Latika Takes

The parallels with Jo: An interview with Brendan Cox

Australia is reeling after the horrific attack on Helen Haines MP. Haines, 65, was allegedly rammed multiple times by a 43-year-old Brendan Nugent who was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser…

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4 days ago · 2 likes · Latika M Bourke

In the US, the Democrats are confident.

‘Republicans’ path to keeping control of the House has all but evaporated,’ said the independent, non-partisan Cook Political Report.

Meanwhile, Race to the White House, which has correctly predicted the Senate race in the last three elections, calculates a 72 per cent chance the Democrats could take the Senate, too.

The chief issue is the same one which helped Trump take back the White House — the cost of living. The totem of this problem is petrol and diesel prices, which have shot to Biden-era, pandemic highs thanks to Trump’s war in Iran, started in spite of his pledge not to start ‘Forever Wars.’

October will set the record for the most expensive month of gas prices ever. This record was also set in the last two months.

Unsurprisingly, the Reuters/Ispos poll shows Trump’s approval rating has tanked to a new low of 31 per cent, and his disapproval rating is at 66 per cent, up from 41 per cent at the time of his inauguration.

If the midterm results are bad for the Republicans, Trump will no doubt attempt to spin his way out of them. But for now the record shows him having it both ways. He says he is not on the ballot, but he has poured enormous energy into rallying the MAGA faithful to turn out to vote, staging rallies in swing states and for key candidates.

One of those has been Vivek Ramaswamy, who, in a sign of the Republicans’ desperation, has taken US politics, polarisation and personal attacks to a new low. The candidate to be Governor of the state of Ohio released an ad featuring the mother of his Democratic rival, calling her daughter, Amy Acton, a liar.

But this was hardly political gold dust. Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody when she was 12 years old and their stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her. The last time Acton set eyes on her mother in person was in the courtroom when her stepfather was arrested and indicted in 1978. He fled the state, evading prosecution and died in 2004.

Acton called the platforming of her mother ‘despicable’ and ‘exploitative.’

That does not even cover it. It is worth zooming out to appreciate what Ramaswamy did.

He tried to frame his political opponent as a liar by exploiting a family breakdown triggered by her allegations of paedophilia at the hands of her stepfather. These claims were taken seriously enough in the late 1970s to warrant the removal of her and her brother from their mother’s care and led to a grand jury indictment.

Pitting family breakdowns into the political arena is gross at the most basic level, but to know it involves allegations of paedophilia is unforgivable, and it should especially disgust the MAGA supporters who pressed for the release of the Epstein Files.

Not that Ramaswamy, or the Republicans who matter, are even sorry. What they did next was worse. Instead of admitting the gross error of judgment and basic humanity, Ramaswamy claimed ownership and said he would spend $4 million to air it.

When this tawdry affair reached the White House, what did the President and Vice President do?

‘Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,’ US Vice President JD Vance said.

Trump also cheered Ramaswamy on and told him to ‘ride with it’.

‘I don’t care. If it were my mother speaking badly about me, you’d be making it the number one story on the news,’ he told reporters.

‘This has nothing to do with a stepfather or anything else. This has to do with the fact that a woman got out, the mother of a person running for governor of one of the greatest states, where I set records and said that she’s a liar.’

It has everything to do with the stepfather and far more.

Chris Christie, former Republican Governor of New Jersey, told the US ABC Network’s This Week: ‘This goes to the rotten moral core that Donald Trump has created for my party. And you then take probably two of the most prominent Trump wannabes in our party, JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, and what they’re showing America is, we want to be just as morally bankrupt as Trump.’

‘This is the future of our party if we don’t get our act together: to have charmless people with no charisma and the lack of moral clarity and centre that Donald Trump has.’

‘One of the long-term impacts from this year’s election will be for Republicans in general, and Vice President Vance in particular, defending an ad that attempted to seek political gain from the rape of an underage girl,’ Doug Sosnik, who advised former President Bill Clinton, told Latika Takes.

Endorsing an attack ad over child rape is surely the end state of Trump’s vitriolic brand of politics, which began with casual but still eyebrow-raising insults like ‘Crooked Hillary’ and corrosive conspiracy theory questioning of opponents, such as the citizenship of the first black president, Barack Obama.

Trump’s success has been to execute so many shocking tactics that the public has become numb and desensitised to the gradual but now clear erasure of any standards in public life and campaigning.

In the United States, where political violence, just like gun violence, has become an accepted part of their culture, assassination attempts are hardly irregular. High-profile attempts have been made on President Trump himself, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the US Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. January 6 and the Presidential pardoning of those convicted for their insurrection crimes all but sent a green light to anyone else contemplating violent methods.

But those outside America do not have to accept this as their destiny.

MAGA’s exploitation of child rape should serve as a midterm moment for all those involved in public life and setting standards, and especially for those abroad who think copying the Make America Great Again formula will make them electorally successful at home.

Well before Helen Haines’ attacker was identified in the media, and his social media posts, which show an assortment of far-left and pro-climate change leanings, were exposed, One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson rushed to News 24 airwaves to concede an error.

This related to a cartoon she had published on social media mocking Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie’s vaginal prolapse. She said she now believed the cartoon was not appropriate, that she had not seen it herself and that it would be taken down. Originally, she had told Lambie to ‘lighten up,’ despite now claiming she had not seen it before it went out.

Weeks earlier, she was on the back foot over a cartoon that called the former SAS Captain and federal Liberal MP a traitor. Hanson is not the only one reassessing. The Labor Cabinet Minister Clare O’Neill in February deleted a post in which she referenced being ready to smash some Liberals, having just ‘smashed’ a Pilates class. She removed the post that afternoon, after it, rightly, triggered an outcry.

Words do matter. On the weekend, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said as plainly as a public servant could on the ABC’s Insiders program that the AFP monitors a direct relationship between those cartoons and an uptick in threats made against politicians.

On X, Hanson shot back: ‘The Please Explain cartoons have nothing to do with the tragic attack on Helen Haines. They will not be going anywhere,’ she said.

Hanson, who blocks the ABC and The Guardian from press events, accused her critics of wanting to censor her.

These same cartoons have depicted former Labor Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews being run over and independent Senator Lidia Thorpe under the wheels of a vehicle. If these are meant to be jokes, Hanson can and should find better ways to make the public laugh. Her cartoons have been an innovation in political communication and an effective way of skewering government incompetence when others have been too timid; to ensure their continued success, she needs to enforce better quality control to ensure that they don’t become a liability.

This has zero to do with cancelling or censoring. And it certainly does not mean letting our political leaders off the hook when they are performing badly. It should be clear that if you need to depict harm to your opponent, mock their health or accuse them of treachery, whatever political argument you were trying to make was long lost. Being nasty is not clever, and we are about to find out if it is even electorally successful for Trump and his acolytes.

You don’t need an intelligence officer to tell you that in our hyper-connected world, the path to online radicalisation is now so swift and silent that it can be possible to miss. It can happen in days. The metric of political content is not whether the target of the attack should have big enough shoulders, but whether the content could inspire or even incite someone who is disaffected, mentally disturbed or prone to radical ideologies.

Australians have always been able to biff with vigour and well. The nation hardly has a reputation for being shrinking violets. So as Americans prepare to have their say on Trump’s methods, so too can we.

This piece was first published by The Nightly

This is a project I have been long promising and even longer imagining; finally, it’s here!

My guide to London will list five top recommendations on where to eat, drink and play in London and more. If you would like my recommendations on something specific, find my email at the bottom of this post.

There is no shortage of things on offer in London, but you can spend an awful lot of money on very poor-quality or basic food, coffee and experiences.

If you are a first-timer, regular or local to London, this guide is for you because the five central premises that dictate my recommendations are:

• Australian-level standards: Food, wine and coffee will be assessed to Australian tastes and expectations

• Consistency: If something makes my list, rest assured I’ve visited it frequently and received the same quality time after time

• Proximity: This guide will unashamedly focus on Zone 1, where I believe the need to fossick to find London’s gems is most acute

• Value: This guide won’t penny-pinch, but it does not intend to send you to Michelin and overpriced restaurants for no point. London is an expensive city, so if you are going to spend on meals and coffee out, you may as well make sure you paid for an experience that was memorable and worth every penny

• Original, unique and boutique: London is blighted by mass chains. Whatever you do, I beg you to avoid them at all costs, and I am here to help you avoid the chain trap and find meals you will go home and brag about

In 2010, I returned to London for the first time since I spent a year here after finishing high school and starting university. I had just joined the Canberra press gallery and was on a long break after spending the entire 2010 election campaign on the road.

Around this time, I had switched from drinking tea to coffee and found London’s coffee offerings horrifically limited. Back then, it felt like it was just Flat White and Sacred, and you really had to travel and hunt down Australian-style coffee. It was an almost scarring experience and every trip back until I finally moved here had to factor in finding decent coffee.

Happily, proper coffee has exploded across London in the last decade, and you will not find it difficult to find a decent cup amid the Prets and Costa Coffees. But still, there is good, and then there is the best.

My top five coffee destinations in London are below.

1. WatchHouse.

WatchHouse. tops my list for London’s best coffee, hands-down. As soon as you walk into WatchHouse. you know it’s serious about coffee. The architecture is clean and minimalist; everything screams you are here to drink coffee and little else.

Wooden shelves line the store, and while the tables and chairs are all wooden and seemingly uninviting, there is something quite calming about the coffee experience in WatchHouse.

WatchHouse. was founded by Roland Horne, who started the cafe in a former 19th-century watch house in trendy Bermondsey, south-east London, in 2014. He said the gap in the market he sought to fill was a ‘holistic’ experience of coffee.

I discovered WatchHouse quite late in the game, I think, after Covid, which says something about its concept and success: it stayed small and focused, perfecting one thing it wanted to do well, coffee, before expanding. They didn’t start offering brunch until two years later, and even today, the food offerings are relatively limited. You come here for coffee, not so much to eat, although you can.

This ethos lives on, as even today they divide their cafes into brunch and espresso houses.

In 2020, they began their roastery, and this is a great cafe worth visiting if you are in the area. Every coffee is perfect. I have never in my life had a bad cup here, and the consistency is excellent no matter which cafe or ‘House’ you visit.

WatchHouse serves everything from batch brew to cold brew to espressos, matcha lattes, tea and more.

A flat white sets you back £4.5. Collect loyalty stamps on the WatchHouse. app.

Find WatchHouse at more than 30 locations around the world. Favourites in London include: Covent Garden, Bishopsgate, St Mary Axe, Borough, Bermondsey and Bond Street.

https://watchhouse.com/

2. Daisy Green

The Daisy Green story is as Australian-done-good overseas as you can get.

Established by Prue Freeman, who began selling banana bread and coffee from a bike cart when the only coffee available in the Square Mile, where she worked, was Starbucks and Pret.

Daisy Green, her first brick-and-mortar cafe, began in Marble Arch in 2013. She now has more than 20 locations across London, making Australian coffee ubiquitous in all the places you find yourself in London.

Each Green has a unique first name, usually related to the location and carries a unique art signature thanks to Prue’s husband, business partner and art connoisseur Tom. Playful and buzzy, the Green cafes target an affordable price point with their menus, although the £5 lamingtons are eyewateringly high. They are very popular brunch spots, and some attract a younger crowd than others.

A flat white sets you back £3.9 with no extra charge for oat milk, making it one of the most affordable coffees in London. Collect loyalty stamps on the Daisy Green app.

Find a Daisy Green cafe at more than 20 locations. Favourites in London include: Ziggy Green in Regent Street and Larry’s underneath the Portrait Gallery.

https://www.daisygreenfood.com/

3. Roasting Plant Coffee Shop

Roasting Plant Coffee Shop brings the theatre to your daily cup of coffee. Ordering your coffee is a sensory, if not slightly gimmicky, experience thanks to founder Mike Caswell’s Javabot system.

Beans are stored in clear canisters along the wall and are pushed through the pneumatic system overhead for roasting. It means there are usually several bean types on offer and the baristas will always have a recommendation handy to your taste profile.

The only downside is that all those beans rattling through plastic tubes over your head can get a bit noisy. This is not the place for a quiet or serious work meeting.

Compared to WatchHouse. and Daisy, Roasting Plant’s decor is less upscale and far more everyday and simplistic, as opposed to WatchHouse’s elegant calm.

A flat white sets you back £3.65. Collect loyalty stamps on the Rwrd app.

Find Roasting Plant Coffee at five locations in London. Favourites are London Bridge and The Strand.

https://roastingplant.co.uk/

4. Kiss the Hippo

Kiss the Hippo meets somewhere between WatchHouse. and Roasting Plant. It has just 12 locations across London, making it less ubiquitous than WatchHouse. but more available than Roasting Plant.

Kiss the Hippo is also aiming for a coffee-only aesthetic; it does serve a few pastries, cakes and cookies but focuses predominantly on good coffee. It serves espresso, drip and cold coffees and offers a choice of beans.

Established in 2018, it is a relative latecomer to the UK’s speciality coffee boom but focuses on being carbon neutral.

They take coffee seriously and you will not walk out of here disappointed with your brew.

A flat white sets you back £4.2. Collect loyalty points through their website and stamps on the Rwrd app.

Find Kiss the Hippo at 12 locations in London. Soho is the best for the central London tourist.

https://kissthehippo.com/

5. Grind

Grind pitches to the same market as Daisy. The vibe is buzzy, fun and noisy and splits into three different types of venues: coffee trucks, coffee shops and restaurants and cocktail bars.

It’s the place where your afternoon cup might turn into an espresso martini and more.

I have a special spot in my heart for Grind because when I moved to the UK in 2016, Grind was one of the few places putting Australian-style coffee and brunch on the London menu.

It has now been completely overtaken by the explosion of look-alikes, but Grind is a consistent stayer. Founded by one half of the Bodyrockers, Australian DJ and musician Kaz James, and entrepreneur David Abrahamovitch, Grind has gone on to supply coffee to Soho House and British Airways and is heavily focused on retail offerings like canned iced coffees.

They began in Shoreditch in 2011, right at the start of good coffee’s birth in London, but happily, their coffee has never suffered as a result of their expansion.

A flat white starts at £4.25. Collect loyalty points on the Grind app.

Find Grind at 14 locations in London. My favourite is London Bridge.

https://grind.co.uk/

I waited for a whole day in the virtual queue to get these tickets, which sold out in an instant for the year, and boy, did that patience pay off.

Late last night, with just a few dozen people shuffling in a single line the full 68.3 metres in a black room, I viewed the Bayeux Tapestry.

The British Museum has brought the Tapestry from Normandy, France to London until July next year. And it is sublime and divine. The experience was immersive and bordered on spiritual. (Although the British Museum could really do away with the constant naggers who tell you at every second to queue and shuffle. You are somewhat raced through it and it does dampen the aura somewhat.)

I was stunned at how vibrant the 11th-century artwork is, and how much movement and activity it captures. I thought I would be seeing a faded, perhaps frayed and dulled piece of linen that would look like hieroglyphs on fabric.

How wrong I was. The Tapestry bursts with life and animation, and even the figures depicted have very easy-to-read facial expressions. It was astonishing how vivid and graphic embroidered battle scenes could be.

The British Museum will open its next round of tickets next year. If you can get them, get them. And for my overseas readers, yes, this is absolutely a reason to justify a trip to London. C’est magnifique!

The Guardian

Rioting France and the Welfare State

At what point do Western leaders acknowledge and respond to the failed economic model that voters all around the world are reacting to, with varying shades of viciousness?

Surely a new Grand Bargain is needed that acknowledges both capitalism and socialism, as they have been sold and rolled out have failed. Welfare states are not sustainable, but nor is the US model of entrenched inequality that creates oligarchy and trillionaires, leaving the rest to ill-afford the cost of living.

This week it was France’s turn to signal its anti-establishment ferocity, with looting, burning and violent protests in Paris. Riots and protests aren’t exactly oddities in France. And these sorts of protests are not uncommon across Europe; remember London’s bout of similar riots in 2011.

Yet, even by French standards, these were exceptional as student protests morphed into wider complaints about the cost of modern living, inequality, as well as thugs hijacking the demonstrations and looting designer stores. And these collide with France’s precarious fiscal position and the very real prospect that Emmanuel Macron’s legacy as President will be to open the doors of the Élysée to populist Marine Le Pen.

Noah Smith says France needs an austerity moment, but Western societies are caught in a trap of not recognising the difference between a welfare state and an unsustainable model.

Noahpinion

France and the limits of liberalism

I’m writing about this a little bit late, but France has been having some pretty bad riots…

Read more

2 days ago · 540 likes · 74 comments · Noah Smith

Desperate GOP throws spaghetti at the wall

Donald Trump has thrown his support behind a Republican ad run by Vivek Ramaswamy who is running to be Ohio Governor. The ad represents a new low in MAGA’s tactics. It features the mother of his Democratic rival saying her daughter is a liar. Amy Acton has said she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child and she was removed from her mother’s care at the age of 12.

Ramaswamy is unrepentant and will spend $3 million promoting the ad, amid Republican fears that the party is going to get wiped out in the midterms, largely viewed as a scorecare on Trump’s second term.

The Observer

Susan Collins secures tariff exemptions for Canada

In a sign of how real the threat to Republicans are, the moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins from the border state of Maine, has secured some last-minute tariff exemptions on Canadian goods, such as plywood sheets, paper products, machinery and refrigeration equipment, and packing crates and boxes. She made the announcement on social media.

But shortly after, the White House issued a statement saying the goods exempted would be offset with tariffs on valves, carpets and waste products.

CTV News

Bee immunity

It could just be an old wives tale but as soon as I feel myself getting sick I run for honey. Turns out bee hives are an incredible chemical mix of immunity.

The Conversation

And that’s my list for this week.

Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye; I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.

📻 For my media this week, I joined the BBC’s Radio Scotland to discuss the horrific attack on Australian MP Helen Haines.

🎙️ On the ABC’s Global Roaming, Geraldine Doogue and I discussed Europe’s war with Russia, and we replayed our interview examining how to protect women in politics.

Haines was at the boot of her own car outside her electorate office at the time. Local business owners who witnessed the attack rushed to her aid and performed a citizen’s arrest on Nugent, who is now charged. Just like after the Bondi attack, it is the everyday bravery that has stood out.

Haines’ husband of 40 years, Phil, also spoke to the media alongside the Governor-General Sam Mostyn. Both shone and led the tone for the national response. Phil Haines showed an incredible level of bravery and stoicism as he spoke of his wife’s legs both being amputated and urging well-wishers to channel their thoughts into fundraising rather than flowers.

‘The two most important parts of Helen for us as a family is her heart and her mind. Her heart is huge. And her mind - she has the sharpest intellect,’ he said.

‘We are thankful and grateful that at this stage her heart and her mind are in good shape.’

Mostyn called on the community to ask itself how it had lost its 'great skill of disagreeing well and with decency to each other.’ Nugent’s motives are unclear, and mental health issues are clearly being examined; he had posted pro-Hamas and extreme left content on social media.

As the news broke on Monday morning UK time, there was a sense of dread and horror. After Bondi, it feels that Australia’s innocence is well and truly shattered. The things that never used to happen in Australia, including political violence, are starting to happen.

And it carried a terrible echo of 2016, the year I moved to the UK, and the horrifying assassination of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was stabbed to death by a man sympathising with far-right ideology in her constituency while she was meeting voters.

Political violence in the UK has been recurring with the assassination of David Amess MP by an Islamic State supporter in 2021 and the alleged murder of Reform supporter and former Tory Minister Ann Widdecombe this year.

After Jo’s death, her husband and father of their two children Brendan Cox established More in Common, an NGO which conducts research and helps devise policy aimed at healing social polarisation.

I spoke with him about the attack on Helen Haines and below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Latika M Bourke (LMB): Brendan, I saw your tweet. You came out of a long meeting, you said, to see that news. Can you tell me about how you heard the news, your feelings and reaction to it?

Brendan Cox (BC): I had actually been in an all-day meeting in a basement in Cambridge about the growing anti-semitism problem in the UK and how we can build a coalition to address it. And I’d encouraged people at the beginning of the day to turn their phones off so that we could have a proper sort of deep conversation — the substance of the conversation deserved that.

And therefore, it was only during a late afternoon break when I came outside to check my phone that I then had lots of messages from friends saying, ‘I hope you’re okay, I’ve seen the news, hope you’re okay,’ which is always bad news.

I get those messages from time to time when something awful happens. So I clicked across to BBC News to see what it was, and obviously the story was what happened to Helen.

I think I’d describe it as a punch to the guts, that sense of just profound sorrow, of remembered pain, of present concern, hope that she might be okay and the fear that she might not be.

And obviously it all replays all of the… because it’s so similar.

I know nothing about Helen other than what I’ve read in the last day or so, but from what it sounds like, actually, completely similar to Jo, in terms of both where it happened, obviously not literally. But in terms of it wasn’t the corridors of power; it was back in the constituency, in your home, where you feel safe, and you should be able to feel safe meeting with constituents.

It sounds like Helen is incredibly focused on her community first; Jo was very similar, and Jo’s first name is Helen, so there’s a weird sense of parallels.

And then, of course, you go through all of the pain knowing what her family are experiencing. When I first heard the news, I didn’t know how old she was, whether she had young kids, and so all of that just goes through your head.

LMB: Brendan, I can vouch that she’s exactly like Jo in that, just like a really gentle person who is the least likely — and not saying any violence against anyone is okay, obviously — but you can see why some people might be targeted. Jo and I think Helen share this trait of being completely unremarkable in that sense; they were kind of very pastoral. It’s weird to me.

BC: Yeah, no, I agree. I’m not in Australia; I don’t know Australia well, but what I have seen, it feels like a reaction to it; the scale of the shock is partly driven by that, because again, similar to the scale of shock in the UK when Jo was killed, this sense of ‘What the hell, what the hell is this? This is not who we are.’

LMB: Yes. Yes. Brendan, you mentioned how you know you hear of all these messages, your friends texting you, that must be happening an awful lot to you because we have had so many political assassinations and attempts in the UK and elsewhere in the world. And now, in the unlikeliest place, in country Australia.

What is your sense of when you see these messages just coming at you all the time, way too often?

BC: Yeah, each time I get a barrage of messages, it fills me with a sort of dread of what the f*** has happened there. And the key to understanding exactly what that family will be going through, some of it’s quite granular in terms of who will tell; do they have children to tell? Will there be a moment of hope before the realisation of the scale of it, all those kinds of things.

And then, of course, the macro political situation, which is: how are democracies ending up in a place where this kind of violence - it’s not daily, thank God, I mean, the threats are daily, but the actual attacks feel like they are increasing in their regularity. How have we built a society where that is happening, and that’s a deep, longer-term…

The bits where I think we have agency — one of the things when Jo was killed was how disempowering it was; you can’t do anything about it, you can’t make it, right.

And I think similarly, in the case of Helen, it looks like, thank God, she’s going to survive and what a huge relief that is and for her family — the pain and the impact have happened.

Just a summary of the news — it sounds like the motivation might be quite complicated and unclear — but, even if the motivation for this might have been personal or specific, the sort of culture that accepts this kind of violence and where violence becomes normalised is one that we should all worry about.

Again, I can’t talk about this case because I don’t know it and it might not apply to this case. But the wider pattern of intimidation and a political culture of violence, there are reasons that that is happening.

LMB: And what are the solutions? I know you do a lot of work at More in Common on this. I mean, this is a deep and complex problem, as you said, but if there is any advice you can give to just an ordinary person feeling so shocked about this, what is it?

BC: I think there are two things, so I think one: there are a set of policy changes that need to happen, and those might be very tactical things, like reviewing the security of members of parliament, but those are tactical; those are not going to solve this.

And to be fair to Australia, they’ve led in some of the thinking about this, the ban on social media for under-16-year-olds, that kind of stuff, and I know that there’s a conversation now happening about an algorithm clampdown.

But I would say that the policies that are on the table are a pale imitation of what’s needed to make sure that the information environment doesn’t undermine our democracy. So, in terms of policy, I would say that is very high on the list.

So, only after Jo’s murder, we launched something called Britain Talks, with The Mirror newspaper, which is on the left, as you know, and The Express newspaper, which is on the right.

And it matched their readers together to have a conversation about what we’ve got in common.

LMB: Political violence in the UK has gotten worse against MPs since Jo’s death; do you think we’re succeeding in that, though?

BC: It’s hard to say. The information environment, the role of hostile states in boosting extremism. There’s a whole series of underlying societal conditions, I guess, which are accelerating and driving that violence.

I think that the work that has happened since Jo’s murder in the UK would have had an impact on that, but it’s swimming against the tide, coming back to the online algorithms, unless we address those structural drivers

We definitely need communities and individuals to provide leadership in the space, but we also need a conducive policy about it.

LMB: And how far would you go on that with an algorithm? What’s your recommendation?

BC: I’m actually doing quite a lot of policy work on this at the moment in the UK.

Obviously, I know the UK context better in terms of what we’ve got in terms of the Online Safety Act; my understanding is that in terms of the Australian process at the moment, there is a live conversation around algorithmic amplification.

LMB: Yeah, Sikorski, the Foreign Minister of Poland, a couple of years ago said that algorithms just should be banned, which I think is quite interesting because that is the social media model we all signed up to; originally, it was like, I get to choose who I’m following ….

BC: Totally

LMB: And then it turned into this thing where now you’re getting spewed up all this weird stuff?

BC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it’s all pretty clear what the algorithm does. It’s designed to either reinforce your prejudices or make you furious with people who have different views by serving up the most extreme content.

LMB: Yes

LMB: And just my final question, Brendan, you’re watching this horror show too often. Do you still recommend to people to go into public life?

BC: Yep, every day.

LMB: Do you really?

BC: Yeah, yeah, I think this is how we’ll change things, how we’ll change the policy environment that is talked about. It’s how we get good things done. It’s how we’ll find ourselves out of this crisis now.

I also worry about my friends who are in politics, but if good people stand back, then we know where politics will go. So I don’t downplay the risks; I don’t pretend like those risks don’t exist. But I think in a period of those risks, the importance of the service is compounded.

I think it becomes even more important to step forward and, through the work that we’ve done in Jo’s name, for example, the Jo Cox Leadership Program, the Labour Party has supported and trained hundreds of women into politics.

Again, women tend to get the most abuse, the most threats …

LMB: Yes.

BC: … often the most violence directed against them, but certainly one of Jo’s beliefs was that until we get a Parliament that better reflects the nation, then we’ll continue to create policy that doesn’t serve the nation, and even in the midst of, in the aftermath of what happened to Jo, I think that building and encouraging good people into policies is the best way of getting out this obvious problem.

LMB: Well, I wasn’t sure how you’d answer that question, but I wasn’t expecting that answer. Thank you for giving me so much of your time. I know you’re a busy guy. I really appreciate it.

You can read the news report I published from this interview in The Nightly here.

Latika’s guest is Hanno Pevkur, who served as Estonia’s Defence Minister until last month. He discusses the need for Europeans to make good on their NATO defence spending commitments, whether Article 5 is valid, Estonia’s ambitions to acquire deep-strike capability and the war in Ukraine.

He also discusses Russia’s increasing attacks and sabotage against European nations.

We are Bellingcat

I raced through this book.

Written by computer-geek-turned-investigative-OSINT-reporter Eliot Higgins and published in 2021, I came across this on my Kindle only recently.

Bellingcat, for those who don’t know, is a citizen journalist/blogger website or investigative news outlet that uses investigative journalists and online hobbyists to crack major cases, mostly through using publicly available information.

Higgins really took off during the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, but became an everyday name for me during MH17, when he and his team of sleuths exposed Russia’s hand behind the downing of the passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in 2014.

This book is extremely readable, and quite a good field guide for anyone, journalists or otherwise, who are interested in identifying facts or how to become a fellow fact fundamentalist. Higgins has a lovely tone; he is neither boastful nor too shy in showcasing his successes. His book could easily have been a brag, but he comes across as very down-to-earth, extremely thoughtful, ethical and honest.

What was most interesting about this book is Bellingcat’s relationship with truth, in terms of upholding and exposing it.

When Higgins begins his work, he could rely on social media content being legitimate, more often than not. It is how he is able to use tools like Google Maps to determine location, apps that track the sun’s shadow to pinpoint time and social media networks to penetrate the identities of soldiers in Russian military battalions. Early on, he makes a clear distinction between this sort of work — using open source or publicly available information to piece together a case — and the work of WikiLeaks — publishing classified and private information obtained by hacking.

There is a very interesting passage when Bellingcat begins paying Russian sources for data like flight logs and internal Russian ID lists that will expose Russian crimes; Higgins explains the ethical debate they had when they began seeking this sort of information, as opposed to using only publicly available sources.

As the book continues, his work runs up against misinformation, deliberately faked images and footage, and outright cyberattacks from Russia. There are also interesting questions about whether censoring hate speech, violent imagery and footage recorded in war zones is actually the right approach, given it can help citizen investigators prove state involvement in war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Most depressing is how much of a harbinger it serves as for what Russia is doing to Europe and the West today. I will never forget the morning in Canberra, waking up at 0600 to the news that MH17 had been shot down. It is one of my lifelong regrets that I did not pay enough attention then, as a political reporter in the Canberra press gallery, to what this horrific crime was showing us about Russia’s imperial designs over Ukraine, which led to the downing of MH17, the annexation of Crimea and then the full-scale invasion. It was all right in front of us.

Reading through Higgins’ description of Bellingcat’s pioneering work, which laid out step by step how the Russians operate and conduct this style of warfare, was like reading a horror movie script in slow motion, when you know the ending.

Higgins must certainly have another book in him: how Bellingcat’s method works in an AI-slop world, a political climate of ‘alternative facts’ and social polarisation was the question on my mind almost right through the book.

Bloomsbury

White House turned down Starlink

After last weekend’s diesel deal, Ukraine suffered another stealth attack from the White House — the slowing down of the Starshield.

Starshield is the military-grade satellite system owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which provides satellite services through Starlink.

Ukraine uses Starshield to fly and intercept drones. This week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said the service was slowed, meaning Ukraine could not intercept Russian drones. He also said allied warnings of incoming Russian attacks were not provided this week.

Zelensky has been openly criticising US President Donald Trump post the diesel deal. Was the slowing of Starshield White House retribution?

Reuters

But wait, there’s more

Joe Barnes from the UK Telegraph says that’s not quite the story.

He writes that Musk cooked up the idea, then distanced himself from it on X in public when he feared a backlash from European clients.

Telegraph (£)

India’s Missing Cockroach

India’s cockroaches are back in action, but this time, so too is India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP is a play on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]) is a satirical movement that began as a meme but turned into a mass uprising of mostly Gen-Z Indians who successfully demanded the resignation of India’s education minister over leaked exam papers.

Then Modi was caught unaware by the people’s movement and caved to their demands, even communicating with them via their favoured platform, Instagram.

It was a rare concession from the strongman leader who has cracked down on dissent in democratic India since first being elected in 2014.

Now the cockroaches are back, accusing India’s Election Commission of tampering with voter lists in favour of Modi’s BJP, something that is denied.

But this time police are arresting the protestors, including their leader Abjijeet Dipke, who has been detained twice and now not seen since his second arrest on Friday. CJP organisers have written to Delhi police demanding to know where he is.

And the Flamingo Revolution is back

What is taking place in Albania is really worth keeping an eye on. Protestors, who initially began demonstrating against a plan to let Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, build a resort on an area where flamingos are protected, are back.

This time they have become violent and also focused on what they say is the corruption of the government led by Edi Rama.

Albanian dissident and writer Fatos Lubonja spoke to about how the protests have become ‘the last hope we have.’

Hope and Healing

“Revolution as an Emergency Brake”

I’ve just come back from two weeks in Albania, where I immersed myself in what is happening on the ground with the Flamingo Revolution. Since returning to the US, Albanians have been pushed past their ability to endure: Tirana has erupted into days of escalating violence…

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8 days ago · 1 like · 1 comment

And that’s my list for this week.

Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye; I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.

📻 For my media this week, I joined the BBC’s World Service Weekend program on Saturday.

🎙️ On the ABC’s Global Roaming, Geraldine Doogue and I interviewed Adrian Ash on what’s driving the gold market, and Laura Tingle and I spoke to Thiago de Aragão about the Brazilian election.

Last week I moderated the opening session at the Italian Navy’s Trans-Regional Seapower Symposium.

And this week I moderated a panel at the Warsaw Security Forum in collaboration with the Doho Forum on the prospects for peace in the Middle East.

You can watch it here if you are interested.

Back in the UK, I was invited by the Sussex International Relations Society to speak to a very smart bunch of mostly Politics and International Relations students about working in international journalism.

It was a delight.

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The unorthodox Republican appeared to have learnt from past US follies overseas and declared no more …

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This first is one Labour should not have lost — Keir Starmer’s north London seat of Holborn and St Pancras.

Sir …

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After recently reading Regime Change, I decided to go back to the definitive account of the first Trump term and re-read ’s deliciously gossipy account of the internal dysfunction that marked the first Donald era.

It was a worthwhile comparison read; much stood out, and it was also a helpful refresher.

While everyone remembers the high turnover of staff in the first Administration, I had almost forgotten the sheer chaos of the first Trump Administration that was centred around personnel, particularly the infighting, the wars between Steve Bannon and ‘Jarvanka’ — Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner.

Some might say Trump 2.0 is chaos on repeat. But it is different. While Regime Change illustrated how much policy was made up on the run, resulting in chaos, the lack of quotes attributed to key figures in the Administration, compared to Fire and Fury, when seemingly everyone was on the record in some way, underlined how disciplined, or silenced, Trump’s White House is the second time around.

Fire and Fury was not just policy chaos, but a chaos of clashing personalities, mixed with diametrically opposed views of how to execute whatever MAGA was back then.

Stephen Miller is just a backroom minion, but by the second term, an ideological driver bringing coherence to the MAGA agenda.

It was also interesting to review the role of Kushner, who is now leading the Board of Peace to try and bring peace to Gaza and compare how he, as family, eventually prevailed in the turf war with Bannon, who is no part of the second Trump term.

But Bannon’s legacy lives on. His strategy for communications is very much what Trump and the White House continue to deploy today and has arguably taken over many Western media ecosystems. It was fascinating to me that this was so clearly mapped out, yet still there seems to be little adaptation to mitigate the confected chaos and conflict from dominating the breakdown in political communication.

Macmillan

I’m not a monster presents… where is Austin Tice

So this is not strictly what I have been reading but more what I’ve been listening to (I can do you a list of my fav podcasts if there’s demand, just let me know FYI), but I have been glued to this podcast series from BBC investigative journalist Josh Baker and Sara Obeidat.

Baker’s second series, I’m not a Monster, explored the case of British ISIS bride Shamima Begum, which was also a sensation in both content and format. His audio storytelling is a sensation and just gets better and better.

This season goes on the hunt for Austin Tice in Syria, and some of the episodes, including finding a safe full of documents on Tice, are riveting, chilling and full of tension.

Baker’s curious, open mind, as well as his working relationship with Obeidat, shine in this series. It is a gripping story, told through facts and humanity, and I cannot recommend it more. They bring Syria and their hunt for Tice to life.

BBC

Trump ‘blackmails’ Europe

A lot gets said about ‘burden-sharing’ in the transatlantic relationship these days. But just which side is bearing the burden unevenly, or unfairly, these days?

After starting his war against Iran that he has so far been incapable of winning or ending, Trump has effectively blackmailed Europe into releasing 100 million barrels of diesel oil by the end of the year.

Trump had threatened Europe with an export ban to try and suppress domestic gas prices ahead of the November midterms.

Europe caved. An emergency (video) meeting of G7 leaders on Friday agreed to release 100 million barrels over the next four months.

European leaders are fuming.

Politico

Burnham may do big things

A great piece on Andy Burnham’s debut conference speech by Fleet Street Fox, aka . She thinks his big agenda will grab voters, and is well overdue in Britain.

Fleet Street Fox

Andy Burnham is playing the long game - and British politics desperately needs it

Career politicians know nothing, right? They live in the Westminster bubble. They’ve never had a proper job. They couldn’t run a tap without fucking it up…

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23 days ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Susie Boniface

On Soho House

Full disclaimer: I’m a member. But this brutal takedown of the private members’ club franchise/chain, which has expanded far beyond what it should have, is utterly hilarious.

This is one article I absolutely stayed for the comments — laugh-out-loud funny.

And that’s my list for this week.

Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye; I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.

This week I returned home to London from New York, where I covered Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the United Nations General Assembly for The Nightly as well as to Apple HQ in San Jose, California. (So apologies for the lack of reading list last week; I could barely function last Friday from the exhaustion.)

📻 On the ABC’s Global Roaming, Geraldine Doogue and I interviewed Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal on UNGA and Laura Tingle and I spoke to The Economist’s Tom Nuttall about Germany’s political situation.

Next week I will be in Venice moderating at the Italian Navy’s Trans-Regional Seapower Symposium.

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Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong is Latika’s guest this week. She discusses Australia’s approach to the Pacific, whether China and the United States can be trusted not to destroy humanity through runaway AI and why Australia did not join the recent UK-led sanctions against goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Known as the ‘Soho of Kyiv’, the trendy district i…

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Her guest is one of Ukraine’s most decorated and well-known military Commanders — Major Yuri Fedorenko, who is better known as ‘Achilles’ — also the name of the UAV brigade he commands from Kharkiv.

Achilles speaks to Latika Bourke in Kyiv with the assistance of his wife, Maria Mezentseva, who is a Member of Ukraine’s Parliament.

Achilles and Maria discuss the state of the war, the lessons for Europe and what it’s like to be parents as your country is in an existential war.

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Professor Curtice discusses the change in the fault lines of UK politics driving the fragmentation of voters.

Latika and John discuss whether Nigel Farage can become Prime Minister of the UK, whether the UK would vote for a black woman in Kemi Badenoch, after Kamala Harris’ failure in the United States and if the Keir Starmer political coup was to be expected.

Verbatim media has caught Reform operatives and leader Nigel Farage suggesting ways to circumvent British electoral laws banning foreign donations.

The sting, one year in the making, was broadcast by Channel 4 and online on the eve of Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham.

The footage showed the undercover journalist, posing as the British son of a wealthy American, teasing out a plot by Reform aides to have the American donor pay for polling that would be published in the conservative press with no traces to Reform (not disclosing who commissioned the polling is against the rules).

After this was done, and materially affected key decisions by the Labour government under Keir Starmer, the journalists then graduated the plotting to a lunch with Farage and his right-hand man Dan Jukes. The pair suggested the funds be funnelled from the US donor to Reform via his British son.

Highly recommend watching the report in full.

Channel 4 News

Exclusive: Nigel Farage filmed undercover celebrating secret new foreign donations

By Channel 4 News Investigations Team…

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2 months ago · 269 likes · 46 comments · Channel 4 News

Farage drops ‘contractors’ Orr and Jukes

By morning both James Orr and Dan Jukes were gone from their positions, with Farage trying to diminish their roles in the party to that of ‘contractors.’

There is no Farage without Jukes, who was captivated by the Brexiteer when he saw him speak at his school as a student.

Politico

Is it the start of the end?

says while Reform voters won’t care, enough others may.

The Times (£)

Ukraine and Russia erode their own red lines

Whatever red lines existed in Russia’s war against Ukraine are fast eroding. Vladimir Putin has been pounding Kyiv, the capital, relentlessly and today, in broad daylight, attacked the building that houses the country’s spy agency in downtown Kyiv.

It is hard to state how central an attack this is — it occurred opposite St Sophia’s Cathedral, which has been largely a no-go zone as it is an area frequented by government, overseas diplomats and foreign visitors and home to the international hotels where visiting dignitaries and many overseas guests semi-permanently live. I am never not in this area when in Kyiv, as it is typically one of the safer areas for the reasons above.

I think in Sydney terms it would be like targeting a government building on Macquarie Street.

One small piece of potentially better news is that US President Donald Trump is despatching his negotiators, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, to Moscow and Kyiv as early as this weekend.

Associated Press

German far-right supporters don’t share Russian anxiety

There is an election to watch this weekend taking place in Germany. The eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt could vote for the far-right AfD to lead it’s state parliament.

Surprise, surprise, Kremlin mouthpiece Kirril Dmitriev is retweeting his support of the AfD’s national leader Alice Weidel under the pretext of pretending to care about the German economy.

But the truth is that AfD’s voters simply do not see Russia as a threatening neighbour, unlike the now majority of Germans.

Deutsche Welle

And that’s my list for this week.

Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye; I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.

📻 For my media, I joined Times Radio to discuss UK politics and reviewed the newspapers on Moncole Radio’s The Gobalist.

This week I was in Bled, Slovenia, for the Bled Strategic Forum where I moderated a panel on the EU and Indo-Pacific and ‘Deterrence without Stability.’

Next week I will be in Kyiv at the YES Conference.

General Carsten Breuer made the comments as the German government said…

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They discuss drone warfare and what the lessons of the wars in Ukraine and Iran have meant for the Indo-Pacific.

They also discuss the health of the alliance at the military-to-military level and whether the reported shortage of munitions is affecting US readiness in the Indo-Pacific.