These Aren't the Spies You're Looking For
Labour is immersed in the worst espionage scandal since the Cold War
Towering Columns
For The Times, Juliet Samuel says the spy scandal sits at the top of an iceberg of Chinese infiltration that has been ongoing for years.
Was [Matthew Collins], for example, working for a government that, despite being altogether incoherent and overly soft on China, was ultimately prepared to listen to advice about critical national security interests? Or did his immediate superior, in the form of Labour national security adviser Jonathan Powell, appear to have copious commercial and political connections with Beijing, even to the point of being a fellow of an elite networking operation called The 48 Group Club? Were senior ministers at the time trying desperately to wring investment out of Beijing? Had the attorney-general of the day recently found spurious reasons to give away British sovereign territory into Beijing’s orbit? These are relevant questions, and yet, even though the answers to most of them are yes, they still give the prime minister and his aides sufficient deniability. The official has “full freedom”, as they say, to read the room for himself.
It’s only natural, they’d say, that a case such as this should be the subject of high-level, cross-departmental meetings on how to handle any serious retaliatory moves from China or the huge fiscal implications of this official being so fully, entirely, joyfully free to say what he thinks. But the prime minister and the national security adviser and the attorney-general in no way wish to interfere in his important work — not at all!
For all the government torpedoed its own case, however, it can also hardly be said that the CPS did its finest work. Was there not a shrewd way through the government’s devious China politicking? Did the Russia case really change all that much about the legal arguments? Perhaps it’s worth asking the attorney-general, Lord Hermer, to shed some light on the matter. The CPS answers to him. During debates in the House this week, the ill feeling was palpable. One after another, the Tory China hawks stood up to point out the government’s contradictions and evasions. But their simmering rage has at its source not just the current government’s betrayal….
…Whatever answers are ultimately dragged out of ministers and officials, we are still under immediate threat. Just look at the record: China intercepting top-secret government data en masse, Chinese “police stations” operating in our cities, Beijing-sponsored hackers inside the Electoral Commission, lucrative joint laboratories between British universities and Chinese defence conglomerates, British technology companies asset-stripped, and the ranks of our former senior civil service and corporate elite lining up to “advise” Chinese companies.
On ConservativeHome, Bob Seely says British establishment complicity with China is alarming but has deep roots, recommending a serious change of direction.
First, national security is non-negotiable, so we get Chinese industrial spies – sorry, military PhD students – out of our universities as part of a wider reform of the university sector. We should name and shame – and prosecute where we can – anyone acting as covert agents of CCP influence. We have an honest conversation with China over its Confucius Institutes; either they stop peddling Communist propaganda on campuses or we will replace them with Taiwanese alternatives. I’d also sell weapons to Taiwan and do everything we can to build its defences to prevent an opportunistic Chinese invasion that will destroy the global economic and stability.
Second, Government should produce an annual statement on foreign economic dependency, especially but not exclusively on China. We need to understand our dependency on others to mitigate against it. We can use it as a call to action to diversity supply chains, and – combined with lowering energy prices – start on-shoring at least some industry which has left in previous years. If China moves against the US or Taiwan, we must have the freedom to act to support them without fearing the collapse of our economy. We need to be clear what China’s aim is: its Communist rulers want us to be so dependent on them that when they go to war with the US or Taiwan, we – with other European nations – will no choice but to break our alliance with the US. Such a move would signal the end of West power and would be a century-long strategic catastrophe for the UK – yet that is the direction in which Sir Kier Starmer is taking us.
Third, we need an annual national report on military and non-military threats to the UK and Western democracy; everything from info ops to espionage, cyberattacks to economic stratagems, all the way through to military threats. Submissions should come direct from all departments, but led by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – with no watering down from weak Governments allowed. I’d suggest it be co-ordinated by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the one body I trust – more or less – to deliver a report both robust and independent.
Also in The Times, Max Hastings warns that the AUKUS defence pact is under strain.
On Monday the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is paying his first visit to Trump and Aukus will be high on the agenda. The president, adopting his accustomed transactional approach, is likely to say hard things about Australia’s close trade relationship with China. He also wants to see the country’s defence spend increase from its current 2 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent. Albanese has good cards of his own to play: the Americans prize Australian rare earths, likewise its intelligence-gathering operations in the Northern Territory and basing facilities at Fremantle, which are being dramatically expanded. It is unlikely Trump will say anything that provokes a breach with Canberra. He could well announce a continuing commitment to Aukus.
But will Australians believe such a pledge, from this president? The deal has become a totemic talking point in their country, reflecting wider uncertainties about which way they should look for their own security, against an ever more powerful and aggressive China. A recent poll showed that 60 per cent of Australians doubt that the promised American submarines will ever be delivered to them. A vocal lobby is pressing for reinstatement of a collaboration to buy French boats, ditched in 2021 in favour of Aukus. James Curran, professor of modern history at Sydney University and a defence guru, wrote last week in Foreign Affairs that the Aukus deal “has become emblematic of the US-Australian alliance as a whole, and risks being weighed down by unfulfilled expectations on both sides … What Australian elites want is the old American ally, the one to which they so often appealed as the guarantor of the old rules-based order … The only way forward may be to accept that the US today is simply not the ally Canberra is used to.”
None of this changes the dominant reality, which challenges Europe as much as Australia, Japan, Taiwan. America remains the key ally in confronting both Russia and China. There is no credible substitute for US might. It cannot be wrong to continue to strive to keep defence relationships alive, even amid the immense difficulties. Albanese may get a spiky reception at the White House next week: the president dislikes him, a paid-up socialist. Both men have reasons for keeping the wheels on the Aukus wagon, and probably will do so for now. But the US retains until 2031 a right to cancel. Down the track, just as Europe is unwillingly coming to terms with the new dependency of its regional security upon our own shoulders and wallets, so it will be also for the major nations of the Pacific. Aukus hinges upon wishful projections in Canberra, London and Washington alike. Realities may yet scupper it, and by no means all of them are called Trump.
On his Substack, Ed Conway highlights the seriousness of the rare earths minerals crisis.
[Because mining rare earths is hard and emissions-intensive] in recent decades most G7 nations were perfectly happy that most of the world’s rare earth production was happening somewhere else. Anywhere but in their own backyards. And since China was able to produce these magnets far cheaper than anyone else (the less said about the emissions the better), that meant cheaper consumer electronics for everyone. It meant a company like Apple could shower their devices with neodymium magnets (what else did you think “MagSafe” was?).
But of course, here we are in the midst of a trade war and, once again, rare earths are back on the front pages. The reason, this time around, is that China has announced a set of regulations which mean anyone buying their REE, or the products made with them, will have to apply for a licence from the Chinese government. It’s hard to say quite how onerous this will be in practice, but it does seem more far-reaching than any of the previous restrictions imposed by Beijing. Quite why China is doing this is, as ever, a bit of a mystery. The obvious explanation is that it’s an attempt to retaliate to the US, though in this case the restrictions seem to apply internationally. The other obvious explanation is that China wants to wield control over certain nooks of the supply chain, including military applications (there’s a lot of rare earths in an F35 fighter jet, for instance).
A more intriguing theory is that China might also be fishing for more information about what applications those rare earths are actually used for. Is this an attempt to map out a somewhat opaque supply chain? One of the strands in Material World is that our understanding of how stuff is made, of the web of relationships and processes that stand between consumers and the raw materials that go into their products - is shockingly primitive. China’s “map” of the global economy is better than anything Western governments have at their disposal. But is this exercise an attempt to improve that map yet further? Covering this story left me wondering, too, why people aren’t talking about Spruce Pine a bit more. After all, China might have a near monopoly on rare earths, but the US has a near monopoly on the ultra pure quartz you need to make the silicon wafers we turn into semiconductors and solar panels. Should America decide to cut off exports from the rest of the world, it would have just as crippling an effect as these Chinese restrictions.
In The Times, Gerard Baker says liberal conservatism has now been all but replaced by a post-liberal Right-populism and may never return.
Across the West, supposedly conservative governments have betrayed conservatism, and in the process fatally weakened the political cause. In the US, the Republican administration of George W Bush embraced neoconservatism — an unhappy bastardisation of the fundamental conservative idea that government should leave well alone and the fundamental conservative instinct of modesty. The effort to remake the world after 9/11, starting in the greater Middle East, was many things but it was neither conservative nor successful. Bush was also the president who abandoned fiscal conservatism and began America’s slide into the debt-heaped nation Thatcher would not recognise today.
In continental Europe, the high water mark of centre-right conservatism was set by Angela Merkel who, having achieved dominance of German politics and the European stage, proceeded to squander it with reckless abandon. An open door for migrants; green climate extremism that only increased German energy dependence; a failure to move the country’s economy beyond its ageing industrial base. These are the defining legacies of the “most successful European conservative of the 21st century”. In Britain so-called conservative modernisers, from David Cameron to Boris Johnson and beyond, produced 14 years of economic stasis and rising social unease. Like Merkel, they embraced wholeheartedly economically ruinous environmental alarmism and socially ruinous levels of immigration. They jettisoned fiscal conservatism too, presiding over the largest tax take and the largest share of government spending in the economy since before Thatcher came to office. It was as though they were intent on finding the end point in the Iron Lady’s famous dictum that “the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”.
I exaggerate slightly. Conservative ideas are enduring and may simply, in the press of changing economic and political circumstances, be undergoing another evolution. A new synthesis may emerge. Thatcher herself was a populist conservative with ideas that were deemed way too radical — and implausible — for the economic and social stability of the West, which seemed at the time to have settled into comfortable decline. For all the failures of the past 20 years, who would bet against the appeal of conservatism in the next 20?
On his Substack, Rob Henderson says the downwards social mobility of cultural elites has fuelled radical politics.
For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it. According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.
Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem—the petty disappointments of a small slice of America—but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences. To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.
Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages—or perhaps the right word is privileges—it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.
Wonky Thinking
Oren Cass argues in Foreign Affairs that a new US geopolitical strategy should include a commitment to balanced trade, reciprocity and disentanglement from distortive investment flows.
If it pursued reciprocity, Washington would also make a second demand: balanced trade. Economists have long understood that the benefits of free trade are undermined if countries adopt beggar-thy-neighbor policies that shift productive capacity to themselves at the expense of partners. In its efforts to achieve benevolent hegemony, the United States tolerated being beggared by its neighbors. For example, major trading partners such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea have pursued aggressive industrial policies and export-led growth strategies that shifted productive capacity from the United States and created persistent trade imbalances.
The United States tolerated this state of affairs partly for the sake of securing the loyalty of its allies and partners, and partly out of a mistaken belief that making things did not matter anymore and offshoring American industry would lead to cheaper goods for American consumers and better jobs in high-value service industries. Those tradeoffs have become untenable, as a weakened manufacturing sector has frayed the social fabric by eliminating millions of good blue-collar jobs, shattered the foundations of local economies across broad swaths of the country, reduced investment and innovation, imperiled supply chains, and eliminated the strategic depth afforded by a robust industrial base.
The United States should be a strong advocate for a large and open market as a core feature of an alliance, but it must insist that all participants foster the mutual benefit that a well-functioning trading system provides. In practice, this requires that each country commit to maintaining balance in its own trade, buying as much from others in the bloc as it sells to them. In the global trading system today, the United States operates as the consumer of last resort, absorbing surpluses from all who wish to run them. No other country can match China’s abuse of the global trading system, but Germany, Japan, and South Korea all rely on export-led growth and expect the U.S. economy to absorb their massive eexport surpluses, too, to the benefit of their producers and the detriment of American competitors.
Although a bilateral imbalance between any two countries is not necessarily problematic, an alliance cannot tolerate members pursuing large overall surpluses, which by definition necessitate others to run large deficits. Reciprocity would require using tariffs, quotas, or other regulatory barriers to discipline any country that is creating a structural imbalance. Countries running persistent surpluses could also commit to voluntary restraints on their own exports and could encourage their companies to build capacity in allied markets, as Japan did in the 1980s after the Reagan administration objected to Japanese automakers pouring cheaper cars into the American market. Countries that refused to play by the rules and pursue balance would be pushed out of the common market and face a high, uniform tariff from all members of the bloc.
In an era when the United States guaranteed open access to its market regardless of whether participants followed the rules, other countries quite rationally took advantage. If the United States instead conditioned access to its market on trading relationships that are balanced and thus mutually beneficial, countries will find it in their interest to adjust accordingly. The shock waves triggered by the Trump administration’s tariffs are educating both economists and U.S. allies on this point. Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have all altered their own trade policies—lowering barriers for U.S. exporters and raising barriers for China’s, in various combinations—and some have also made large commitments to invest in expanding U.S. capacity.
The third demand of a reciprocity strategy is simple: “China out.” The strategy of benevolent hegemony atop a liberal world order assumed the United States would remain the lone superpower, all countries would move toward market democracy, and free trade among them would foster prosperity for all. But China didn’t follow the script. How would U.S. leaders in 1997 react if a time traveler could go back and tell them that China—whose GDP per capita was then lower than that of the Republic of the Congo—would remain an authoritarian country with a state-run economy yet rise to match the United States geopolitically and outcompete it in industrial power? Presumably, they would laugh. But anyone who believed it would surely abandon the blind embrace of China on the spot. The United States, after all, had triumphed in a Cold War during which not even the most orthodox free-market libertarians advocated that the United States pursue trade with the Soviet Union or otherwise entangle the American and Soviet economic and political systems.
U.S. producers will not be able to enjoy the benefits of free trade if they are forced to compete against state-subsidized Chinese competitors in the Japanese market, or face imports from Malaysia into the U.S. market that rely on Chinese materials and components sold below cost. Thus, other countries’ access to the American market must be conditioned on their willingness to exclude China. The requirement of balanced trade would itself push countries in this direction, as many are discovering in the wake of the escalating U.S.-Chinese tariff war. The American refusal to continue absorbing China’s surplus has led to import surges into Europe, for instance, creating enormous headaches for leaders there. With the United States maintaining an unconditionally open market, Mexico might want to welcome enormous investment from BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, in factories that would then export cars into the United States. But if Mexico cannot run an enormous trade surplus with the United States, the proposition loses its appeal.
The China challenge goes far beyond trade imbalances, of course. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping shuts off the global supply of rare-earth magnets, the world is seeing the cost of letting the Chinese Communist Party manipulate and corner vital strategic markets. China makes investments abroad to usurp critical technologies and exercises political leverage over investors in the Chinese market. Governments and corporations will repeatedly see advantage in accepting what China offers, even as the cumulative effect of those bargains weakens both. If Washington pursued a strategy of reciprocity, the security of the United States and its allies and partners, and the freedom of the open market they would share, would depend on holding all participants accountable for disavowing that course.
Investment flows likewise require decoupling. The United States and its allies and partners should prohibit inbound investment from China (including foreign direct investment that results in China-based firms operating within their borders) and also prohibit their own citizens and firms from holding assets or making investments within China’s borders. Technology ecosystems will also need to diverge, especially as the United States leads efforts to restrict China’s access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips and chip-making equipment. On all fronts, the principle must be that one can do business in the Chinese sphere or the American one, but not both.
After decades during which Washington entangled the U.S. and Chinese economies, abandoned expertise and neglected to invest in domestic manufacturing, and accepted dependence on Chinese supply chains, the process of decoupling will impose real costs on the United States. In the short run, some consumer products will become more expensive. Some businesses will suffer from the loss of suppliers or customers. Reindustrialization will require substantial new investment, which implies some reductions in consumption.
But these results are best understood as the price of losing the bet on globalization. Climbing back out of that hole was always going to be expensive. The longer that policymakers refuse to acknowledge reality and insist on doubling down on the failed status quo, the more expensive it will become. Conversely, paying those costs now represents an investment in reindustrialization that will pay enormous dividends for decades.
The United States retains considerable leverage to redefine its role in the world and shape a new U.S.-led alliance system accordingly. Other countries will sulk when they realize that the old deal is no longer available. But if Washington can make clear that the options are a new alliance or no alliance, other market democracies will rationally accept the offer.
The deal would be a fair one. The United States would hold other countries only to the same conditions to which it would expect to be held. Obviously, it would remain a heavy spender on its own defense and the common defense; it would not expect other countries to pay the full cost. In seeking balanced trade, it would be asking others to meet it in the middle, not to accept a role reversal in which American producers get to dominate global markets.
These new American demands would disrupt the status quo and impose short-term costs on allies and partners. But they, too, would ultimately benefit. Those in Asia surely wish they could credibly defend Taiwan without wondering whether the United States would truly do so if push came to shove. Those in Europe surely wish they could have credibly warned Putin away from invading Ukraine. In Germany and Japan, especially, export-led growth models appear to have run their course and have given way to stagnation. Both countries would do well to turn toward strategies that boost domestic consumption. And while the lure of cheap Chinese goods and capital has repeatedly proved irresistible in the short run, all are aware of the long-term risks. Any market democracy should be excited to accept a partnership on those terms over the alternative of falling into a Chinese sphere of influence, and the United States can afford to hold firm on the terms.
The OECD published “A comprehensive overview of the Energy Intensive Industries ecosystem”, analysing the state of play for these industries in Europe compared to the rest of the world.
Energy intensive industries (EIIs) are key components of the industrial base of OECD economies. Even if the contribution of EIIs to domestic value added and employment is low in the EU and the United States compared to the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, ‘China’), the report highlights their importance as suppliers of inputs to many downstream sectors such as Construction, Fabricated metals, Automotive and Machinery, which makes them significant contributors to the overall competitiveness of economies. For example, a large part of inputs produced by EIIs operating in Europe is embodied in EU exports (e.g. in the automotive sector), contributing to the value added of these downstream sectors. In addition, across regions, labour productivity in EIIs is higher than in the rest of manufacturing, which might be related to high capital intensity and economies of scale, and is highest in ‘Coke & petroleum’, ‘Chemicals’ and ‘Basic metals’. This is worth noting in a context of the general productivity slowdown across OECD economies.
Between 2000 and 2020, China emerged as the main player in the global EIIs ecosystem, but this was driven to a large extent by domestic demand. As a consequence, the value added produced by EIIs in the EU and the US was fairly stable during that period. Although the EU and the US do not appear to have a competitive advantage in goods produced by the EIIs as a whole, they did not have had a competitive disadvantage either in the period up to 2020. By contrast, over the past two years, the EU trade balance for energy intensive industries has significantly worsened, with sectors like ‘Basic metals’ and ‘Coke & petroleum’ showing a trade deficit in 2022 and the ‘Chemicals’ sector experiencing a sharp decline in its trade surplus. The energy shock of 2022 seems to have severely affected the competitiveness of EU producers, leading to a substantial drop in production in both 2022 and 2023, while import competition intensified.
The decline in output is problematic because it could affect the ecosystem’s capacity to invest at a time when it needs to accelerate its low-carbon transition and its digital transformation. Indeed, the decarbonisation of EIIs via energy and carbon efficiency improvements – rather than via downscaling – is fundamental to reach the 2050 Net Zero targets while keeping a strong industrial basis and avoiding carbon leakage. This requires the rapid development and adoption of new low-carbon technologies across all energy intensive industries. However, the large increase in energy prices since 2022 has dearly affected production costs, and could limit the sector’s investment capacity, slowing down the much-needed replacement of polluting assets.
In this respect, the analysis reveals that the twin transition of the EIIs ecosystem was already an important challenge, even before the energy price crisis. The energy intensity of the ecosystem has decreased in the past two decades, mostly in ‘Basic metals’ and ‘Chemicals’, but at a much lower rate than the rest of manufacturing. Patents protecting decarbonisation technologies still represent a small share of inventions developed by EIIs, although this share is slightly higher for European companies than in the rest of the world (2% against 1.5%). The opposite is true for digital patents: EU countries are lagging behind in terms of the EIIs digital transition, with only 3% of EII patents developed by inventors located in the EU embedding a digital technology, twice as small as the world’s average. Furthermore, the EIIs ecosystem is less R&D intensive than the rest of manufacturing, which can represent a bottleneck for the development of decarbonisation and digital technologies. Finally, the demand for digital and green skills in occupations advertised by firms operating the EIIs ecosystem is comparable to the manufacturing sector and generally low.
The slow improvement in energy efficiency relative to other manufacturing sectors may be related to lower effective energy prices, which come from (i) more favourable energy pricing (e.g. differential treatment in the EU ETS in terms of free allowances and preferential energy prices in other OECD economies); (ii) tax exemptions covering energy costs; and (iii) lower per-unit costs of energy typically faced by large energy consumers. The weak patenting activity in decarbonisation technologies may itself be a consequence of these historically lower effective energy prices and relatively weak public support for R&D and technology adoption, as evidenced by the lack of focus of recent green recovery packages on the manufacturing sector. In fact, most public policies targeted at the EIIs ecosystem in Europe and beyond have focused on lowering energy costs to alleviate competitiveness concerns rather than directly supporting innovation and technology adoption. Such support will likely need to be amplified for EIIs to accelerate their decarbonisation efforts and their transition to the digital economy, particularly in light of the low R&D intensity of EIIs compared to the rest of manufacturing. The introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will help to level the playing field globally but cannot address issues related to energy cost differentials, low R&D spending and export market competitiveness of the EU industry.
Book of the Week
Stephen Davies published a new book, The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is here to stay.
The re-election of Donald Trump has illustrated in spectacular fashion the extent to which politics all over the world is in a state of continual flux. Old political configurations and parties are under unprecedented strain, with new forces, particularly on the hard-right, challenging the status quo everywhere. Rejecting stale analyses based on moralistic panics about ‘populism’ or social media, political commentator Steve Davies shows how we are going through a deep-seated process of realignment rooted in underlying structural trends. We are transitioning, he argues, from an era where the key political division was over the economic structure of society to one where the primary division is between a vision rooted in national identity and sovereignty, and an essentially post-national cosmopolitanism.
This change upends the ideological and electoral alliances that have structured our political systems for decades. No-one who wishes to truly understand the crises currently roiling the political status quo can afford to miss this stunning panoramic analysis of how this process works and how it is playing out across the world, from the USA and Germany to Argentina and India, and beyond. The re-election of Donald Trump has illustrated in spectacular fashion the extent to which politics all over the world is in a state of continual flux. Old political configurations and parties are under unprecedented strain, with new forces, particularly on the hard-right, challenging the status quo everywhere.
Rejecting stale analyses based on moralistic panics about ‘populism’ or social media, political commentator Steve Davies shows how we are going through a deep-seated process of realignment rooted in underlying structural trends. We are transitioning, he argues, from an era where the key political division was over the economic structure of society to one where the primary division is between a vision rooted in national identity and sovereignty, and an essentially post-national cosmopolitanism.
This change upends the ideological and electoral alliances that have structured our political systems for decades. No-one who wishes to truly understand the crises currently roiling the political status quo can afford to miss this stunning panoramic analysis of how this process works and how it is playing out across the world, from the USA and Germany to Argentina and India, and beyond.
Quick Links
Despite the Government’s questioning the decision, the Home Office was told about the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Villa Park a week ago, according to the West Midlands Police.
The managing director of Birmingham Council reportedly called a property agent an anti-Semitic slur.
The Government has failed in its attempt to block the appeal of Palestine Action against its designation as a terror group.
Western executives warned of a rare earths supply chain crisis following disputes between China and the US…
…and many are returning from visits to China “terrified” at its advantage on automation and robotics.
The BBC was guilty of a “serious breach” of standards over its Gaza documentary, Ofcom found.
Pensana, a leading rare earths firm, has scrapped plans for a £250 million refinery in the Humber Freeport.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, defended his clean energy targets despite rising bills.
Germany will allow retirees to earn 2,000 euros per month tax free.
The East London Mosque’s “fun run” banned women and girls over 12 from participating, though boys and men of all ages could enter.
Spanish environmental activists vandalised a painting of Columbus at the Madrid Naval Museum.
A Sudanese migrant danced after killing a hotel worker by stabbing her 23 times.
Three asylum seekers stand accused of raping a woman on Brighton beach.
Payrolled employment has fallen in absolute numbers for the first time since the pandemic.