By Gideon Rachman
Spanish unemployment is nearing 25 per cent. The suicide rate is climbing in Greece. Britain is in a double-dip recession. Amid all this pain, the cry is growing louder. Austerity policies in Europe are dangerous. Someone has to stop this madness.
REUTERS/POOL via Reuters TV
Welcome to our live coverage of the Leveson Inquiry into the standards and ethics of the UK press, on the second day when Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, is giving evidence.
By Esther Bintliff, Salamander Davoudi and Tim Bradshaw in London, with contributions from FT correspondents. All times London time.
More words have been written about the Falklands/Malvinas than the islands probably deserve. Sadly, almost a thousand service personnel died there too, in the months after Argentina invaded 30 years ago this week. Why is the problem so intractable? The answer to that question can perhaps be boiled down to less than 70 words.
Every time a British prime minister visits Washington, he knows that he will be measured against sepia photos of previous “special relationships” between British prime ministers and US presidents: Churchill and Roosevelt, Thatcher and Reagan, Blair and Bush. So David Cameron both needs to emphasise his closeness to Barack Obama – but not lay it on too thick, lest it sound desperate or “slavish”, to use a word that Cameron once employed in opposition.
It certainly looks as if Obama is going out of his way to give Cameron face. There is the specially-arranged trip on Airforce One to go and watch a basketball game in Ohio. There is a state banquet. (The British keep having to emphasise that this is not a state visit, only the Queen does those.) There is the joint article in the Washington Post, emphasising the “essential” nature of the relationship between the UK and the US. (The word “special” is worn thin through over-use.) And there is the tribute from the American ambassador in London, who claimed in an interview, given just before the Camerons’ arrival, that President Obama’s first call in an international crisis, is to No 10 Downing Street.
By Gideon Rachman
The question of whether a war will break out over Iran’s nuclear programme has been around for so long that it is easy to become almost blasé. In 2006 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was already asserting dramatically: “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.”
William Hague travels this week to Brazil; the UK foreign secretary wants to curry favour and, more importantly, greater trade with Latin America’s rising powers. “Britain is coming back,” he says. “We are turning around decades of British withdrawal in Latin America.”
What a shame, then, that next door in Argentina much of British diplomacy has literally slipped back into the semaphore age – at least when it comes to the Falklands/Malvinas issue.
The British delegation that set off for the European Union summit in Brussels today was in no doubt that it faced a rough ride. The British are being accused of worsening the crisis, by adopting a hardline negotiating position. This is regarded as a little unfair in London. As a senior member of the British delegation puts it – “You can blame Britain for lots of things. But we didn’t invent the euro.”
Photo: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters
Welcome back to the FT’s live coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and its global fallout. By John Aglionby, Tom Burgis and Esther Bintliff on the news desk in London with contributions from correspondents around the world.
Pressure is once again mounting on eurozone leaders to find a convincing solution to the sovereign debt crisis. Today:
Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank made a key speech to the European Parliament, hinting at greater ECB action if governments moved towards a “fiscal compact”
22.32: Tony Barber, the FT’s Europe editor in London, has been analysing the landmark speech by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and offers these insights:
by William Wallis, Africa editor
David Cameron’s relatively liberal stand on gay rights is causing a predictable backlash in Africa. The reacton is not just fuelled by a clash of sexual mores – although Mr Cameron threatening to make British aid conditional on the relaxation of laws against homosexuality, as he did at the recent Commonwealth summit, was guaranteed to raise hackles on a continent where homosexuality is mostly taboo.
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