political drama series. It's about a BBC TV news programme being launched in 1956, against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. And, goodness me, isn't it good? Better than good, in fact – it's a high-carat television diamond, and not some lab-grown job either, but the real, romantic, sparkling deal hewn out of the earth and hawked via Antwerp before ending up in the Imperial State Crown. From the get-go – those classy, Hitchcockesque credits – you know you're in for a treat, and it doesn't disappoint: the dialogue brims with zingers and has the velocity of an assault rifle, like the West Wing in its pomp, while the plot zooms along, twisting this way and that, oozing corruption, sex and ambition.
Daily Record
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Netflix fans have just days to watch 'sexy' period drama with near perfect rating
The enthralling and 'steamy' historical drama — set in 1956 during the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution — is currently streaming on Netflix, but will depart from the streamer on June 5. British television drama series The Hour was first broadcast on BBC Two when it made its series premiere back in 2011. Starring Ben Whishaw, Dominic West, and Romola Garai, supported by Burn Gorman, Anna Chancellor, Tim Pigott-Smith, Juliet Stevenson, Anton Lesser, Julian Rhind-Tutt, and Oona Chaplin, the riveting historical drama has been penned by Brick Lane screenwriter Abi Morgan (who also serves as one of the executive producers on the show). With hour-long episodes across its two series, the show was mostly filmed in Hornsey Town Hall and its lead director was Coky Giedroy. The Hour is currently streaming on Netflix, but will depart from the streamer on June 5. Centred around a fictional current-affairs show being launched by the World Service in June 1956, The Hour is set in a BBC newsroom at the time of the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. It follows maverick journalist Freddie Lyon (Whishaw), ambitious producer Bel (Garai), and enigmatic anchor Hector (West) as they launch the investigative news show — The Hour. Drama and tensions run high as the three protagonists become embroiled in a steamy love triangle, playing out against the backdrop of a cryptic murder. Set in the ruthless area of sexual politics, The Hour is a show that redefines the historical drama. Speaking to Digital Spy about what he felt when he first walked onto The Hour's set, actor Dominic West said: 'It's extraordinary, the detail. You get a sheet of paper which I have to hold while I'm being broadcast, which is in the background anyway. There's no way it'll ever be on screen, and yet it's a detailed timetable or list of detailed questions as it would have been." Actress Romola Garai also talked about her experience filming for the show and said: "You'll sometimes get someone say to you, 'Do you want something to hold?' because quite often it's nice to have a prop or something. "So you'll get a piece of paper and it's normally just the lunch menu! You'll get a piece of paper on this job and it'll be typed from a Corona typewriter and it'll be the schedule for a made-up show that isn't even in the script with all period dates of the shows that we would be covering. I think the production design might have OCD! It's really, really accurate." With a smashing 94 per cent rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, The Hour has been lauded by critics as well as audiences. One critic wrote: 'With its casting, its look, its unfolding mysteries, its attention to important historical events, its sexiness, The Hour hits every pleasure centre.' While another said: 'A gripping thrill-ride of a show; escapist and stylish despite playing a bit fast and loose with historical accuracy at times.' Another positive review added: 'The Hour is alternately ferocious and tender, and refreshingly clear-eyed about the interactions between gender and class,' and one reviewer observes: 'What makes it so engaging is that it works so well with and within the strictures of the well-thumbed genres it combines in equal parts: spy thriller, murder mystery, backstage drama, triangular romance.' Praise for director Abi Morgan also ran abound, with one viewer saying: 'Outstanding show: fantastic script by Abi Morgan who also did River and The Split and outstanding performances. Season 2 was even better than season one. The best show we saw this year! I just hope we see more shows from Abi Morgan. She is so talented.' Another audience review calls The Hour a 'fab series' that's witty and has 'great sets and clothes'. Commending the 'superb line up of the cream of actors', the audience review further states that the show is 'well cast', however 'the pace is a bit odd but it's great evening watching.'
