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Boris is on the defensive after a series of ethical lapses, said, “There were things we simply did not get right” about a gathering at Downing Street during a lockdown in 2020.

This article explores the outrage currently surrounding the Downing Street Party and its apparent cover-up.

After issuing apologies its seemingly not enough as the UK public still express dissatisfaction with the actions of the UK government.

As pressures are mounting for Boris to resign this article and others covering the topic would be useful for inquiries into ministerial accountability and Boris's apparent ability to continue to get away with scandal that would have been detrimental to a PM in previous years.

Do we think that Johnson will somehow avoid being held properly to account or is it possible he might even step down as PM?

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z2ptycw/revision/2

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Advantages and disadvantages - Voting in UK Election - National 4 Modern Studies Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Study voting systems in the UK for National 4 Modern Studies

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Strengths & Weaknesses of different  electoral systems 

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Strengths & Weaknesses of different  electoral systems 

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The strengths and weaknesses of the different electoral systems in the UK test questions - Higher Modern Studies Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Revise the variety of electoral systems used in the UK and their strengths and weaknesses as part of Bitesize Higher Modern Studies.

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https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/take-a-closer-look-at-the-house-of-lords-it-may-not-be-quite-what-you-think/.

This article is quite useful in assessing the effectiveness of the House of Lords and evaluating the extent to which it is a representative institution. Good wider reading for exam questions on topics such as Constitutional reform and Parliament.

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The House of Lords is reputed as an antiquated chamber of old white men wearing strange robes. Meg Russell dispels common misconceptions, showing how the Lords is quite diverse relative to the Commons and better reflects the country's vote distribution. It is also politically assertive, thanks to the 1999 reform that removed hereditary members, and no longer conservative in nature. Nevertheless, the Lords is far from perfect and in need of further reform.
The image of the House of Lords is very familiar to us in Britain, and to millions overseas. Our second chamber has existed for centuries (and is indeed the oldest such institution in the world), so it's easy to assume that it is the 'same as it ever was'. But in a book published this week with Oxford University Press I argue that the Lords deserves far closer attention. Particularly since the reform by Labour in 1999 which removed most of its hereditary members, the chamber has changed fundamentally. These changes affect who sits there, how they perceive their role, and the impact that they have on policy. Indeed it is no longer possible to fully understand the dynamics of British politics without understanding the Lords.

One reason that few stop to examine the chamber is because it's constantly viewed as being on the brink of reform. But the current coalition's reform plans failed in 2012 - like so many others before them - and large-scale changes are now off the agenda, at least for a while. That makes it important to examine more carefully the second chamber that we have actually got.

The ermine-clad media image of the Lords is misleading, and significantly out of date. It's hard to find a newspaper story about the chamber that isn't accompanied by a picture of a gathering of elderly white men wearing red fur-trimmed robes. Yet nearly any day of the year, not a single such outfit would be in sight. Robes are worn en masse only for the Queen's speech, and the rest of the time peers look much like members of any other legislature. They may be older on average, but are now increasingly demographically diverse. The Lords has the same proportion of women members as the House of Commons (at 23%), and a relatively higher number of ethnic minority members (at 42, compared to the Commons' 28). Importantly, the party balance in the Lords now reflects how people vote in general elections more closely than does that in the Commons. This last factor has been important in giving peers greater confidence, and consequently making them into more influential policy players.

The House of Lords is no longer a weak institution. The classic understanding of British politics is as executive-dominated, with the government able to get its way in parliament due to its majority in the House of Commons. The Lords, as an unelected body, has long been seen as peripheral. But the 1999 reform changed that to a significant degree. Because the government has no majority in the Lords, and peers now feel more confident and legitimate, they are both more willing and able to challenge government policy. The Blair and Brown governments suffered more than 450 defeats in the Lords 1999-2010, and David Cameron's coalition has already suffered 75. Although most Lords defeats can in principle be overturned when bills return to the Commons, in practice they often are not. Ministers may accept that peers have a valid point, or may not want to lose precious time overturning amendments, or sometimes may fear that they will face trouble with their own MPs if they seek to do so (as both Blair and Brown did on key occasions). On top of this, while defeats are the most visible sign of Lords influence, many more changes are made to bills through negotiation with peers - as illustrated by through case studies in the book. Again, this can be because ministers fear the consequences of not listening. Indeed, a key part of preparation of bills in Whitehall is now for officials to think through any aspects that the Lords may oppose.
This article was originally published on UCL's Constitution Unit blog. Note: This article gives the views of the About the author author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.
The Lords is no longer a conservative body, with either a large or a small 'c'. For two centuries the Conservative party dominated the Lords, but this situation ended with the 1999 reform. Since then, the balance of power in the chamber has been held by the Liberal Democrats and numerous Crossbench independents. When Blair was prime minister he faced considerable problems with the Lords over civil liberties matters, when it blocked proposals such as restrictions on jury trial and detention of terrorist suspects without charge. More recently, the coalition has faced difficulties over its cuts programme, on matters such as welfare and legal aid. For the first time in 200 years, the government thus faces credible opposition in the Lords from the left. The chamber's new assertiveness has also seen it pushing at established conventions, and there have been clashes since 2010 over the Commons' traditional financial privilege when the Lords has tried to protect public spending. Such pressures would - ironically - be even greater if the Conservatives were governing alone, and the Lib Dems were teaming up with Labour to oppose them from the Lords. A nice illustration of two tendencies was last month, over the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill, when the Lords took the unusual step of voting on an amendment to block the bill at second reading. But the result demonstrated the extent to which the chamber has changed: peers supported the bill by 390 votes to 148. Compare this to the chamber's treatment of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill - which equalised the age of consent - just before the 1999 reform. Back then the bill was denied a second reading by 222 votes to 146. Yes, this is partly because the world (and particularly the Conservative party) has moved on. But the House of Lords has done so even more.

Despite all this the House of Lords still needs further reform. This article paints a rosy picture of how the Lords has improved, but the institution is far from perfect. Many elements of its composition in particular remain difficult to defend. The most obvious is the continued use of byelections to replace hereditary peers when they die (for the 92 such members who can still sit under the 1999 Act). The most recent took place only this week. In addition, the Prime Minister continues to control how many peers are appointed, when, and with what party balance - an extraordinary, unregulated patronage power that is unequalled in any other democracy. This in turn contributes to the ever-growing size of the chamber. Following the collapse of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's proposals last year, the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee is now considering what small steps can be taken to deal with anomalies such as these (my own evidence to the committee can be seen here). Some of these changes are clearly urgent.

Of course, many consider such proposals to be merely tinkering, and want instead to see a chamber that is largely or fully elected. That is a principled position, but pragmatically such a reform seems quite unlikely to occur. As I chart in the book, various ambitious schemes have failed over the past 150 years, while the changes that succeed tend to be those that are small and piecemeal. Overseas experience likewise teaches us that second chambers are very difficult to reform. But those who want to see a better - and maybe stronger - parliament should not despair. Seemingly small and incomplete steps can make a big difference, as the 1999 reform has clearly done. In fact, even dropping the red ermine-trimmed robes for the Queen's speech would help, by bringing the chamber's image into line with the reality.

Dr Meg Russell is Reader in British and Comparative Politics, and Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit in the School of Public Policy, University College London. She has written widely on the British parliament, British politics, and legislatures more broadly. She has also worked as an adviser to government, parliamentary committees, and public bodies. Her new book, The Contemporary House of Lords: Westminster Bicameralism Revived, is published by Oxford University Press this week.

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Take a closer look at the House of Lords: it may not be quite what you think

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The House of Lords is reputed as an antiquated chamber of old white men wearing strange robes. Meg Russell dispels common misconceptions, showing how the Lords is quite diverse relative to the Commons and better reflects the country's vote distribution. It is also politically assertive, thanks to the 1999 reform that removed hereditary members, and no longer conservative in nature.

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ecent developments in the Labour party have once again highlighted how, despite the leader's promise to end factionalism, internal divisions are alive and well. The party agreed last month to ban four groups, leading to the automatic expulsion of members - expected to reach 1,000, though this figure hasn't been confirmed - on the party's left. The groups are Socialist Appeal, a Trotskyist group considered a successor to Militant; Labour Against the Witchhunt, which believes many Labour antisemitism claims were fabricated for political reasons; Labour in Exile Network, a defender of those suspended or expelled from Labour; and Resist, the project of ex-MP Chris Williamson, intended to become a registered political party.

These now-proscribed organisations are small and you could forgive even the most active Labour member for never having heard of some of them. But, by and large, the Labour left opposed the bans: they believe that a "guilt by association" rule is unfair and suspect this is only the start of a slippery slope, with bigger groups critical of Keir Starmer at risk of being ousted next. A panel has been set up to consider further proscriptions. It is worth taking this moment to review how, as a new leadership has changed Labour's internal dynamics, key organisations within Labour have been bolstered and others weakened.

The factional group with the most influence in the party now is perhaps Labour First. Its secretary, Luke Akehurst, topped the ballot in last year's elections for the national executive committee (NEC), and former full-time national organiser Matt Pound plays a key role in the leader's office. This traditional "old right" organisation, with links to trade unions and local government, was founded in the 80s and its raison d'être has always been to fight the "organised hard left". It once acted quite independently of Blairites, but tensions melted away under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and this unity has held up well. For young activists, Blairite-Brownite divides are a historical irrelevance; for older members on the party's right, the possibility that Corbynites could return to power in Labour is still keenly felt.

The day after Starmer's election, Labour to Win was unveiled. It brings together the two main strands of Corbyn-scepticism: Labour First and Progress, which was first established in 1996 to champion New Labour. Since the L2W launch, Progress has merged with Peter Mandelson's Policy Network and become Progressive Britain.

The three organisations have distinct purposes. Progressive Britain takes on a thinktank role, focusing on policy debates and research, while Labour First retains its original job of mobilising "moderate" members. Labour to Win performs a similar task, but has a broader appeal: rather than old right or Blairite, the umbrella group pitches itself as simply in favour of winning elections and moving on from Corbynism.

Momentum is the big Labour left rival to those organisations. Although its ability to influence decision-making at the top of the party drastically diminished with the election of Starmer, the group that sprang from Corbyn's first leadership campaign still has a large membership, full-time paid staff and finds success in internal elections. It won five of the nine local party representative places up for grabs on Labour's NEC in November. But its direction and aims have changed.

After co-founder Jon Lansman decided not to restand as chair last year, control was won by the Forward Momentum faction. Arguing that the activist network had been too top-down and too focused on "one last electoral push", the newcomers were brought in by members on a promise to empower the grassroots. Alongside democratic initiatives like a policy primary, in which members vote on proposals they would like to see the party adopt, the reformed Momentum has sought to steer its work away from internal Labour organisation - such as candidate selections and retaining control of local party executives - and towards extraparliamentary activities, such as evictions resistance campaigns.

Some on the Labour left - those who still prioritise holding on to power within the party wherever possible - are frustrated by this development. "What a waste of time," one former Corbyn staffer sighed in response to recent news of Momentum's "refounding" process. But the outlook is bleak for Corbynites in this party under new management, so the switch in priorities is understandable. This also opens up an opportunity for the soft left, which should actually be the most powerful faction - with most of the membership in the same place as them - but is organisationally weak.

Open Labour, the soft-left organisation founded in 2015, only managed to get one of its two NEC member representative candidates elected. As a promoter of pluralism and a critic of infighting in a bitterly divided party, it is more challenging for Open Labour to attract either attention or funding from private donors. Then there is the Tribune group of Labour MPs, who put up three NEC candidates and returned none. They are supposed to represent the soft left of the parliamentary party, but Tribune's membership is politically diverse to the point of being ridiculous. It has been contesting internal elections but largely doesn't behave as a factional campaigning outfit, which is partly why soft-left MPs attend the meetings in parliament of Labour First, where they are briefed and can swap stories about how things are going in their local parties.

The best example of the soft left being organised is perhaps Starmer's shadow cabinet - but even here there are signs of it falling back, as the recent reshuffle saw figures to their right promoted. The Labour left is preoccupied with other tasks at the grassroots and with the split in the parliamentary party. The soft left is consistently under-funded and doesn't have the member data necessary to make a big splash, having backed Lisa Nandy rather than the winning leadership candidate last year. This leaves the party's right, working together under the Labour to Win umbrella, as the most influential faction in the party - and the most likely to shape Starmer's agenda as leader.

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The balance of power among Labour's factions is shifting under Keir Starmer | Sienna Rodgers

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ecent developments in the Labour party have once again highlighted how, despite the leader's promise to end factionalism, internal divisions are alive and well. The party agreed last month to ban four groups, leading to the automatic expulsion of members - expected to reach 1,000, though this figure hasn't been confirmed - on the party's left.

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What are the different Conservative factions?

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More than a quarter of Tory MPs are aligned to one or more internal movements. Here are the key groups

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What does this suggest about rights protection in the UK?

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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that an application over the long-running so-called "gay cake" case is inadmissible.

The court has said that the decision is final.

In 2018, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Northern Ireland gay rights activist Gareth Lee was not discriminated against when the Christian owners of a Belfast bakery refused to make him a cake iced with the slogan "Support Gay Marriage".

Mr Lee then referred the case to the ECHR, claiming that the Supreme Court failed to give appropriate weight to him under the European Convention of Human Rights.

Mr Lee claimed that his rights were interfered with by the decision of the UK's highest court to dismiss his claim for breach of statutory duty to provide services, and the interference was not proportionate.

However the seven-judge chamber of the ECHR said that in order for a complaint to be admissible, "the Convention arguments must be raised explicitly or in substance before the domestic authorities."

The court said Mr Lee had not invoked his Convention rights at any point in the domestic proceedings.

"By relying solely on domestic law, the applicant had deprived the domestic courts of the opportunity to address any Convention issues raised, instead asking the Court to usurp the role of the domestic courts," the ECHR ruling said.

"Because he had failed to exhaust domestic remedies, the application was inadmissible."

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In a statement, Mr Lee said he had "very much hoped for a different outcome" from the ECHR application.

He said he was "most frustrated that the core issues did not get fairly analysed and adjudicated upon because of a technicality."

Ciaran Moynagh of Phoenix Law, who brought the case to the ECHR, said they will "now consider whether a fresh domestic case is progressed".

Mr Moynagh added that the "substantive issues" raised by Mr Lee remain unaddressed.

The controversy first flared when Mr Lee, a member of the LGBT advocacy group QueerSpace, ordered a £36.50 cake in May 2014 featuring Sesame Street puppets Bert and Ernie for a private function marking International Day Against Homophobia from Ashers bakery in Belfast.

His order was accepted and he paid in full, but, two days later, the Christian owners of the company called to say it could not proceed due to the message requested.

Mr Lee then launched the legal case, supported by Northern Ireland's Equality Commission, alleging discrimination on the grounds of his sexuality, and won hearings at the county court and the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal in 2015 and 2016.

But the owners of Ashers, Daniel and Amy McArthur - backed by the Christian Institute - challenged those rulings at the Supreme Court, and in 2018 five justices unanimously ruled that they had not discriminated against the customer.

The court's then president said the McArthur family hold the religious belief that "the only form of marriage consistent with the Bible and acceptable to God is between a man and a woman".

She said: "As to Mr Lee's claim based on sexual discrimination, the bakers did not refuse to fulfil his order because of his sexual orientation.

"They would have refused to make such a cake for any customer, irrespective of their sexual orientation.

"Their objection was to the message on the cake, not to the personal characteristics of Mr Lee or of anyone else with whom he was associated."

Mr Lee said at the time that the refusal to make the cake made him feel like a "second-class citizen".

The McArthurs said they did not turn down this order because of the person who made it, but because of the message requested on the cake.

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ECHR rules 'gay cake' case application inadmissible

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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that an application over the long-running so-called "gay cake" case is inadmissible. The court has said that the decision is final. In 2018, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Northern Ireland gay rights activist Gareth Lee was not discriminated against when the Christian owners of a Belfast bakery refused to make him a cake iced with the slogan "Support Gay Marriage".

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Party factions/consensus and adversarial politics 

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Party factions/consensus and adversarial politics 

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How important are leaders for party success?

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inston Churchill offered this advice about how the Conservative party should treat its leader. "The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed."

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. Tory MPs are tremendously angry with him. They are not quite so furious that they will pole-axe their number one this week, but they are sufficiently incensed to decline to sustain him and refuse to cover for him. Large numbers of them "withdrew their love" in a dramatically public fashion by disdaining to turn up to support him at the most recent prime minister's questions. They missed an especially unedifying session during which the Speaker had to issue four reprimands to the Tory leader for disorderly behaviour. Where normally the chamber is rammed for PMQs, the vacant green leather behind Mr Johnson bore silent witness to how severely he has aggravated his parliamentary party. Attendees at a later, private meeting of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers described the atmosphere as sullen. It was not much improved by the prime minister's belated confession that he had " crashed the car into a ditch".

The consensus among Conservative MPs is that their leader's stock with his parliamentary party is plumbing depths not previously seen, not even during the bleakest stretches of the pandemic. The catalyst is the grotesque mishandling of the Owen Paterson affair and the fierce blowback from it, but there are many other underlying sources of discontent. The result is that the prime minister has managed to alienate every Tory faction of any significance.

The most obviously ominous development for him is the fury among the "red wallers", the large number of Tory MPs who entered the Commons just under two years ago and sit for formerly Labour constituencies mainly concentrated in the Midlands and the north. Previously counted as uber-loyalists, on the grounds that he won them their seats, they are angry that they have been plunged into a sleaze crisis made in Number 10, angry that the prime minister ducked below the parapet while they were exposed to the outrage of voters and further aggrieved that their party suffered so much reputational damage before its leader finally acknowledged that he had blundered. The betrayal of key promises to provide high-speed rail to the north of England has worsened the mood among those representing areas that have lost out. To add to the lengthening list of grievances, the government now wants to fiddle with the cap on social care costs in a way that will leave less affluent pensioners, many of whom live in red wall constituencies, paying tens of thousands of pounds more. "Boris has still got a bit of capital in the bank, but a lot of it has gone," says a Conservative MP representing a Yorkshire seat.

They are angry that they have been plunged into a sleaze crisis made in Number 10, angry that the prime minister ducked below the parapet while they were exposed to the outrage of voters

The "red wallers" are sometimes depicted as being in generational conflict with the "red corduroys", a reference to the weekend trouser wear sometimes favoured by older Conservative MPs sitting for wealthier, more traditionally Tory areas. Yet the corduroy brigade is also extremely disgruntled. Many in this group engage in the financially rewarding extracurricular activities that are threatened by a tightening of the rules on MPs' outside jobs. Either ex-ministers or never-will-be ministers, they are already very unbiddable by government business managers. "The whips know not to bother me," says one. This group will be even more ungovernable and even less forgiving if the prime minister's shabby bungling costs them money.

These two tribes have featured most prominently in the recriminations that have racked the Tory party over the past three weeks, but they are not the only factions that are discontented with Mr Johnson. There is rumbling from the self-styled "Spartans", the Brexit fundamentalists who played such an instrumental role in collapsing the premiership of Theresa May and paving the path to Number 10 for Mr Johnson. He's given them the rock-hard Brexit that they wanted, but he is not delivering the domestic programme that they imagined would follow. For an important proportion of them, the point of getting out of the EU was to allow Britain to become a low-tax, light-regulation, small-state country. They are aghast to see a Conservative government raising taxes to their highest share of the economy since the early 1950s.

This dissatisfied group overlaps with the Thatcherites who have long been suspicious that the Tory leader is not a genuine disciple of the Iron Lady, but a Plasticine Boy. "Boris doesn't have a conviction in his body," complains one veteran Thatcherite. "There's a lot of us worrying: is this a Conservative government?" They tend not to blame the recent tax-hiking budget on Rishi Sunak, who most believe to be one of them at heart, but the spendthrift, haphazard headline-chasing of his next door neighbour.

Just because the right of the Tory party is unhappy doesn't mean its remaining centrists are satisfied. Liberal, internationalist Tories, the type who tried to stop the government's savage cuts to the aid budget, don't feel this is their kind of government either. They are angsty that moderate voters are repelled by sleaze, mendacity, incompetence and the crude bombast of the prime minister. "Many of us assumed that Boris was the One Nation Tory who ran London," says a centrist Conservative MP who backed him for the leadership in 2019. "Unfortunately, we've learnt that this was just a persona to win London. We've learnt that this was not the genuine Boris." Then there is the chunky segment of Tory MPs who never trusted him, always thought he would be a bad prime minister and tried to stop him becoming leader. Residual Cameroons and Mayites can be found in this group, nursing their resentment about the large role he played in the destruction of his two predecessors.

This dissatisfied group overlaps with the Thatcherites who have long been suspicious that the Tory leader is not a genuine disciple of the Iron Lady, but a Plasticine Boy

Now I come to the Johnsonites, the loyal band of Tory MPs whom he can expect to sustain him when he trips, cover for him when he makes mistakes and defend him against all enemies. Except I can't, because there really isn't such a thing as a Johnsonite. He is a highly unusual prime minister in not having a strong body of committed supporters who will back him through thick and thin. It is a struggle to think of more than a handful of Tory MPs who might fight for him to the bitter end. He doesn't have colleagues who are dedicated to his philosophy, because he is an opportunist of no fixed ideological abode. He doesn't have MPs who are devoted to him because they admire the calibre and consistency of his character because you can't esteem what doesn't exist. He hasn't got loyalists, only lackeys. He inspires no true believers, he simply attracts hangers-on. They will let go of his coat-tails the moment they conclude that his premiership is on an irreversibly downward trajectory.

He became leader not because Tory MPs thought he would make a decent prime minister, but because they reckoned him their best bet for winning the last election. His prospects of remaining number one are crucially dependent on Tory MPs continuing to regard him as a winner. The biggest threat to Mr Johnson is not the recent droop in the Conservative party's poll rating, but the larger drop in his personal ratings. Are voters who once shrugged at his character failings because they liked his shtick tiring of the act? Has the joke stopped being funny? That's what Sir Keir Starmer is hoping and some Tory MPs report anecdotal evidence that this is beginning to happen among their constituents. "I notice they don't call him Boris anymore," says one. "They call him Johnson."

Our most recent Opinium poll recorded approval for his performance as prime minister at a record low. A lot of things could be at work here. Not just sleaze, but also huge waiting lists for NHS treatment, looming tax rises and the waning of vaccine euphoria. What most matters to Tory MPs of all factions is whether the leader is an asset who boosts the chances of their party retaining power or a drag who endangers it. One shrewd former cabinet minister notes: "If you look back in history, Tory leaders get done in when their ratings track below the party." Tories have a record of ruthlessness when they decide a leader has reached his or her expiry date. Even winning three elections in a row couldn't save Mrs Thatcher when MPs concluded that she had become a liability.

Boris Johnson is not yet in the pole-axe zone, but he is stumbling into its vicinity.

Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer

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Boris Johnson has united every Tory faction - in anger at him | Andrew Rawnsley

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inston Churchill offered this advice about how the Conservative party should treat its leader. "The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed.

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Some wider (pre-reading for our next topic) 

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Some wider (pre-reading for our next topic) 

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In the UK, although First Past The Post remains as the biggest electoral system for electing Prime Minister, other alternative electoral systems like Supplementary Voting, Additional Member System, and Single Transferable Voting are also essential to UK politics where they have been implemented in different elections around the country. Arguably they may not be an effective substitution over FPTP, but they are advantageous and indispensable in making the UK electoral system more democratic and fairer.

To start with, it is not until 1997 that the voting system in the UK become diversified. Under the Blair government, proportional additional member system (AMS) was created, which was designed for the devolved body in Scotland, Wales, and London. Now AMS is mainly used for choosing members of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh National Assembly, and the Great London Assembly. AMS has largely improved democracy mainly due to its 'proportionality' characteristics. AMS works as a hybrid of FPTP where a fairer outcome and better proportional representation can be seen. Every voter gets two ballot papers, one for party candidates for their local constituency and one for party slates of candidates for the wider regional contest. The first votes work in the same plurality way as FPTP where the winner with the most votes wins the most seats. In the second round, where the runner-up party is underrepresented, it will get seats until the big two got over-represented then the third party got seats, and so on. A key rationale for the AMS system is to offer proportional representation for each of the bodies involved. For example, in Scotland, the percentage of the electoral system's deviation from proportionality is almost twice as well in terms of matching party seats with their vote shares compared to the Westminster under FPTP. It is undeniable that AMS has improved democracy in terms of producing electoral fairness and avoiding tactical voting wherein AMS, voters can actually vote for their preferred parties. However, on the other hand, it is controversial seeing the drawback of AMS has not improved democracy. It is relatively confusing where it requires a specific formula to calculate the proportional representation compare to FPTP, this may decrease political participation in some way. Also, constituency representation may be less effective as representatives in the party-list have no constituency duties. Another argument is although theoretically, AMS allows the possibility of a strong single government, i.e., people vote for the same party for both rounds, proportional voting systems tend to produce coalition or minority governments. In reality, AMS has only delivered one single-party outcome (when the SNP won an outright majority in the Edinburgh Parliament in 2011). Overall, AMS still gives a better representation especially for women and minority groups.

Despite the Additional Member System, the Supplementary Voting system (SV) is another successful example in the way of an alternative electoral system that has improved democracy in the UK. SV is a majoritarian system, and it is known for the London mayor electorate and choosing all police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales. It is a two-ballot paper voting as well where voters need to fill in their first and second preferred candidates. The candidates with over 50% votes will be elected straightaway. If there is no majority in the first round, the top two candidates go into a run-off stage, where the votes of voters who voted for the eliminated candidates in the first round will be redistributed according to their second preferences and add up to the top-two. The biggest advantage is there are fewer wasted votes compare to FPTP, which is very beneficial when used in electing 'sub-elections', e.g., London mayor and PCCs. Although SV might encourage voters to support only main party candidates as other parties are always soon be eliminated in the first round, for example, London mayors have only shifted between Conservatives and Labours, the second preference of all the voters is counted, encouraging consensus politics and giving out less divisive campaigning. In 2017 the Conservative election manifesto proposed to replace all SV elections with FPTP but failed to get a Commons majority, this proved the well-establishment and success of SV. SV also gives out a relatively high turnout rate at 40-45% in recent London mayoral elections which are quite high for local elections. Therefore, the Supplementary Voting system to a large extent remedy the disadvantages of the plurality system and has worked well so far to construct a more complete and democratic electoral system in the UK.

Last but not least, Single Transferable Voting is also a vital system in the UK electorate where it is used in Northern Ireland and private and local electorate such as the Student Union and. It used complex mathematical formulae and candidates are ranked by voters where votes can be transferred when calculating. STV has a clear advantage of achieving highly proportional outcomes and avoiding tactical voting and tyranny of the minority, but it produces a weak MP-constituency link, and it is unlikely to create a strong single government due to the transferable votes. Although STV has not been a common alternative voting system, its result better reflects public support, which helps to ensure that both sides will be more fairly represented and therefore willing to support the peace process and a more democratic government.

In conclusion, it is all three alternative voting systems plus the main FPTP system created the whole image of the UK electorate system. They have all operated effectively and increased the electoral legitimacy of governments. Of course, no voting system is perfect, but these alternative voting systems are complementary with FPTP to ensure the variety and fairness in the electorate in both devolved bodies and local elections, which has improved democracy in the UK to a large extent.

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What are other voting systems in the UK despite FPTP? Stephanie Yang City of London Freemen's school

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In the UK, although First Past The Post remains as the biggest electoral system for electing Prime Minister, other alternative electoral systems like Supplementary Voting, Additional Member System, and Single Transferable Voting are also essential to UK politics where they have been implemented in different elections around the country.

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The Johnson government is looking into scrapping the FTPA. This changes the constitutional provisions for elections, though they can be argued as weak anyway.

This is possible because of executive dominance in the legislature.

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Constitution minister Chloe Smith said: "The Fixed-term Parliaments Act caused constitutional chaos last year which, when combined with total gridlock in Parliament, meant the previous government couldn't deliver what it was asked to do.

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Boris Johnson able to call early election under proposed new law

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Constitution minister Chloe Smith said: "The Fixed-term Parliaments Act caused constitutional chaos last year which, when combined with total gridlock in Parliament, meant the previous government couldn't deliver what it was asked to do.

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BBC News - What is devolution and how does it work across the UK?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54974078

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How devolution works, on the back of Boris' comment that 'devolution was Tony Blair's biggest mistake'.   This is great ammunition for his opponents, particularly the SNP.

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Devolution: What is it and how does it work across the UK?

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Elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments will be held on 6 May.

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An example of the Lords voting down a bill, holding the government to account.

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The Internal Market Bill is designed to enable goods and services to flow freely across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland after 1 January - when the post-Brexit transition period runs out.

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Brexit: Government's bill suffers heavy House of Lords defeat

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The Internal Market Bill is designed to enable goods and services to flow freely across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland after 1 January - when the post-Brexit transition period runs out.

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Trump is refusing to concede he lost the election and the transition of power to Biden has not begun.

This means Biden cannot access information held by the government, meaning he cannot prepare for his COVID response in an informed way.

Good example of how a Lame Duck president can still frustrate the workings of government.

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donald trump's failure to work with joe biden is becoming more urgent as covid spreads - cnnpolitics

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Analysis: Trump's failure to work with Biden is becoming more urgent as Covid spreads

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President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden's aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost.

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Biden wins, this is a breakdown.
The Dems have lost seats in the house and Trump may have lost, but he got a greater amount of votes than he did last time.

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Senate Balance Of Power

Senate seats are up for election once every six years. There are 35 seats up for this year's Senate elections including special elections in Arizona and Georgia. The Democrats need to flip four seats to gain control. The Republicans need to retain at least 21 seats to keep control.

House Balance Of Power

All 435 House seats are up for election every two years. The Democrats gained control from the 2018 Midterm Elections with 232 seats. The Republicans need to flip 21 seats to gain control.

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Senate seats are up for election once every six years. There are 35 seats up for this year's Senate elections including special elections in Arizona and Georgia. The Democrats need to flip four seats to gain control. The Republicans need to retain at least 21 seats to keep control.

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How it works and how a candidate can win the popular vote but lose the EC.

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Who elects the US president?

When Americans cast their ballots for the US president, they are actually voting for a representative of that candidate's party known as an elector. There are 538 electors who then vote for the president on behalf of the people in their state.

Each state is assigned a certain number of these electoral votes, based on the number of congressional districts they have, plus two additional votes representing the state's Senate seats. Washington DC is also assigned three electoral votes, despite having no voting representation in Congress. A majority of 270 of these votes is needed to win the presidency.

The process of nominating electors varies by state and by party, but is generally done one of two ways. Ahead of the election, political parties either choose electors at their national conventions, or they are voted for by the party's central committee.

The electoral college nearly always operates with a winner-takes-all system, in which the candidate with the highest number of votes in a state claims all of that state's electoral votes. For example, in 2016, Trump beat Clinton in Florida by a margin of just 2.2%, but that meant he claimed all 29 of Florida's crucial electoral votes.

Such small margins in a handful of key swing states meant that, regardless of Clinton's national vote lead, Trump was able to clinch victory in several swing states and therefore win more electoral college votes.

Biden could face the same hurdle in November, meaning he will need to focus his attention on a handful of battleground states to win the presidency.

A chart showing electoral college votes by state

The unequal distribution of electoral votes

While the number of electoral votes a state is assigned somewhat reflects its population, the minimum of three votes per state means that the relative value of electoral votes varies across America.

The least populous states like North and South Dakota and the smaller states of New England are overrepresented because of the required minimum of three electoral votes. Meanwhile, the states with the most people - California, Texas and Florida - are underrepresented in the electoral college.

Wyoming has one electoral college vote for every 193,000 people, compared with California's rate of one electoral vote per 718,000 people. This means that each electoral vote in California represents over three times as many people as one in Wyoming. These disparities are repeated across the country.

A visual of population per electoral vote by state

Who does it favour?

Experts have warned that, after returning two presidents that got fewer votes than their opponents since 2000, the electoral college is flawed.

In 2000, Al Gore won over half a million more votes than Bush, yet Bush became president after winning Florida by just 537 votes. In all, the US has had five presidents who lost the overall popular vote but won the election.

A chart showing recent election outcomes by popular vote and electoral college margins

Professor George Edwards III, at Texas A&M University, said: "The electoral college violates the core tenet of democracy, that all votes count equally and allows the candidate finishing second to win the election. Why hold an election if we do not care who received the most votes?

"At the moment, the electoral college favours Republicans because of the way Republican votes are distributed across the country. They are more likely to occur in states that are closely divided between the parties."

Under the winner-takes-all system, the margin of victory in a state becomes irrelevant. In 2016, Clinton's substantial margins in states such as California and New York failed to earn her enough electoral votes, while close races in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan took Trump over the 270 majority.

A visual showing margins and electoral votes by state gained by Trump and Clinton in 2016

As candidates easily win the electoral votes of their solid states, the election plays out in a handful of key battlegrounds. In 2016, Trump won six such states - Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - adding 99 electoral votes to his total.

The demographics of these states differ from the national average. They are older, have more white voters without college degrees, and often have smaller non-white populations. These characteristics generally favour Republicans, and made up the base of Trump's votes in 2016.

For example, 67% of non-college-educated white people voted for Trump in 2016. In all six swing states, this demographic is overrepresented by at least six percentage points more than the national average.

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Electoral college explained: how Biden faces an uphill battle in the US election

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When Americans cast their ballots for the US president, they are actually voting for a representative of that candidate's party known as an elector. There are 538 electors who then vote for the president on behalf of the people in their state.

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Only a throw away line in this not a big segment, but it mentions the impact of devolution throughout cities in England and how local bodies are demanding more justification over lockdowns from the central government and more power over their own approach to the coronavirus. - This show the impact of the Blair era city government reforms.

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Tension over coronavirus rules pervaded local and national UK politics this week as the north of England faced further restrictions, and pubs and restaurants in central Scotland were closed. Will Westminster now take a more centralised approach to restrictions? Plus, we discuss Prime Minister Boris Johnson's virtual Conservative party conference speech and whether he has any hope of achieving his domestic agenda in the age of coronavirus. Presented by Sebastian Payne, with Sarah Neville, Mure Dickie, George Parker and Robert Shrimsley. Produced by Anna Dedhar and Josh de la Mare. The sound engineer was Louise Burton and the editor, Liam Nolan. Music by Metaphor Music.

Review clips: Manchester Evening News, Scottish government, Parliament

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Payne's Politics - Coronavirus clampdowns go regional

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Tension over coronavirus rules pervaded local and national UK politics this week as the north of England faced further restrictions, and pubs and restaurants in central Scotland were closed. Will Westminster now take a more centralised approach to restrictions?

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Relationship between the executive and legislature

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Relationship between the executive and legislature

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Lady Hale the former President of the UK Supreme Court has criticized Parliament for voting through the Coronavirus Act of 2020. This has given the government increased power to act without the consent of parliament, to impose such things  as lockdown.

Conservative MPs may rebel over this as the the act needs to be renewed and Parliament is not able to scrutinize the actions of government effectively.

Is the act necessary for government to act effectively in a crisis or is it preventing effective scrutiny of government?

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The former president of the supreme court says parliament "surrendered" its role over emergency laws restricting freedoms amid the coronavirus pandemic, in an intervention expected to embolden MPs threatening a Commons revolt.

Lady Hale, who retired in January after becoming the first woman to lead the supreme court in 2017, is critical of the way health regulations were imposed on the public with little or no parliamentary scrutiny.

The Coronavirus Act 2020, passed in March, gave government "sweeping" powers alongside other "draconian" regulations, and "it is not surprising the police were as confused as the public as to what was law and what was not", she says in an opening essay for a collection published on Monday and seen by the Guardian.

In a reference to Dominic Cummings, the prime minister's chief adviser whose lockdown journey to Durham was revealed by the Guardian, Hale says: "A certain government adviser obviously did know what the regulations were and what they said. Others might have also felt that they had a reasonable excuse for doing something like he did. But they did not do it, either because they did not know the law and just abided by what they were told or because they felt they were not safe.

"Hence the outcry that there was one law for those in power and another law for the rest of us. There isn't. But that's how it felt to many."

Hale says parliament has resumed much of its traditional role "but it did surrender control to the government at a crucial time". "Maybe the lockdown and its severe consequences ... were inevitable or at least the best solution that could be devised in the circumstances. My plea is that we get back to a properly functioning constitution as soon as we possibly can."

Growing numbers of Tory MPs are increasingly unhappy about the way restrictions on everyday life have been forced into law without the Commons being effectively consulted. They intend to register a protest on Wednesday 30 September, when there will be a vote on renewing the provisions of the Coronavirus Act.

The act gives the government a wide range of emergency powers to tackle the coronavirus crisis, although most of the Covid lockdown laws have been imposed using regulations under the Public Health Act 1984, which take effect prior to a parliamentary vote.

At the weekend Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, signalled his willingness to rebel against the government to ensure parliament gets a greater say.

"In March, parliament gave the government sweeping emergency powers at a time when parliament was about to go into recess and there was realistic concern that NHS care capacity might be overwhelmed by Covid-19," he told the Sunday Telegraph.

"There is now no justification for ministers ruling by emergency powers without reference to normal democratic processes. It is essential that going forward all of these massively important decisions for family life, and affecting people's jobs and businesses, should be exercised with proper supervision and control."
Lady Hale: 'My Desert Island Judgments? Number one would probably be the prorogation case'
On 30 September, MPs plan to vote on an "all or nothing" proposition that would either extend the powers in the Coronavirus Act for six months or result in them lapsing.

In a recent report arguing that the government's sidelining of parliament for emergency measures had "not always been justified", the Commons public administration committee said the government should allow votes on amendments. More than a dozen Tory MPs are said to share Brady's concerns, and one proposal is for an amendment that would ensure any new measures have to be voted on by MPs first.

Brady's intervention is a sign of the scale of disquiet among Boris Johnson's backbenchers about the way he is handling the pandemic.

Some Conservative MPs, such as Sir Desmond Swayne of New Forest West, are concerned the government's restrictions are too draconian. Swayne has complained that rules on face coverings were imposed without "the democratic legitimate right to ask you the counter case and vote upon it in parliament". Others have expressed doubts about the "rule of six".

The intervention from Hale is likely to fuel the discontent. In Justice Matters, a 153-page book published by the Legal Action Group, she explains that parliament has three constitutional functions: to pass laws, vote on government funding and hold it to account.

"In March this year, almost exactly six months [after the prorogation ruling at the supreme court upheld the sovereignty of parliament, it] surrendered these functions in the face of Covid-19," she writes.

It voted to give the Treasury £260bn in contingencies and passed the Coronavirus Act. Furthermore "a great deal of what the public was told they could or could not do was not in the regulations. It was just in government guidance."
Topics

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Parliament surrendered role over Covid emergency laws, says Lady Hale

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The former president of the supreme court says parliament "surrendered" its role over emergency laws restricting freedoms amid the coronavirus pandemic, in an intervention expected to embolden MPs threatening a Commons revolt. Lady Hale, who retired in January after becoming the first woman to lead the supreme court in 2017, is critical of the way health regulations were imposed on the public with little or no parliamentary scrutiny.

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An example of the use of a signing statement/ceremony. This is an informal power of the President. Trump will use this event to claim credit, he will hope this may give him a boost on the lead up to the election.

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WASHINGTON - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has long owed a debt to President Trump, who has repeatedly bestowed diplomatic gifts at crucial moments as Mr. Netanyahu has battled for his political survival.

Leaders of the Persian Gulf states are similarly grateful to Mr. Trump, who has embraced their governments, cracked down on their archnemesis, Iran, and defended them from intense political criticism in Washington. Like Mr. Netanyahu, they are eager to see Mr. Trump win a second term in November. And at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu and a select group of Gulf Arab officials will be returning the favor, doing their part to repay and support Mr. Trump by participating in a signing ceremony for a pair of new accords between Israel and two Gulf nations, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, that Mr. Trump is promoting as a historic breakthrough.

In substance, the agreements do not constitute the "peace" that Mr. Trump proclaims. They do not end a state of actual conflict but do create normalized relations - including travel and diplomatic contacts - between Jewish and Arab states that never fought one another and for several years have been de facto allies, particularly in alignment against Iran.

But as proclaimed in new Trump campaign advertisements, they make up the heart of the president's message on foreign policy as the 2020 campaign draws to a close: that for all his bellicose rhetoric and unpredictability, he is bringing new harmony to the chaotic Middle East.

There is little doubt that Mr. Netanyahu and the leaders of the Emirates and Bahrain - presumably with the blessing of its powerful neighbor, Saudi Arabia - have an incentive to help Mr. Trump depict himself as an effective diplomat, something he has done without reservation.

Campaign Facebook ads declared last week that Mr. Trump had "achieved PEACE in the MIDDLE EAST," noting that he had been nominated for a Nobel - misspelled as "Noble" - Peace Prize for his efforts. (Anyone can be nominated for the prize by any one of a cast of thousands; Mr. Trump has been nominated by a pair of right-wing Scandinavian legislators.)

"It can't be overlooked that this is happening 48 days before our election," said Halie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. "In the past three Israeli elections, Donald Trump tried to put his thumb on the scale for Prime Minister Netanyahu. And now Netanyahu has come to Washington amid his own domestic political crisis at home."

Ms. Soifer noted that talk of "peace in the Middle East" was a sleight of hand, applying a term normally used to describe a hoped-for grand settlement between Israel and the Palestinians - a separate Trump diplomatic effort that has completely stalled - to far more modest diplomatic declarations.

"One has to assume this is being driven by Donald Trump's political agenda, and interest in putting points on the board in advance of the election," Ms. Soifer added.

Much the same holds for the Gulf countries, said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and former head of the Gulf desk on Israel's National Security Council.

"Those countries really want Trump to stay in power. They are worried about Biden getting into office," he said. "They fear he might be soft on Iran and harder on them, on human rights, and stuff like that, and stop even those weapons sales that Trump is so proud of."

Trump administration officials reject such talk, saying they are being denied due credit by the president's critics for hard diplomatic work to formally link Israel with Gulf leaders still unsure whether the Arab world is prepared to accept Israel, long denounced as evil, as a partner.

"There was not a lot of dialogue between Israel and Bahrain, or Israel and the United Arab Emirates, at all the different levels before this happened. We've built trust with both sides," Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump's son-in-law and adviser, who has played a lead administration role on Middle East diplomacy, said last week.

Speaking of Tuesday's event, he added: "It's very rare that you get to experience a peace agreement. It's even more rare to experience two peace agreements on one day."

And Mr. Trump's Middle East partners have reasons to strike deals now that go beyond giving their host a showy South Lawn ceremony with some 200 attendees. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are facing a reputational crisis in Washington over their military interventions in Yemen's civil war, a humanitarian disaster that has drawn global outrage. The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, hopes to overcome his near-pariah status after the October 2018 killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi; he is presumed to be giving private support for the new accords.

For Mr. Netanyahu, the trip to Washington serves as a brief escape, or distraction, from a domestic political crisis over his management of the coronavirus that could threaten his grip on power as much as his pending criminal trial on bribery and fraud charges.

Analysts have also predicted for months that Mr. Netanyahu would make an appearance at Mr. Trump's side during the closing weeks of the U.S. election campaign, both as a personal repayment to Mr. Trump for years of political support and to help ensure that his presidency and policies continue.

Mr. Trump has, after all, been very good to Mr. Netanyahu during a period when the Israeli leader has fought for his political survival. Just two weeks before Mr. Netanyahu faced a tight election vote early last year, for instance, Mr. Trump recognized Israel's authority over the long-disputed Golan Heights. With Mr. Netanyahu facing another popular vote earlier this year, along with a fresh criminal indictment, Mr. Trump hosted him at the White House to unveil a peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians that heavily favored Israeli interests.

Again managing multiple crises at home, Mr. Netanyahu will welcome a splashy event at the White House. He left for the airport Sunday night right after imposing a three-week national lockdown that will go into effect on Friday, just before the Jewish New Year and High Holy Days, a response to soaring morbidity rates that his zigzagging policy changes, repeatedly abandoned for political reasons, have failed to contain.

Demonstrations against Mr. Netanyahu have clogged the streets outside his residence in Jerusalem every weekend for months. And on Sunday, anti-corruption protesters filled the highway outside Ben-Gurion International Airport as he departed for the 48-hour excursion, with some holding signs demanding that it be a one-way trip.

The United Arab Emirates shares Mr. Netanyahu's gratitude toward Mr. Trump. Like the Israeli leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the Emirates, appreciates the American president's hard line on Iran, withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and support for its close ally Saudi Arabia.

"I think the U.A.E.'s calculus was very much, this is a favor we're doing to the Trump administration," said Robert Malley, a former National Security Council official who oversaw Middle East affairs in the Obama White House. Mr. Malley said the Emirates' mentality toward the Trump administration amounted to, "We owe them."

He added that the Emirates, like Israel, are mindful that, if elected president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. would most likely follow policies less aligned with their own. Mr. Biden is expected to re-engage with Iran diplomatically, and his Democratic Party is heavy with influential critics of both Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies.

"It's also an insurance card with Biden," added Mr. Malley, now president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, a senior administration official said that the texts to be signed on Tuesday would not be released until after the event, and hinted that representatives from unnamed "other Arab countries" could be in attendance.

The official said that the Trump administration was considering sales of the advanced F-35 fighter jet to the United Arab Emirates, a move widely suspected to be a condition of the Emirates' willingness to normalize. Trump officials deny such a quid pro quo, however, adding that whatever action the administration takes, it will ensure that Israel's "qualitative military edge," as defined in U.S. law, will be protected.

As for the Palestinians, many will watch Tuesday's event with more than a little resentment. The Emirates agreed to normalize ties with Israel without consulting the Palestinians, who have long pressed Arab countries to deny Israel normal relations until their core territorial and political demands are met.

"The Trump administration's efforts in bringing Arab anti-democratic regimes into open relationships with Israel will only enable authoritarianism in the region by normalizing occupation and apartheid in Palestine, boosting monarchical regimes who crush dissent in the Gulf and playing into the Iranian regime's narrative," said Yousef Munayyer, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC.

"All for some pre-election photo ops," he added.

Michael Crowley reported from Washington, and David Halbfinger from Jerusalem.

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A White House Ceremony Will Celebrate a Diplomatic Win and Campaign Gift

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WASHINGTON - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has long owed a debt to President Trump, who has repeatedly bestowed diplomatic gifts at crucial moments as Mr. Netanyahu has battled for his political survival. Leaders of the Persian Gulf states are similarly grateful to Mr. Trump, who has embraced their governments, cracked down on their archnemesis, Iran, and defended them from intense political criticism in Washington.

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ovid-19 is a great accelerator. In most of the countries it has struck, whatever inequalities, divisions and tensions were festering before its arrival have now sped into the political foreground. And so it has proved here. Race, class, gender, poverty, wealth, the north-south divide - even though it often feels it as if time has stood still, all of these things are now vividly in front of us, demanding attention. And one key issue has come roaring back: the fate of the United Kingdom itself. Brexit and the pandemic are pushing its countries and regions in strikingly different directions.

Clearly, nothing highlights our increasingly unsettled, estranged national condition better than the politics of Scotland. One should always hesitate before claiming that mere polls represent historic shifts, but in the last few months, a number of surveys have found support for Scottish independence running at more than 50%. Leaving aside undecideds, a Panelbase poll last week put the for-and-against numbers at 55 and 45 respectively: an elegant inversion of the 2014 referendum result, and another excuse for stories about political shockwaves supposedly now spreading from Edinburgh to London.

It is remarkable that the possible end of the union has yet to enter England's political conversation, on left or right.

The superficial explanation is obvious. As one Tory put it to me last week, Nicola Sturgeon has succeeded in creating a contrast between her government's "cautious and communitarian" approach to Covid-19 and the idea that Boris Johnson's administration has been "chaotic and market-driven". As the UK government has lurched from crisis to crisis, she has presented an image of grown-up competence - even if, as evidenced by Scotland's exam results fiasco, an image is sometimes all it is. Brexit is also central to what is happening, not least in the sense that remain-voting Scots who backed the union six years ago have decided that independence is now the better option.

Elections to the Scottish parliament will take place in May 2021. Even if the Scottish National party has done surprisingly little with its 13 years in power, and governs in a narrow, cliqueish fashion, the most recent poll on voting intentions for Holyrood found 57% of the electorate planning to support Sturgeon and her party in the constituency vote, and the SNP heading for an outright majority. The Johnson government still insists that it will not countenance another referendum on independence, certainly not during the current parliament. But the current situation seems to point in one direction: towards a potentially historic showdown, and the fissures decisively opened in 2014 becoming unmendable.

For some of us in England, independence for Scotland is still a fascinating and exciting prospect. The idea may be laced with anxiety about what exactly it would mean for politics in our home country, but it also highlights basic notions of democracy and self-determination, and suggests a realistic chance for a modern kind of left politics that could jump away from cruel, reckless economic liberalism and the lunacies and nastiness of Brexit. From a more dispassionate perspective, what seems remarkable is that the increasing possibility of an end of the union has yet to enter England's political conversation, on left or right.

A sense of ignorance and complacency may go right to the top. According to a recent report in the Financial Times, Michael Gove recently warned the cabinet of the seriousness of the situation and outlined ideas about how to pull Scotland back, and the first minister to respond was Rishi Sunak. "I now understand why this is so important," he said. An odd thing for a holder of one of the great offices of state to say, but there we are.

Sleepwalking is one aspect of the English approach to the union; the other is a biting hostility, which mirrors some of the uglier aspects of Scottish separatism. A vocal part of English opinion still imagines Scotland to be a place full of entitlement and unjustified grievances, and therefore best let go - a belief cynically encouraged by David Cameron and George Osborne in the election campaign of 2015, when they pushed the idea that Labour might go into coalition with the SNP, and signed off billboards featuring Alex Salmond with the caption "Don't let the SNP grab your cash". In June last year, let us not forget, a briefly infamous survey found that 63% of Conservative party members agreed that Scottish or Northern Irish secession was a price worth paying for our exit from the European Union. Brexity patriotism is a strange thing: always clad in the union jack but so defined by a crazed and zealous Englishness that it embraces a surreal contradiction: that in pursuit of a supposedly reborn United Kingdom, the UK itself can be written off as collateral damage.

For now at least, this is more the stuff of emotion than practical politics - and even if it still festers in the Tories' collective soul, given that the end of the UK would surely spell the fall of Johnson and his ministers, the government wants nothing to do with it.

When I spoke to a senior Conservative minister last week, they acknowledged the gravity and urgency of the current situation, and outlined roughly what they may try to do next year. Even if the SNP won by a landslide, recession and a lingering pandemic would perhaps allow the government to play for time ("The question would be, 'Do you want to call a referendum now?' I don't think Sturgeon would want to") while it tried to re-emphasise the kind of cultural argument voiced in 2014 by Gordon Brown - that people should not be forced to choose between Scottishness and their place in the UK. Much would be made of steps Westminster had taken to fight the worst effects of the pandemic, such as Sunak's furlough scheme. If the debate carried on for another two or three years, this source reckoned, tensions over Brexit might by then have receded, along with the idea of the EU as an "easy cushion into which you could rest" if an independent Scotland instantly faced big fiscal and economic challenges.

Whatever these arguments look like on paper, as Johnson holidays in Scotland and ministers are dispatched on PR trips, the idea of the government styling itself as the union's great defender sits rather awkwardly with a plain fact. However much Tory voices may try to portray independence as a fiendish conspiracy worked up by the SNP, they and their party have played a huge role in weakening the union, and continue to do so.

Labour also has a case to answer - about the hatchet-faced, factional, macho politics that it embedded in Scotland over decades, and the fall into disgrace of the Blair government, not least on Iraq. But from the miners' strike, through the poll tax to the bedroom tax, it has been Tory actions and aggressions that have most outraged Scots. By 1987 - 33 long years ago - the Conservatives were down to only 10 MPs in Scotland; a decade later, they had none at all. To have even tried to rebuild any meaningful legitimacy would have required an emollient, open, progressive kind of Conservatism - to some extent, the kind of politics belatedly tried by the former leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davidson. But in retrospect, Brexit killed that prospect, and now far too much of what the Tories do threatens to only deepen Scotland's estrangement from Westminster.

All this makes for a mixed-up and confusing political stew. Wreckers of the union are now desperately trying to save it, while the effects of the pandemic could conceivably fall in two contradictory directions - fomenting change but also convincing some people that in times as turbulent as these, the status quo remains the safest bet. So far, only one thing is crystal clear: that even as England dozes, British politics is now brimming with fundamental issues, and the fate of the UK will sooner or later prove to be the most fundamental of all.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist.

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The Covid-19 crisis is accelerating the breakup of the UK | John Harris

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ovid-19 is a great accelerator. In most of the countries it has struck, whatever inequalities, divisions and tensions were festering before its arrival have now sped into the political foreground. And so it has proved here.

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Links to constitutional reform and parliament.

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Patronage is nothing new and the appointment of new peers always brings charges of cronyism. It also invariably provokes a debate about the future of the institution and this is already under way.

One consequence of creating so many new peers is that it will hamper efforts, already slow, to reduce the numbers through a mix of early retirements and a "two out, one in" scheme. Lord Fowler, the Lords Speaker, has written to fellow peers observing that "any substantial intake of new members will drive us over 800 - perhaps to somewhere near the figures back in 2016 and further away from our aim of a 600-member House."

But the bigger question about the Lords is less to do with the numbers or even the expense of running the place but whether it should continue in its current form as a wholly appointed legislature.

In fact, do we even need a second chamber? Many unitary, as opposed to federal, states get by with just one, though they tend to be much smaller than the UK. New Zealand, Finland, Denmark and Israel are unicameral.

But if we accept that a second chamber is needed as a check on the Commons and to improve legislation, the next question is whether it should be elected. Indeed, it has been asked over and over again since 1911 when the Parliament Act asserted the supremacy of the Commons and stated in the preamble that a "Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis" would be established. More than a century and several botched attempts later the Lords remains an appointed, if no longer entirely hereditary, chamber.

In a world that demands legitimacy, an unelected Upper House by definition fails to provide it. But would electing it make the system work any better? Whenever parliament has been asked, it has not been able to make up its mind. In 1999, seven options for change were put before MPs, ranging from a wholly elected Lords to a variety of partially-elected hybrid schemes, and each one was voted down.

In 2010, the Coalition promised to take a stab at it but its constitutional overhaul got nowhere after the defeat of the AV referendum. The problem, as it always has been, is that an elected Upper House will claim equal democratic legitimacy with the Commons, especially if PR is used to vote peers in.

It is easily forgotten in the middle of this pandemic that the Conservative election manifesto pledged to set up a commission on the constitution to encompass all its elements, from the future of the Lords to the size of the Commons, which is still at 650 MPs despite promises to cut it to 600.

Given what else is on the Government's plate it is no surprise that little has been heard about this. It was promised in the first year so there are a few months left yet.

By far the biggest issue it will need to address is the future of the Union and whether a new devolutionary, or federal, dispensation can head off pressure for another independence referendum.

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Scrapping the Lords wouldn't make British democracy work any better

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Patronage is nothing new and the appointment of new peers always brings charges of cronyism. It also invariably provokes a debate about the future of the institution and this is already under way. One consequence of creating so many new peers is that it will hamper efforts, already slow, to reduce the numbers through a mix of early retirements and a "two out, one in" scheme.

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Interesting read on recent key cases and how they have or haven'y fallen along the ideological leanings of the judges both proving and disproving the political aspects of the Court's decisions.

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The US Supreme Court reshaped under President Donald Trump has been called the most conservative-leaning court in modern US history.

Now the death of liberal judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg means it could further tilt towards conservatives if the Republican Party is able to replace her in the months ahead.

With two appointments already in the president's first term, the bench's ideological balance already tilted right, favouring conservatives in a 5-4 split.

The top court in the US has a profound impact on American life, ruling on highly contentious issues like abortion and gun rights.

Nine judges on its bench, called justices, get lifetime terms so when President Trump got to pick two - Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh - there was huge expectation to see the impact this would have.

We look back at five closely watched cases this year to see if this conservative-leaning court actually voted that way.

In June, the court said that a Louisiana law requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals - effectively limiting the number of abortion providers in the state - was unconstitutional. The ruling, in which Justice Roberts sided with the court's liberal quartet, was seen as a major victory for progressives and pro-choice advocates. The future of reproductive rights in the US had been garnered intense focus since Justice Kavanuagh's nomination in 2018. With a conservative majority secured, many feared previous cases protecting a woman's right to choose, namely Roe v Wade, would be overturned.

Anti-abortion activists were hoping this case would provide proof that a majority of the court was ready to start rolling back abortion protections with the ultimate goal of allowing states to entirely ban the procedure. Instead, it demonstrated that Roberts, who sided with the four liberals, was more interested in respecting the precedent set by a recent case with similar facts than quickly steering the court in a more conservative direction.

Looking at three different cases, the court decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender employees from workplace discrimination. Justice Roberts and Justice Gorsuch joined the court's progressives in arguing that Title VII of the act, which bars discrimination against sex, applies to claims of sexual orientation and gender identity. The 6-3 ruling is a resolute victory for progressives and marks the biggest moment for LGBT rights in the US since the court legalised same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

This will probably be seen as the big surprise of this court term, given that conservatives Roberts and Gorsuch sided voted with the liberals to expand federal employment protections to gay and transgender individuals. It's yet further evidence of how fast and how far views in American society, including the courts, have come on the issue of gay rights.

In Department of Homeland Security v Regents of the University of California, the nine justices examined an Obama-era policy that shields hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people - known as Dreamers - from deportation, and gives them work and study permits. Somewhat unexpectedly, the court ruled that the administration's attempts to shut down the programme were "arbitrary and capricious" in a way prohibited by federal law. Once again, Justice Roberts joined the liberal judges to deliver a win for liberals.

This case had all the makings of political dynamite, with the possibility that hundreds of thousands of US residents could face the prospect of deportation if their temporary immigration protection was stripped away. Instead, Roberts once again proved to be a stickler for proper procedure, ruling that while the Trump administration may have had the power to do something - in this case, rescind DACA - they botched the process so badly they'd have to start over from the beginning.

Last month, the court ruled that states must allow religious schools to participate in state scholarship programs funded by tax credits. The case, Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue, centred on a 2015 Montana law - later struck down by the state supreme court - that allowed public funds for scholarships to help families send their children to private schools, most of which were religious schools. The 5-4 ruling, which fell neatly within ideological lines, may open the door to further public funding of religious institutions, marking a victory for conservatives and the Trump administration. Critics say it may divert funds from public schools, in favour of private or religious schools.

The court had a number of cases dealing with issues of religious freedom and church/state separation this term. While decisions involving contraceptive coverage and employment discrimination in religious institutions garnered the headlines, they turned on details of the laws in question. No case more clearly exposed the durability of the conservative majority in this area than the ruling in Montana v. Epsinoza, where five justices held that the US constitution itself required government programmes to be made equally accessible to secular and religious schools.

The Supreme Court ruled in March that states are free to abandon the insanity defence in cases where defendants argue they could not distinguish between right and wrong. In an unusual move, liberal Justice Elena Kagan joined the five conservative justices in her decision. The 6-member majority ruled that a 1995 Kansas law eliminating the insanity defence did not violate the US constitution. In this state, mental capacity may only be considered in the sentencing phase of trial. To date, Kansas is one of just five states to effectively eliminate the insanity defence. This ruling may encourage others to follow suit.

The use of insanity as a defence from criminal culpability has been around longer than the United States itself. This term, however, Elena Kagan broke with the liberal justices to write an opinion joined by the five conservatives allowing states to significantly curtail its use in criminal trials. It's a notable ruling, given that criminal procedure is one area where even some conservatives justices have been divided recently, as the court tries to balance the powers of law enforcement and the criminal courts with defendant rights.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg death: How has Trump's Supreme Court changed America?

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The US Supreme Court reshaped under President Donald Trump has been called the most conservative-leaning court in modern US history. Now the death of liberal judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg means it could further tilt towards conservatives if the Republican Party is able to replace her in the months ahead.

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Roberts showing his willingness to uphold precedent as he takes an Originalist position in key rulings 'against' the conservative values he was appointed for.

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The Louisiana abortion case: Roberts strikes down an anti-abortion law

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) blocked a Louisiana law barring physicians from performing abortions unless the doctor had admitting privileges at a local hospital. Chief Justice Roberts, the crucial conservative vote that swung the decision toward the liberal argument, wrote his own opinion, in order to make it clear that his vote was guided by earlier precedent.

"The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons," the Chief justice wrote. "Therefore Louisiana's law cannot stand under our precedents."

In fact, Roberts was opposed to the decision in case of the Texas law. The Texas case, decided by SCOTUS in 2016, struck down a law which they found created an "undue burden" on women seeking an abortion. Chief Justice Roberts was among those who dissented, voting to uphold the Texas law. Roberts has also said publicly that he believes "that the case was wrongly decided." So why did he vote against the new Louisiana law? Because the law stands on precedent, and this argument had been decided.

The arguments against the recent Louisiana law were that this was " not medically necessary," and that the law was in fact written in order to restrict abortion. Because admitting privileges are granted at the discretion of each individual hospital, this put a physician's ability to legally perform an abortion at the discretion of local hospitals as well. The majority opinion, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, held that the Louisiana law was unconstitutional.

Breyer also noted, "The evidence also shows that opposition to abortion played a significant role in some hospitals' decisions to deny admitting privileges."

In his footnote to the Louisiana decision, Roberts showed that his opinion in this case was a narrow one, writing that the "validity of admitting privileges law depends on numerous factors that may differ from state to state." SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts may be signaling that if someone can just bring a valid argument in front of the Supreme Court, he would be free to vote in support of a law that restricted abortion in some way.

In other words, Roberts may vote to uphold current abortion laws only until conservatives wise up and make a new argument against them - but for now, the Supreme Court Justice is thwarting the wishes of the current administration.

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5 times Supreme Court Justice Roberts was true to the Constitution-thereby angering Trump fans

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In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) blocked a Louisiana law barring physicians from performing abortions unless the doctor had admitting privileges at a local hospital. Chief Justice Roberts, the crucial conservative vote that swung the decision toward the liberal argument, wrote his own opinion, in order to make it clear that his vote was guided by earlier precedent.

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The government will now do US style televised press briefings. Currently this is done behind closed doors by civil service press officers, that plan is that the PM will appoint a press officer/advisor who will make the televised briefings on his behalf (but he will pop up occasionally).

Some argue this will make the government more transparent, others say it will just be a media spectacle. Which one will it prove to be?

This comes off the back off of the popularity of the COVID 19 briefings.

Links to structure and actions of govt and potentially another way of being held to account by the media - synoptic link to Component 1.

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Downing St has announced that it will be televising its afternoon lobby press briefing, come October. Inspired by the daily coronavirus briefings, it's a shake-up that supporters say could improve transparency. On the podcast, Katy Balls speaks to former No 10 comms chief Craig Oliver, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson. They also take a punt at which experienced broadcaster may be brought in to deliver the briefing.

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Will No 10's press briefing shake-up really deliver more transparency? | Coffee House Shots | The Spectator

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Downing St has announced that it will be televising its afternoon lobby press briefing, come October. Inspired by the daily coronavirus briefings, it's a shake-up that supporters say could improve transparency. On the podcast, Katy Balls speaks to former No 10 comms chief Craig Oliver, James Forsyth...

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Biden appears to be making inroads into traditional Republican voting groups. Interesting to see what happens with the older white, and white (non-college educated) vote in November.

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A New York Times/Siena College poll finds that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is ahead of the president by 14 points, leading among women and nonwhite voters and cutting into his support with white voters.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 race, building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters and making deep inroads with some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Mr. Trump following his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new national poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden is currently ahead of Mr. Trump by 14 percentage points, garnering 50 percent of the vote compared with 36 percent for Mr. Trump. That is among the most dismal showings of Mr. Trump's presidency, and a sign that he is the clear underdog right now in his fight for a second term.

Mr. Trump has been an unpopular president for virtually his entire time in office. He has made few efforts since his election in 2016 to broaden his support beyond the right-wing base that vaulted him into office with only 46 percent of the popular vote and a modest victory in the Electoral College.

But among a striking cross-section of voters, the distaste for Mr. Trump has deepened as his administration failed to stop a deadly disease that crippled the economy and then as he responded to a wave of racial-justice protests with angry bluster and militaristic threats. The dominant picture that emerges from the poll is of a country ready to reject a president whom a strong majority of voters regard as failing the greatest tests confronting his administration.

Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by enormous margins with black and Hispanic voters, and women and young people appear on track to choose Mr. Biden by an even wider margin than they favored Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump in 2016. But the former vice president has also drawn even with Mr. Trump among male voters, whites and people in middle age and older - groups that have typically been the backbones of Republican electoral success, including Mr. Trump's in 2016.

Arlene Myles, 75, of Denver, said she had been a Republican for nearly six decades before switching her registration to independent earlier this year during Mr. Trump's impeachment trial. Ms. Myles said that when Mr. Trump was first elected, she had resolved to "give him a chance," but had since concluded that he and his party were irredeemable.

"I was one of those people who stuck by Nixon until he was waving goodbye," Ms. Myles said. "I thought I was a good Republican and thought they had my values, but they have gone down the tubes these last few years."

Ms. Myles said she planned to vote for Mr. Biden, expressing only one misgiving: "I wish he was younger," she said.

Most stark may be Mr. Biden's towering advantage among white women with college degrees, who support him over Mr. Trump by 39 percentage points. In 2016, exit polls found that group preferred Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Trump by just 7 percentage points. The poll also found that Mr. Biden has narrowed Mr. Trump's advantage with less-educated white voters.

The exodus of white voters from the G.O.P. has been especially pronounced among younger voters, an ominous trend for a party that was already heavily reliant on older Americans.

Fifty-two percent of whites under 45 said they supported Mr. Biden while only 30 percent said they supported Mr. Trump. And their opposition is intense: More than twice as many younger whites viewed the president very unfavorably than very favorably.

Tom Diamond, 31, a Republican in Fort Worth, Texas, said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump but would do so with real misgivings. He called the president a "poor leader" who had mishandled the pandemic and said Mr. Biden seemed "like a guy you can trust." But Mr. Trump held views closer to his own on the economy, health care and abortion.

"Part of you just feels icky voting for him," Mr. Diamond said. "But definitely from a policy perspective, that's where my vote's going to go."

Some unease toward Mr. Trump stems from voters' racial attitudes. According to the poll, white voters under 45 are overwhelmingly supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement, while older whites are more tepid in their views toward racial justice activism. And nearly 70 percent of whites under 45 said they believed the killing of George Floyd was part of a broader pattern of excessive police violence toward African-Americans rather than an isolated incident.

What's striking, though, is that even among white seniors, one of Mr. Trump's strongest constituencies, he has damaged himself with his conduct. About two-fifths of whites over 65 said they disapproved of Mr. Trump's handling of both the coronavirus and race relations.

Mr. Trump retains a few points of strength in the poll that could offer him a way to regain a footing in the race, and the feeble condition of his candidacy right now may well represent his low point in a campaign with four and a half months still to go.

His approval rating is still narrowly positive on the issue of the economy, with 50 percent of voters giving him favorable marks compared with 45 percent saying the opposite. Should the fall campaign become a referendum on which candidate is better equipped to restore prosperity after the pandemic has subsided, that could give Mr. Trump a new opening to press his case.

The president is also still ahead of Mr. Biden among white voters without college degrees, who hold disproportionate influence in presidential elections because of how central the Midwest is to capturing 270 electoral votes.

Yet if Mr. Trump still has a significant measure of credibility with voters on the economy, he lacks any apparent political strength on the most urgent issues of the moment: the pandemic and the national reckoning on policing and race.

Nearly three-fifths of voters disapprove of Mr. Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including majorities of white voters and men. Self-described moderate voters disapproved of Mr. Trump on the coronavirus by a margin of more than two to one.

Most of the country is also rejecting Mr. Trump's call to reopen the economy as quickly as possible, even at the cost of exposing people to greater health risks. By a 21-point margin, voters said the federal government should prioritize containing the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, a view that aligns them with Mr. Biden.

Just a third of voters said the government should focus on restarting the economy even if that entails greater public-health risks.

That debate could become the central focus of the campaign in the coming weeks, as coronavirus outbreaks grow rapidly in a number of Republican-led states that have resisted the strict lockdown measures imposed in the spring by Democratic states like New York and California.

The public also does not share Mr. Trump's resistance to mask wearing. The president has declined to don a mask in nearly all public appearances, even as top health officials in his administration have urged Americans to do so as a precaution against spreading the coronavirus. In the poll, 54 percent of people said they always wear a mask when they expect to be in proximity to other people, while another 22 percent said they usually wear a mask.

Just 22 percent said they rarely or never wear a mask.

Mr. Trump's job approval on race relations was just as dismal. Sixty-one percent of voters said they disapproved of Mr. Trump's handling of race, versus 33 percent who said they approved. By a similar margin, voters said they disapproved of his response to the protests after the death of Mr. Floyd.

Mr. Trump has sought several times in the last month to use demonstrations against the police as a political wedge issue, forcing Democrats to align themselves squarely either with law-enforcement agencies or with the most strident anti-police demonstrators.

The poll suggested most voters were rejecting that binary choice, as well as Mr. Trump's harsh characterization of protesters: Large majorities said they had a positive overall assessment of both the Black Lives Matter movement and the police.

The picture of Mr. Biden that emerges from the poll is one of a broadly acceptable candidate who inspires relatively few strong feelings in either direction. He is seen favorably by about half of voters and unfavorably by 42 percent. Only a quarter said they saw him very favorably, equaling the share that sees him in very negative terms.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, is seen very favorably by 27 percent of voters and very unfavorably by 50 percent.

Harry Hoyt, 72, of York County in Southern Maine, said he has sometimes voted for Republican presidential candidates in the past and cast a grudging vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. He felt better this time about his plan to vote for Mr. Biden.

"Biden would be a better candidate than Trump, simply because he's a nice person," Mr. Hoyt said. "One of the most important things to me is the character of the man in charge of our country."

Significantly, one group that saw Mr. Biden as far more than just acceptable was black voters. Fifty-six percent of black respondents in the poll said they saw Mr. Biden very favorably, a far more enthusiastic judgment than from any other constituency.

The limited passion for Mr. Biden among other Democratic constituencies does not appear to be affecting his position against Mr. Trump. Though only 13 percent of people under 30 said they had a very favorable opinion of the former vice president, that group is backing Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by 34 percentage points.

Nicholas Angelos, a 20-year-old voter in Bloomington, Ind., who said he supported Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, said he would vote for Mr. Biden as the "lesser of two evils." He said he believed the former vice president would "try his best," in contrast to Mr. Trump, whom he described as "an autocrat" and "anti-science."

"We all have to compromise," said Mr. Angelos, who described himself as very liberal. He added of Mr. Biden, "I don't think he's anything special."

For the moment, voters also appear unpersuaded by one of the primary attack lines Mr. Trump and his party have used against Mr. Biden: the claim that, at age 77, he is simply too old for the presidency. Mr. Trump, 74, has mocked Mr. Biden's mental acuity frequently over the last few months and his campaign has run television advertisements that cast Mr. Biden as absent-minded and inarticulate.

But three in five voters said in the poll that they disagreed with the claim that Mr. Biden was too old to be an effective president. The percentage of voters who agreed, 36 percent, exactly matched Mr. Trump's existing support in the presidential race.

Lindsay Clark, 37, who lives in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, was among the voters who said she would probably vote for Mr. Trump because she was unsure Mr. Biden was "physically and mentally up to the task" of being president. But Ms. Clark expressed little admiration for Mr. Trump, whom she called unpresidential.

Ms. Clark, who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016, said she was hard-pressed to name something she really liked about Mr. Trump, eventually settling on the idea that he expressed himself bluntly.

"I was just trying to think if I could think of something off the top of my head that I was like, 'Yes, I loved when you did that!'" she said of Mr. Trump. "And I kind of just can't."

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Biden Takes Dominant Lead as Voters Reject Trump on Virus and Race

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A New York Times/Siena College poll finds that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is ahead of the president by 14 points, leading among women and nonwhite voters and cutting into his support with white voters. Joseph R. Biden Jr.

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Jum Clyburn (House Majority Whip) discussing the 'conference committee' stage where two different versions of a bill are reconciled -- the bill in question is for police reform with the Democrats and the Republicans at odds over how 'strong' it should be.

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U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on Sunday warned against weakening proposed legislation designed to curb police brutality, saying Congress should not be looking for the "lowest common denominator."

Booker pushed back against Republican objections to the measure, which would make it easier to hold police accountable for misconduct, ban chokeholds, set up a national database of use of force incidents, ban racial and religious profiling, and increase training.

"This is not a time for lowest common denominator, watered down reforms," Booker, D-N.J., said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "It's a time to stop the problem, because if someone's knee is on your neck, you can't take it halfway off and say that that's progress."

"We have the tools with which to stop people from dying," said Booker.

Booker, who has made overhauling the criminal justice system a top priority since coming to Washington, played a major role in drafting the latest legislation.

It was introduced last week in response to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into the victim's neck for more than eight minutes, and those of several other unarmed blacks, most of them at the hands of police.

The section of the bill that has criticized by opponents is the part that would make it easier to hold police accountable for their actions. Officers currently enjoy what is known as "qualified immunity," which protects them against lawsuits for most actions.

Booker cited examples of a pregnant woman being tasered by police for failing to sign a parking ticket, an unarmed man killed in a hospital by police while wandering around, and a bicycle rider being shot multiple times in what police said was a case of mistaken identity.

"Do we want to have a nation where police officers who do really awful things cannot be held accountable?" Booker said.

But the accountability provision could sink the bill, said U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate, who called it a "poison pill" among the GOP.

"We know that any poison pill in legislation means we get nothing done," Scott, who is developing GOP legislation, said on CBS. "That sends the wrong signal, perhaps the worst signal right now in America. I think we're going to have legislation that can be negotiated that gets us to the place where something becomes law that actually makes a difference. That's got to be our goal."

Scott said he would favor decertifying officers engaged in misconduct, improving training and tactics, and making sure all police departments report use of force incidents to the U.S. Justice Department.

And President Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order to encourage police departments "to meet the most current professional standards for the use of force, including tactics for de-escalation."

He made those comments Friday during a roundtable in Dallas where he also said he would push a pilot program allowing social workers to work with law enforcement.

"We're not defunding police," he said. "If anything, we're going the other route: We're going to make sure that our police are well trained - perfectly trained, they have the best equipment."

Booker said the Democratic bill would have been a poison pill last month, but right now, "the sense of what's possible has shifted," especially in the wake of protests erupting across the country and a major shift in public opinion.

"When we stop short and start talking about finding a bill that's the lowest common denominator it is meaning that we will revisit this again when another unarmed black person gets killed and the nation erupts," Booker said. "We could miss the moment by not solving the problem and ending practices that we know would make a difference to lives."

Still, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a co-sponsor of the House Democratic bill, said there was a potential for compromise after the House and Senate acted separately.

"Our system is designed that way," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "Let's just let both houses do whatever they're going to do, and then let's get down to the serious business of reconciling our differences."

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'We have the tools with which to stop people from dying,' Booker says in pushing bill to address police brutality

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U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on Sunday warned against weakening proposed legislation designed to curb police brutality, saying Congress should not be looking for the "lowest common denominator." Booker pushed back against Republican objections to the measure, which would make it easier to hold police accountable for misconduct, ban chokeholds, set up a national database of use of force incidents, ban racial and religious profiling, and increase training.

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"Britain's claims to being a functioning democracy are only skin deep."

This talks about how party funding, deceitful advertising, the House of Lords etc. all pose a threat to Britain's so-called 'democracy.'

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Do we live in a democracy? You may well ask. An unelected adviser seems to exercise more power than the prime minister, and appears unanswerable to people or parliament. Boris Johnson makes reckless public health decisions that could put thousands of lives at risk, apparently to dig himself out of a political hole. Parliament is truncated, as the government arbitrarily decides that MPs can no longer take part in votes remotely. As the government blunders from one disaster to the next, there seem to be no effective ways of holding it to account.

Established power in this country is surrounded by a series of defensive rings. As soon as you begin to name them, you see that the UK is a democracy only in the weakest and shallowest sense.

Let's begin with political funding. Our system permits billionaires and corporations to outspend and outmuscle the electorate. The great majority of money for the Conservative party comes from a small number of very rich people. Just five hedge fund managers have given it £18m over the past 10 years. The secretive Leader's Group grants big donors special access to the prime minister and his frontbenchers in return for their money. Courting and cultivating rich people to win elections corrupts our politics, replacing democracy with plutocracy.
Coronavirus is our chance to completely rethink what the economy is for | Malcolm Bull
This grossly unfair system is supplemented by outright cheating, such as breaching spending limits and secretly funding mendacious online ads. The Electoral Commission, which is supposed to regulate the system, has deliberately been kept powerless. The maximum fine for winning an election (or a referendum) by fraud is £20,000 per offence. Democracy is cheap in this country.

Despite such assistance, the Conservatives still failed to win a majority of votes at the last election. But, thanks to our preposterous, outdated first-past-the-post electoral system, the 43.6% of the vote they won granted them a crushing majority. With proportional representation, we would have a hung parliament. Five years of unassailable power for Johnson's Conservatives, even as popular support collapses, would have been impossible.

The structure and symbolism of parliament, with its preposterous rituals and incomprehensible procedures, could scarcely be better designed to alienate people, or to favour former public schoolboys, educated in a similar environment. Even its official emblem tells us we are shut out. It's a portcullis: the means by which people are excluded from the fortress of power. The portcullis is topped by a crown, reminding us that power is still vested symbolically in an unelected head of state. Many of her actual powers have been assumed, in the absence of a codified constitution, by the prime minister.

These powers are routinely abused, by all governments. Prime ministers bypass parliament, governing through special advisers like Dominic Cummings. When they make catastrophic mistakes, they have the power to decide whether or not there should be a public inquiry, and, if there should, what its terms and who its chair should be. It's as if a defendant in a criminal trial were allowed to decide whether the trial goes ahead and, if so, what the charges should be and who the judge and jury are.

Even when an investigation does take place, the prime minister can suppress its conclusions, as Johnson has done with the report on Russian interference in the British political system, which remains unpublished. Does it contain details of unlawful donations to the Conservative party? Or of Conservative Friends of Russia, whose launch party was attended by Cummings? A key figure in this group was a man who has subsequently come under suspicion of being a Russian spy. He has been photographed with Johnson, whom he described as a "good friend". What was going on? Without parliament's intelligence and security committee's report, we can only guess.

The same inordinate powers enabled Johnson to suspend parliament last autumn, until his decision was struck down by the supreme court, and to terminate remote access for MPs this week, preventing many of them from representing us. He is, in effect, a monarch with a five-year term and a council of advisers we call parliament.

The House of Lords is a further defensive ring within this ring. Some of its seats are reserved for hereditary aristocrats. Some are reserved for bishops, making this the world's only country, other than Iran, in which religious leaders have an automatic right to sit. The rest are grace and favour appointments, keeping power within existing circles. Many of them are granted to major political donors, reinforcing the power of money. In any other country, they would call it corruption.

Despite a vast array of new democratic techniques, pioneered in other countries, there has been a total failure to balance our supposedly representative system with participatory democracy. This failure grants the winning party a scarcely challenged power, on the grounds of presumed consent, to do as it pleases, for five years at a time. Even when public trust and consent collapse, as they have now done amid the coronavirus pandemic, there are no effective channels through which we can affect the decisions government makes.

These formal rings of power are supported by further defences beyond government, such as the print media, most of which is owned by billionaires or multimillionaires living offshore, and the network of opaquely funded thinktanks, that formulate and test the policies later adopted by government. Their personnel circulate in and out of the prime minister's office.

Our political system has the outward appearance of democracy, but it is largely controlled by undemocratic forces. We find ourselves on the wrong side of the portcullis, watching helplessly as crucial decisions are taken about us, without us. If there's one thing the coronavirus fiascos show, it's the need for radical change.

* George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Topics

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Britain's claims to being a functioning democracy are only skin deep | George Monbiot

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Do we live in a democracy? You may well ask. An unelected adviser seems to exercise more power than the prime minister, and appears unanswerable to people or parliament. Boris Johnson makes reckless public health decisions that could put thousands of lives at risk, apparently to dig himself out of a political hole.

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Backlash against the governments plans to require ID at polling stations

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Backlash against the governments plans to require ID at polling stations

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This is an example of sectional pressure groups and think tanks holding the government to account by highlighting how these measures could block black and minority ethnic groups out of democracy.

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Anti-racist and Bame organisations have warned the government that its plans to require ID at polling stations will lock black and ethnic minority people out of democracy.

In an intervention timed to coincide with Windrush Day, groups including the Runnymede Trust, Hope Not Hate and the Race Equality Foundation said government policy amounted to the "importing of US-style voter suppression to the UK".

Ministers want to make it compulsory for voters in England, Scotland and Wales to show ID cards before they can cast their ballot, but the plans are highly controversial because different demographics are more likely to have valid ID cards than others.

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Groups demographically more likely to support the government like white people and older people are significantly more likely to already have photo ID, leading some critics to claim that the ministers are trying to suppress turnout of their opponents' supporters.

Suspicions have also been raised because in-person voter fraud is a non-existent problem under the UK's current system, with just one person convicted a year - out of proportion to the push for the policy.

The government says people without an existing form of ID will be able to apply for an electoral ID card, but the groups said this aspect of the policy "represents another barrier to voting that will put many off - with a postcode lottery in terms of how easy the cards are to acquire in each of the 300+ councils of the UK".

"We are writing to sound the alarm at government plans that will make it harder for people to vote," the groups say.

"The government is intent on pushing ahead with a voter ID which will have a disproportionate impact on Bame people.

"We are deeply concerned that - since there is no universal ID in the UK - this show-your-papers plan represents an importing of US-style voter suppression to the UK."

The groups cited data showing that white people are most likely to hold one form of photo ID, with 76 per cent holding a full driving licence compared to 31 per cent of Asian people and 48 per cent of Black people.

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The statement was signed by Dr Zubaida Haque, interim director of The Runnymede Trust, Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, Pragna Patel director of Southall Black Sisters, Jabeer Butt OBE, CEO of the Race Equality Foundation, and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.

They added: "The Windrush scandal showed what can happen when millions of people who lack ID are shut out by government. We must not risk a rolling Windrush scandal here, with Bame and marginalised groups locked out of our democracy. Ministers must think again."

A pilot of voter ID laws was carried out at the 2019 local elections. The Electoral Commission, which administered the pilots, said it was "not able to draw definitive conclusions from these pilots about how an ID requirement would work in practice, particularly at a national poll with higher levels of turnout or in areas with different socio-demographic profiles not fully represented in the pilot scheme".

The government is, however, pressing ahead with the plan, which was included in the Conservative manifesto. They argued that the measure would "protect the integrity of our democracy".

Voter ID laws have a long history as a partisan issue in the United States, where they tend to be introduced by Republican state administrations who rely on white voters for the overwhelming majority of their support. Critics point to many of the same factors handing a partisan advantage to the laws' proponents.

Voter ID requirements are common in continental Europe, but many of the same issues do not apply as these countries tend to have national ID card schemes where cards are already mandatory for all. A similar system is in place in Northern Ireland, where electoral ID cards are issued free of charge.

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Bame groups accuse government of 'importing of US-style voter suppression' to Britain

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Anti-racist and Bame organisations have warned the government that its plans to require ID at polling stations will lock black and ethnic minority people out of democracy.

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UK charities urge PM to demand a green COVID-19 recovery.

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UK charities urge PM to demand a green COVID-19 recovery.

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This is an example of promotional pressure groups, seeking to promote 'green recovery', to convert the ideas behind the cause into government action or parliamentary legislation.
- Sudiksha

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The chiefs of some of Britain's leading charities have written to the prime minister to demand a "green recovery" from the coronavirus crisis, urging him to use economic rescue packages to build low-carbon infrastructure and spur the creation of long-term green jobs.

The group of 57 charities representing 22 million members called for any bailouts to be subject to strict conditions so that companies receiving state help in the Covid-19 crisis would have to meet low-carbon targets, and for all elements of any economic recovery package to be subject to a test to ensure they were in line with the UK's target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

They also want ministers to cancel, rather than suspend, the debts of developing countries struggling with the impact of Covid-19 and the climate crisis.

Charities including the Women's Institute, the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Oxfam and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) signed the letter, which comes after weeks in which ministers have made references to the need for a sustainable recovery, but without providing policy details.

"We know a green recovery makes economic sense, and is supported here in the UK and overseas by leading businesses, academics, ministers and health representatives," said Tanya Steele, the chief executive of WWF UK, one of the organisers of the letter. "What we urgently need to see now, and post-pandemic, is commitments from government on turning this into action."

The campaigners said investing in a green recovery could support at least 210,000 green jobs and bring benefits of £90bn a year, from economic rejuvenation and better health.

The charities include poverty campaigners and faith groups, as well as green pressure groups. Melissa Green, the general secretary of the Women's Institute (WI), said: "WI members are clear that post-Covid-19 economic packages need to incorporate robust and ambitious green policies in order to get on track for net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner."

The charities join an increasing number of economists, health professionals, leading climate experts, developing countries and the government's own statutory advisers, who are all calling for a green recovery to lift countries out of recession and on to a low-carbon pathway.

Fossil fuel companies and high emitters such as airlines and carmakers have already benefited from billions in public finance from the recovery package, without green strings attached.

Carbon dioxide emissions, which plunged when lockdowns took effect, had since begun to rebound sharply, research found last week. Experts fear that without strong government interventions, the UK will return to business as usual with high carbon emissions, or that emissions could rise to levels above pre-lockdown levels, if people desert public transport in favour of driving their cars.

The UK is widely seen internationally as holding a particular responsibility for leading the world into a green recovery because the government will host the next vital UN climate summit. Called Cop26, and now postponed by a year to take place in Glasgow in November 2021, the conference is seen as the last chance for nations to get back on track to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.

"As host of Cop26, the UK government has an immense responsibility to lead the world to a green and just recovery," said Clara Goldsmith, the campaigns director for the Climate Coalition. "This is the only way to build a resilient economic recovery which ensures we keep global heating to no more than 1.5C and supports the most vulnerable. We have one chance and we must not waste it."

Campaigners have been frustrated by the government's lack of any policy detail on the possibility of a green recovery, and the lack of any clear agenda for Cop26.

"The best way to show this leadership [needed at Cop26] is to put resilience at the heart of our economic recovery by accelerating the transition to net zero, restoring nature and supporting the most vulnerable at home and overseas," wrote the charity leaders. "It is time for decisive action."

The charities laid out a seven-point plan, similar in content to the advice given by economic experts and the Committee on Climate Change, the statutory body that advises ministers on meeting the UK's carbon targets. Their demands include: new public investment in energy efficiency, renewable energy and zero-carbon transport; setting up a climate infrastructure bank; trade deals that support British farming, to ensure greater protection for nature; ending fossil fuel finance, in the UK and overseas; helping to halt the decline of biodiversity around the world.

They also called for a new government committee, led by a minister, to work with civil society groups on delivering a green recovery.
Topics

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Leading UK charities urge PM to seek green recovery from Covid-19

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The chiefs of some of Britain's leading charities have written to the prime minister to demand a "green recovery" from the coronavirus crisis, urging him to use economic rescue packages to build low-carbon infrastructure and spur the creation of long-term green jobs.

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Former National Security Advisor John Bolton accuses the Democrats of 'impeachment malpractice' 

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Former National Security Advisor John Bolton accuses the Democrats of 'impeachment malpractice' 

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This article describes the contents of John Bolton's upcoming book 'The Room Where It Happened'. Bolton states that the impeachment inquiry led by the Democrats failed to incorporate other 'Ukraine like' episodes, and accuses Trump of engaging with China and other nations to ensure victory at the upcoming election. This links to the spec by highlighting flaws within Congress' ability to hold the President to account.

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In his new book, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, describes instances when the president sought to halt criminal inquiries. He also says President Trump's loyalists mocked him behind his back.

John R. Bolton was President Trump's national security adviser for 17 months. Mr. Trump asked if Finland was part of Russia, Mr. Bolton wrote in his new book. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

[Read our 5 takeaways from John Bolton's book.]
John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine but for a variety of instances when he sought to use trade negotiations and criminal investigations to further his political interests.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed a willingness to halt criminal investigations "to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked," citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. "The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn't accept," Mr. Bolton writes, saying that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new accusation by describing how Mr. Trump overtly linked tariff talks with China to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping to buy American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year's election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was "pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win." Mr. Bolton said that Mr. Trump "stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome."

The book, "The Room Where It Happened," was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled publication next Tuesday and has already become a political lightning rod in the thick of an election campaign and a No. 1 best seller on Amazon.com even before it hits the bookstores. The Justice Department went to court on Wednesday for the second time this week seeking to stop publication even as Mr. Trump's critics complained that Mr. Bolton should have come forward during impeachment proceedings rather than save his account for a $2 million book contract.

While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Mr. Bolton's volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official who participated in major foreign policy events and has a lifetime of conservative credentials. It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain was a nuclear power and asked if Finland was a part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. The president never tired of assailing allied leaders and came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. He said it would be "cool" to invade Venezuela.

At times, Mr. Trump seemed to almost mimic the authoritarian leaders he appeared to admire. "These people should be executed," Mr. Trump once said of journalists. "They are scumbags." When Mr. Xi explained why he was building concentration camps in China, the book says, Mr. Trump "said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do." He repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to prosecute former Secretary of State John F. Kerry for talking with Iran in what he insisted was a violation of the Logan Act.

In the face of such behavior, even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock Mr. Trump behind his back. During the president's 2018 meeting with North Korea's leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, "He is so full of shit." A month later, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the president's North Korea diplomacy, declaring that there was "zero probability of success."

The State Department had no comment, but Mr. Trump fired back on Twitter just after midnight. "Wacko John Bolton's 'exceedingly tedious'(New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories," he wrote early Thursday morning, adding: "A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!"

Intelligence briefings with the president were a waste of time, Mr. Bolton writes, "since much of the time was spent listening to Trump, rather than Trump listening to the briefers." Mr. Trump likes pitting staff members against one another, at one point telling Mr. Bolton that former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson had once referred to Nikki R. Haley, then the ambassador to the United Nations, by a sexist obscenity - an assertion Mr. Bolton seemed to doubt but found telling that the president would make.

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like "(the opposite of the truth)" after some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy, but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton's but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

"His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern - or create - policy," Mr. Bolton writes. "That had its pros and cons."

Mr. Bolton is a complicated, controversial figure. An official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush and George W. Bush's United Nations ambassador, Mr. Bolton has been one of Washington's most vocal advocates for a hard-line foreign policy, a supporter of the Iraq war who has favored possible military action against rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

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While other books by journalists, lower-level former aides and even an anonymous senior official have revealed much about the Trump White House, Mr. Bolton's volume is the first tell-all memoir by such a high-ranking official. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

Like Mr. Tillerson and other officials who went to work for Mr. Trump believing they could manage him, Mr. Bolton agreed to become the president's third national security adviser in 2018 thinking he understood the risks and limits.

But unlike some of the so-called axis of adults, as he calls Mr. Tillerson and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who tried to minimize what they saw as the damage of the president's tenure, Mr. Bolton used his 17 months in the White House to accomplish policy goals that were important to him, like withdrawing the United States from a host of international agreements he considers flawed, like the Iran nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others.

Mr. Bolton thought Mr. Trump's diplomatic flirtation with the likes of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia were ill advised and even "foolish" and spent much of his tenure trying to stop the president from making what he deemed bad deals. He eventually resigned last September - Mr. Trump claimed he fired him - after they clashed over Iran, North Korea, Ukraine and a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bolton did not agree to testify during the House impeachment inquiry last fall, saying he would wait to see if a judge would rule that former aides like him should do so over White House objections. But after the House impeached Mr. Trump for abuse of power for withholding security aid while pressuring Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Bolton offered to testify in the Senate trial if subpoenaed.

Senate Republicans blocked calling Mr. Bolton as a witness even after The Times reported in January that his then-unpublished book confirmed that Mr. Trump linked the suspended security aid to his insistence that Ukraine investigate his political rivals. The Senate went on to acquit Mr. Trump almost entirely along party lines. But Mr. Bolton greatly angered critics of the president for waiting to make his account public until now.

The book confirms House testimony that Mr. Bolton was wary all along of the president's actions with regard to Ukraine and provides firsthand evidence of his own that Mr. Trump explicitly linked the security aid to investigations involving Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton.

On Aug. 20, Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump "said he wasn't in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over." Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the aid.

Mr. Bolton, however, had nothing but scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Mr. Trump, saying they committed "impeachment malpractice" by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. Instead, he says they should have also looked at how Mr. Trump was willing to intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey's Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China's ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.

Mr. Bolton writes that he raised concerns about both cases with Mr. Barr, who shared them. "Barr said he was very worried about the appearances Trump was creating," Mr. Bolton writes. Similarly, he recalls, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, "was plainly stunned at Trump's approach to law enforcement, or lack thereof."

Just as Mr. Trump sought Ukraine's help against his domestic rivals, he similarly married his own political interests with policy during a meeting with Mr. Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting last summer in Osaka, Japan, according to the book. Mr. Xi told Mr. Trump that unnamed political figures in the United States were trying to start a new cold war with China.

"Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats," Mr. Bolton writes. "Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China's economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win." (Mr. Bolton says he would have printed Mr. Trump's exact words, "but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise.")

Robert Lighthizer, the president's trade representative, denied on Wednesday that Mr. Trump sought election help from China during that meeting. "Absolutely untrue," he said when asked during a Senate hearing. "Never happened. I was there. I have no recollection of that ever happening. I don't believe it's true."

At a daily news conference on Friday, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, said Chinese officials "have no intention and will not interfere in the internal affairs and elections of the United States."

Mr. Barr, for his part, denied Mr. Bolton's version of their conversations. "There was no discussion of 'personal favors' or 'undue influence' on investigations, nor did Attorney General Barr state that the president's conversations with foreign leaders was improper," said Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman.

Mr. Bolton does not say these were necessarily impeachable offenses and adds that he does not know everything that happened with regard to all of these episodes, but he reported at least some of them to Mr. Barr and Mr. Cipollone. They should have been investigated by the House, Mr. Bolton says, and at the very least they constituted abuses of a president's duty to put the nation's interests ahead of his own.

"A president may not misuse the national government's legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest," Mr. Bolton writes. "Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump's confusion of his personal interests," he adds, then "there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that 'high crimes and misdemeanors' had been perpetrated."

Katie Benner, Ana Swanson and Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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Bolton Says Trump Impeachment Inquiry Missed Other Troubling Episodes

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In his new book, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, describes instances when the president sought to halt criminal inquiries. He also says President Trump's loyalists mocked him behind his back. [Read our 5 takeaways from John Bolton's book .] John R.

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The justices punt to Congress on controversial policy the court created.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday officially took a pass on revisiting its 50-year-old doctrine of "qualified immunity" for law enforcement officers, despite intense national outcry over police misconduct and legal protections that shield cops from liability.

"The Supreme Court has made clear that they are not prepared to reconsider qualified immunity at this moment," said Joanna Schwartz, an expert on the doctrine at UCLA School of Law.

Without explanation, the justices declined to take up the case of Norman Cooper, a 33-year-old black father, who was tased nine times by two San Antonio police officers while having an acute mental-health episode inside his parents' home in 2015 and later died.

Cooper's family filed an excessive force claim, but the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the officers enjoyed qualified immunity for their actions. That decision now stands.

The case was one of 10 involving qualified immunity that the Supreme Court had examined this spring for possible review but ultimately rejected.

"The court is likely very aware of the activity in Congress around this issue, and it is something Congress could fix," said Jay Schweikert, a criminal justice policy analyst at the Cato Institute and leading critic of qualified immunity. "But the fact that Congress could fix this does not absolve the court from addressing a mess it created."

While the Civil Rights Act of 1871 gives Americans the unambiguous ability to sue public officials over civil rights violations, the Supreme Court subsequently limited liability to only those rights that have become "clearly established law." Critics say the standard is near-impossible to meet.

Police officers accused of misconduct can face criminal charges, but convictions are exceedingly rare. That leaves civil lawsuits as one of the few avenues for alleged victims to pursue their claims.

"Advocates will keep bringing petitions to the Supreme Court, so they will have the chance to take up the issue in the fall," said Schwartz.

Qualified immunity has drawn scrutiny from across the political spectrum -- and the Supreme Court bench. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas have both publicly supported steps to clarify or curtail the policy.

"I have previously expressed my doubts about our qualified immunity jurisprudence," Thomas wrote last week in a dissent from the court's decision not to take up the issue, "because our qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text, I would grant this petition."

At least four justices need to agree for a case to be accepted for review.

"The Court doesn't make their votes public. But we know that fewer than four Justices were willing to reconsider qualified immunity, despite having numerous petitions to choose from at the conference. I perceive that action as the Court sending a strong message that, absent changed circumstances, it does not intend to reconsider qualified immunity anytime soon," said Christopher Walker, a professor at The Ohio State University Law School.

"The ball is now definitively in Congress's court. And state governments can also respond by limiting the immunities their officers enjoy under state law," Walker said.

House Democrats have introduced legislation that would significantly curtail qualified immunity for law enforcement officers, but many Republicans remain staunchly opposed.

"We certainly don't have the votes on qualified immunity to move it forward. The truth is suing the officer is harder to do than suing the department or the city. That's where the resources are anyway. So, I think that's the right path to go on," said Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said President Trump is also opposed to the idea of limiting qualified immunity.

"Taking away qualified immunity would make the streets of this country a whole lot less secure," McEnany told reporters last week. "The Supreme Court has litigated this for decades and has approached what they think is the appropriate balance with qualified immunity."

Legal immunity for officers was originally devised out of concern about harassment from lawsuits and potential for personal bankruptcies. Some experts have also warned about the erosion of a deterrent effect from police if they became hesitant about enforcing certain laws because of potential legal liability.

Of the 30 qualified immunity cases that reached the Supreme Court between 1982 and 2017, just twice did the justices find immunity did not apply to official conduct, according to University of Chicago law professor William Baude.

Many legal experts argue that the policy has become overly broad, ineffective and unfair.

"One might think that the threat of civil liability will cause officers to act more cautiously. But in practice, officers almost never personally pay judgments when they are found liable," wrote Daniel Epps, an associate law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in a New York Times op-ed.

"Qualified immunity routinely requires courts to say that there will be no penalty for a police officer who has violated the Constitution. That sends the message - to officers and the public - that the police are above the law," Epps wrote.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday officially took a pass on revisiting its 50-year-old doctrine of "qualified immunity" for law enforcement officers, despite intense national outcry over police misconduct and legal protections that shield cops from liability.

"The Supreme Court has made clear that they are not prepared to reconsider qualified immunity at this moment," said Joanna Schwartz, an expert on the doctrine at UCLA School of Law.

Without explanation, the justices declined to take up the case of Norman Cooper, a 33-year-old black father, who was tased nine times by two San Antonio police officers while having an acute mental-health episode inside his parents' home in 2015 and later died.

Cooper's family filed an excessive force claim, but the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the officers enjoyed qualified immunity for their actions. That decision now stands.

The case was one of 10 involving qualified immunity that the Supreme Court had examined this spring for possible review but ultimately rejected.

"The court is likely very aware of the activity in Congress around this issue, and it is something Congress could fix," said Jay Schweikert, a criminal justice policy analyst at the Cato Institute and leading critic of qualified immunity. "But the fact that Congress could fix this does not absolve the court from addressing a mess it created."

While the Civil Rights Act of 1871 gives Americans the unambiguous ability to sue public officials over civil rights violations, the Supreme Court subsequently limited liability to only those rights that have become "clearly established law." Critics say the standard is near-impossible to meet.

Police officers accused of misconduct can face criminal charges, but convictions are exceedingly rare. That leaves civil lawsuits as one of the few avenues for alleged victims to pursue their claims.

"Advocates will keep bringing petitions to the Supreme Court, so they will have the chance to take up the issue in the fall," said Schwartz.

Qualified immunity has drawn scrutiny from across the political spectrum -- and the Supreme Court bench. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas have both publicly supported steps to clarify or curtail the policy.

"I have previously expressed my doubts about our qualified immunity jurisprudence," Thomas wrote last week in a dissent from the court's decision not to take up the issue, "because our qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text, I would grant this petition."

At least four justices need to agree for a case to be accepted for review.

"The Court doesn't make their votes public. But we know that fewer than four Justices were willing to reconsider qualified immunity, despite having numerous petitions to choose from at the conference. I perceive that action as the Court sending a strong message that, absent changed circumstances, it does not intend to reconsider qualified immunity anytime soon," said Christopher Walker, a professor at The Ohio State University Law School.

"The ball is now definitively in Congress's court. And state governments can also respond by limiting the immunities their officers enjoy under state law," Walker said.

House Democrats have introduced legislation that would significantly curtail qualified immunity for law enforcement officers, but many Republicans remain staunchly opposed.

"We certainly don't have the votes on qualified immunity to move it forward. The truth is suing the officer is harder to do than suing the department or the city. That's where the resources are anyway. So, I think that's the right path to go on," said Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said President Trump is also opposed to the idea of limiting qualified immunity.

"Taking away qualified immunity would make the streets of this country a whole lot less secure," McEnany told reporters last week. "The Supreme Court has litigated this for decades and has approached what they think is the appropriate balance with qualified immunity."

Legal immunity for officers was originally devised out of concern about harassment from lawsuits and potential for personal bankruptcies. Some experts have also warned about the erosion of a deterrent effect from police if they became hesitant about enforcing certain laws because of potential legal liability.

Of the 30 qualified immunity cases that reached the Supreme Court between 1982 and 2017, just twice did the justices find immunity did not apply to official conduct, according to University of Chicago law professor William Baude.

Many legal experts argue that the policy has become overly broad, ineffective and unfair.

"One might think that the threat of civil liability will cause officers to act more cautiously. But in practice, officers almost never personally pay judgments when they are found liable," wrote Daniel Epps, an associate law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in a New York Times op-ed.

"Qualified immunity routinely requires courts to say that there will be no penalty for a police officer who has violated the Constitution. That sends the message - to officers and the public - that the police are above the law," Epps wrote.

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Supreme Court won't revisit qualified immunity for police, leaving it to Congress

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday officially took a pass on revisiting its 50-year-old doctrine of "qualified immunity" for law enforcement officers, despite intense national outcry over police misconduct and legal protections that shield cops from liability.

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Ron Klein survived the trench warfare of one disputed presidential election. As co-chair of the Al Gore campaign in Florida two decades ago, he watched lawyers brutally slug it out for weeks over vote recounts. "Republicans were very aggressive," he recalls, "and they beat the Democrats in court."

Twenty years later, America is now staring down the barrel of an election that could make the shenanigans of Bush v Gore in 2000 look like child's play.

Many voting systems across the US are still rickety and unprepared for a massive surge of mail-in ballots. Cyberhacking, disinformation and the coronavirus are new threats. Most ominously, this time there is an incumbent in the White House many fear will sow doubt, thrive on chaos and simply refuse to accept defeat.

"The business community is really getting concerned about the integrity of this election," Klein added. "They're concerned that it is being set up in a way that if it doesn't go a certain person's way, that person may claim that he still has the office and won't leave. They just feel in terms of the stability of the United States and likelihood of disruption, it's very, very dangerous."

The race to succeed Bill Clinton in 2000 came to hinge on swing state Florida. Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state and co-chair of George W Bush's statewide campaign, announced that Bush had won the state. Gore called his opponent to concede but, as the margin narrowed, phoned back to withdraw his concession.

Democrats demanded a recount in Florida but Republicans said no. Lawyers joined the battle on both sides, wrangling for five weeks over what voters had intended with poorly designed punch-card ballots ("hanging chads" and "dimpled chads") and why likely Democrats appeared to have voted for Pat Buchanan, a conservative Christian running as a third-party candidate.

They're concerned that it is being set up in a way that if it doesn't go a certain person's way, that person may claim that he still has the office

Republicans, future Donald Trump ally Roger Stone among them, seized the narrative with hardball tactics that included rowdy protests outside meetings of election officials. The battle went all the way to the supreme court which, in a 5-4 vote, ruled that no alternative method of recount could be established in a timely manner. Bush would be the 43rd president; Gore said he disagreed with the verdict but accepted it.

Two decades on, both sides are already hiring lawyers for a bitter struggle that might go way beyond a handful of counties in a single state. A preview was offered by a recent primary election in Georgia, where voters waited up to five hours to cast ballots at some polling places due to equipment problems, workers being unfamiliar with a new voting system and pandemic-related physical distancing measures.

Many voters showed up to vote in person because absentee ballots they requested never arrived by mail. Officials said thousands of mailed-in ballots may not have been counted because of faulty software or badly calibrated vote-tabulation scanners. To avoid similar setbacks in November, Democrats and voting rights activists are pushing for a massive expansion of mail-in voting.

People organize absentee ballots in Madison, Wisconsin, on 7 April. Photograph: Steve Apps/AP

Ron Wyden, Democratic senator for Oregon, which already votes by mail, warned in a Medium post this week: "If Congress and states don't act immediately, our country could face an electoral Chernobyl this fall."

In a phone interview, Wyden added: "We already know that Donald Trump is going to say the election has been stolen from him, no matter what, so we're trying all the things to take away those kinds of arguments from him. For example, our focus on having the state and federal governments do everything to prepare for expanded voting right now is absolutely key to minimizing the questions."

But Trump has threatened to pull funding from states that have tried to get absentee ballots to all voters. The president has frequently asserted, without evidence, that mail-in voting leads to "total election fraud" and his Republican allies in Congress have repeatedly opposed funding to expand it.

It is a claim Trump is likely to make loudly if he is polling badly in November. There are also concerns that he may seek to exploit any hiccups or irregularities; Florida, for instance, is a crucial swing state with a long history of glitches. Election experts have warned that results could be delayed in many places, maybe by days, so that the winner is not known on election night - might Trump use that time to spread conspiracy theories and declare victory? Amplified by conservative media, he could establish a momentum that would be hard to stop, reminiscent of Bush in 2000.

Klein, who went on to serve in Congress and is now a lawyer based in Fort Lauderdale, said: "President Trump is splashing water on this notion that we're not gonna have a fair election because there's fraud, unproven, like he did last time. It's very troubling to have the person who has the biggest microphone put out those kinds of thoughts and intimidate and scare people into thinking that no matter what the outcome, they're not going to believe it's fair. That's a threat to democracy itself."

Trump's challenger, Democrat Joe Biden, told Comedy Central's Daily Show recently: "This president is going to try to steal this election. This is a guy who said that all mail-in ballots are fraudulent, voting by mail, while he sits behind the desk in the Oval Office and writes his mail-in ballot to vote in a primary" - referring to Trump himself voting by mail in Florida.

But noting that military leaders have recently been willing to speak out against the president, Biden added: "You have so many rank-and-file military personnel saying, 'Well, we're not a military state, this is not who we are.' I promise you, I'm absolutely convinced, they will escort him from the White House in a dispatch."

There has never been such a scenario in a country that prides itself on the peaceful transfer of power at each inauguration.

Klein remarked: "It's pretty amazing to think that we're even having this conversation: that a president wouldn't leave if he or she was not successful and Biden's comments that the military will have to intervene and take him out of the White House. That is just like Venezuela; it doesn't sound like the United States. But I think at this stage, people have come to expect Donald Trump is capable of doing anything, so who knows?"

Grassroots activists are mobilizing to prevent such a constitutional crisis.

Last week the groups Indivisible and Stand Up America launched Protect the Results, a joint effort to mobilize millions of Americans should Trump seek to undermine the outcome of the election. The plans include protests and potential work strikes, calls to state and local election officials to ensure that every vote is counted accurately, and applying pressure on officials to defend democracy.

You'd have to be living under a rock for the last three and a half years to think that Donald Trump is going to go willingly

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, said: "You'd have to be living under a rock for the last three and a half years to think that Donald Trump is going to go willingly.

The Trump campaign gives short shrift to the concerns. Courtney Parella, deputy press secretary, said: "The Democrats are the only ones trying to create chaos in our election system by pressuring states to switch to universal vote-by-mail, something election experts have already warned that states cannot and should not attempt to do by November.

"The media and Democrats, like Senator Wyden, continue to spread fear to keep voters away from the polls while enthusiasm for the president is at a record high. Preventing Americans from voting in-person is voter suppression and pretending that fraud doesn't exist in mail voting is both dangerous and irresponsible. Make no mistake, if Democrats in Washington take control of elections, we will never see another free and fair election."

But just as in 2000, there appears to be one guaranteed winner of the 2020 election: the legal profession.

The looming dispute offers rich pickings. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, observed: "Both sides are lawyering up to the eyebrows. There are lawyers in every state, both for the Democrats and for the Republicans, trying, depending on how you view it, either to protect the integrity of the vote or to subvert it.

"The worst part of that is people are essentially primed not to trust the process. They know it's easily manipulated and that makes people more prone to listen to Trump and his minions when they say that the vote was stolen from them."

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A 2000 repeat in 2020? Concerns mount over 'integrity' of US election

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Ron Klein survived the trench warfare of one disputed presidential election. As co-chair of the Al Gore campaign in Florida two decades ago, he watched lawyers brutally slug it out for weeks over vote recounts. "Republicans were very aggressive," he recalls, "and they beat the Democrats in court."

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To what extent does partisanship affect the decisions made by the Supreme Court?

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To what extent does partisanship affect the decisions made by the Supreme Court?

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As the Supreme Court makes decisions in policy areas that are politically contentious and about which the two major parties fundamentally disagree-death penalty, abortion, gun control etc.- the Court is to some extent turned into a political institution.

However, there are occasions when the judges make rulings for reasons 'other than where they stand on the left-right spectrum'. This was seen when Neil Gorsuch (who was appointed by Trump) wrote in a majority opinion that discriminating against LGBTQ+ employees violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This does not necessarily mean Gorsuch( a committed Republican)  is starting to lean towards the left. Instead, his decision stemmed from how the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of their gender , 'and in practice there is no way to discriminate against a person for being LGBTQ+ without discriminating against their 🤬'.

Therefore, whilst the judges can be guided by partisan political values, they can also make politically neutral decisions where necessary.
- Sudiksha

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Everyone knows that there are liberal US supreme court justices and there are conservative supreme court justices, and usually in a politically charged case you can pretty well predict the way the justices will vote by where they stand on the left-right spectrum. But not always: the decision upholding Obamacare's individual mandate was written by Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, and the decision legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the United States was written by Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy.

In the last week, progressives have notched two more supreme court victories with unexpected votes by the conservative justices. In Bostock v Clayton county, the Trump-appointed justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a majority opinion that discriminating against LGBTQ+ employees violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And in Department of Homeland Security v Regents of the University of California, in a 5-4 decision, the court decided that the Trump administration could not proceed with its plan to eliminate Daca, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects certain immigrants from deportation. Donald Trump has been apoplectic over the decisions, calling them " shotgun blasts to the face " of conservatives.

If your theory of judicial behavior is a purely political one, these results might seem mystifying. Why is Gorsuch siding with the liberals? Donald Trump's "shotgun to the face" is one he himself loaded and fired, by appointing Gorsuch to the court. Was Gorsuch a Trojan horse, a person of secret left-ish sympathies?

No, of course not. Because while the court is extremely political, it's not completely political, and sometimes judges do in fact make rulings for reasons other than where they stand on the left-right spectrum. And that's important, because it means we shouldn't really think of the court as having made "progressive decisions" at all. They were rulings that had progressive outcomes. But the justices' politics haven't changed, and we can't assume there is any kind of pattern here. The court is still fundamentally conservative, and these rulings are more the product of luck than any kind of shift in the "hearts and minds" of Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts. Do not be surprised if next year, they rule in ways that hurt LGBTQ+ people and immigrants just as much as this week's rulings have helped them. We can celebrate the outcome, but we certainly shouldn't treat Roberts and Gorsuch as champions of the rights of the oppressed.

To think about what the decisions imply about the court itself, it's helpful to understand the justices' actual reasoning in each case. In Bostock, Gorsuch's reasoning was very simple: the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and while it does not specifically prohibit discriminating against people for being LGBTQ+, in practice there is no way to discriminate against a person for being LGBTQ+ without discriminating against their sex. After all, if I fire a man for being attracted to men, but I would not fire a woman for being attracted to men, what is making the difference in my conduct? The sex of the employee. Gorsuch said that it doesn't matter whether Congress intended to prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, because the thing they did prohibit covers acts of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.

It's very straightforward reasoning. It's also quite "conservative", in the sense that Gorsuch is applying a form of judicial interpretation usually associated with conservatives, most notably Antonin Scalia. Scalia was an advocate of textualism, meaning that the words of a statute matter far more than what the lawmakers writing it intended for it to do. If applying the law in its most literal form has a negative unintended consequence, tough luck. Gorsuch felt that a consistent application of textualism required ruling in favor of LGBTQ+ rights. But if Gorsuch's vote resulted from his highly literal interpretive theory, there's no reason to expect he will be progressive in cases involving LGBTQ+ people more generally. The Human Rights Campaign opposed Gorsuch's confirmation originally citing worrying past decisions, and while there is evidence that he is not personally homophobic, if the "textualist" reading of a statute goes against LGBTQ+ people next time, they are unlikely to find Gorsuch so friendly to the cause.

In the Daca case, too, there is more going on than simply "John Roberts being favorably disposed toward immigrants." Roberts himself wrote in his opinion that the decision had nothing to do with the merits or justice of Daca, but was purely about a procedural issue: "We do not decide whether Daca or its rescission are sound policies... We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action." Of course, judges always say that what they're doing isn't political, even when it is, but there are justices with fetishes for procedural regularity, whose loyalty to the process far exceeds their loyalty to any kind of "justice" or political value. The ostensible issue in the Daca case was whether, under the Administrative Procedure Act, the Trump administration's had undergone the proper process for presenting its justifications for ending the program, and whether the administration's judgments about Daca's legality had undergone the correct amount of deliberation.

Justice is sometimes served at the supreme court, but when it is it's often by chance

This is a rather dull question of administrative law, and the issues being argued about have very little to do with whether or not Daca is a good thing. Of course, it could be that John Robert's subconscious sympathies for immigrants are influencing his judgment on the administrative law question. But it could also be that they aren't, and that he's genuinely committed to ensuring that executive branch agencies undergo a particular series of steps in order to make or rescind new rules. If that's the case, under a Democratic administration, progressives might find that Roberts proves just as much an obstacle to the accomplishment of progressive goals as he is currently proving to the accomplishment of Trump's goals. The law that is applied in our favor one day will be applied against us the next.

Judges make decisions for all kinds of reasons, ranging from their ideals of justice to whether or not they have had lunch. Sometimes partisan political values guide a judge, but sometimes the desire to avoid looking like a political partisan guides them. The point is: we can't rely on the justices' conscience to improve the world. Even "progressive" justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg often turn out to have unexpectedly conservative streaks, and while a conservative may look like a lefty from time to time, it's frequently because of an obscure procedural issue that nobody except lawyers understands or cares about. Justice is sometimes served at the supreme court, but when it is it's often by chance. The court won't save us, and conservative justices are still not our friends.
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Don't be fooled. The US supreme court hasn't suddenly become leftwing | Nathan Robinson

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Everyone knows that there are liberal US supreme court justices and there are conservative supreme court justices, and usually in a politically charged case you can pretty well predict the way the justices will vote by where they stand on the left-right spectrum.

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What the constitution says about Civil Unrest

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What the constitution says about Civil Unrest

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This article, which discusses the limitations set by the constitution on handling events of civil unrest such as the protests going on at the moment, which links back to the spec by showing the way the Constitution controls what happens in America - Ashleigh

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"When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."

- James Mattis, retired four-star Marine Corps general and former defense secretary

Under what circumstances may the government use lethal and non- or lesser-lethal force in the face of unlawful protests, riots, and looting? The answer is context dependent. But the use of such force-whether exercised by state or federal armed forces-is always constrained by a fundamental constitutional principle of reasonableness, so long as no armed conflict exists. Although I agree with everything Mark Nevitt wrote in his Just Security article on the powers and limitations of the President's response to the recent protests, it is important to ground the discussion in constitutional norms - rather than just Department of Defense understandings or policy - which would apply to use of the US military as well as federal and state law enforcement authorities.

It is critical to understand the scope of the state and federal governments' authority to use physical force against individuals. Although federal and state authorities generally have authority to control domestic violence and discretion to determine the means necessary to do so, they must exercise that authority and discretion reasonably under the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the use of force continuum to which law enforcement agencies generally adhere as policy should be understood to be a constitutional requirement.
The Use of Force and the Constitution
All uses of lethal and non- or lesser-lethal physical force by government agents must be reasonable under the circumstances. This is not only wise policy, it is a constitutional demand. Reasonableness is required either by the Fourth Amendment or by the general constitutional demand that all government action be reasonable and non-arbitrary. In this context, the latter reasonableness requirement-that all government action be reasonable and non-arbitrary-can also be based in the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments which protect against government infringements of personal liberty, including the infliction of physical injury.

Although not all measures to control crowds, riots, or looting necessarily implicate the Fourth Amendment, some certainly would. The Fourth Amendment protects "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable search and seizures." Searches and seizures always entail the use of some measure of actual or constructive "force"-broadly construed-against persons and property.

The Fourth Amendment requires that all searches and seizures be reasonable. Courts interpret this requirement contextually. Reasonableness has substantive and procedural components. Substantively, there must be a legitimate constitutional basis for a search or seizure. Procedurally, both must always be conducted or "executed" reasonably. Measures adopted to control riots, looting, and crowds typically restrict or deprive individual movement, and therefore implicate "arrests" and other "seizures."

Arrests involve substantial restraints on one's freedom of movement, typically taking someone from a public or private place where they have a right to be and placing them in government custody. Substantively, arrests require probable cause that the individual committed a crime. Procedurally, police may make arrests without a warrant for any crime committed in the officer's presence or for a felony committed outside of an officer's presence. Additionally, police may use only reasonable force to effect an arrest.

Seizures occur when someone's movement is temporarily restricted in some meaningful way by an intentional show or use of government authority, including force short of an arrest. Substantively, in a law enforcement context, seizures are constitutional if they are based upon a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot or if there is some other specific, legitimate law enforcement purpose. Criminal behavior could include looting, assault, trespassing or a curfew violation. Other legitimate purposes for a temporary stop might include checking identification for a limited access area (such as by verifying press credentials, employment or residency) or seeking information related to a recent crime in the area. Procedurally, seizures are constitutional if the measures taken to effect a seizure, and during it, are reasonable under the circumstances. For example, stopping a suspicious person and conducting a non-intrusive frisk for weapons is appropriate if there is a reasonable suspicion both that the person may be involved in criminal activity and that they are armed and potentially dangerous.

Riot- and crowd-control measures include arrests and seizures, but not all measures would necessarily involve one or the other. Often, in these situations, an individual's movement or behavior is restricted or limited in some way, but they are "free to leave"-in Fourth Amendment terms-to go somewhere or do something else. A seizure occurs only when an individual is temporarily and intentionally immobilized, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, by a government agent. Efforts to effect a seizure or arrest must always be reasonable under a totality of the circumstances.

Notwithstanding the Fourth Amendment, there is also a strong argument that all government action must be reasonable in order to be constitutional. Generally speaking, government action must be reasonably calculated to achieve (or rationally related to) a legitimate government purpose. The government action must also be a reasonable and permissible means of achieving that legitimate purpose. As Justice Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland:

Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional.

This is a general principle of constitutional law. Government action must be "appropriate" and "plainly adapted" to its alleged purpose. Not only must it not be "prohibited" by the Constitution's text, it must be consistent with the Constitution. Every use of physical force not amounting to a "search" or "seizure" must also, therefore, be reasonably directed to a legitimate end and reasonably necessary under a totality of the circumstances.
The Insurrection Act Does Not Alter These Constitutional Requirements.
The Insurrection Act allows a president broad discretion to use as much of the federal armed forces and state national guard units as he or she deems necessary to quell insurrections against the authority of a state or to remove substantial interferences with the enforcement of federal laws. A president could invoke either of these justifications in response to widespread riots and looting.

These statutes allow a president to "take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy." Despite this broad language, the president may not authorize the armed forces to do anything he would like. Although the exigencies of a situation may require some deference to on-the-spot judgement calls, Congress cannot empower a president to violate specifically applicable aspects of the Constitution. The requirement that the use of all physical force be reasonable under the circumstances is one such specifically applicable constitutional requirement.
Recent Examples Unreasonable use of lethal force that violates the Fourth Amendment.
The President has infamously tweeted that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." In Tennessee v. Garner, the Supreme Court held that the use of lethal force to stop a fleeing suspected felon is a Fourth Amendment "seizure" that must be "reasonable." In this context, lethal force is reasonable only if the suspect presents a threat of serious harm to the officers or others. Shooting unarmed looters who are not engaging in any form of violence against a person would therefore clearly violate the Fourth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Unreasonable use of non-lethal force that violates the Fourth Amendment.
A viral video on social media apparently shows Minneapolis law enforcement shooting several people with rubber bullets or paint balls to force them to go inside a house rather than stand on a private porch. The officers were allegedly enforcing a curfew order. That order, however, prohibited only travel on public streets or places (with certain exceptions not relevant here). Violating the order is a misdemeanor. The curfew is likely a constitutionally reasonable response to the disorder and turmoil that has been taking place in Minneapolis. The City's website containing the order specifically clarified, however, that people may be outside a home as long as they were on private property.

Under these circumstances, the use of non-lethal force to compel someone on private property to go inside a home was not rationally related to enforcing the curfew order. It also appears to lack any other basis in law and was undertaken without warning. Police were apparently shouting that people go inside their homes. When these individuals did not do so and continued recording, an officer said only "light 'em up" before the police fired. No additional warning and no explanation for the over-enforcement of curfew order were given. It would therefore amount to an unreasonable use of non-lethal force. Because the purpose was to confine someone in their home, and doing so is likely a "seizure," it also violated the Fourth Amendment. The officers undertaking this action are guilty of an assault. The city is also subject to a civil action under federal law.
Unreasonable uses of force not implicating the Fourth Amendment.
Another viral video shows several Georgia police officers apparently arresting two college students inside a car, smashing the car's windows and using tasers on both individuals despite no visible resistance. Under these circumstances, the use of force would not reasonably necessary to effectuate the arrest to enforce the curfew order. Indeed, two days later, the Georgia chief of police fired two of the officers pictured in the video, and the Atlanta mayor condemned the officers' actions.

On Saturday night, May 31, 2020, there were reports of Minneapolis police firing rubber bullets and using tear gas and flash-bang devices to disperse allegedly peaceful crowds or protesters, all without warning. Numerous videos indicate that reporters and their cameramen have been pushed and shoved without warning despite their obvious status. And police in Washington D.C. reportedly used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up peaceful protesters outside the White House this past Monday night on June 1, 2020. This included a now-viral video of police and/or national guard, without warning, striking an Australian reporter and her cameraman with a baton and riot shield, respectively, before also being shot with rubber bullets. And several videos from New York City and Los Angeles over the past week seem to show police driving cars into protesters.

Let's assume the police were correct that a lawful government directive or purpose required the people affected to disperse or leave the area at the time and place that these forcible measures were used. Using such non-, lesser-, or potentially-lethal force without prior warning would be unreasonable if less stringent measures were feasible. Invasions of liberty and personal integrity such as occurred in these incidents must have some specific justification, including the absence or failure of feasible, less-intrusive coercive measures.

These examples do not involve a Fourth Amendment search or seizure. Not only were the individuals "free to leave"-meaning they were not "seized" under court precedent-they were forced to do so. But even assuming that end was appropriate, can we say the use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades and less- or non-lethal bullets was proper? Can we say that potentially grievously injuring a person by running into them with a car is a reasonable response? Was it consistent with the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution? Absent some reasonable justification for failing to use lesser coercive measures, the answer is almost certainly no.
* * *
Because reasonableness surrounding the use of physical force is a constitutional requirement, nothing in the Insurrection Act would change the above legal analysis. It does not matter if the government agents are members of the national guard or federal armed forces or of the city police or state troopers. Whether acting under state or federal authority, the U.S. Constitution imposes the same constraints.

The authority to quell riots and looting must be exercised responsibly, meaning reasonably, at every level. All law enforcement officers, members of the National Guard and members of the federal armed forces must be told and trained to use force only when necessary and only when it reasonably appears that lesser means of coercion are not feasible under the circumstances or have failed. Warnings should be given before using physical force when possible. The Department of Justice and many law enforcement agencies refer to this as the " use of force continuum." The continuum is not merely policy, however. It must be understood as a constitutional demand. Reasonableness is determined by what a government agent reasonably perceived in good faith under a totality of the circumstances. Those who have sworn to protect this country and its population have been vested with great power and must therefore show great restraint in the use of physical force.

Photo credit: Police face demonstrators near the White House to protest the death of George Floyd and systemic racism on June 3, 2020 (Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)

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Rachel VanLandingham, Lt Col, USAF (Ret.)

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The U.S. Constitution and Limits on Detention and Use of Force in Handling Civil Unrest - Just Security

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"When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."

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This links to the spec by showing the way Presidential campaigns work and how Presidents are elected

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That empty feeling

President Donald Trump saw a turnaround coming for his flagging reelection bid. He bragged about his campaign getting more than a million ticket requests for his first rally since March. It was in the deep-red state of Oklahoma. But once he got backstage, he was confronted with a state of blue - a vast expanse of empty blue seats in the upper level of the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa.

Trump yelled at those aides who were present, The New York Times reported. Not among them was campaign manager Brad Parscale, who had promised multitudes - 100,000 - and had a stage built nearby so Trump and Vice President Mike Pence could speak to the overflow. The overflow turned out to be less than a low-flow trickle. Those speeches were canceled and work crews were quickly dispatched to dismantle the outdoor stage.

The fire marshals said 6,200 people were in the arena for Trump's return to the rally stage. A Trump campaign spokesman said 12,000 people passed through security metal detectors. If that was true, there were still 7,000 seats unclaimed, when Trump rallies are supposed to always be packed. So what went wrong?

Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp said on "Fox News Sunday" that protesters created a hostile environment and blocked supporters from attending the president's Saturday evening rally. Reporters on the ground said they saw no altercations, and one of three checkpoints was blocked for about 15 to 30 minutes, according to CNN. Protesters at Trump rallies are hardly unusual and haven't caused past crowds to melt away. Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh complained the media "attempted to frighten off the president's supporters" with their warnings about the coronavirus.

As it turned out, six members of Trump's advance team tested positive, and Trump was furious that the campaign let that news out hours before the rally. Few of those who did attend wore masks or practiced social distancing. The number of newly confirmed coronavirus cases in Oklahoma hit a record, but it will likely be days or weeks before it was known if the rally made things worse.

Trump held the stage for a disjointed speech lasting about an hour and 40 minutes ( all here on video). He called Joe Biden "a helpless puppet of the radical left" and denounced the unrest from protests over the George Floyd killing but did not address the underlying racial issues. His 2020 campaign relaunch borrowed liberally from his old playbook, with appeals to racism.

He called the coronavirus the "kung flu" and, in a variation of the Mexicans-as-criminals theme from his 2016 campaign debut, asked the crowd to imagine a "tough hombre" breaking the "window of a young woman" at 1 a.m. while her husband is away.

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Slow-walking: His alibi

A week later, Trump was still smarting over speculation about his health that arose from his June 13 appearance at a U.S. Military Academy commencement ceremony. "I have lived with the ramp and the water since I left West Point," he told the Tulsa audience during a reenactment of the events for almost 14 minutes.

The slow, hesitant walk from the speaking platform? The president said he was wearing leather-bottom shoes, "which is good if you are walk on flat surfaces. It's not good for ramps." There was no handrail and the steel ramp "was like an ice-skating rink." He asked a general to stay close so he could grab on to him if needed and "so I took these little steps."

What about the glass of water that he began raising with one hand and then stopped to steady with the other? Trump suggested his arm was tired from individually saluting cadets 600 times, and he didn't want to spill water on his tie because when that happens, "it doesn't look good for a long time." Trump then performed a one-handed water sip, tossed the glass away, and heard the crowd chant, "Four more years." (Here's the full video.)

Early Sunday, upon Trump's return from Washington, his tie was undone.

Barr's whinge and purge

Attorney General William Barr has been conducting a slow-motion purge at the Justice Department, replacing or bypassing prosecutors who have been tough on allies of Trump such as Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.

He didn't say why he wanted to get rid of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman. But Berman's office prosecuted Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen, is investigating top Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani and indicted the former New York mayor's associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. He also has pursued a case against a Turkish bank that Trump wanted to go away as a favor to Turkish President Recep Erdogan, according to John Bolton's new book.

The sacking did not go as smooth as an "Apprentice" firing. Barr on Friday asked Berman to resign and offered another job, but he refused. Then Barr issued a statement that Berman had "stepped down." A statement from Berman said no, he didn't resign, and that Barr had no authority to fire him because he was appointed to his post by a panel of Southern District Judges in 2017 after Trump failed to send a nomination to the Senate.

On Saturday, Barr, complaining that Berman had "chosen public spectacle over public service," announced that Trump had fired Berman at the attorney general's request - except Trump insisted to reporters: "That's his [Barr's department]), not my department. I'm not involved."

So did Barr get what he wanted? It doesn't look like it Barr was going to install a close associate in the job. But Berman held out until Barr retreated and agreed to follow the usual procedure when a U.S. attorney leaves, installing Berman's trusted and widely respected deputy, Audrey Strauss, to run the office. As for the permanent replacement that Barr wanted nominated - SEC chairman Jay Clayton, who has no prosecutorial experience - Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham said he would honor tradition to let home-state senators, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, sign off on any replacement.

Janison: The weak that was

Even before the Tulsa debacle, Trump and his administration was looking weak in several key ways at the outset of a campaign summer, which could undercut Trump's efforts to convince voters that Biden would perform less effectively, writes Newsday's Dan Janison. The irony is that Trump so often intones the word "strong" as a mantra.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump's attempt to dismantle the program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Whether because of bad lawyering or poor execution or both, the administration didn't follow the necessary procedures. Another case backfired into a 6-3 assertion of gay rights from the high court. Earlier, the court denied Trump his chance to put a controversial immigration question on the census due to Cabinet-level incompetence.

Public relations for this administration proves as weak as its legal practices. Few if any honest observers say deploying tear gas to clear the way for a strange Trump photo-op demonstrated strong leadership. Weak negotiations marked his multiple failures in foreign policy. The president had no had no evident impact on calming the uproar over the George Floyd killing, nor has he convinced the public that he delivered a strong response to the COVID-19 pandemic or the economic rupture that followed.

Tests fail Trump

When it suits him, Trump has boasted about how much coronavirus testing is being done. But he also complains that it makes the infection numbers look worse, with a head-scratcher analysis, "If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases."

In Tulsa, Trump suggested he had deliberately slowed down testing, which health experts consider vital not only for identifying those carrying the virus but to curb the spread. "When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people, you're going to find more cases," Trump said from the rally stage. "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test."

The White House said he was just kidding, an explanation they've used before for the inexplicable or indefensible. "That was tongue-in-cheek, please ... Come on, it was a light moment," trade adviser Peter Navarro said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told CNN that Trump's statement was very consistent with the White House's policy in managing the virus that has killed about 120,000 in the U.S. "This is unfortunately not a joke," Jha said.

Biden tweeted Sunday, "I can't believe I have to say this, but we should be speeding up testing - not slowing it down." Senate Democrats told The Washington Post that the Trump administration has yet to distribute nearly one-third of the funds provided by Congress for coronavirus testing and contact tracing.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday found 41% of Americans approve of how Trump has handled the pandemic and 58% disapprove.

Peter King may be convention no-show

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said he has attended at least eight Republican national conventions. But when Trump delivers his acceptance speech Aug. 27 in Jacksonville, Florida, King said he may not be there.

"Thousands of people in a closed arena raises health issues, so I really haven't decided," King told Newsday's Laura Figueroa Hernandez, who writes of the contrasting Republican and Democratic convention plans. "I would hope there's some type of social distancing. I hope that everyone is required to wear a mask, I think they should do that." But King worried distancing "almost goes against the whole instinct of a convention."

The GOP moved the convention finale from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jacksonville's 15,000-seat arena because Trump didn't want local officials' coronavirus concerns getting in the way of a packed house. Long Island's other Republican House member, Rep. Lee Zeldin, attended the Tulsa rally Saturday and plans to be in Jacksonville too, a spokeswoman said.

Democrats postponed their convention in Milwaukee from July to August hoping for more favorable conditions. But there are no decisions yet on how many will be allowed into the arena and whether Biden will deliver his acceptance speech there.

"Unlike Donald Trump, we are actually going to listen to the public health experts as we come to Milwaukee because we believe it's really important to have a safe, exciting, inspiring convention in Milwaukee and I'm confident we can do that," says Democratic Party chairman Tom Perez. A DNC member from Great Neck, Robert Zimmerman, said Biden could give his acceptance speech in front of Mount Rushmore or the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington or another historic site.

Bolton: Stop Trump in November

Bolton, a hard-core conservative who served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan's, says Trump must be stopped in November, but he won't vote for Biden.

In an ABC News interview aired Sunday night, the former Trump national security adviser said the 2020 election is the last "guardrail" to protect the country from Trump.

"I hope [history] will remember him as a one-term president who didn't plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can't recall from. We can get over one term - I have absolute confidence, even if it's not the miracle of a conservative Republican being elected in November. Two terms, I'm more troubled about," he said.

"I'm not going to vote for him in November - certainly not going to vote for Joe Biden either," Bolton said, adding he would write in a conservative Republican.

Bolton told Britain's Daily Telegraph in another interview that the 45th president "does not know the difference between the national interest of the U.S., and the interests of Donald Trump" and that is very dangerous for the country."

Pressed by interviewer Martha Raddatz on his own past support for Trump, Bolton called it a "mistake," adding, "I overrated the chances to make this into a coherent, rational, systematic, decision-making process, to advance American interests."

More coronavirus news

See a roundup of the latest pandemic developments from Long Island and beyond by Newsday's reporting staff, written by Lisa L. Colangelo. For a full list of Newsday's coronavirus stories, click here.

What else is happening:

Trump-loathing teens,TikTok users and fans of Korean K-pop music say they helped disrupt planning for Trump's Tulsa rally with a massive campaign organized on social media to order tickets for an event they had no intention of attending, The Associated Press reported. While it's unlikely they were responsible for the low turnout, they may have inflated the campaign's crowd expectations, AP reported.

A lawsuit couldn't stop Bolton's book, but Trump's next legal battle over publishing might be against his niece. The president told Axios in an interview that Mary Trump is "not allowed" to write her forthcoming unflattering book about him because she signed a nondisclosure agreement when the family settled a battle over his father Fred Trump's estate.

Trump also told Axios he's had second thoughts about his decision to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate head of government and he is open to meeting with dictator Nicolas Maduro. A gesture toward the Cuba allied-Maduro might not sit well with conservative-minded Cuban and Venezuelan communities in Florida, a critical swing state.

Zeldin drew criticism fromhis potential Democratic opponents for not wearing a mask or adhering to social distancing guidelines at Trump's Tulsa rally. A campaign spokesman said that was because Zeldin and those around where he sat had recently tested negative for COVID-19. Zeldin also got a ride on Air Force One. See Newsday's story by Vera Chinese.

The family of the late rock star Tom Petty filed a cease-and-desist notice to the Trump campaign after his 1989 hit, "I Won't Back Down," was played at the Saturday night rally. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together," the family tweeted.

Trump allies are worried about Biden making inroads among evangelical voters, a critical category for Trump, Politico reported.

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Trump's rally, rally embarrassing night in Tulsa

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President Donald Trump saw a turnaround coming for his flagging reelection bid. He bragged about his campaign getting more than a million ticket requests for his first rally since March. It was in the deep-red state of Oklahoma.

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Who is Rishi Sunak and what is his game plan?

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Who is Rishi Sunak and what is his game plan?

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Who is the new chancellor? What moves has he been making? To what extent does this undermine Boris or help strengthen the government?

Also Mr Sunak seems to have a bit of a fan club in both Westminster and the media, being referred to as Dishy Rishi.

A potential future challenger for the Conservative leadership?

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Listen to this episode from Red Box Politics Podcast on Spotify. Matt Chorley speaks to Steven Swinford, deputy political editor of The Times, and Salma Shah, former special adviser to Sajid Javid, about the game the chancellor is playing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order introducing several police reforms while rejecting calls to defund or dismantle the police

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US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order introducing several police reforms while rejecting calls to defund or dismantle the police

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The US president issued an executive order that would discourage police from using chokeholds and create a national database for police misconduct, however this executive order was met with criticism, as some argue that it does not tackle systemic racism effectively.
* Link with congress

Additionally, House democrats and Senate republicans evidently disagree on certain aspects of police reform, despite a bipartisan consensus that action is necessary. This was evident when Senate majority leader Mitch MCconell came out firmly against a democratic plan to overhaul policing.
Perhaps this comes as a result of the extreme loyalty that the republicans give to the Trump administration and fear of retaliation from the White House, if they go against Trump’s agenda. This is also due to the fact that most republicans are counting on Trump’s core supporters for re election. This poses the question, whether this extreme loyalty towards Trump has led to ‘unlimited’ presidential power.
-Belan

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police reform: trump offers full-throated defense of police in executive action signing - cnnpolitics

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Trump offers full-throated defense of police in executive action signing

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President Donald Trump took his first concrete steps on Tuesday to address growing national outcry over police brutality even as he offered a staunch defense of law enforcement that left little question about his allegiances.

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Electioneering in the age of COVID. Motivated in part commentators believe by dropping poll numbers. An attempt to rally the 'silent majority' through the 'politics of hate' -- hate for the democrats (the 'radical left'), the BLM protesters ('bad people') and the Media ('fake news')

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Trump addresses campaign rally at half-empty Tulsa arena

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Biden has a double digit lead in some cases. 'Fear' is a key motivator for voting for Biden -- makes for an interesting discussion of voting behaviour -- the politics of hate and fear seem to dominate (more perhaps than gender and class??)

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden continues to lead President Donald Trump in the race for the White House, as majorities say racism, unemployment, and coronavirus pose a major threat to the stability of the country, according to the latest Fox News Poll.

Biden supporters are far more likely to say fear that Trump might win is behind their vote choice (63 percent) than to say it is enthusiasm for Biden (31 percent). The opposite is true among those backing Trump, as almost twice as many of his supporters say enthusiasm is the motivation (62 percent) rather than fear Biden could win (33 percent).

Fear is a big factor when it comes to turnout, and that could help Biden. In 2016, more of those backing Trump (61 percent) than Hillary Clinton (54 percent) said fear motivated them.

"Negative emotions like fear, anxiety, and anger, can be powerful motivators for political participation," says Daron Shaw, who conducts the Fox News Poll with Democrat Chris Anderson. "The lack of enthusiasm for Biden, however, does create an opening for Trump to define him as out of touch and not up to the task."

In the head-to-head matchup, the poll finds Biden leads Trump by a 50-38 percent margin. That 12-point advantage is statistically significant, and up from Biden's 8-point lead last month (48-40 percent).

For over a year, the portion backing Trump against Biden has stayed between 37-42 percent. Biden's support has ranged from 42-52 percent.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE POLL RESULTS
"Trump needs to expand beyond traditional Republican groups and cut Biden's support among independents," says Shaw. "The best news in the poll for the Trump campaign is a significant percentage of independents saying they haven't decided or are considering a third-party option."

Independents prefer Biden over Trump by 39-17 percent, but another 43 percent are undecided or supporting someone else.

Biden's lead comes from the backing of black voters (+79 points over Trump), those under age 30 (+37), suburban areas (+22), women (+19), and voters ages 65+ (+10).

Trump, on the other hand, is underperforming his vote share among key groups, such as white evangelical Christians (+41 points) and rural voters (+9). In 2016, he won white evangelicals by 64 points and rural areas by 27.

Moreover, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide protests against police brutality, more voters see Biden as empathetic and respectful.

Forty-seven percent say the phrase "cares about people like me" describes Biden compared to 37 percent who say it fits Trump.

Fifty-three percent believe Biden respects racial minorities vs. 35 percent who say the same about the president.

Among black voters, most say Biden respects racial minorities (79 percent), while most think Trump does not (86 percent).

Over half of seniors (52 percent) and a plurality of women (46 percent) think "cares" describes Biden. Larger numbers of both groups say it does not apply to Trump (57 percent seniors and 60 percent women).

Suburban women, in particular, give Biden the edge on "cares" (48 vs. 30 percent for Trump) and respecting racial minorities (55 vs. 27 percent).

Plus, Biden is better liked. His favorable ratings are net positive by 9 points (53 favorable vs. 44 unfavorable), while Trump's are net negative by 13 (43 favorable vs. 56 unfavorable).

Among voters extremely interested in the election, Biden tops Trump by 53-42 percent.

Trump's overall job rating held steady, as 44 percent of voters approve and 55 percent disapprove. His best marks came in April, when views on his performance split 49-49 percent.

As protests continue since George Floyd's death on May 25, a 61 percent majority disapproves of how Trump is handling race relations (32 percent approve).

That matters, as 81 percent are concerned about racism and another 64 percent perceive racism as a major threat to the stability of the country. That's on par with the coronavirus pandemic (67 percent major threat) and unemployment (67 percent major threat).

Almost all blacks (87 percent) and most Hispanics (71 percent) see racism as a major threat to the country's stability, compared to over half of whites (58 percent). Those numbers roughly match disapproval of Trump on race relations: 88 percent among blacks, 77 percent among Hispanics and 53 percent among whites.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
All in all, about 6 in 10 hold positive views of the protests after Floyd's death (57 percent) and negative views of how Trump responded to them (56 percent).

"It's hard to believe an issue has emerged more challenging for Trump to navigate during his re-election campaign than a pandemic, but that happened with the racial reckoning prompted by George Floyd's murder," says Anderson.

Nearly one in five (18 percent) have participated in a recent protest, including 14 percent of whites, 35 percent of blacks, and 51 percent of blacks under age 45.

By a 13-point margin, more think police brutality against blacks is a widespread problem rather than isolated incidents (54-41 percent). There is a whopping 80-point race gap: blacks are more likely to say police brutality against blacks is widespread by 76 points, while whites are more likely to say it is isolated by 4 points.

Views divide over reducing funding for police and reallocating those funds to other social services (41 favor vs. 46 oppose).
Poll Pourri
An equal number of voters (56 percent) have an unfavorable view of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and President Trump. Among those who dislike both of them, Biden is preferred over Trump in the presidential matchup by 63 points. And those who view both Biden and Trump negatively pick Biden by 32 points. In 2016, voters with unfavorable views of both Clinton and Trump voted for Trump by 17 points.

More Republicans have a positive view of Trump (86 percent) than of former President George W. Bush (72 percent) and former presidential candidate and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (37 percent). In fact, more Democrats (47 percent) view Romney favorably.

Conducted June 13-16 2020 under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company (R), this Fox News Poll includes interviews with 1,343 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide who spoke with live interviewers on both landlines and cellphones. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for all registered voters. The poll includes additional interviews (an oversample) of randomly selected black voters to allow analysis of the subgroup.

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Fox News Poll: Biden widens lead over Trump; Republicans enthusiastic, but fear motivates Dems

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden continues to lead President Donald Trump in the race for the White House, as majorities say racism, unemployment, and coronavirus pose a major threat to the stability of the country, according to the latest Fox News Poll.

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Supreme Court holding the Executive to account.

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Supreme Court holding the Executive to account.

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BBC News - Trump's bid to end Obama-era immigration policy ruled unlawful

On Thursday, the justices voted 5-4 to uphold the lower courts' findings that the administration's order violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which says a government action cannot make policy that is "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law" or "unsupported by substantial evidence".

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The US Supreme Court has ruled against US President Donald Trump's bid to end a programme that protects hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.

The justices upheld lower court rulings which found his move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme was "unlawful".

The policy protects undocumented youths, dubbed "Dreamers".

The Trump administration has sought to end the Obama-era policy since 2017.

The Supreme Court took up the case after lower courts ruled that the administration did not adequately explain why it was ending the programme, criticising the White House's "capricious" explanations.

The ruling, which does not prevent the Trump administration from continuing in its efforts to end the programme, affects an estimated 700,000 young people who entered the US without documents as children.

What is Daca?

Most of the children protected by the Daca programme are from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

A 2012 executive order, created by former President Barack Obama, shields these so-called "Dreamers" from deportation, and provides work and study permits.

President Obama signed the order following failed negotiations for immigration reform on Capitol Hill.

In order to qualify for Daca, applicants under the age of 30 are required to submit personal information to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including addresses and phone numbers.

They must go through an FBI background check and have a clean criminal background, and either be in school, recently graduated or have been honourably discharged from the military.

In exchange, the US government agrees to "defer" any action on their immigration status for a period of two years.

It is only available to individuals residing in the US since 2007.
You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on Twitter to get the latest alerts.

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Trump's bid to end immigration policy 'unlawful'

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The US Supreme Court has ruled against US President Donald Trump's bid to end a programme that protects hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation. The justices upheld lower court rulings that found his move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme was "unlawful".

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This applies to all ministers, junior ones as well as senior cabinet ministers.

Douglas Ross felt he was not able to promote the government position of supporting Cummings, so made the decision to resign.

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A UK government minister has resigned over Boris Johnson's handling of accusations that the prime minister's chief adviser breached coronavirus lockdown rules.

Douglas Ross, a junior minister in the Scotland office and MP for Moray, said the furore over Dominic Cummings and his decision not to apologise for making a trip across England as the pandemic was reaching its peak in late March "mean I can no longer serve as a member of this government".

The prime minister said last night he regretted the "confusion, the anger and the pain people feel" about Mr Cummings' actions, after his most senior aide held an unprecedented press conference on Monday to respond to reports about a 264-mile journey from his London home to north-east England.

Mr Cummings defended his actions, arguing he and his wife had feared they had contracted the disease and decided to self-isolate on his parents' farm so family members were on hand to care for their four-year-old son in case both of them were taken seriously ill.

But in a clear breach of the lockdown rules, he also said that he drove for 30 minutes to the local beauty spot of Barnard Castle to test his eyesight after recovering from his symptoms. Neither he nor his wife were tested for the virus.

Most senior government ministers have said they were satisfied with his explanation of events, but some Tory backbenchers continued to urge Mr Johnson to sack his aide, while others expressed their anger privately.

In his resignation letter to the PM, Mr Ross said: "Mr Cummings' interpretation of the government advice was not shared by the vast majority of people who have done as the government asked."

He added: "I have constituents who didn't get to say goodbye to loved ones; families who could not mourn together; people who didn't visit sick relatives because they followed guidance of the government. I cannot in good faith tell them they were all wrong and one senior adviser to the government was right."

Jackson Carlaw, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said Mr Ross's resignation was a "great loss" to the government and that he "entirely" respected and understood his decision. Several other Scottish Tories expressed support for Mr Ross on social media.

Conservatives continued to express their displeasure that Mr Cummings had not been sacked. Midlands MP Harriett Baldwin, Simon Jupp - who represents East Devon - and Calder Valley's Craig Whittaker all said or implied that Mr Cummings should quit.

Support for Mr Johnson and his government appeared to have collapsed following the revelations about Mr Cummings late on Friday. The prime minister's net personal rating dropped by 20 points over the weekend to minus 2, according to a poll by Savanta ComRes, while the government's approval rating fell 16 points in a day.

Michael Gove, Cabinet Office minister, defended Mr Cummings on Tuesday morning, dismissing concerns that his behaviour would undermine social distancing rules.

"We want to ensure that when people are out and about . . . they maintain social distancing rules," he said. "I would separate that from . . . Dominic. He was not engaged in the flouting of social distancing rules . . . he wasn't travelling for leisure purposes."

Mr Gove said most "sensible and reasonable" people would make up their minds about the actions of Mr Cummings. "But what is clear is that he didn't break the law, break the rules."

He added that Mr Cummings had taken steps to ensure that the risk of him and his family infecting anyone else during the long-distance motorway trip to Durham was "absolutely minimised".

Recommended

Mr Gove said it would have been helpful for the chief of staff to have made his public statement earlier rather than leaving it until Monday evening, three days after the story first broke. He added: "I can understand how strongly people feel, there are people who have had to put up with an enormous amount."

The cabinet minister also defended Mr Cummings' claim that he drove to Barnard Castle with his wife and son as a test to ensure his eyesight was sufficient to drive back to London. "He wanted to make sure he was able to return to work and contribute in the fight against coronavirus," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. That had been "a sensible thing", he insisted.

But in a statement the College of Optometrists said: "We strongly advise against taking a drive to test your eyesight", adding that while "routine eyecare" was not available in the lockdown its members were still providing "urgent or emergency and essential care".

Meanwhile, Mr Gove confirmed that Mary Wakefield, the wife of Mr Cummings, had never shown any of the main symptoms of coronavirus - despite her having written an article in The Spectator magazine about having experienced the virus.

"It is the case that while Mary was ill it was not the case that she had Covid-19 symptoms, she did not have a fever or persistent dry cough," he said.

Tory MP William Wragg criticised the efforts of Mr Gove and other ministers to defend the official. "It's humiliating and degrading to their office to see ministers put out agreed lines in defence of an adviser," he wrote on Twitter.

Leaders of most of the smaller opposition parties jointly wrote to Mr Johnson on Tuesday calling on him to sack Mr Cummings as his actions had "severely undermined trust and confidence in public health advice".

Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour party, did not join the initiative and is understood to have concluded that, with parliament in recess until next week, there were no immediate sanction measures for opposition parties to pursue.

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Minister quits in protest over Dominic Cummings' lockdown trip

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A UK government minister has resigned over Boris Johnson's handling of accusations that the prime minister's chief adviser breached coronavirus lockdown rules. Douglas Ross, a junior minister in the Scotland office and MP for Moray, said the furore over Dominic Cummings and his decision not to apologise for making a trip across England as the pandemic was reaching its peak in late March "mean I can no longer serve as a member of this government".

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PM versus Cabinet government: Daily Briefings

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PM versus Cabinet government: Daily Briefings

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As you know, the government has been holding daily briefings in regards to Covid-19. Since this began, the following have hosted the briefing:
Boris Johnson (PM)
Rishi Sunak (Chancellor)
Priti Patel (Homes Secretary)
Matt Hancock (Health Minister)
Robert Jenrick (Housing, Communities and Local Government)
Michael Gove (Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster)

What does this suggest about the dynamic of the Cabinet? Is it a good thing that a range of government officials face the press? Or should Boris Johnson be more Presidential in his approach here?

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Gorsuch and Roberts side with the Liberals in land mark ruling to protect LGBTQ workers from dismissal based on sexual orientation. Helps with arguments that judges are 'politicians in robes' as here they haven't stuck with the viewpoints of the President's who appointed them (the current White House is against this ruling).

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America's top court has ruled that employers who fire workers for being gay or transgender are breaking the country's civil rights laws.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court said federal law, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, should be understood to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

The ruling is a major win for LGBT workers and their allies.

And it comes even though the court has grown more conservative.

Lawyers for the employers had argued that the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had not intended it to apply to cases involving sexual orientation and gender identity. The Trump administration sided with that argument.

But Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated to the court by President Donald Trump, said acting against an employee on those grounds necessarily takes sex into account.

"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," he wrote.

Members of the LGBT community across the US were celebrating on hearing the news.

'An emotional day'
Sean K Heslin, Palm Springs, California Today's Supreme Court ruling brought me to tears. As a gay man lucky enough to live in California and originally come from New York I've never had to personally worry about losing a job or not being hired simply because of my sexual orientation. But as a financial adviser working with clients all around the country for over 30 years, I've heard countless stories of people who have lost their jobs simply for being gay. It's angered and saddened me for so long. For years now, I have been speaking at seminars or with friends and family about how in this day and age it's still perfectly legal to fire someone just because they're gay. Many people didn't believe me. Until today.
What does the ruling mean?

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex as well as gender, race, colour, national origin and religion.

Under the Obama administration, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the anti-discrimination law, said it included gender identity and sexual orientation. But the Trump administration has moved to roll back some protections in healthcare and other areas.

While some states in the US had already explicitly extended such protections to LGBT workers, many have not.

It's difficult to overstate the significance of the decision.

While the court is establishing a long history of decisions expanding gay rights, this is the first time it spoke directly about the legal protections for transgender individuals.

That the ruling comes out just days after the Trump administration announced it was removing transgender health-insurance protections only puts the issue in stark relief.

Transgender rights is becoming a political battlefield, and a majority of the Supreme Court just announced which side it's on.
Read more here
What have campaigners said?

LGBT advocates hailed the decision as the end of people hiding their sexuality at work.

"Especially at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back the rights of transgender people and anti-transgender violence continues to plague our nation, this decision is a step towards affirming the dignity of transgender people and all LGBTQ people," said Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD.

The American Civil Liberties Union shared a prepared statement from transgender plaintiff Aimee Stephens, who died last month. Her case was the first major transgender civil rights case heard by America's top court.

"I am glad the court recognised that what happened to me is wrong and illegal," Ms Stephens said. "I am thankful that the court said my transgender siblings and I have a place in our laws - it made me feel safer and more included in our society."

But the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian non-profit that asked the court to hear Ms Stephens' case, said it was disappointed in the ruling. It warned it would "create chaos and enormous unfairness for women and girls in athletics, women's shelters and many other contexts".

What did the court say?

In his opinion, Mr Gorsuch said such matters were not before the court.

"The only question before us is whether an employer who fires someone for being homosexual or transgender has discharged or otherwise discriminated against that individual 'because of such individual's sex'," he wrote.

The teenagers behind virtual pride

Calls to ban LGBT 'conversion therapy' in UK

LGBT people 'still suffering' during lockdown

The answer, he said, was "clear" - even if such a scenario had not been anticipated when the law was written.

"It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex," he wrote.

Three conservative justices opposed the ruling: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.

What are the cases?

The ruling resolves three cases brought by people who said they had been fired after their employers learned they were gay or transgender.

Ms Stephens had previously presented as a man at work for six years before writing a letter to colleagues saying she would return to work "as my true self, Aimee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire".

Two weeks later, Ms Stephens was fired for insisting in working in women's clothes.

In a court filing last year, the funeral home owner argued it wanted Ms Stephens to comply with a dress code "applicable to Stephens' biological sex".

A lower court sided with Ms Stephens.

Donald Zarda, a skydiving instructor from New York who died in a skydiving accident in 2014 , had filed one of the other cases.

He was dismissed after joking with a female client with whom he was tandem-diving not to worry about the close physical contact because he was "100% gay".

The company maintained he was fired because he shared personal information with a client, not because he was gay, but a court in New York ruled in Mr Zarda's favour.

Gerald Bostock, a former child welfare services co-ordinator from Georgia, lost his job after joining a gay recreational softball league, thereby publicly revealing his sexual orientation.

His employer, Clayton County, said his dismissal was the result of "conduct unbecoming of a county employee".

Mr Bostock lost his discrimination case in a federal court in Atlanta.

Other key moments in US LGBT history

January 1958 - The US Supreme Court rules for the first time in favour of LGBT rights, saying an LGBT magazine, deemed obscene by the FBI and postal service, had first amendment rights

July 1961 - Illinois becomes the first state to decriminalise homosexuality

June 1969 - Protests begin after police raid the Stonewall Inn in New York City, now seen as the start of the LGBT civil rights movement

September 1996 - President Clinton defines marriage as a union between "one man and one woman"

June 2003 - The US Supreme Court determines sodomy laws to be unconstitutional

October 2009 - Democratic President Barack Obama signs the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Law, expanding hate crime laws to include sexual orientation

June 2015 - In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court rules 5-4 that same-sex marriage is legal across the country

June 2016 - The Pentagon lifts its ban on having transgender Americans serve in the military

March 2018 - Republican President Donald Trump issues a policy banning transgender Americans from serving in the military

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Top US court backs protection for LGBT workers

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The US Supreme Court has ruled that employers who fire workers for being gay or transgender are breaking the country's civil rights laws. In a 6-3 decision it said federal law prohibited discrimination based on sex or gender and rejected the argument that the authors of the law had not intended that meaning.

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How is Starmer changing the Labour party? 

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How is Starmer changing the Labour party? 

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This is a podcast and it can be accessed on Spotify too.

He sold himself as not being too far from Corbyn but has started to purge the party of Corbynites. How will starmerism come to be defined?

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After a months-long campaign to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir Starmer was eventually elected leader of the Labour party in March, just as the country was entering lockdown and parliament suspended. It was a time of national crisis and public opinion was broadly supportive of the government's emergency measures.

But as the Guardian's political editor, Heather Stewart, tells Anushka Asthana, as satisfaction with the government's handling of coronavirus has dipped, Keir Starmer's ratings show the best start to the job of any opposition leader in living memory. It follows confident performances in the Commons and a clear-out of prominent Corbyn allies from the shadow cabinet. So is the party now united behind its new leader?

The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.

Support The Guardian

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How is Keir Starmer changing the Labour party? - podcast

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After a months-long campaign to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir Starmer was eventually elected leader of the Labour party in March, just as the country was entering lockdown and parliament suspended. It was a time of national crisis and public opinion was broadly supportive of the government's emergency measures.

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Sir Keir Starmer calling the opposition to account.

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Sir Keir Starmer calling the opposition to account.

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In one of his first acts as Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer announced he would not indulge in opposition for opposition's sake.

This was seen as a decisive break from his own party's recent past.

But now he wants to create more distance between the government and the opposition.

Johnson urged to 'get a grip' on virus strategy

LIVE: Prime Minister's Questions

Virtual Commons row to return to Parliament

Some say they have noted a more hostile, less consensual tone towards Boris Johnson from Sir Keir.

In an interview with the Guardian, he has suggested that the prime minister lacks "grip". At Prime Minister's Questions today, he accused the prime minister of undermining public trust in his own government with his actions, just at the time when it is needed most.

But, in truth, Sir Keir's stated policy of "constructive criticism" had already tended to emphasise the latter of those two words at PMQs.

And his approach to today's session had as much in common with his approach before - to put down a marker in case things go wrong.

One step beyond

Sir Keir called for an exit strategy from the government at a time when some of his own MPs - and certainly grassroots members - wanted to see him clash with No 10 more robustly on issues of the day.

He now feels vindicated as he believes the lack of a strategy - "an exit without a strategy", as he puts it - is becoming apparent.

The Labour leader is determined to stay one step ahead of the government.

So, by raising questions now over the easing of lockdown while doubts remain about the alert level and the efficacy of the track and trace system, he is positioning the party to distance itself further from the government's approach if the R number goes up.

But it is true that his tone towards Boris Johnson himself is hardening.

Frustration

Labour insiders say this isn't so much the result of a strategic change, but is borne of a sense of frustration with the prime minister over recent days.

As part of the "constructive criticism" approach, the Labour leader sent a letter to Boris Johnson on 18 May about the re-opening of schools.

At PMQs, Sir Keir said he had not received a reply.

The Labour leader was also annoyed by the way advice to those who are shielding was released, without proper consultation.

And he is irritated by what he perceives as an attempt by the PM to keep shifting responsibility for the crisis away from the door of No 10 to local councils, officials, and individuals.

So, Sir Keir is attempting to ensure that if things do go wrong and there are local lockdowns and/or higher infection rates in the weeks ahead, the buck must stop at Downing Street.

And this all appears to be part of a wider narrative he has been pursuing - that the government was too slow to go in to lockdown, and potentially too cavalier in easing it.

Questions, questions

At PMQs, it is Boris Johnson's job to answer Sir Keir's questions.

But there are questions for the Labour leader too.

Some of his political opponents are finding it frustrating that it appears to be the Labour leader and not the prime minister who is having his cake and eating it.

While Sir Keir has been focussed on the government's handling of the crisis, his critics say there has been less scrutiny of what he would do instead.

For example, he has complained of a lack of consultation over the re-opening of schools.

He is also concerned about the effect the closures will have had on the educational attainment of disadvantaged pupils in particular.

But if he were prime minister, would he have led from the front and pushed for partial re-opening? Or would councils and unions have had an effective veto?

Perspiration not inspiration?

More widely though, is he prioritising perspiration over inspiration?

Sir Keir has done some heavy-lifting to make his party look like a more effective opposition and he has proved he can make Boris Johnson sweat.

His own standing in the polls has risen - but his party still lags behind the Conservatives.

So far, the more positive policies that will be necessary to rally new converts to his banner have been less apparent.

Of course, he has talked about valuing public sector workers more, and of rebuilding the economy in a fairer way after the crisis has passed.

He will seek to "win the peace".

But while we may see a laser-like focus on the government's perceived failings, Sir Keir's own vision for the UK remains hazy.

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Labour leader Starmer's political distancing

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In one of his first acts as Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer announced he would not indulge in opposition for opposition's sake. This was seen as a decisive break from his own party's recent past. But now he wants to create more distance between the government and the opposition.

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"Move on" - that's the overwhelming message from No 10 about the behaviour of the prime minister's most valued adviser.

Whether it was urging MPs to pick a different subject yesterday, or Boris Johnson's seemingly public allergy to answering questions about Dominic Cummings at today's press conference, Downing Street hopes - if not quite believes - that it is time for the furore around the chief aide's adventure to the north east of England at the height of lockdown to subside.

Dominic Cummings 'might have broken lockdown rules'

Lockdown easing to allow groups of six to meet

MPs to decide new method of voting in person

You may well be reading this and agreeing that it is time to turn the page. When the country is still in the grip of a health crisis - and the start of an economic one - of course the conduct of one individual is dwarfed by the concerns and fears of millions of people, and the scale of the decisions that the government has to make on all of our behalf.

The belief inside No 10 is the tangible outrage has started to wane. But the political drama of the last few days is relevant, whether Downing Street likes it or not.

After a period when the government has enjoyed an astonishing level of public support, according to the polls, the public was given a reason to doubt the conduct of those making the decisions - and that matters.

Fatigue with the hour-by-hour drama of the story itself may not quickly remove that question mark.

Cracked relationship

At the very least, the episode has created argument and anger, just at the moment when the government was preparing to ask the population to understand a new set of instructions on how to live their lives that requires unity to work.

And even though Boris Johnson has a huge majority in Parliament, with the virtual sessions lending a surreal air to procedures in Parliament too, the Cummings saga has cracked the relationship between much of the Tory Party and its boss in No 10.

The story may pass, and the memory may fade. But the prime minister's decision to defend his aide through the controversy has sapped a lot of goodwill that existed between Boris Johnson and those he needs to cheer his leadership from the backbenches.

Some ministers are still upset, even appalled, with how events have unfolded.

And with the level of challenge the government will face in the months to come, it's a self-imposed fracture it could well have done without.

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Cummings saga leaves cracked relationship

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"Move on" - that's the overwhelming message from No 10 about the behaviour of the prime minister's most valued adviser.

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Condoleezza Rice on inequalities in America

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Condoleezza Rice on inequalities in America

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Her views on the role of the President in the current crisis, the things that divide America, and the way forward.

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Face The Nation: Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Scott Gottlieb

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Missed the second half of the show? The latest on America's racial divide, President Trump's tweets and increased risk of spreading coronavirus amid protests

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LONDON (Reuters) - Three opinion polls released in Britain on Saturday showed support falling for Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party, as public confidence in the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic declines.

However, the figures are unlikely to be an immediate concern for Johnson, who does not need to hold an election until 2024 after winning a comfortable parliamentary majority in December.

The sharpest swing came in a poll conducted by Survation on June 3, which had support for the Conservatives falling to 41% from 45% in the previous poll, conducted in the period May 22-26. Support for the opposition Labour Party rose by five points to 39%.

Surveys for Deltapoll and Opinium, both conducted on June 4-5, showed the Conservative lead narrowing to three percentage points.

Opinium said 47% of people surveyed disapproved of the government's handling of the coronavirus crisis, against 34% who approved, extending a steady deterioration in confidence in the government since the crisis started.

Britain has suffered Europe's highest reported death toll from COVID-19, with more than 50,000 deaths according to a Reuters tally this week based on official sources.

A survey on Thursday by the market research company Kantar indicated that British people had lost a greater degree of confidence in their government than citizens of any other country in the G7 group of large, advanced economies.

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UK support for Johnson's Conservatives falls as COVID deaths rise

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LONDON (Reuters) - Three opinion polls released in Britain on Saturday showed support falling for Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party, as public confidence in the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic declines. However, the figures are unlikely to be an immediate concern for Johnson, who does not need to hold an election until 2024 after winning a comfortable parliamentary majority in December.

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I think Shapiro has a very valid point here. The kente cloth is a little too much .... the symbolism is lost here -- not a good moment for 'cultural appropriation' [it is in any event a very unrepresentative symbol for 'Africa' (whatever Africa is in America)] -- sympathize yes but get the laws passed and fix the brutality!

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Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Tuesday for "coordinating outfits with the Democratic Power Rangers" after congressional Democrats donned African-patterned garb and knelt in a demonstration against racism and police brutality at the Capitol Monday.

"Nancy Pelosi is a terrible Speaker of the House, but Nancy Pelosi is very good at coordinating outfits with the Democratic Power Rangers...," Shapiro said during Tuesday's episode of "The Ben Shapiro Show."

"At the State of the Union address ... all the women were wearing white to demonstrate 'purity of feminism," he went on, "well now, she got everybody in kente cloth."
EX-WARREN SURROGATE BLASTS WHITE DEMOCRATS FOR KNEELING IN AFRICAN CLOTH: 'THIS HAS TO BE HELL'
On Monday, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined other Democrats in kneeling inside of the Capitol Visitor Center for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, representing the length of time George Floyd was pinned down by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

The lawmakers' attempts to look woke appeared to backfire on them when various black Twitter users called them out on their "virtue signaling," and accused them of cultural appropriation.

Author Obianuju Ekeocha posted a video criticizing Democrats for treating "Africans like we're children. These fabrics and these colorful things that we have within our culture and tradition, they all mean something to us. I know you look at us and you say, 'Oh, Africans are so cute in all of your colorful dresses,'" she continued. Well, some of those dresses and patterns and colors and fabrics actually do mean something to us."
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"All these old white people putting on kente cloths to symbolize how much they care about black Americans ... how do you not find this culturally appropriating?" Shapiro agreed. "What in the world are you doing?"

"Last I checked," he concluded, "Democrats in Congress are supposed to be passing legislation to help fix the 'systemic racism of the United States.'"
Fox News' Sam Dorman contributed to this report.

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Ben Shapiro slams Pelosi for donning kente cloth in Floyd demonstration: 'What in the world are you doing?'

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Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Tuesday for "coordinating outfits with the Democratic Power Rangers" after congressional Democrats donned African-patterned garb and knelt in a demonstration against racism and police brutality at the Capitol Monday.

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This article is an opinion piece and argues that democracy in the UK is not particularly healthy.

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Do we live in a democracy? You may well ask. An unelected adviser seems to exercise more power than the prime minister, and appears unanswerable to people or parliament. Boris Johnson makes reckless public health decisions that could put thousands of lives at risk, apparently to dig himself out of a political hole. Parliament is truncated, as the government arbitrarily decides that MPs can no longer take part in votes remotely. As the government blunders from one disaster to the next, there seem to be no effective ways of holding it to account.

Established power in this country is surrounded by a series of defensive rings. As soon as you begin to name them, you see that the UK is a democracy only in the weakest and shallowest sense.

Let's begin with political funding. Our system permits billionaires and corporations to outspend and outmuscle the electorate. The great majority of money for the Conservative party comes from a small number of very rich people. Just five hedge fund managers have given it £18m over the past 10 years. The secretive Leader's Group grants big donors special access to the prime minister and his frontbenchers in return for their money. Courting and cultivating rich people to win elections corrupts our politics, replacing democracy with plutocracy.
Coronavirus is our chance to completely rethink what the economy is for | Malcolm Bull
This grossly unfair system is supplemented by outright cheating, such as breaching spending limits and secretly funding mendacious online ads. The Electoral Commission, which is supposed to regulate the system, has deliberately been kept powerless. The maximum fine for winning an election (or a referendum) by fraud is £20,000 per offence. Democracy is cheap in this country.

Despite such assistance, the Conservatives still failed to win a majority of votes at the last election. But, thanks to our preposterous, outdated first-past-the-post electoral system, the 43.6% of the vote they won granted them a crushing majority. With proportional representation, we would have a hung parliament. Five years of unassailable power for Johnson's Conservatives, even as popular support collapses, would have been impossible.

The structure and symbolism of parliament, with its preposterous rituals and incomprehensible procedures, could scarcely be better designed to alienate people, or to favour former public schoolboys, educated in a similar environment. Even its official emblem tells us we are shut out. It's a portcullis: the means by which people are excluded from the fortress of power. The portcullis is topped by a crown, reminding us that power is still vested symbolically in an unelected head of state. Many of her actual powers have been assumed, in the absence of a codified constitution, by the prime minister.

These powers are routinely abused, by all governments. Prime ministers bypass parliament, governing through special advisers like Dominic Cummings. When they make catastrophic mistakes, they have the power to decide whether or not there should be a public inquiry, and, if there should, what its terms and who its chair should be. It's as if a defendant in a criminal trial were allowed to decide whether the trial goes ahead and, if so, what the charges should be and who the judge and jury are.

Even when an investigation does take place, the prime minister can suppress its conclusions, as Johnson has done with the report on Russian interference in the British political system, which remains unpublished. Does it contain details of unlawful donations to the Conservative party? Or of Conservative Friends of Russia, whose launch party was attended by Cummings? A key figure in this group was a man who has subsequently come under suspicion of being a Russian spy. He has been photographed with Johnson, whom he described as a "good friend". What was going on? Without parliament's intelligence and security committee's report, we can only guess.

The same inordinate powers enabled Johnson to suspend parliament last autumn, until his decision was struck down by the supreme court, and to terminate remote access for MPs this week, preventing many of them from representing us. He is, in effect, a monarch with a five-year term and a council of advisers we call parliament.

The House of Lords is a further defensive ring within this ring. Some of its seats are reserved for hereditary aristocrats. Some are reserved for bishops, making this the world's only country, other than Iran, in which religious leaders have an automatic right to sit. The rest are grace and favour appointments, keeping power within existing circles. Many of them are granted to major political donors, reinforcing the power of money. In any other country, they would call it corruption.

Despite a vast array of new democratic techniques, pioneered in other countries, there has been a total failure to balance our supposedly representative system with participatory democracy. This failure grants the winning party a scarcely challenged power, on the grounds of presumed consent, to do as it pleases, for five years at a time. Even when public trust and consent collapse, as they have now done amid the coronavirus pandemic, there are no effective channels through which we can affect the decisions government makes.

These formal rings of power are supported by further defences beyond government, such as the print media, most of which is owned by billionaires or multimillionaires living offshore, and the network of opaquely funded thinktanks, that formulate and test the policies later adopted by government. Their personnel circulate in and out of the prime minister's office.

Our political system has the outward appearance of democracy, but it is largely controlled by undemocratic forces. We find ourselves on the wrong side of the portcullis, watching helplessly as crucial decisions are taken about us, without us. If there's one thing the coronavirus fiascos show, it's the need for radical change.

* George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Britain's claims to being a functioning democracy are only skin deep | George Monbiot

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Do we live in a democracy? You may well ask. An unelected adviser seems to exercise more power than the prime minister, and appears unanswerable to people or parliament. Boris Johnson makes reckless public health decisions that could put thousands of lives at risk, apparently to dig himself out of a political hole.

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Simple politics is a great site if you haven't already used it.

The video will make a great introduction for the ideologies next year.

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Classical Liberalism , Freedom , & Democracy

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What is Liberalism? (Liberal Democrats in UK politics)

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Short, simple and jargon free crash course in the basics behind liberal thinking and liberalism. In UK Politics, think Liberal Democrats.

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This is an opinion piece though not labled as one.

The link to the spec is where it highlights that the individuals surrounding Trump are largely obedient, something Trump has made sure of over time through appointments. It highlights a difference between the UK and the US in terms of the executive being invested solely in the president, while in the UK government is more collective by structure and more empowered to challenge the PM.

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The sheer tumult of the Trump era, the unceasing torrent of events that were unthinkable even hours before, has left a nation constantly off balance, unable to find its bearing and grasp how far it has traveled.

The developments of the past 24 hours were a reminder of how slippery the downward slope has been.
As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America's brutal fault lines - race, gender, poverty and broken politics
More than a hundred thousand Americans are dead from a pandemic after the government's botched response; there are armoured cars and troops outside Washington metro stations; men in combat gear carrying sniper rifles were seen perched in the open door of a helicopter flying low over the commercial district. A military chopper buzzed a crowd of demonstrators so close to the ground they were buffeted around by the wind from the rotor, a dispersal technique learned in counter-insurgencies abroad.

On Monday, an entirely peaceful protest was driven out of a city square in front of the White House with teargas, baton charges and mounted police, so Trump could pose in front of a church with a Bible.

A priest and a seminarian, who had been distributing water and hand sanitizer to protesters from the steps of St John's Episcopal, were driven away by police with helmets and riot shields to create an uncluttered tableau. A Bible was procured for Trump from inside the church for him to hold aloft. Journalists asked if it was his Bible. "It's a Bible," he replied.

The rate of fresh affronts has often outpaced the capacity to digest - or even describe - them. Peaceful protesters, journalists, a young African American man pleading for mutual understanding, shop owners, residents are being targeted for arbitrary arrest or police beatings or both - especially if they are black.

Overnight the very language of governance has changed. The defence secretary has described US cities as the "battlespace" and the president has rejoiced in his administration's "overwhelming force" and "domination" over the citizenry.

As each extraordinary moment slides by it poses its own question - "How did we get here?" - but then is swept away by the relentless flow of the Twitter feed. Simply trying to take stock is exhausting.

One reason it is so hard to keep track of the descent is the near instant normalisation of every bizarre new turn, administered like a fast-acting anaesthetic. Trump is surrounded by more coherent people insisting nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Anyone unable to restrain themselves from yelling "this is crazy" left the administration some time ago. In William Barr, Trump has an attorney general ready to draft executive orders at will, together with legal-sounding justifications.

Among the gang of officials walking behind Trump for his Bible photo op was the defence secretary, Mark Esper, and the country's top general, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, wearing combat fatigues. Their presence on Lafayette Square, walking amid the detritus left by fleeing protesters, stepped over the line that is supposed to separate the US military from domestic politics and added ballast to Trump's imagery of a righteous war against a pernicious enemy within.

The Pentagon later said the two men had no idea where they were being led when they fell in line behind the president in the grounds of the White House, and had no clue about the means used to clear Lafayette Square before their arrival. But the washing of hands was performed by an unnamed defence official. Neither Esper nor Milley renounced their actions on camera.

It is not just the public officials. The constitutional constraints have also shown themselves more elastic than previously thought. Congress can demand to see officials and documents it needs to perform its duty of oversight but the administration now feels empowered to ignore such calls whenever it wants and suffer no consequences.

George Floyd protests: can Trump deploy federal troops on to the streets in the US?

The 1807 Insurrection Act, which Trump is dangling over the nation, seems amorphous enough to allow the president to deploy the armed forces against the wishes of the states, if he deems circumstances to have made it "impracticable to enforce" the law.

Fear is easing the way for each new step towards militarisation. The looting and destruction on the fringes of the protests are terrifying, but partly a consequence of law enforcement tactics. The police have focused on dispersing the protests rather on arresting the looters. And it is the violence that plays on a loop on the news.

The other reason it is so hard to keep track of the downward slide is the daily farce of the Donald Trump show. On Tuesday, at a Catholic shrine (day two of a brief detour into Christianity), it was the president telling his wife out of the side of his mouth to smile and her half-hearted attempt to obey.

The day before, it was the long amble from the White House to St John's, with the president walking 20 yards in front of his cabinet and relatives - with his odd straight-armed, chest-out gait and his trousers, a couple of inches short, flapping around his ankles - past the "Fuck Trump" graffiti on the public toilets.

A photo op as protests swirled: how Trump came to walk to the church

And then, on reaching the church, holding the Bible at various angles, including upside down, like an unfamiliar device pulled at random from a toolbox, which it was. He had once claimed it was his favourite book but when asked which was his favourite verse, he became flustered and dodged, insisting "the whole Bible is incredible".

One of the lessons of history is beware the buffoon, but when every day is so bizarre and distracting those lessons are hard to remember. We are constantly negotiating the rapids. And each day brings us closer to forgetting what normal used to look like.
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'How did we get here?': Trump has normalised mayhem and the US is paying the price

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The sheer tumult of the Trump era, the unceasing torrent of events that were unthinkable even hours before, has left a nation constantly off balance, unable to find its bearing and grasp how far it has traveled. The developments of the past 24 hours were a reminder of how slippery the downward slope has been.

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So ... if Clinton had a moment after race riots that helped defeat Bush does Biden have the same now? Elections are made of a series of 'moments' ....

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Joe Biden has shown that a well-timed public appearance can be effective and powerful, though the dangers of a low profile are likely to escalate.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Memorial Day after laying a wreath at a veterans' memorial in Delaware. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Under normal circumstances, Joseph R. Biden Jr. might have delivered a speech on race in America on Sunday, covered by a press corps following him around the country. He might have visited Minneapolis or another city torn by violence. He might have summoned reporters to the front of his plane to critique President Trump's leadership of a nation in crisis.

But at a moment that is emerging as a critical test for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president is constrained by the limitations of a pandemic that has confined him to his home in Wilmington, Del., for the past three months.

Until now, Mr. Biden has sought to make the best of his circumstances with remote speeches, fund-raisers and interviews over Zoom, and digital advertisements.

Yet the president's struggles are providing Mr. Biden with an opportunity to show an anxious nation how he might lead during these twin crises of civil unrest and a health emergency that has killed more than 100,000 Americans. The question is whether he can do this largely from the confines of his home or whether the moment has come to join other Americans - Mr. Trump among them - who have begun venturing into the world, to make his case to voters to oust a sitting president.

Mr. Biden may be thinking that moment has come. On Sunday, his announced schedule consisted only of delivering recorded remarks to a virtual rally in Maryland. But late in the day the former vice president made an unannounced tour of businesses in downtown Wilmington damaged during protests. On Monday he will meet with community leaders there.

Presidential campaigns can be defined by moments like this. Bill Clinton made a dramatic trip to Los Angeles, its streets empty and smoke still lingering in the air, after the riots of 1992. It was a high-risk move, providing images of Mr. Clinton touring the ruins of strip malls in Koreatown, playing basketball in what was called South-Central, and speaking at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. He went on to defeat President George Bush six months later.

A visit by Mr. Biden to Minneapolis, or any of the other many American cities that were convulsed by protests and riots over the weekend, would be complicated because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Biden has broken his quarantine only twice for public appearances: the trip downtown on Sunday, and a visit on Memorial Day to lay a wreath at a veterans' memorial.

But as tensions have mounted since the death of a black man, George Floyd, in the custody of Minneapolis police officers last Monday, Mr. Biden has raised, at least somewhat, his national profile - to the relief of some Democrats who fear he has had slipped off the radar screen in the midst of an epidemic that has riveted the nation.

He delivered remarks about the plight of black Americans on Friday, the day after Minneapolis was roiled by demonstrations. He issued a statement late Saturday night as looting and fires swept American cities, supporting the protesters while condemning the violence. He called Mr. Floyd's family.

"He's been present," said Lis Smith, who was a senior adviser to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. "I don't think it matters to people whether he's giving an address from his home or from behind a podium. No one in the cities facing unrest is sitting around thinking that the thing that could make this all better is having a presidential candidate in town stoking the fires."

The challenges of this moment would be daunting for any candidate. And even Democrats who admire Mr. Biden have long worried about his political skills and fortitude. He is 77 and given to verbal missteps.

Can Mr. Biden give the nation hope and reassurance, and demonstrate how he might lead the country through a period of racial turmoil? Can he address a country's fears in the midst of a pandemic that has sickened 1.7 million Americans and gutted the economy?

And can he navigate what has historically been a fault line for the Democratic Party, speaking at once to aggrieved African-Americans and others enraged by the death of Mr. Floyd while not alienating white blue-collar voters who prioritize law and order and have fled the Democratic Party for Mr. Trump?

For Mr. Biden, the risks of staying in political isolation are likely to escalate as these twin crises play out. He is competing for attention not only with Mr. Trump but also with Democratic leaders in Congress and mayors and governors. CNN did not provide live coverage of his remarks about Mr. Floyd on Friday as its correspondents waited for Mr. Trump to show up in the Rose Garden to talk about China and the World Health Organization.

And while Mr. Biden has self-quarantined in deference to stay-at-home directives by health officials - and to his own vulnerability to the disease, given his age - Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants to return to something approaching a normal campaign and will resume in-person fund-raisers in June.

Still, for the time being, there are some benefits to Mr. Biden's surgical approach to the campaign. Less is sometimes more in politics, particularly for a candidate who does not have the platform of public office.

Mr. Biden's short but stark appearance on Friday showed that when he does step onto a large platform, his appearances can be powerful and effective. In this case, it set up a sharp contrast with Mr. Trump's terse news conference at the White House, where he initially made no mention of the events engulfing the nation.

Mr. Biden was able to draw another contrast with Mr. Trump last Wednesday night as he paid tribute in a video to the 100,000 Americans who have died of Covid-19. Mr. Trump has struggled to seem empathetic as the nation confronted this grim milestone.

And as this long spring churns on, Mr. Biden's confinement has freed him of the trappings of the modern campaign, its days packed with expensive and time-consuming rallies and chartered jets, which often seem a throwback to a predigital era. It has spared Mr. Biden the 14-hour days that can be exhausting even for a candidate half his age.

He is able to spend far less money by staying off the road, no small matter as he confronts an incumbent with a $187 million general election cash advantage. His isolation has allowed him to accelerate hiring that was constrained during the primaries by the campaign's money shortage.

The virus crisis has taken him a little out of the spotlight - probably not a bad thing, given his propensity for saying the wrong thing - and focused attention on Mr. Trump as he struggles to manage a deadly pandemic and civil unrest across the nation.

"It's fine - it's more than fine," said Rahm Emanuel, the former Democratic mayor of Chicago who was chief of staff to former President Barack Obama. "This is a race of Trump versus Trump, and Trump is losing."

Scott Reed, a Republican consultant who managed the 1996 presidential campaign of Bob Dole, said Mr. Biden's situation was reminiscent of the challenge Mr. Dole faced after capturing the nomination in April 1996 and then having to fill time, and attract attention, for four months until the convention. But this, he said, is playing more to Mr. Biden's advantage.

"The basement strategy may become the new front porch strategy," Mr. Reed said. "He may have found a new way to skin the cat."

That is not to say that Mr. Biden would have chosen to spend the months leading to the convention in seclusion at his home rather than on the campaign trail. The former vice president has considerable work to do to energize liberals and younger voters. But it is far from clear whether he can do that without showing up and engaging those voters face to face. More broadly, Mr. Biden faces the challenge of building enthusiasm for his candidacy, something Mr. Trump enjoys from his devoted base.

Potentially most damaging, the pandemic is almost certain to impede the ability of surrogates and campaign volunteers to go door to door building up support.

"The virus is really hurting the ability of Joe Biden - his entire campaign and people outside his campaign - to mobilize," said Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Mr. Biden defeated in the primaries. "Candidates for public office should be out among the people. Biden can't be there. Surrogates can't be there. You can't have people knocking on doors."

A critical question now is whether Mr. Biden and his campaign have the agility to make the most of this moment. Fund-raising was always going to be a big priority for Mr. Biden during this interregnum. The fact that he is not traveling should spare the campaign the overhead of the lavish events, with food and open bars, that donors expect these days.

"There are a lot of upsides for him," Ms. Smith said. "The way we run presidential campaigns in 2020 is inefficient, outdated and expensive."

For the past four years, Mr. Trump has been an inescapable public presence, from Twitter to television to rallies. By contrast, two former presidents - George W. Bush and Mr. Obama - made rare forays onto the public stage in recent weeks. Mr. Bush posted a video appealing for partisan unity around the coronavirus, and Mr. Obama spoke to graduating high school seniors.

That drew a flurry of attention, the same way Mr. Biden's carefully chosen outings have won him notice over these past 10 days.

The digital technology of quarantine and his pick-your-moments schedule may have carried him through his low-profile spring.

But the campaign seems to have moved to its next chapter, as the nation confronts yet another crisis, and Mr. Trump struggles to find his bearings. For Mr. Biden, this could be an opportunity to step up and demonstrate how he, as president, would fill what many Democrats (and some Republicans) see as a void in leadership in the White House. That might be a hard case to make from a basement.

Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.

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Can Biden Emerge From the Basement and Meet the Moment?

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Joe Biden has shown that a well-timed public appearance can be effective and powerful, though the dangers of a low profile are likely to escalate. Under normal circumstances, Joseph R. Biden Jr. might have delivered a speech on race in America on Sunday, covered by a press corps following him around the country.

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Skip to content

16 and 17 year olds can now officially vote in Wales for Senedd elections.
Votes at 16 & 17 come into force on Monday, as part of the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020.

Next year's Senedd elections will be the first in which 16 and 17 year olds and legally resident foreign nationals are allowed to vote in Wales, in a major expansion of the franchise. Around 65,000 16/17s are expected to benefit.

The move is a victory for young people, following campaigning from ERS Cymru and a coalition of youth and civil society campaigners.

Westminster now looks increasingly isolated for barring the UK's nearly-1.5m 16 and 17 year olds from picking their MP. 16 and 17 year olds can already vote in Scotland for all non-Westminster elections.

A survey commissioned by the Electoral Commission following the Scottish independence referendum (in which 16 and 17-year-olds were entitled to vote) found that 75% had taken part.

The move in Wales means 16 and 17 year olds will now rightly have a say over critical issues that affect their future, such as health, education and the economy.

As we've already seen in Scotland, this is a boost for our democracy as a whole - strengthening citizenship and boosting political engagement.

Over the past few years ERS Cymru spoke to hundreds of young people across Wales - the first set of young people that will be voting in 2021 - and they can't wait to vote for the first time and truly have their voices heard.

Sadly, England now looks increasingly isolated on this, and it's a constitutional injustice that 16/17 year olds there will continue to be denied the vote. It's time for the government to get behind this win-win policy.

Extending the franchise for Westminster elections is now a question of 'when', not 'if'. Will parties get on with it?
Sign the petition for votes at 16/17 for Westminster elections here. Read 'Civic Duty: The Conservative Case for Votes at 16/17' here.

Read more posts...

See what we've been up to this month.

Posted 28 May 2020

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16 and 17 year olds secure the right to vote in Wales today

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Skip to content 16 and 17 year olds can now officially vote in Wales for Senedd elections. Votes at 16 & 17 come into force on Monday, as part of the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020.

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Opportunities to ask the government a question at their daily briefing

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Opportunities to ask the government a question at their daily briefing

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Thought this would be interesting in terms of participation. As well as the government asking questions in their daily briefing, the public are afforded an opportunity to. To what extent does this help with participation?

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Submit a question for the daily coronavirus (COVID-19) press conference. If your question is chosen, a cabinet minister will answer it during the live broadcast.

You must be 18 or over to submit a question.

What you need to know

An independent polling organisation chooses the questions at 10am each day. Ministers will not see the questions before the press conference. The government is not involved in choosing questions.

If your question is chosen

The Cabinet Office will contact you by 3pm on the day of the press conference.

You can either:

record a video of yourself asking your question to be shown during the live broadcast

have your question read out by the minister

If your question is not chosen

If the Cabinet Office does not contact you within 3 days, your question will not be used in the press conference. However, the Cabinet Office might contact you to ask for your permission to use your question elsewhere.

You can submit your question again at any time.

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Ask a question at the coronavirus press conference

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Submit a question for the daily coronavirus (COVID-19) press conference. If your question is chosen, a cabinet minister will answer it during the live broadcast. You must be 18 or over to submit a question. An independent polling organisation chooses the questions at 10am each day.

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This is interesting for many reasons:
1. Parliament will re-open but will still practice 'social distancing'.
2. June 2nd will see a debate on how Parliament will be vote (important when considering there will not be a full 650 MPs present in the Commons).

As an aside (and something that links to Paper 1 and democracy), if Parliament can debate and vote virtually, should we just scrap it all and have direct democracy?

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The House of Commons that resumes business on Tuesday will be neither virtual, nor normal.

After several weeks when MPs were actively discouraged from attending Westminster, they will be back, but the strictures of social distancing will mean normal parliamentary socialising - chats in the Tearoom, coffee-filled gossip sessions in Portcullis House, meals in the Members' Dining Room, and all the rest, will still not be possible.

Mr Speaker Hoyle has already made clear that he will not permit a crowded chamber, either. So the atmospherics will be a bit weird and MPs may feel more isolated in the Covid-19 Parliament than they ever did participating from home.

The first business will be to find some kind of middle ground that allows MPs to perform one crucial function - voting - while avoiding the dangers of infection posed by their normal method of trooping through the division lobbies.

To this end, the government has recalled the House a few hours early to debate the issue, although, as I write, no motion has emerged.

Depending on how long those deliberations take, this manoeuvre could have knock-on effects on the rest of the week. The early recall (an 11:30, rather than 14:30 start) means the business previously set down is lost, starting with Justice Questions, which are definitely cancelled, and possibly extending to the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill, although it could be put back again, if there is time for a Second Reading debate.

If not, there could be a cascade of rescheduling through the rest of this short Commons week - so the programme described below is subject to change.

And there is quite a lot of important law-making to get through, including emergency legislation to protect Covid-19-hit companies from their creditors, due to be rushed through on Wednesday, and a very important measure to help the courts, by tidying up the hopelessly confused law on sentencing.

Of course, there will doubtless be major statements from ministers on the pandemic and its ramifications, and possibly something on the ominous state of affairs in Hong Kong. Plus a goodly helping of important committee hearings, not least a fascinating-looking session of the Treasury Committee, with three former chancellors giving their view on what their successor should do. Bring popcorn...

Here's my rundown of the week ahead.

Tuesday 2 June

The Commons is back, earlier than usual (11:30) and will plunge straight into considering a motion on its method of voting. Nothing has been published yet, but the word is that the government is insisting that voting must be restricted to those physically present, while nodding to Mr Speaker's insistence that the advice of Public Health England, that the normal process is unsafe, must be respected.

This makes no concession to those MPs unable to attend during the pandemic, although, if they are no longer to be permitted to vote remotely, it may be that opposition parties will press for them to be allowed to use the proxy voting system already available for pregnant MPs. It seems highly likely there will be opposition amendments of some kind.

There will be considerable pressure to reach all-party agreement on the solutions, but the atmosphere is more than a little unpromising, because opposition parties were annoyed by the way the government forced through the ending of the virtual parliament.

So what if there is no agreement? MPs could be in the awkward position of having to vote on how they should vote, before having agreed a safe method of voting, which may require Mr Speaker to step in and ordain a safe voting method on his own authority.

The Speaker's role is so shrouded in custom and practice that he would be able to do this.

And keep an eye on the politics of this vote. This is House rather than government business, and it may provide an opportunity for Conservative backbencher angry at the Cummings affair (60-plus have called for the PM's adviser to go) to blow off a bit of steam and signal that they should not be ignored.

It is certainly possible for ministerial statements to be taken on a Recall day - I'm not so sure about Urgent Questions.

All this will probably still leave time for consideration of the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill, which finally kills off the Cameron government's attempt to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. It was based on the complaint that Labour seats tended to have smaller electorates than Conservative ones, skewing the electoral system in Labour's favour.

This has been stalled since the Lib Dems joined Labour to block the new constituency boundaries needed, and has always been unpopular with the troops. Labour has an amendment down to oppose the bill, even though it welcomes the move to keep 650 MPs.

Its complaint is that the rules on constituency size are too inflexible and that attempting to base boundaries on the next electoral register would mean using an incomplete list, thanks to the pandemic.

On the (still virtual) Committee Corridor, Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (09:30) takes evidence on how to remove another constitutional legacy of the Cameron years, the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, with evidence from academic experts, while Justice (14:30) has a series of panels giving evidence on the impact of the pandemic on the courts, prisons and probation service.

In the Lords (11:00) questions to ministers cover removing the five-week wait for Universal Credit payments (a subject that may be raised with Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey when she appears before the Lords Economic Affairs Committee at 15:00) and free TV Licences for over-75s. The main legislating is the detailed committee stage scrutiny of the Telecoms Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill.

Wednesday 3 June

The Commons opens (11:30) with half an hour of Welsh Questions, followed by half an hour of PMQs - where the Covid-era solemnity may break down a bit as MPs get their first chance to tackle the prime minister about the Cummings affair. Mr Speaker will be continuing to limit attendance in the chamber, but, even so, noise levels may increase.

The day's ten-minute rule bill, from Conservative Fiona Bruce, aims to amend the 1967 Abortion Act to exclude correctable conditions like cleft lip, cleft palate and clubfoot as qualifying physical abnormalities for the purposes of medical termination of pregnancy.

Then comes the day's main business, the rushing through of the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill. This includes a series of long-term reforms that had been in the pipeline before the pandemic, but the main focus now is a series of measures to provide temporary protection for otherwise viable companies hit by the pandemic - it suspends parts of existing insolvency law.

It gives companies that are insolvent or in danger of insolvency a 20-day moratorium to allow them to seek new investment and restructure, subject to supervision by a "monitor" who must certify that the company could be rescued as a going concern. There will be restrictions on winding-up orders and aggressive tactics by landlords.

On the Committee Corridor, the Treasury Committee (14:30) ponders the economic impact of the pandemic with the aid of Lord Darling, the last Labour Chancellor, George Osborne and Philip Hammond. This should be interesting from a number of points of view, and may provide a useful glimpse of the economic medicine that may follow the pandemic.

I imagine an early questions will be about the PM's comments before the Commons Liaison Committee, ruling out income tax rises or an end to the "triple lock" on the state pension.

My eye was also caught by the Education Committee session (09:30) on the impact of the pandemic on education and children's services.

In the Lords (11:00) questions to ministers cover the impact of the pandemic on local democracy, and the timings, chair and terms of reference of the proposed Royal Commission on Criminal Justice - that's from the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Lord Ramsbotham.

The main business is the continued committee stage scrutiny of the Private International Law (Implementation of Agreements) Bill. This deals with the process for adjudicating disputes between individuals in different countries, notably over child custody, and is shaping up to be pretty controversial. The snag at the moment is that the Lords do not yet have an online voting system in place, so it may be a while before they can move beyond the "shadow boxing" phase at Committee, and hold actual votes at Report Stage.

Thursday 4 June

The Commons day opens (09:30) with 40 minutes of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport questions, followed by a mini-question time for Attorney General Suella Braverman. And then the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees Mogg, will announce forthcoming Commons business.

Then comes a rather technical-sounding, but highly significant measure, the Sentencing (Pre-Consolidation Amendments) Bill. This is a measure which paves the way for the new sentencing guidelines created by the Law Commission to be put into action, finally sorting out the massively confused law on sentencing in the courts.

This is Secret Barrister territory, an area where the legal system is deep in the mire, and a huge chunk of cases sent to the Appeal Court are to sort out mistakes in sentencing by judges mired in complex and conflicting law.

As a Law Commission Bill, this is subject to a special fast-track process involving a joint parliamentary committee, to speed it onto the statute book.

Then comes an interesting parliamentary curiosity, a 90-minute debate under Section 13A of the European Union Withdrawal Act, on a motion from Sir Bill Cash and the European Scrutiny Committee, calling on the government to report back to MPs regularly on the progress of the "future relationship" talks with the EU.

The European Scrutiny Committee has produced a report which sums up the concerns of all the select committees about their aspects of the talks - and the motion simply asks ministers to respond to them. But there's always the chance of an amendment, for example, calling for an extension the transitional period before the UK leaves the EU Single Market.

The day's committee hearings include Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (09:30) looking at the impact of the pandemic on business and workers, and the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Sub-Committee on Online Harms (looking at the proposals in the government's Online Harms White Paper) quizzes witnesses from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (14:30).

The other interesting committee action is the opening of the committee-stage consideration of the Domestic Abuse Bill (11:30 and then 14:00. These are the early hearings involving evidence from witnesses, before the process of line-by-line consideration kicks in, and there has been some controversy over the refusal to allow victims of domestic abuse to give evidence remotely.

This is now routine for select committees, but no provision has been made for public bill committees to do the same.

In the Lords (11:00) question time includes Baroness Benjamin asking about how 18-to-25-year-olds can be prevented from becoming online child sex predators.

The main debate is on the economic lessons of the pandemic, and has attracted a healthy 57 speakers, including former Chancellor Lord Lamont and former Home Secretary Lord Blunkett.

There's also a short debate on the situation in Hong Kong, and the impact on human rights of the Chinese government's new national security legislation.

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The House of Commons that resumes business on Tuesday will be neither virtual, nor normal. After several weeks when MPs were actively discouraged from attending Westminster, they will be back, but the strictures of social distancing will mean normal parliamentary socialising - chats in the Tearoom, coffee-filled gossip sessions in Portcullis House, meals in the Members' Dining Room, and all the rest, will still not be possible.

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BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg argues that Boris Johnson's decision to support Dominic Cummings over his alleged lockdown breach will affect Boris's relationship with many Tory backbenchers, particularly (although this is not expressly) stated amongst those 'Red Wall' constituencies. With a large majority though, how influential could this backbench tension be?

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"Move on" - that's the overwhelming message from No 10 about the behaviour of the prime minister's most valued adviser.

Whether it was urging MPs to pick a different subject yesterday, or Boris Johnson's seemingly public allergy to answering questions about Dominic Cummings at today's press conference, Downing Street hopes - if not quite believes - that it is time for the furore around the chief aide's adventure to the north east of England at the height of lockdown to subside.

Dominic Cummings 'might have broken lockdown rules'

Lockdown easing to allow groups of six to meet

MPs to decide new method of voting in person

You may well be reading this and agreeing that it is time to turn the page. When the country is still in the grip of a health crisis - and the start of an economic one - of course the conduct of one individual is dwarfed by the concerns and fears of millions of people, and the scale of the decisions that the government has to make on all of our behalf.

The belief inside No 10 is the tangible outrage has started to wane. But the political drama of the last few days is relevant, whether Downing Street likes it or not.

After a period when the government has enjoyed an astonishing level of public support, according to the polls, the public was given a reason to doubt the conduct of those making the decisions - and that matters.

Fatigue with the hour-by-hour drama of the story itself may not quickly remove that question mark.

Cracked relationship

At the very least, the episode has created argument and anger, just at the moment when the government was preparing to ask the population to understand a new set of instructions on how to live their lives that requires unity to work.

And even though Boris Johnson has a huge majority in Parliament, with the virtual sessions lending a surreal air to procedures in Parliament too, the Cummings saga has cracked the relationship between much of the Tory Party and its boss in No 10.

The story may pass, and the memory may fade. But the prime minister's decision to defend his aide through the controversy has sapped a lot of goodwill that existed between Boris Johnson and those he needs to cheer his leadership from the backbenches.

Some ministers are still upset, even appalled, with how events have unfolded.

And with the level of challenge the government will face in the months to come, it's a self-imposed fracture it could well have done without.

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Cummings saga leaves cracked relationship

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"Move on" - that's the overwhelming message from No 10 about the behaviour of the prime minister's most valued adviser.

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A contrast? America has a long way to go before ever attempting to consider itself a 'meritocracy' where all can pursue the 'American dream'.

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The difference between the two presidential candidates played out in stark contrast on Sunday.

While Joe Biden was using social media to share a message of understanding, acknowledging the country's pain, President Trump used the same medium to endorse a call for violence in response to the protests raging across the nation.

The Democratic candidate shared a photo of himself in Wilmington, Del., where he said there were protests the night before. Biden wrote in posts across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram about how the country needs to turn its "anguish to purpose."

"We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us. We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us. We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us," Biden wrote.

Biden continued, "The only way to bear this pain is to turn all that anguish to purpose. And as President, I will help lead this conversation - and more importantly, I will listen, just as I did today visiting the site of last night's protests in Wilmington."

Conversely, Trump took to Twitter and retweeted someone who seemingly labeled all of the demonstrators as "bad guys" and advocated for violence from "good guys" to put a stop to the protests, while ignoring the many instances of police acting violently.

"This isn't going to stop until the good guys are willing to use overwhelming force against the bad guys" the tweet read.

Trump has no real answers for the protests and, according to a report from CNN, his top aides are divided over how to advise him. So, he's left to his default position of pointing fingers to curry support from his most fervent allies. He has leaned on hate and division ever since he descended down the escalator to announce his candidacy when he lied about Mexican immigrants to encourage racists to join his side. His lack of ability, or desire, to pull people together during a crisis is damaging-especially with the pandemic-and it continues with his rhetoric about the protests. Fear and anger feed his base but leave many lost in a time of need.

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Biden Visits Protest Site While Trump Endorses Violent Pushback

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The difference between the two presidential candidates played out in stark contrast on Sunday. While Joe Biden was using social media to share a message of understanding, acknowledging the country's pain, President Trump used the same medium to endorse a call for violence in response to the protests raging across the nation.

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Trump has made an executive order that makes social media companies liable for what people write on their platforms.

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trump signs executive order targeting social media companies - cnnpolitics

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Brian Fung, Ryan Nobles and Kevin Liptak, CNN

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Trump signs executive order targeting social media companies

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, days after Twitter called two of his tweets "potentially misleading."

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Awful scenes in America this weekend:
https://youtu.be/8TidQ9LDFDs

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Joe Biden Addresses the Unfolding Situation in Minnesota and the Killing of George Floyd

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Police men and women walking with protesters (the other side of the distressing racial scenes coming out of America)

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TOPLINE

As protests sparked by George Floyd's death entered their chaotic fifth day, social media filled with images and video of police officers using batons, tear gas and rubber bullets to quell crowds⁠-but some squads joined in with Saturday protesters to express their stance against police brutality, and to show solidarity with the anti-racism movement.

Police officers kneel during a rally in Coral Gables, Florida, on Saturday in response to the death ... [+]
Photo by EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI/AFP via Getty Images

KEY FACTS

"We want to be with y'all, for real. I took my helmet off, laid the batons down. I want to make this a parade, not a protest," Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson was seen telling protesters in Flint, Michigan, before he joined the assembled crowd to march, eliciting cheers.

Officers in Camden, New Jersey, helped carry a banner reading "Standing in Solidarity," and seemed to join in with the crowd chanting "no justice, no peace."

In Santa Cruz, California, Police Chief Andy Mills took a knee with protesters in the pose made famous by Colin Kaepernick, with the department tweeting it was "in memory of George Floyd & bringing attention to police violence against Black people."

Two Kansas City, Missouri, police officers⁠-one white man, one black man⁠-were photographed holding aloft a sign reading "end police brutality."

In Fargo, North Dakota, an officer was seen clasping hands with protest organizers while holding up a sign reading "We are one race... The HUMAN race."

Officers in Ferguson, Missouri, participated in a nine and-a-half minute kneel in Floyd's memory, with cheers erupting from the crowd.

Despite the moments of solidarity, conflict broke out between protesters and police in Kansas City, Fargo and Ferguson.

Crucial quote

Although she didn't join the crowd, remarks made by Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields Friday to a black woman protester made the rounds online. "Let me tell you something, I am standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd and everybody's thinking 'how can we use force and diffuse this' and I'm not having it. I'm not having that," she said to the protester. "You have a right to be upset, to be scared, and to want to yell. And we're going to have everybody doing what they need to do and we're going to do it safely. That's my first commitment. And I hear you."

Key background

Protests around the world have broken out since the May 25 death of Minneapolis resident and black man George Floyd, which occurred after a white police officer, caught on video, was seen kneeling on Floyd's neck while arresting him. Three other officers stood by while Floyd could be heard saying "I can't breathe." While the four officers have been fired⁠-and the one captured kneeling, Derek Chauvin, was arrested and charged with third-degree murder⁠-a combination of centuries of systemic racism, ongoing outrage at police, the coronavirus outbreak, and mass unemployment have fueled unrest across the country. Over the past five days of protests, police were captured deploying tear gas, flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets on protesters and journalists, along with numerous incidents of physical violence. One woman in Brooklyn, New York, was roughly thrown to the ground, while an NYPD SUV was seen driving through a crowd of protesters. A Minneapolis photojournalist was permanently blinded in one eye after taking a rubber bullet to the face.

Further reading

'Unacceptable And Wrong': AOC Condemns De Blasio's Defence Of NYPD Driving Into Protesters (Forbes)

Wave Of George Floyd Protests Continues Into Sixth Day (Forbes)

George Floyd Protests Continue Across U.S. For Fifth Day: Joe Biden Condemns Violent Protests (Forbes)

Global Protests Sparked By George Floyd's Death Spread To Toronto, London And Berlin (Forbes)

I'm a New York-based journalist covering breaking news at Forbes. I hold a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Previous bylines:

... Read More

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In Some Cities, Police Officers Joined Protesters Marching Against Brutality

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As protests sparked by George Floyd's death entered their chaotic fifth day, social media filled with images and video of police officers using batons, tear gas and rubber bullets to quell crowds⁠-but some squads joined in with Saturday protesters to express their stance against police brutality, and to show solidarity with the anti-racism movement.

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Johnson will be question by the liaison committee over Cummings and the Coronavirus response.

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Boris Johnson will be questioned by senior MPs later amid continued calls for his top adviser to resign.

The prime minister will appear before the Commons Liaison Committee for 90 minutes, during which he will be asked about Dominic Cummings' controversial lockdown trip to County Durham.

More than 35 Tory MPs have called for Mr Cummings to resign or be fired after his 260-mile journey came to light

But cabinet minister Robert Jenrick told the BBC it was "time to move on".

Wednesday's session, due to begin at 16.00 BST, will be the first time that the PM has faced questions from MPs since the allegations against Mr Cummings emerged at the end of last week.

Among those set to question the PM will be the committee's chairman, Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin, former Tory cabinet ministers Greg Clark and Karen Bradley, ex-Labour minister Hilary Benn and the SNP's Pete Wishart.

The bulk of the hearing will be devoted to the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic - with the section on Mr Cummings' actions due to last less than 30 minutes.

What did Dominic Cummings do?

Should the PM choose his inquisitor?

PM postpones grilling by senior MPs

Mr Cummings' decision in March to drive from his London home to his parents' farm in County Durham with his wife - who had coronavirus symptoms - and his son has dominated the headlines since the story broke on Friday night.

The PM's chief adviser gave a news conference on Monday, explaining that Mr Cummings decided to make the trip because he felt it would be better to self-isolate in a place where he had options for childcare if required.

He has received the continued support of the prime minister, who said that his aide had acted legally and with integrity.

But cross-party critics have called for Mr Cummings to leave No 10, while junior minister Douglas Ross resigned in protest.

Sir Bob Neill, Tory MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, is among those calling for Mr Cummings to resign, saying the row had become a "distraction".

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme Mr Cummings had "real talents and abilities" but "no adviser is indispensable".

However, in a note to fellow MPs, Danny Kruger, former political secretary to Mr Johnson and now Tory MP for Devizes, said demanding the resignation of Mr Cummings was "basically declaring no confidence in the PM".

In response, Sir Bob said he didn't accept this, adding: "This is actually about us wanting to help the prime minister to get back to be able to focus on the key task of pulling the country together."

SCHOOLS: When will children be returning?

EXERCISE: What are the guidelines on getting out?

THE R NUMBER: What it means and why it matters

RECOVERY: How long does it take to get better?

A SIMPLE GUIDE: What are the symptoms?

But Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said Mr Cummings's actions were "within the law" and he retained the backing of the cabinet.

"It doesn't look as if any of the guidelines or the rules have been broken," he told BBC Breakfast.

"And so my view is that now we accept that and we move on because there are many many more important issues that we need to be talking about....like the track and trace system, for example, that's going to have a big impact upon millions of people's lives."

The BBC's assistant political editor Norman Smith said Downing Street clearly hoped the storm would subside and MPs and the media would move on to other issues.

What is the liaison committee?

The Liaison Committee - a panel of 37 MPs who chair various select committees - is the only Commons committee that can question the prime minister.

This will be Mr Johnson's first appearance since he became PM last July.

The committee's new chairman, Conservative MP Sir Bernard Jenkin, announced the session last week - before Mr Cummings' controversial trip came to light.

Sir Bernard was appointed to his new role last week even though he no longer chairs a committee of his own and despite a cross-party attempt to block his appointment.

The MP, who previously chaired the Public Administration Committee, was a leading member, alongside Mr Johnson, of the 2016 campaign to get Britain out of the EU.

Conservative Tobias Ellwood - who chairs the defence select committee - appeared unhappy on Twitter he was not on the list of MPs asked to appear, and was retweeted by fellow Tory Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the foreign affairs committee.

But a statement from Sir Bernard said the whole Liaison Committee had "unanimously agreed" the members of the working group who would be joining him for the session.

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH'S MINDFUL MIX: Soothing sounds to escape to

CORONAVIRUS NEWSCAST: Cummings up roses?

Content available only in the UK

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Johnson to be questioned by MPs over Cummings row

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Boris Johnson will be questioned by senior MPs later amid continued calls for his top adviser to resign. The prime minister will appear before the Commons Liaison Committee for 90 minutes, during which he will be asked about Dominic Cummings' controversial lockdown trip to County Durham.

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Twitter has labelled a trump tweet as having potentially mis-leading claims. Consider the effect this may have on electoral success of a president. Is it twitters duty to fact check or is it meddling?

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Twitter for the first time took action against a series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and providing a link to further information.

Since ascending to the US presidency, Trump has used his Twitter account to threaten a world leader with war, amplify racist misinformation by British hate figures and, as recently as Tuesday morning, spread a lie about the 2001 death of a congressional aide in order to smear a cable news pundit. Throughout it all, Twitter has remained steadfast in its refusal to censor the head of state, even going so far as to write a new policy to allow itself to leave up tweets by "world leaders" that violate its rules.

The company's decision on Tuesday afternoon to affix labels to a series of Trump tweets about California's election planning is the result of a new policy debuted on 11 May. They were applied - hours after the tweets initially went out - because Trump's tweets violated Twitter's "civic integrity policy", a company spokeswoman confirmed, which bars users from "manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes", such as by posting misleading information that could dissuade people from participating in an election.

Trump responded on Tuesday evening with a pair of tweets that repeated his false claims about voting and accused Twitter of "interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election". "Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!" he wrote. Federal law protects the rights of internet platforms to moderate the third-party speech they publish.

Trump's tweets include numerous false statements about California's plan to expand access to voting by mail in November due to the coronavirus outbreak. The tweets now feature a light blue exclamation point icon, with the message "Get the facts about mail-in ballots". The alert label may not be visible when the tweets are embedded in another web page, such as below.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

Clicking on the alert will link users to a " Twitter-curated page " that variously describes Trump's claims as "unsubstantiated" and false. The Twitter page also aggregates tweets from a number of journalists and publications explaining why Trump's statements are false.

Trump's claims about California on Tuesday were blatantly wrong. The state is not sending a ballot to anyone who lives in the state but rather those registered there. Sam Mahood, a spokesman for the secretary of state, Alex Padilla, said in an email only active voters in the state would be mailed ballots.

As states prepare for an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that this will lead to fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare and one analysis found just 143 convictions involving mail-in ballot fraud since 2000, representing 0.00006% of the ballots cast during that time period.

Trump, who voted by mail in Florida in March, has made it clear that he opposes any effort to make it easier to vote by mail for all eligible voters, including sending an absentee ballot application to all voters, a measure the Republican National Committee does not oppose. In March, he said Democratic efforts in Congress to expand mail-in voting would make it so "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again". Studies have shown neither Democrats nor Republicans benefit from a switch to a vote-by-mail system.

Trump also attacked efforts to increase mail-in voting in Michigan and Nevada last week. He falsely said Michigan was sending absentee ballots to all registered voters; in fact the state was only sending an absentee ballot application. Trump later deleted his tweet and reposted a new one accusing the secretary of state of unlawfully sending the applications, something the secretary of state says is well within her authority.

Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, lambasted Twitter's decision in a statement, framing it as an attempt by "Silicon Valley" to "obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters". Parscale also asserted that Twitter's "clear political bias" was a reason that the Trump campaign pulled its advertising from Twitter "months ago".

Twitter banned all political advertising in November 2019, more than six months ago. At the time, Parscale decried the global policy change as "another attempt by the left to silence Trump and conservatives".
Twitter to ban all political advertising, raising pressure on Facebook
Experts on misinformation raised questions about whether Twitter's measure would be effective. Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Democracy Project, noted that the "Get the facts" phrasing could further entrench misinformation with its "legitimizing tone".

"Get the facts implies there is a debate where facts are being marshalled in evidence," he wrote on Twitter. "It elevates the claim."

Claire Wardle, the director of First Draft News, also questioned whether Twitter's information page would be effective in changing any minds.

"If we are to consider the reasoning behind this, it's not a belief that this will change anyone's minds, it's to provide necessary context to a tweet that should be taken down, but if they did that would lead to more conspiratorial thinking," she said. "They're stuck between a rock and hard place."
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Twitter labels Trump's false claims with warning for first time

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Twitter for the first time took action against a series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and providing a link to further information.

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The Lincoln Project -- think they might have misread this one ... may actually encourage people to vote for Trump? Thoughts?

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No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America.

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No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America. https://t.co/wc0VxVOrxA

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No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America. pic.twitter.com/wc0VxVOrxA
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 1, 2020

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No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America. https://t.co/wc0VxVOrxA

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No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America. https://t.co/wc0VxVOrxA

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No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America.

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2020 election and Trump as head of state

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2020 election and Trump as head of state

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This podcast gives an update on the 2020 election. Covid 19 means that the campaigning is very different from usual.   It also notes that Trump spends little time as consoler-in-chief on his briefings, something former Presidents have done much more as head of state.

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Awful scenes in America

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George Floyd death: Clashes as protests spread across US

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Crowds rally at the White House among other places over the death in police custody of George Floyd.

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Use of social media and effective campaigning.

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Use of social media and effective campaigning.

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This is a great example of effective use of media by the conservatives in the 2020 election. It uses YouTube as the platform and draws on pop culture references. Undoubtedly, this sort of stunt increases exposure for the party. To what extent can we argue it is the most influential factor in influencing voters?

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Boris Johnson's funny Love Actually parody | Our final election broadcast

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Andy Burnham the Mayor of Manchester argues the government's response to Coronavirus is London centric. Could this put a strain on the union?

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Two weeks ago, I joined the eight other English regional mayors on a phone call with the prime minister. As a former mayor himself, Boris Johnson gets where we're coming from. Over the best part of an hour, we had a friendly discussion about the release from lockdown and the need for the regions to be empowered to lead recovery within a national framework.

I took the opportunity to repeat a call for a safety-led approach to any release. But I also made a point of saying how important it was for us all to preserve a sense of national unity. We wanted to continue work in that way, but given the complexity of what lay ahead, that would mean being properly involved in what comes next.

When I listened to the PM make his announcement last Sunday - and observing the government's behaviour this week - it has felt as though it had decided to do the polar opposite of what I was asking. Life has changed and, suddenly, everything feels very fractious.

In Greater Manchester, we had no real notice of the measures. On the eve of a new working week, the PM was on TV "actively encouraging" a return to work. Even though that would clearly put more cars on roads and people on trams, no one in government thought it important to tell the cities that would have to cope with that.

Far from a planned, safety-led approach, this looked like another exercise in Cummings chaos theory.

But it wasn't just the lack of notice that was the problem. The surprisingly permissive package might well be right for the southeast, given the fall in cases there. But my gut feeling told me it was too soon for the north. Certainly, the abrupt dropping of the clear "stay at home" message felt premature.

Simply telling people to drive doesn't work for the third of people here who don't own a car

If the government had taken us through their reasoning, perhaps we could have been reassured. But this brings me to a recurrent problem throughout the crisis. The mayor of London is on Cobra, and rightly so. But there is no place for any mayors from the north, or indeed the rest, of England.

For a government elected on votes in the north, and promises to "level-up", it is surprising how quickly it has reverted to the default, London-centric mode in this crisis. Last Sunday's package certainly felt more suited to the south than to the north.

And the same pattern continued into the week. On Thursday, a £1.6bn funding package was agreed for Transport for London. I don't have a problem with that. But where was the deal for Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham?

Like London's Tube, our tram system has seen an increase in passengers this week. But we are running a skeleton, 20-minute service and are not even fully funded to do that. If you are encouraging a return to work, surely any safety-led approach would require you to help cities fund extra trams to allow for social distancing? Simply telling people to drive doesn't work for the third of people here who don't own a car.

It's not just on transport where the government is not reading the room. At the start of the crisis, the message to councils was, "spend what you need to keep people safe, we will see you right". Now it's all about "sharing the cost".

In the same week that the ONS identified the link between the virus and deprivation, the government removed deprivation weighting from the latest council allocations. Nine of the 10 Greater Manchester councils received hefty cuts. The change resulted in a huge shift of resources from north to south, with Knowsley getting a 39% cut and South Gloucestershire a 30% increase. Not so much "levelling-up" as doubling down on the north-south divide.

This matters because northern councils are seeing more cases and facing extra costs, not least on issues like homelessness. At the start of all this, the government rightly launched an "Everyone In" policy. We needed no persuading and already had a scheme in hand. However, a few weeks on, the goalposts were moved. When we said Everyone In, civil servants explained, we meant people who were homeless before the crisis, not those who have become homeless since.

We are now left with 800 people in hotels and apartments but with insufficient funding to help them make a transition to a more secure placement. The communities secretary insists he is fully funding "Everyone In" but our councils see it differently. The gap between national government and local government in England is growing wider by the day.

So where do we go from here?

If the government carries on in the same vein, expect to see an even greater fracturing of national unity. Different places will adopt their own messaging and policies. Nervousness in the north about the R number will see more councils adopt their own approach on schools, as Liverpool, Gateshead and Hartlepool are doing. Arguments will increase about funding. And if we don't get the help we need, there is a risk of a second spike here which, in turn, will pass the infection back down the country through the Midlands to London.

Instead, the government needs to draw a line and show it is listening.

Tomorrow morning, it should ask the mayor of the West Midlands to represent the non-London mayors on Cobra and commit to publish the regional R number, as requested by myself and the mayor of the Liverpool city region. They should quickly follow that by agreeing a transport funding package for cities to put on more buses and trams so that people can travel more safely to work. And something that would win back huge goodwill across all of England would be a commitment to honouring the promise to cover all costs incurred by councils, including on homelessness.

We remain in the midst of a national crisis and we need a sense of national unity to get through it. We all need to work hard next week to bring that back.

*Andy Burnham is mayor of Greater Manchester
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Are we all in this together? It doesn't look like it from the regions | Andy Burnham

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Two weeks ago, I joined the eight other English regional mayors on a phone call with the prime minister. As a former mayor himself, Boris Johnson gets where we're coming from. Over the best part of an hour, we had a friendly discussion about the release from lockdown and the need for the regions to be empowered to lead recovery within a national framework.