Monthly Archives: February 2025

Aid, Britain, Defence, Economic, Government, Politics

Labour’s foreign aid cuts: they will undermine security

BRITAIN

THE nature of politics is about choices. Some are forced on governments by circumstance. Others are self-imposed. The Labour Government’s decision to cut the aid budget to pay for an increase in defence spending is firmly in the latter category. It is also very wrong – forcing the world’s poor to pay for Britain’s safety and security. This is a false economy. Cutting overseas aid will make the world more unstable, not less. The very crises that fuels conflict – poverty, failed states, climate disasters, and mass displacement – will only worsen with less development funding. Labour’s logic is self-defeating: diverting financial resources from aid to defence does not buy security; it undermines it.

The numbers tell the story. Despite government attempts to inflate the amounts involved, in real terms the extra £6bn for defence is tiny relative to Britain’s GDP. The UK could easily absorb this through borrowing – especially in a global financial system where pound sterling is heavily traded – or, if the government prefers, through a modest wealth tax. Yet, Sir Keir Starmer has chosen to frame this as a zero-sum game, where aid must give way to security. But why? Because this is not about economic necessity – it’s about political positioning. Labour wants to prove that it can be fiscally disciplined even when the numbers don’t demand it. It wants to neutralise Tory attacks, even when the real battle is over priorities, not affordability.

It is also a move that aligns with Donald Trump’s worldview. The US President wants to close down the US government’s main overseas aid agency, treating it as an expensive indulgence rather than a pillar of foreign policy. A UK prime minister that echoes Mr Trump’s “America first” instincts on defence and aid will likely meet with congeniality. Starmer has been searching hard for common ground since President Trump was re-elected. On aid and defence spending he has found it.

Labour doesn’t just believe in fiscal discipline; it believes that it must adopt financial rectitude and has constructed a justification for that belief. The problem is that by accepting Conservative trade-offs, Labour locks itself into an orthodoxy that it may later need to break. In a volatile world, Britain – outside the EU – must boost high-value exports and cut reliance on fragile supply chains. Even under Joe Biden, the UK was kept out of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, which strengthened transatlantic industrial policy. Will Downing Street ever admit that Britain’s real limit is productive capacity and not budget deficits?

Britain’s fiscal constraint is artificial, but its resource constraints are real. Energy, food, and manufacturing are matters of national security, not just market functions. Without investment, dependence on key imports makes the UK vulnerable to supply-chain shocks and price inflation. If every pound spent requires a cut elsewhere, recent announcements by Labour’s Ed Miliband and Steve Reed wouldn’t have mattered.

Keir Starmer often presents himself as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue – claiming to be adapting to circumstances rather than adhering to dogma. Yet, such pragmatism is itself a belief system, one that treats capitalism’s rules as fixed and unchangeable, markets as being beyond politics, and history as a one-way street where past mistakes justify permanent and crippling caution. In doing so, Starmer isn’t just rejecting viable alternatives – he’s rewriting history to suggest they were never an option to begin with.

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Britain, Government, Policing, Society

Is the role of policing to serve us?

POLICING

IN far too many countries, the word “police” is not a reassuring one. Even in civilised European nations the police are regarded by many law-abiding citizens with dislike and mistrust. In less happier societies around the world, corruption and brutality are horrifyingly normal among police officers.

However, the police of this country have been different from the start because Britain was slow to allow the creation of a police force at all.

Many in Parliament had looked across the Channel and saw gendarmes as an army of oppressors, a force to impose the will of the State. It was only through the enlightened brilliance of Sir Robert Peel which persuaded citizens to change their minds.

He devised a wholly new sort of police. They were to be unarmed and unassuming, their uniforms non-militaristic. Their job was to prevent crime and disorder.

Their methods were persuasion and the cultivation of public confidence, so that an alliance and bond of trust formed between the public and their police force.

Peel’s 1829 principles were codified by Charles Reith in his 1948 history of our police. They advise officers “to recognise always that the power to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and behaviour”.

The principles urge them “to maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public the police”.

For, as Peel pointed out, the police are only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which every citizen should perform when he or she can.

A large part of these rules can be summed up by saying the police are paid to serve us, and not to boss us about.

Yet, today, there are far too many instances of police nationwide departing from these guiding principles. For example, citizens who might struggle to get police attention for a crime who then find officers on their doorstep because of something they have said on social media.

In such egregious but increasingly common cases, have police forgotten their job and invented new tasks which the public suspect of being mistaken and oppressive?

The time may have come for a new Royal Commission on the police, the first since 1962, so they can be guided back to the dutiful path that Sir Robert Peel wisely set for them.

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Britain, Economic, Government, Intellectual Property, Legal, Society, Technology

Press freedom, copyright laws, and AI firms

BRITAIN

AMONG Britain’s greatest contributions to Western culture are press freedom and copyright law. Established side by side more than 300 years ago, they underpinned the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and much of the social change that followed.

They facilitated the free flow and exchange of ideas, opinions, literature and music, and offered legal safeguards for creators and publishers against having their work stolen or plagiarised.

Today, these sacred principles are at risk as never before.

In their headlong rush to develop all-embracing artificial intelligence systems, big-tech firms seem determined to ride roughshod over the intellectual property rights of those whose material they want to appropriate.

Musicians, authors, film and TV companies, artists and media organisations are already seeing their work lifted and used without permission. As the struggle for AI dominance intensifies, this larceny is becoming increasingly brazen.

Worse still, the UK Government appears to be taking the side of the tech giants over the creatives.

In a consultative document on possible changes to copyright law, it has proposed four options. Of these, its “preferred” option is to give a new exemption to AI firms, allowing them to develop their machine learning with copyrighted material without permission unless the holder actively opts out of the process.

Ministers have claimed such a change would give creators more control, but this is an illusion.

One of the strengths of British copyright is that it’s automatic. Works do not have to be registered to be protected from being stolen.

That means individual artists and the smallest local news sites have the same rights and protections as the largest publishers.

Permitting AI firms to take what they want unless rights have been reserved is like telling burglars they can walk into homes unless there is a note on the door asking them not to. In any case, there is no effective technical means of reserving rights and creatives will often be unaware their material has been “scraped”.

It would be far better to strengthen rather than weaken copyright legislation so it can be enforced quickly and effectively against infringements by AI developers. The onus should surely be on them not to break the law in the first place.

Everyone understands that AI is a vast and growing phenomenon which will be of enormous benefit in fields such as healthcare and business efficiency.

Many people will also appreciate the Government’s desire for Britain to be at the forefront of this technological revolution. But that cannot be used as cover to trample over crucial rights and freedoms.

Ingesting the entire output of the British music industry or mass-market news websites will not contribute anything to medical research.

Neither will it do much for our economy, as most of the profits generated by the tech companies will be taken out of the country.

It is both surprising and troubling that the Government has done no analysis of the economic impact of its proposal.

The UK has the world’s second largest creative sector, generating an estimated £126billion a year and supporting 2.4million jobs. Relaxing copyright law would cause it incalculable damage.

We also have vibrant, free and media pluralism – for now at least.

Our traditional press is in the process of rapid flux, as print gradually gives way to new digital platforms and revenue streams. But the fundamentals remain the same – to inform and entertain the public with fair, accurate, challenging and well-written journalism.

In this age of conspiracy, disinformation, and fake news, trusted sources of information and commentary are more important than ever. But it costs money to produce them, and if every article can immediately be copied without payment, then generating the revenue needed to sustain reliable journalism becomes impossible.

A free and independent media has long been a cornerstone of our democracy, but it is under very serious threat. We take it for granted at our peril.

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