SRINAGAR: Restoration of statehood to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), as promised by the Centre, would be done after the Assembly poll in the Union Territory (UT) and a call to conduct elections would be taken by the Election Commission of India (ECI), Union Home Minister Amit Shah said today.
Talking to news agency ANI in a interview, Shah noted that there has been a marked improvement in the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir as the lowest militancy-related incidents were reported in the recent past.
He also insisted that Article 370, which was done away with by the Centre in August 2019, had actually harmed the country and the BJP had always been against it.
Noting that development in J&K was leading to gradual ending of militancy, Shah said, “See all the figures. There is a lot of change in Jammu and Kashmir.” Indicating that he could not comment on the timing of the poll in J&K, Shah said, “I had clearly stated that statehood will be restored in Jammu and Kashmir after elections. The process for preparation of voters’ list is nearing completion in the UT. Now, the Election Commission has to take a call on elections.”
On the issue of the emergence of new leadership in J&K, Shah said that new leadership would emerge from local bodies where poll had been held earlier. “The panches and sarpanches, who have been elected…new leadership will emerge from them…Since the time militancy started in J&K, the militancy-related figures are at their lowest today. Crores of tourists and ‘yatris’ are visiting J&K now. This is a huge change,” he noted.
Shah said removing Article 370 has been on the agenda of BJP and Jana Sangh. He also referred to India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru in the context of Article 370. “Since 1950, it was on our agenda to remove Article 370 from J&K. Today, the way J&K is witnessing development and decrease in militancy shows that change is coming,” he said. Shah said those slamming the BJP should answer in whose tenure militancy grew in J&K.
“As far as elections are concerned, do they not remember that local body polls were held under our rule? These did not take place for 70 years. Three families were holding sway in J&K and they are making noise…Farooq Abdullah had gone to England. In whose tenure, militancy grew…there should be an answer,” Shah said.
A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation.
The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.
He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian.
Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
‘Team Jorge’ unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video
The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.
Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.
One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.
The consortium of journalists that investigated Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. The project, part of a wider investigation into the disinformation industry, has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
Quick Guide
About this investigative series
Show
The Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay.The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. Read more about this project.
Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. Please consider supporting it today.
The undercover footage was filmed by three reporters, who approached Team Jorge posing as prospective clients.
In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.
Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.
The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.
Tal Hanan and his colleagues met reporters at an office in Modi’in, about 20 miles outside Tel Aviv. Photograph: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
Do you have information about Tal Hanan or ‘Team Jorge’? For the most secure communications, use SecureDrop or see our guide.
The Team Jorge revelations could cause embarrassment for Israel, which has come under growing diplomatic pressure in recent years over its export of cyber-weaponry that undermines democracy and human rights.
Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD did not respond to requests for comment.
Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters. Journalists using conventional methods have struggled to shed light on the disinformation industry, which is at pains to avoid detection.
The secretly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, therefore provide a rare window into the mechanics of disinformation for hire.
Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.
The encounters with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.
It was not possible to verify all of Team Jorge’s claims in the undercover meetings, and Hanan may have been embellishing them in order to secure a lucrative deal with prospective clients. For example, it appears Hanan may have inflated his fees when discussing the cost of his services.
Team Jorge told the reporters they would accept payments in a variety of currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, or cash. He said he would charge between €6m and €15m for interference in elections.
Quick Guide
The undercover footage
Show
What is this undercover footage?
Disinformation operatives work under the radar. To find out more about ‘Team Jorge’, an Israel-based unit selling hacking and social media manipulation services, three journalists went undercover. They posed as consultants, working on behalf of a client in a politically unstable African country who wanted to delay a forthcoming election. The reporters secretly filmed several meetings with the group’s leader, Tal Hanan, who uses the alias ‘Jorge’, and his associates between July 2022 and December 2022.
Who is in the footage?
The footage captures Hanan, as well as his brother, Zohar Hanan, and other associates of Team Jorge. Faces of reporters have been blurred. The meetings took place on video calls, when Hanan and his colleagues gave slideshow demonstrations of their services, and in person, at Team Jorge’s office in an industrial park 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Who did the secret filming?
It was secretly filmed by three reporters from media outlets working in a consortium investigating disinformation: Gur Megiddo (TheMarker), Frédéric Métézeau (Radio France) and Omer Benjakob (Haaretz). The video was then shared with more than 25 other media outlets in the consortium, including the Guardian and Observer. While the Guardian and Observer were not involved in the undercover filming, they are publishing the material because of the strong public interest justifications for doing so.
What is Team Jorge’s response?
Tal Hanan did not provide a detailed response to questions from the Guardian. He said: ‘To be clear, I do deny any wrongdoing.’
However, emails leaked to the Guardian show Hanan quoting more modest fees. One suggests that in 2015 he asked for $160,000 from the now defunct British consultancy Cambridge Analytica for involvement in an eight-week campaign in a Latin American country.
In 2017 Hanan again pitched to work for Cambridge Analytica, this time in Kenya, but was rejected by the consultancy, which said “$400,000-$600,000 per month, and substantially more for crisis response” was more than its clients would pay.
There is no evidence that either of those campaigns went ahead. Other leaked documents, however, reveal that when Team Jorge worked covertly on the Nigerian presidential race in 2015 it did so alongside Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix, who was the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, declined to comment in detail but added: “Your purported understanding is disputed.”
Team Jorge also sent Nix’s political consultancy a video showcasing an early iteration of the social media disinformation software it now markets as Aims. Hanan said in an email that the tool, which enabled users to create up to 5,000 bots to deliver “mass messages” and “propaganda”, had been used in 17 elections.
“It’s our own developed Semi-Auto Avatar creation and network deployment system,” he said, adding that it could be used in any language and was being sold as a service, although the software could be bought “if the price is right”.
Team Jorge’s bot-management software appears to have grown significantly by 2022, according to what Hanan told the undercover reporters. He said it controlled a multinational army of more than 30,000 avatars, complete with digital backstories that stretch back years.
Demonstrating the Aims interface, Hanan scrolled through dozens of avatars, and showed how fake profiles could be created in an instant, using tabs to choose nationality and gender and then matching profile pictures to names.
“This is Spanish, Russian, you see Asians, Muslims. Let’s make a candidate together,” he told the undercover reporters, before settling on one image of a white woman. “Sophia Wilde, I like the name. British. Already she has email, date birth, everything.”
Hanan was coy when asked where the photos for his avatars came from. However, the Guardian and its partners have discovered several instances in which images have been harvested from the social media accounts of real people. The photo of “Sophia Wilde”, for instance, appears to have been stolen from a Russian social media account belonging to a woman who lives in Leeds.
The Guardian and its reporting partners tracked Aims-linked bot activity across the internet. It was behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India and the United Arab Emirates.
This week Meta, the owner of Facebook, took down Aims-linked bots on its platform after reporters shared a sample of the fake accounts with the company. On Tuesday, a Meta spokesperson connected the Aims bots to others that were linked in 2019 to another, now-defunct Israeli firm which it banned from the platform.
“This latest activity is an attempt by some of the same individuals to come back and we removed them for violating our policies,” the spokesperson said. “The group’s latest activity appears to have centred around running fake petitions on the internet or seeding fabricated stories in mainstream media outlets.”
In addition to Aims, Hanan told reporters about his “blogger machine” – an automated system for creating websites that the Aims-controlled social media profiles could then use to spread fake news stories across the internet. “After you’ve created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate,” he said.
‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’
No less alarming were Hanan’s demonstrations of his team’s hacking capabilities, in which he showed the reporters how he could penetrate Telegram and Gmail accounts. In one case, he brought up on screen the Gmail account of a man described as the “assistant of an important guy” in the general election in Kenya, which was days away.
“Today if someone has a Gmail, it means they have much more than just email,” Hanan said as he clicked through the target’s emails, draft folders, contacts and drives. He then showed how he claimed to be able to access accounts on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.
Tal Hanan. Photograph: Source: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
One of the Telegram accounts he claimed to penetrate belonged to a person in Indonesia, while the other two appeared to belong to Kenyans involved in the ongoing general election, and close to the then candidate William Ruto, who ended up winning the presidency.
“I know in some countries they believe Telegram is safe. I will show you how safe it is,” he said, before showing a screen in which he appeared to scroll through the Telegram contacts of one Kenyan strategist who was working for Ruto at the time.
Hanan then demonstrated how access to Telegram could be manipulated to sow mischief.
Typing the words “hello how are you dear”, Hanan appeared to send a message from the Kenyan strategist’s account to one of their contacts. “I’m not just watching,” Hanan boasted, before explaining how manipulating the messaging app to send messages could be used to create chaos in a rival’s election campaign.
“One of the biggest thing is to put sticks between the right people, you understand,” he said. “And I can write him what I think about his wife, or what I think about his last speech, or I can tell him that I promised him to be my next chief of staff, OK?”
Hanan then showed how – once the message had been read – he could “delete” it to cover his tracks. But when Hanan repeated that trick, hacking into the Telegram account of the second close adviser to Ruto, he made a mistake.
After sending an innocuous Telegram message consisting only of the number “11” to one of the hacking victim’s contacts, he failed to properly delete it.
Hanan sent a Telegram message consisting only of the number 11 to one of the hacking victim’s contacts. Photograph: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
A reporter in the consortium was later able to track down the recipient of that message and was granted permission to check the person’s phone. The “11” message was still visible on their Telegram account, providing evidence that Team Jorge’s infiltration of the account was genuine.
Hanan suggested to the undercover reporters that some of his hacking methods exploited vulnerabilities in the global signalling telecoms system, SS7, which for decades has been regarded by experts as a weak spot in the telecoms network.
Google, which runs the Gmail service, declined to comment. Telegram said “the problem of SS7 vulnerabilities” was widely known and “not unique to Telegram”. They added: “Accounts on any massively popular social media network or messaging app can be vulnerable to hacking or impersonation unless users follow security recommendations and take proper precautions to keep their accounts secure.”
Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment, claiming that he needed “approval” from an unspecified authority before doing so. However, he added: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”
Zohar Hanan, his brother and business partner, added: “I have been working all my life according to the law!”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Lahore: Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday claimed that PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif’s condition for agreeing to hold elections is to first disqualify him and send him to jail, media reports said.
Before elections, Nawaz Sharif wants me to be disqualified and sent to jail, Imran Khan said in a televised address, Samaa TV reported.
He also said Pakistan is passing through a critical juncture, and “if correct decisions are not taken, the country will suffer a great loss”.
Imran Khan also said that in developed countries, only rule of law prevails.
He further said courts are meant to treat the weak and the powerful equally. The powerful always considered themselves above the law, and the law is not being implemented to save wealth.
The corrupt want to save their money one way or the other, and unfortunately they got NRO (relief in corruption cases) from (then Army chief) Gen (Qamar Javed) Bajwa, he said, as per Samaa TV.
Imran Khan claimed the “corrupt lot” was scared that if he came to power again, their NRO will end.
“I salute our judiciary on behalf of the nation. All our hopes are pinned on the judiciary,” he said
The PTI chief further claimed efforts are being made to prevent him from coming to power. The entire nation is looking towards the judiciary to protect the Constitution.
“I want to ask the nation to prepare themselves, these people will pressurize the judiciary again,” he said, Samaa TV reported.
The former Prime Minister maintained that if the country is to be taken out of the quagmire, elections must be held soon. If elections are not held within 90 days, it will be a violation of the Constitution.
“If elections are not held, caretaker governments will have no value,” he stated.
Imran Khan said during the PTI era, these people used to raise slogans of “respect the vote”, but are now scared of elections. They will only announce elections once they know the grounds have been prepared.
Hyderabad: Biennial elections to 15 seats of Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council and Telangana Legislative Council will be held on March 13.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday announced the schedule for 13 seats of Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council and two seats of Telangana Legislative Council.
The elections will be held for eight local authorities’ constituencies, three graduates’ and two teachers’ constituencies in Andhra Pradesh. Polling will also be held for one teachers’ constituency and one local authorities’ constituency in Telangana.
The ECI announced that notifications for these elections will be issued on February 16. The last date for filing of nominations will be February 23. The nominations will be taken up for scrutiny the next day. The last date for withdrawal of nominations will be February 27.
Polling will be held on March 13. The counting of votes will be taken up on March 16. The ECI announced that the model code of conduct concerning these elections will come into force with immediate effect in the concerned constituencies.
In Andhra Pradesh, Anantapur and Kadapa Local Authorities’ seats are scheduled to fall vacant on March 29 with the retirement of sitting members. Similarly, sitting members from West Godavari, Nellore, East Godavari, Srikakulam, Chittoorr and Kurnool Local Authorities constituencies will retire on May 1.
Prakasam-Nellore-Chittoor, Kadapa-Anantapur-Kurnool and Srikakulam-Vizianagaram-Visakhapatnam Graduates’ seats, Prakasam-Nellore-Chittoor and Kadapa-Anantapur-Kurnool Teachers’ seats are to fall vacant on March 29.
In Telangana, the term of MLCs from Mahabubnagar-Ranga Reddy-Hyderabad Teachers’ seat and Hyderabad Local Authorities’ seat is to end on March 29 and May 1 respectively.
The Election Commission has directed the chief secretaries of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to ensure that the extant instructions regarding Covid-19 containment measures are complied with while making arrangements for conducting the elections.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.
But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — “Back to her old self again” was how one erstwhile colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the U.K.’s front pages at the weekend.
That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak and his allies were afraid of.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in No. 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectful period of 13 weeks’ silence, the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister exploded back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that her radical economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance.”
In her first interview since stepping down, broadcast Monday evening, she expanded on this, saying she encountered “system resistance” to her plans as PM and did not get “the level of political support required” to change prevailing attitudes.
While the reception for Truss’s relaunch has not been exactly rapturous — with much of the grumbling coming from within her own party — it still presents a genuine headache for her successor, Sunak, who must now deal with not one but two unruly former prime ministers jostling from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job, but is never far from the headlines. Recent engagements with the U.S. media and high-profile excursions to Kyiv have ensured his strident views on the situation in Ukraine remain well-aired, even as he racks up hundreds of thousands in fees from private speaking engagements around the world.
Wasting no time
Truss and Johnson have, typically, both opted for swifter and more vocal returns to frontline politics than many of their forerunners in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They have tended to follow the lead of [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 promised: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.’”
Such an approach has never been universal. Ted Heath, PM from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “behaved appallingly” — in Bale’s words — to John Major, who replaced her in Downing Street in 1990 after she was forced from office.
But more recent Tory PMs have kept a respectful distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the EU referendum in 2016, and waited three years before publishing a memoir — reportedly in order to avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions in the House of Commons on subjects close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and rail services in her hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect to see former prime ministers be a tad more circumspect in the way they re-enter the political debate,” says Paul Harrison, former press secretary to May. “But then she [Truss] wasn’t a conventional prime minister in any sense of the word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done something very unconventional.”
Truss’s rapid refresh has not met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes that “rather than concede, move on, and focus on the future, she denies, digs in and reimagines the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’ time in office “was a period that [people] would rather not really remember too clearly.”
One long-serving Conservative MP said “she only had herself to blame for her demise, and we are still clearing up some of the mess.” Another appraised her latest intervention simply with an exploding-head emoji.
Trussites forever
But despite Tory appeals for calm, the refusal of Truss and Johnson to lie low remains a serious worry for the man eventually chosen to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought better of trying to stage a comeback.
Between them, the two ex-PMs have the ability to highlight two of Sunak’s big weaknesses.
While Truss may never live down the disastrous “mini-budget” of last September which sent the U.K. economy off the rails, her wider policy agenda still has a hold over a number of Conservative MPs who believe they have no hope of winning the election without it.
This was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a caucus of MPs who will carry the torch for the low-tax, deregulatory approach to government favored by Truss and who continue to complain Sunak has little imagination when it comes to supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Truss, insisted “she has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and “posed important questions” about how the U.K. models economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives have been advocating a reappraisal of the actions of the Bank of England in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that Truss was unfairly blamed for a collapse in the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she may be the best advocate for the causes she represents. “There’s a question about whether it actually best serves her interests in pushing back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened so soon after leaving office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — continues to symbolize the star quality and ballot box appeal which they fear Sunak lacks.
One government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, “was all about hard work.”
These apparent deficiencies feed into a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too tentatively and, as one ally put it recently, needs to rip off the “cashmere jumper.”
It’s been posited that British prime ministers swing back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds” — and nothing is more likely to underline Sunak’s nerdiness than a pair of recently-deposed jocks refusing to shut up.
Trouble ahead
Unluckily for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket items coming up which will provide ample ground on which his nemeses can cause trouble.
One is the forthcoming budget — the government’s annual public spending plan, due March 15. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to get personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a nuisance of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to offer the paucity of answers on growth they already fear.
Before that, Truss is expected to make her first public appearance outside the U.K. with a speech on Taiwan which could turn up the heat on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
One person close to her confirmed China would be “a big thing” for her, and is expected to be a theme of her future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of the Northern Ireland protocol, the thorniest unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortured negotiations appear to be reaching an endgame.
Sunak has been sitting with a draft version of a technical deal since last week, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, and is now girding his loins for the unenviable task of trying to get a compromise agreement past both his own party and hardline Northern Irish unionists.
A Whitehall official working on the protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and that “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to assemble the former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind him on a matter of such huge national and international significance. But as things stand such a get-together is difficult to picture.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’ actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departures.
They appear fated to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it — “not caring how much trouble they cause Sunak, because in their view, he should never have taken over from them in the first place.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Dozens of contractors were detained over the weekend in Turkey, as anger grows over the consequences of the devastating earthquakes and the government vows to take action against construction negligence and flaws.
The country’s vice president, Fuat Oktay, said on Sunday that the government had already identified 131 people as responsible for the collapse of thousands of buildings and the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the 10 quake-struck provinces. He said that 114 of the people had been taken into custody.
“We will follow this up meticulously until the necessary judicial process is concluded, especially for buildings that suffered heavy damage and buildings that caused deaths and injuries,” he said.
The Turkish Justice Ministry on Saturday ordered authorities in the affected areas to set up “Earthquake Crimes Investigation Departments” and appoint prosecutors to bring criminal charges against anyone connected to poorly constructed buildings that collapsed.
The death toll has climbed to more than 29,000, the Turkish Emergency Coordination Center said on Sunday.
Some 80,278 people were injured in the quakes. At least 218,406 search and rescue personnel were working in the field, according to Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD).
Environment Minister Murat Kurum said that 24,921 buildings across the region had collapsed or were heavily damaged in the quake, based on assessments of more than 170,000 buildings.
Opposition politicians are openly blaming Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the fact that the country was ill-prepared for the catastrophe, the mismanagement of a special tax imposed after the last major earthquake in 1999 in order to make buildings more resistant, as well as for the slow relief effort.
In the meantime, German and Austrian rescue teams have suspended operations, citing security concerns and reports of clashes between people, looting incidents and gunfire. The German International Search and Rescue (ISAR) and Germany’s Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) said they would resume work as soon as AFAD classifies the situation as safe.
Erdoğan warned that looters would be dealt with “firmly,” saying a state of emergency declared in the affected provinces would allow authorities to act to prevent further incidents.
Among the contractors arrested is Mehmet Yasar Coskun, the contractor of a 12-story building in Hatay with 250 apartments, once advertised as “a frame from heaven,” which was completely destroyed. He was arrested at the Istanbul airport as he was trying to board a flight to Montenegro. It is believed that some 1,000 people were living in the residence, and most of them are still under the rubble.
Another one is Mehmet Ertan Akay, after the collapse of his building in the city of Gaziantep. He was charged with reckless manslaughter and building code violations.
Giving a signal that the devastating quake could lead to Greece and Turkey mending fences, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias paid an unexpected visit to the country and together with his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu visited the flattened areas and met with the Greek rescue teams operating in the quake zones. Tensions between the neighboring countries have been particularly high in recent months, especially as both governments plan elections by summer.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Bengaluru: BJP has appointed Union Minister for Education, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan as in-charge of forthcoming assembly elections in Karnataka.
The party has also appointed Tamil Nadu State President K. Annamalai as the co-incharge. Pradhan had worked as the Karnataka in-charge during the tenure of former chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa in 2008.
Annamalai, who was the Karnataka Cadre IPS officer, has fair knowledge of the state. He had rendered services across the state and earned a good name among the public. The people demanded his appointment and protested his transfers in the state.
Pradhan had worked as in charge of elections in Uttar Pradesh and other states. Both the leaders are very much aware of ground realities of the state and have fair knowledge of the pulse of the party workers.
Aiming to return to power in the state, the saffron party wants to fight on the Hindutva agenda. The leaders have announced that they will seek votes in Karnataka in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As the elections will be held in less than two months, the political parties have already sounded poll bugle in the state. The campaigning has already been launched by major parties.
Leaving no stone unturned, BJP is putting in all efforts as frequent visits by Prime Minister Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to the state have been lined up in the coming days.
LONDON — Public sector workers on strike, the cost-of-living climbing, and a government on the ropes.
“It’s hard to miss the parallels” between the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 and Britain in 2023, says Robert Saunders, historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary, University of London.
Admittedly, the comparison only goes so far. In the 1970s it was a Labour government facing down staunchly socialist trade unions in a wave of strikes affecting everything from food deliveries to grave-digging, while Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives sat in opposition and awaited their chance.
But a mass walkout fixed for Wednesday could yet mark a staging post in the downward trajectory of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, just as it did for Callaghan’s Labour.
Britain is braced for widespread strike action tomorrow, as an estimated 100,000 civil servants from government departments, ports, airports and driving test centers walk out alongside hundreds of thousands of teachers across England and Wales, train drivers from 14 national operators and staff at 150 U.K. universities.
It follows rolling action by train and postal workers, ambulance drivers, paramedics, and nurses in recent months. In a further headache for Sunak, firefighters on Monday night voted to walk out for the first time in two decades.
While each sector has its own reasons for taking action, many of those on strike are united by the common cause of stagnant pay, with inflation still stubbornly high. And that makes it harder for Sunak to pin the blame on the usual suspects within the trade union movement.
Mr Reasonable
Industrial action has in the past been wielded as a political weapon by the Conservative Party, which could count on a significant number of ordinary voters being infuriated by the withdrawal of public services.
Tories have consequently often used strikes as a stick with which to beat their Labour opponents, branding the left-wing party as beholden to its trade union donors.
But public sympathies have shifted this time round, and it’s no longer so simple to blame the union bogeymen.
Sunak has so far attempted to cast himself as Mr Reasonable, stressing that his “door is always open” to workers but warning that the right to strike must be “balanced” with the provision of services. To this end, he is pressing ahead with long-promised legislation to enforce minimum service standards in sectors hit by industrial action.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner | POOL photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Unions are enraged by the anti-strike legislation, yet Sunak’s soft-ish rhetoric is still in sharp relief to the famously bellicose Thatcher, who pledged during the 1979 strikes that “if someone is confronting our essential liberties … then, by God, I will confront them.”
Sunak’s careful approach is chosen at least in part because the political ground has shifted beneath him since the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020.
Public sympathy for frontline medical staff, consistently high in the U.K., has been further embedded by the extreme demands placed upon nurses and other hospital staff during the pandemic. And inflation is hitting workers across the economy — not just in the public sector — helping to create a broader reservoir of sympathy for strikers than has often been found in the past.
James Frayne, a former government adviser who co-founded polling consultancy Public First, observes: “Because of the cost-of-living crisis, what you [as prime minister] can’t do, as you might be able to do in the past, is just portray this as being an ideologically-driven strike.”
Starmer’s sleight of hand
At the same time, strikes are not the political headache for the opposition Labour Party they once were.
Thatcher was able to portray Callaghan as weak when he resisted the use of emergency powers against the unions. David Cameron was never happier than when inviting then-Labour leader Ed Miliband to disown his “union paymasters,” particularly during the last mass public sector strike in 2011.
Crucially, trade union votes had played a key role in Miliband’s election as party leader — something the Tories would never let him forget. But when Sunak attempts to reprise Cameron’s refrains against Miliband, few seem convinced.
QMUL’s Saunders argues that the Conservatives are trying to rerun “a 1980s-style campaign” depicting Labour MPs as being in the pocket of the unions. But “I just don’t think this resonates with the public,” he added.
Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, has actively sought to weaken the left’s influence in the party, attracting criticism from senior trade unionists. Most eye-catchingly, Starmer sacked one of his own shadow ministers, Sam Tarry, after he defied an order last summer that the Labour front bench should not appear on picket lines.
Starmer has been “given cover,” as one shadow minister put it, by Sunak’s decision to push ahead with the minimum-service legislation. It means Labour MPs can please trade unionists by fighting the new restrictions in parliament — without having to actually stand on the picket line.
So far it seems to be working. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group representing millions of U.K. trade unionists, told POLITICO: “Frankly, I’m less concerned about Labour frontbenchers standing up on picket lines for selfies than I am about the stuff that really matters to our union” — namely the government’s intention to “further restrict the right to strike.”
The TUC is planning a day of action against the new legislation on Wednesday, coinciding with the latest wave of strikes.
Sticking to their guns
For now, Sunak’s approach appears to be hitting the right notes with his famously restless pack of Conservative MPs.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner.
As one Tory MP for an economically-deprived marginal seat put it: “We have to hold our nerve. There’s a strong sense of the corner (just about) being turned on inflation rising, so we need to be as tough as possible … We can’t now enable wage increases that feed inflation.”
Another agreed: “Rishi should hold his ground. My guess is that eventually people will get fed up with the strikers — especially rail workers.”
Furthermore, Public First’s Frayne says his polling has picked up the first signs of an erosion of support for strikes since they kicked off last summer, particularly among working-class voters.
“We’re at the point now where people are feeling like ‘well, I haven’t had a pay rise, and I’m not going to get a pay rise, and can we all just accept that it’s tough for everybody and we’ve got to get on with it,’” he said.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent.
‘Everything is broken’
But the broader concern for Sunak’s Conservatives is that, regardless of whatever individual pay deals are eventually hammered out, the wave of strikes could tap into a deeper sense of malaise in the U.K.
Inflation remains high, and the government’s independent forecaster predicted in December that the U.K. will fall into a recession lasting more than a year.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
Strikes by ambulance workers only drew more attention to an ongoing crisis in the National Health Service, with patients suffering heart attacks and strokes already facing waits of more than 90 minutes at the end of 2022.
Moving around the country has been made difficult not only by strikes, but by multiple failures by rail providers on key routes.
One long-serving Conservative MP said they feared a sense of fatalism was setting in among the public — “the idea that everything is broken and there’s no point asking this government to fix it.”
A former Cabinet minister said the most pressing issue in their constituency is the state of public services, and strike action signaled political danger for the government. They cautioned that the public are not blaming striking workers, but ministers, for the disruption.
Those at the top of government are aware of the risk of such a narrative taking hold, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, taking aim at “declinism about Britain” in a keynote speech Friday.
Whether the government can do much to change the story, however, is less clear.
Saunders harks back to Callaghan’s example, noting that public sector workers were initially willing to give the Labour government the benefit of the doubt, but that by 1979 the mood had fatally hardened.
This is because strikes are not only about falling living standards, he argues. “It’s also driven by a loss of faith in government that things are going to get better.”
With an election looming next year, Rishi Sunak is running out of time to turn the public mood around.
Annabelle Dickson and Graham Lanktree contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Srinagar: Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Monday said the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra was not for winning elections but to counter the hate spread by the BJP and the RSS in the country.
Addressing a rally to mark the culmination of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, amid heavy snowfall, he also said Gandhi was determined to restore Jammu and Kashmir statehood.
“The yatra was not for winning elections but against hate. BJP people are spreading hate in the country. Rahul Gandhi has proven that he can unite the country from Kanyakumari to Kashmir on issues like unemployment and inflation,” Kharge said at the rally here to mark the culmination of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Jammu and Kashmir’s Srinagar.
Kharge alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the RSS and the BJP were pursuing the policy widening the poor-rich divide in the country.
“(Prime Minister Narendra) Modiji, RSS and BJP want to keep poor people poor and to make rich, richer. Ten per cent people are looting 72 per cent wealth of the country while 50 per cent own just three per cent,” he said.
While addressing the rally, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said she was also apprehensive initially if people will join the yatra.
“My brother has been walking for the last five months from Kanyakumari. Earlier I also thought, it was a long journey whether people will come out. But they came out everywhere. They came out because people of the country have spirit for unity,” she said.
She said Gandhi, as he was entering Jammu and Kashmir, sent a message to their mother Sonia Gandhi saying that he was going home.
“The whole country supported the yatra. The politics that is happening in the country cannot benefit the country. The politics that divides cannot benefit the country. Those who walked have shown a ray of hope,” she added.
