United Kingdom

Linden Kemkaran, named leader of Kent County Council a week after Reform UK’s sweeping victories in the local elections, appeared to downplay the impact of the largest conflict in Europe since World War 2.

Speaking after she was named as council leader on Thursday evening, she promised to remove the Ukrainian flag from the chamber.

https://archive.ph/s2sRF

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2711934

Archived

More than 3,000 demonstrators took to the streets of East London on Saturday, May 3rd, to protest plans for what would become China’s largest diplomatic outpost in Europe. The site in question: the historic Royal Mint Court, just steps away from the Tower of London.

Organised by a broad coalition of Hongkongers, Tibetans, Uyghurs, pro-democracy Chinese, and human rights allies, the protest was a show of growing public resistance to what many see as the expansion of Chinese authoritarianism onto British soil.

The Chinese government’s proposal to turn the Royal Mint Court into a massive embassy complex has sparked alarm among diaspora communities and rights campaigners. Critics argue the Mega-Embassy would be far more than a diplomatic centre – rather, a looming symbol of Beijing’s global surveillance reach and political coercion.

“This isn’t just bricks and mortar,” said one protest organiser. “This is about presence. This is about intimidation. It sends a message to those who fled China’s authoritarianism: we are still watching.”

Protesters planned a highly visible march from the Royal Mint, across Tower Bridge, and back, hoping to engage the wider public and draw media attention to their cause. But at 10.25a.m. on the day of the event, the Metropolitan Police abruptly imposed severe restrictions – invoking Sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act – and rerouted the demonstration to a backstreet behind the Royal Mint, drastically limiting its visibility.

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The heavy-handed policing has fuelled speculation about political pressure, with many questioning whether the UK government is bending to China’s will to smooth diplomatic relations. Protest leaders say this sets a worrying precedent.

“This is happening in the UK – in a country that supposedly values freedom of expression. If these are the conditions for protests now, what happens when the Mega-Embassy is built?” one activist asked.

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The May 3rd demonstration follows earlier protests on February 8th and March 15th, which also drew significant crowds and featured speeches by UK Members of Parliament critical of the embassy plans.

Organisers have vowed that the resistance will not end here.

“If the plan for the biggest embassy in Europe is ultimately approved, the people of Hong Kong and all communities oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party would refuse to stay silent. Do not compromise! Today is only the beginning of resistance. This place will, for the foreseeable future, remain a battleground.”

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"Say no to Western imperialism, but the Chinese state is no alternative," said Britain's Socialist Workers Party on its website.

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Rana Slow-Cooked Braised Beef Lasagne was pulled from shelves over seafood contamination fears

Archived link

Foreign powers, ransomware gangs and AI threats are driving a surge in incidents affecting British businesses and government systems, [the British Intelligence Agency] GCHQ has warned.

Britain has suffered double the number of “nationally significant” cyberattacks in recent months compared with the year before, according to GCHQ.

Richard Horne, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said that the GCHQ unit has managed 200 cyberattacks since September, which includes “twice as many nationally significant incidents as the same period last year”.

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Referencing the recent attacks on Marks & Spencer, Co-op and Harrods, Horne told the CyberUK conference in Manchester that “the threat picture is diverse and dramatic” and called ransomware “a persistent threat”.

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Rod Latham, director of cybersecurity at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said: “Our statistics indicate that four in ten businesses are attacked in a year, three in ten charities — millions of cybercrimes in a year.”

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Horne called China “the pacing threat in the cyber-realm” and “a cause for profound and profuse concern”.

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On Russia he said that “we see a direct connection between Russian cyberattacks and physical threats to our security” and warned that amid talks on Ukraine, “it is almost certain that Russia will continue its wider cyber espionage activity … against Ukraine and supporting countries”.

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Archived version

Solar panels with suspected links to Chinese slave labour have been installed by dozens of organisations including Manchester City, Cheltenham Racecourse and David Lloyd gyms, The i Paper can reveal.

The scale of Britain’s use of solar panels made by firms alleged to have used components made from the forced labour of minorities in China can be disclosed for the first time.

As well as commercial premises, the locations include schools, hospitals and universities across the country. There is no suggestion that any of the organisations installed solar panels with knowledge of links to Chinese slave labour.

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[The investigation] has mapped 84 non-residential locations where solar panels have been installed with links to alleged slave labour. The data is based on evidence provided by Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) and open source analysis.

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Last week, growing concerns over Britain’s use of Chinese panels with links to Uyghur oppression forced [UK] Energy Secretary Ed Miliband into banning them from being used by the state-funded Great British Energy company unless it can “ensure that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place” in its business or supply chains.

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IPAC’s senior analyst Chung Ching Kwong believes [the] disclosures are a conservative estimate of the UK’s use of such tainted technology, because of the lack of transparency about the original source of materials used in many panels.

“UK consumers are unknowingly complicit in Uyghur forced labour,” said Ms Kwong. “Our work shows how big a mountain the government has to climb to root out slave-made renewables.”

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Professor Laura Murphy at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University has led the way in tracing the original source of polysilicon in these panels. Her latest report in 2023 detailed how a number of Chinese firms had “high” exposure to production in Xinjiang. As well as Jinko, these included: JA Solar, Qcells, Canadian Solar, Trina Solar, and LONGi Solar.

Her report stated: “None of the companies that were engaged in state-sponsored labour transfers in 2021 has announced any changes to its recruitment methods or shown any resistance to participation in the PRC (Peoples Republic of China) Government’s programmes. Indeed, since that time, the PRC Government’s labour transfer programme has only increased in scale and the pressure on companies to absorb the workers the state deemed to be surplus remains high.”

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The UK formed the Solar Stewardship Initiative (SSI) with trade organisations in a bid to tackle human rights challenges within the global solar supply chain including “rigorously” auditing some Chinese sites. Trini Solar and JA Solar are members. The latter firm was suspended in January after the US banned panels made by one of its subsidiaries but was reinstated after the SSI concluded its supply practices had changed.

SSI’s chief executive Rachel Owens said: “We are acutely aware of the complexities involved in verifying supply chain links that may be several tiers removed from the end-product. That is precisely why the SSI, together with a large range of stakeholders including civil society, human rights experts, international financial institutions and industry, developed the SSI Supply Chain Traceability Standard. It will be implemented in 2025.”

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Some Chinese firms have criticised Sheffield Hallam’s report, claiming it disregards corporate due diligence policies.

But Prof Murphy who strongly defended her research, warned against companies taking the words of Chinese firms as evidence that supply chains are clean.

She said: “A simple attestation that forced labor has been excluded simply isn’t enough to ensure that modules are in fact free and clear of forced labor.”

Chloe Cranston at Anti-Slavery International, claimed a lack of extensive testing of Chinese manufacturers has made the UK a “dumping ground” for panels linked to slave labour.

She said: “What we were seeing is many of the big solar companies… essentially creating one clean supply chain for the US to meet the requirements there but then they were not having to take those same steps in other markets globally meaning that the UK market was opening itself up as a dumping ground.”

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Archived version

There is a lie being told about Anas Sarwar on the internet. The Scottish Labour leader, the story goes, is plotting for Pakistani Muslims to take power so they can “dictate” what is taught in schools.

One right-wing influencer, the former actor Laurence Fox, shared an old video of the Glasgow politician talking, rather uncontroversially, about greater south Asian participation in elected politics. Fox posted: “Sharia law is coming.”

Scottish Labour dismissed a series of accusations about Sarwar on social media. “This is an attempt by individuals with a hard-right agenda to use dog whistles to poison our politics,” a spokesman for the party leader said.

It is not only individuals, however, pushing the Sarwar video. It is also the Kremlin. And it is doing so — in a big departure from its conventional propaganda tactics — in a language understood by only 1 in 40 Scots.

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This kind of race-baiting about Scotland, the UK and other European countries is not unusual from government or pro-government media in Russia. The ultra-conservative nationalist television channel Tsargrad responded to the news of Humza Yousaf, a Pakistani, it said, becoming Scotland’s first minister with the headline “Glasgow has fallen”.

For more than a decade, Kremlin agencies and their proxies have been pushing stories they believe will help undermine western democracies and promote the talking points of the Putin regime, especially on Ukraine. However, it is new to see this kind of content aimed at Scottish audiences in a minority language.

So what is happening? Why do Russian propagandists have Gaelic speakers in their sights? Why would they target a relatively small linguistic community? Well, it is not just Gaels.

The rise of artificial intelligence means it is now cheaper and easier than ever to generate news, fake and real, in different languages, including ones badly served by mainstream media.

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NewsGuard, a US group that rates the reliability of news sites, believes the scheme is designed to manipulate chatbots to make other AI products spew out Kremlin propaganda. It thinks the plan is working. “By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information,” NewsGuard said in March. “The result? Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.”

The term disinformation in recent years has turned into another word for “lie”. For experts, it is something much more that: an industrial-scale, military-grade effort to disorientate or demoralise an adversary using information that ranges from the accurate to the twisted to the completely fabricated.

Tommaso Canetta, of the European Digital Media Observatory, said moving into languages such as Gaelic was part of a broader attempt to flood the internet with Russian disinformation. “It is a strategy to create as much noise as possible,” he said, adding that because the network was largely automated any extra investment required to translate content from Russian or English into Gaelic was minimal.

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Thanos Sitistas, a researcher at Greece Fact Check, an organisation that investigates claims online and in media ... suggested that the Gaelic platform had become more targeted since it was launched in late December. “They have adapted their content for Scottish audiences,” Sitistas said, pointing to a recent article about polling indicating greater support for independence. “They are picking it up and then spinning it to give it more traction.”

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Kremlin-linked outlets have previously assumed a linguistic link to support for Scottish independence, even though there is little real-world evidence for it. Joanna Szostek, an expert in Russian political communication at Glasgow University, wonders whether this is why they are using Gaelic. “I think the Kremlin has long been keen on the idea of winning over Scots who dislike and distrust the British establishment — distrust in the ‘mainstream’ is often associated with belief in disinformation,” she said. “Perhaps they think such people might be prevalent in the Gaelic-speaking community? Or, speculatively, this could just be a way for certain Russian propagandists to extract money from state backers for an unusual project. Disinformation is an industry, after all.”

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Quality of care dropped as staff were replaced with less experienced nurses, researchers at the University of Surrey say

Food safety watchdog issues alert over Asda recalling hot and spicy chicken breast slices

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33584974

Archived

British firms working for the UK’s military or intelligence services are advising staff not to connect their mobile phones to Chinese-made electric cars over fears that Beijing could steal sensitive national security data.

Executives at two of the nation’s leading defence giants have told The i Paper that the entire sector is taking a “cautious” and “belt and braces” approach to the possibility of the Chinese state spying on staff via the country’s electric vehicles (EVs).

The security clampdown within the UK’s highly secretive defence sector follows revelations from The i Paper that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has banned cars relying on Chinese technology from sensitive military sites across the country. In some cases, the MoD has asked staff to park their EVs at least two miles from their workplace.

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The latest disclosure of security worries relating to Chinese EVs could also raise concern among some EV buyers, who are increasingly turning to brands like BYD because of their affordability and longer range.

The role of Chinese companies and equipment in critical infrastructure was brought sharply into focus after the government was recently forced to take control of British Steel from its Chinese owner, Jingye Group, to prevent it from closing blast furnaces at the country’s last virgin steelmaking site.

It is understood that the UK’s leading military production groups, including BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, and Raytheon, as well as US defence giant Lockheed Martin and French defence and cyber security firm Thales, are among those firms that have taken precautions against the potential for Chinese EVs to spy on their staff.

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Archived

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Working with the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, the Guardian found more than 150 posts from 29 accounts on three days in August 2024 that sought to draw the attention of anti-immigrant groups and the far right to [exiled dissident Finn] Lau and other Hong Kong exiles. Cybersecurity experts who have reviewed the posts say they exhibited some similarities to a major online influence operation that a Chinese security agency is suspected of orchestrating.

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Lau and his fellow activists have been called traitors, with bounties on their heads that are three times what the authorities offer for murderers. Relatives back home have been arrested and intimidated. As he read the posts, Lau suspected a chilling new tactic: an attempt to harness far-right violence.

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Posts on X inciting attacks on Lau and others were directed at far-right figures, including Tommy Robinson. “They’re even supporting the Muslim minorities too!” read one post denouncing Hongkongers, sent to the Reform UK MP Richard Tice. It gave the date and location of a planned gathering of Hongkongers a few days later. Posts on Telegram appeared in the channels of the leaders of the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative.

Online incitement appears to represent a novel weapon in the arsenal that projects Beijing’s power. Lau is one of the opponents of the regime – Hongkongers as well as Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese and campaigners for democracy – subjected to what the US-based advocacy group Freedom House calls “the most sophisticated, global and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world”. [...]

I usually don’t like to share content behind paywalls, because quality journalism must be supported. But the Financial Times is doing well and this article is important.

The benefits and limits of privatisation

Some 40 years ago, the United Kingdom became a pioneer in the privatisation of publicly owned industries.

Initially the focus was upon a few large businesses.

But over time this changed, as the government privatised monopolies or quasi-monopolies and then went on to contract with private suppliers of a wide range of sensitive public services.

The experience has now been lengthy and varied enough to learn some important lessons, the most important of which is that the basic principles of economics matter.

If a number of suppliers compete in the market for a good or service, consumers are properly informed about what they are buying and able to switch easily to other suppliers, and business owners bear the cost of failure, then private profit-motivated enterprises are going to be the best way to provide the goods or services in question.

But things are very different if consumers have no effective choice or, by virtue of their vulnerability or frailty, are unable to make informed choices at all.

In such cases, the state must step in, by writing and monitoring contracts and instructing and appointing regulators.

Whenever that is the case, no general presumption in favour of supply by profit-seeking entities can exist.

The fundamental argument in favour of private suppliers is that they would still be motivated to supply goods and services as cheaply as possible.

A purely political reason is that private contracts allow government to evade self-inflicted constraints on public sector borrowing even when the proceeds are used to create productive assets.

The argument against, however, is that, in the absence of effective monitoring and credible penalties, private suppliers will become ruthless rent extractors: they will deliver shoddy goods and services, impose various hidden costs and shift risks on to others, mainly taxpayers.

If so, it must be stressed, this would be entirely rational behaviour. The response has to be regulation. But the regulators can be captured — and they often are.

The British experience is now long enough to illuminate these possibilities.

In the years of Margaret Thatcher, privatised industries included British Telecom, British Petroleum, British Airways, British Aerospace, British Gas, Rolls-Royce, Rover, British Steel and the electricity industry. Many of these businesses were, or would soon be, operating in fully competitive markets. But the energy and telecommunication industries continued to have their own regulators, even though a measure of competition could be injected into both.

This was partly because they enjoyed a degree of monopoly power and partly because security of supply was vital in both cases. Finally came two controversial cases: water and railways. Water is a classic monopoly, while the railways has some monopoly elements.

If we look back at all this, we can see that experience has lived up to economists’ expectations: the greater the competition and the more credible the possibility of bankruptcy, the less controversial the privatisations are today.

It is not surprising that water and railways have been problematic. In the former, rent extraction and dumping of environmental costs are at the heart of the complaints. In the latter, the problem is essentially that a way of separating track from train was never achieved.

Yet, as Sam Freedman notes in his recent book, Failed State, something else has happened too. This is the privatisation of public services that are not natural monopolies, but that also do not have informed customers able to look after themselves and, if necessary, shift to other suppliers.

Examples include care homes for the elderly and children, prisons and, for a while, the probation service. There is much more to his book than that. But Freedman concludes, on one children’s home, that “it is an astonishing indictment of the British state that it no longer has the ability to provide care for those who need it most, and instead allows blatantly ill-qualified people to charge exorbitant fees to provide unacceptable levels of care.”

Much of this private provision has, it seems, been imposed on local government to conceal responsibility for the refusal, in the UK’s over-centralised polity, to fund services adequately.

Yet it also raises big questions. Are profit-seeking businesses really the best way to provide such services? Would it not be better if local authorities did so? Or, given the known failures of the latter, might it be wiser to consider some form of mutual or charitable provision as an alternative?

It is time to examine where private provision will not work and then, as Sir Keir Starmer might say, consider some “change”.

- Martin Wolf

https://www.ft.com/content/ec1c26ff-b6fc-4dc0-b0ac-7d26d6179788

The author:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Wolf