Trump’s victory has fractured the western order – leaving Brexit Britain badly exposed

 

Trump’s victory has fractured the western order – leaving Brexit Britain badly exposed

Rafael Behr

To navigate the dangerous new era, Keir Starmer must end the culture of denial around the biggest strategic mistake of modern times

 

Wed 13 Nov 2024 07.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/13/donald-trump-keir-starmer-britain-brexit

 

The 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was not commemorated much in Britain last weekend. It is no Poppy Day. The unravelling of the iron curtain doesn’t compete with Remembrance Sunday for cultural resonance. But it is more relevant to the world we live in today. More poignant, too, now that Americans have chosen a president who is no friend of what used to be called the west.

 

Few world leaders will be gladder to see Donald Trump return to the White House than the former KGB officer who sits in the Kremlin, craving vengeance for his Soviet motherland’s humiliating defeat in the cold war.

 

Vladimir Putin can’t restore the old superpower parity with the US, but he can make European democrats fear Moscow again. He can proselytise for a vicious strain of authoritarian nationalism that suffocates liberal norms and undermines multilateral institutions wherever it takes hold. That malevolent spirit has usurped orthodox conservatism as the driving force of rightwing politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Expressed in the Trump vernacular, it appeals to more Americans than the idea of Kamala Harris as president.

 

American democracy won’t suddenly perish. The system that put Trump in power can remove him, as it has before. Resistance to tyranny is enshrined in law and embedded in US culture, but fastidious political vandalism can dismantle those protections. Trump will enter the Oval Office with a more systematic programme of constitutional subversion than he had the first time around. He has tech oligarchs onside. He can nobble referees in the information arena.

 

The governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological faith and corruption, held together by favours, a personality cult and paranoia. It will be a dogmatic kleptocracy where people who know how to spout the right beliefs to the right people will get lucrative jobs and contracts. Such regimes normalise the hypocrisy of plundering a nation while claiming to make it stronger. There are no contradictions or shame when submitting to the will of the leader is synonymous with doctrinal correctness.

 

For the people who benefit from such a system, election defeat represents not only a loss of income but a threat of judicial investigation under a new president. It isn’t only that they despise democracy. They don’t want to go to jail. The apparatus of free and fair voting has to be subverted.

 

It will be harder to pull that off in the US than it was in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, especially when the Republicans control the Senate and the supreme court, while the opposition are demoralised and divided.

 

If it works, Trump’s inauguration will be remembered as the setting of a sun that rose over Berlin 35 years ago. The ideas that won the cold war will no longer prevail in Washington. The Trumpian right still sometimes identifies itself with something called “the west”, but in its mouth it is a crusade to protect white Christendom from mass migration, not liberal pluralism or the rule of law.

 

The abrasive reality of a post-west America will take some getting used to. It represents an acute crisis for Britain, which counts the US as its paramount defence and security partner, while relying on European trade for its prosperity.

 

Once upon a time, that was a geopolitical balance with huge benefits. The UK was Washington’s best friend in Brussels and Europe’s hotline to the White House. Surrendering that status made Brexit a terrible idea in 2016. It hasn’t aged well.

 

It leaves Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start. He will also make Europe less secure. The variables are quite how little he cares for Nato, how much he will appease Putin, how spiteful he will be to EU leaders and how contagious his politics will be in continental elections.

 

This puts Keir Starmer in an invidious position. Powerful currents of realpolitik demand intimacy with any US administration, regardless of how repulsive the incumbent president might be. Righteous decoupling is not a serious option when national security interests are densely interwoven. But as the price of keeping that relationship sweet, Trump will demand vassalage, which will complicate Starmer’s ambition for closer European ties.

 

Britain could carry on pursuing a new security deal with the EU, while grovelling for special exemption from US tariffs. Maybe Starmer has steady enough hands to thread that needle. But just the hint of alignment with Trump will sour any conversation about easing UK access to the single market.

 

There will be pressure from all sides for Britain to spend more on defence faster. But the growth models on which Rachel Reeves’s budget is built have already been scrambled by the prospect of rising protectionism. And that is before Trump unleashes chaos by trying to stamp down the US trade deficit with China.

 

It is still early days. No 10 is understandably reluctant to give a running commentary on events. So far, it has all been conventional diplomatic platitudes. Inscrutability is Starmer’s default style. He doesn’t busk, especially when the stakes are high.

 

But there is a cost to pretending that not much has really changed. No one buys it. Labour’s foreign policy blew up on 5 November. Plan A was a version of the old mid-Atlantic bridge role that wasn’t wholly convincing to begin with. It relied on the pretence that Brexit was something that happened once in the past, a page that has been turned. In truth, it is a nagging, self-aggravating injury to the country’s strategic position. Without some acknowledgment of that reality, it is impossible to give a meaningful or honest account of the choices that lie ahead.

 

Labour had compelling electoral motives not to go there in opposition. There are plenty of people around Starmer who still see Brexit through that lens, as a conversation to be shut down for fear of upsetting swing voters; a domestic scab not to be picked.

 

But Trump’s victory reinfects the wound. It leaves Britain looking friendless in the post-western world. The shortage of good options isn’t a reason to pretend there isn’t an emergency. Squirming and cavilling around Britain’s biggest strategic blunder in a hundred years is not a sustainable path.

 

It is hardly a secret that Starmer thought it was a stupid idea at the time. And yet, such is the deep perversity of British political debate over Europe that the only permissible terms are dictated by the people who were proved completely wrong. Having been right all along is considered a weakness and a prohibition on telling it how it is.

 

Now, once again, the prime minister faces a blank page where Britain’s role in the world must be written. The policy of not daring to name the problem has failed to deliver workable solutions. Perhaps it is time to start afresh, this time from the truth.

 

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Is Trump About to Wreck Brexit?

Trump and Brexit

 

Trump and Brexit

One interpretation of Brexit was that it represented a moment when Britain decided to retire from greatness and lead a quieter life.

Lawrence Freedman

https://www.iiss.org/publications/survival/2018/survival-global-politics-and-strategy-december2018january2019/606-02-freedman-cm/

 

In early 2017, at gatherings of the globalist elite, a new word could be heard – ‘Trumpandbrexit’. It captured the idea that the two shocking events of the previous year – the Leave victory in the UK referendum on membership in the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election – were part of a single mysterious phenomenon that the elite was ill-equipped to understand. Trumpandbrexit appeared as a popular revolt against their most cherished values: multilateralism and international cooperation, liberalism and human rights, open borders and free trade. As the US and UK had historically been two of the most energetic promoters of those values, the rebuff was both distressing and unfathomable. Might Trumpandbrexit be the vanguard of a movement threatening all that had been achieved in the Western world since 1945?

 

This elite feared that the nationalist virus might spread. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had accepted that putting up barriers to those desperate to flee the wars of the Middle East and North Africa was unconscionable, but also probably futile. The resultant surge of migration into EU territory had galvanised rightist parties. It was not inconceivable that these parties might win elections in all parts of Europe. In 2017, the challenge was beaten back first in the Netherlands, then France and, somewhat less convincingly, in Germany. But it was hard to ignore the harsher tone that had entered into the politics of many countries, and that in some cases intolerant nationalists were in power or getting closer.

 

The phenomenon could be dramatised as an existential struggle across the Western world between the liberal and illiberal, the global and the parochial, the open and the closed, and the broad-minded and the mean-spirited. It pitted the optimism of big cities against the pessimism of small towns. But presenting the struggle as one between the enlightened and the bigoted, lamenting the ease with which populist demagogues had beguiled those from the poorer, less educated, less travelled and more elderly sections of society, risked patronising and caricaturing these people, and missed the complexity of the phenomenon and the contingent and unique features of the different national settings. Popular grievances were expressed in a variety of ways, in some cases via the far left instead of the far right. Most importantly, there were good reasons for people to be cross. Many had been left behind by the transformational economic changes of recent decades and were then badly hit by the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. They saw the wealthy as benefiting from cheap immigrant labour and from the low interest rates that boosted the value of their assets. Levels of inequality were as bad as ever.

 

The wellsprings of Trump and Brexit did show similarities. These lay not only in migration and the financial crisis, but also in the US and UK’s fraught collaborations on the ‘war on terror’ and the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was even the shared figure of Nigel Farage, who had made his career pushing the case for Leave in the UK and who turned up in 2016 as a confidant of Trump. But the differences were also significant.

 

Trump won an election, and with a Republican Congress was able to pursue an agenda that was true to his instincts. Subsequent elections could produce reversals of some of his policies even if their effects lingered. Brexit, by contrast, involved a simple in–out proposition. The Leave camp mounted two quite separate campaigns – an official one going for the higher political ground and Farage’s playing on fears of yet more immigrants. Both offered reassurances to uncertain voters that the Leave proposition was far less radical than it might appear. The Leave victory was therefore quite different from Trump’s. It reflected a disgruntled mood but not a coherent philosophy. After the vote, the most enthusiastic Leavers could not claim a mandate for any particular sort of Brexit. Some insisted that 17.4 million people had voted for a sharp break with all EU institutions and practices no matter what. Others argued that, in practice, the ties were bound to stay close, and that the country was merely giving itself a bit more freedom of manoeuvre without cutting itself off from all mutually beneficial trading relations.

 

British confusion

Compounding this lack of underlying clarity on the meaning of the project was the speed with which the political class embraced it. Sensing the extent of popular anger, it was loath to dismiss the result as an aberration and work immediately to overturn it. Not respecting this exercise of democracy risked aggravating public cynicism. In retrospect, a new and different debate was now needed, focused not on what had just happened, but on what needed to be done to implement the result of the referendum. Looking forward, this debate might have been informed by a realistic appraisal of the complexity of the task and the range of issues that must now be addressed, set against not only the interests of the UK but also those of the remaining 27 members of the EU.

 

This debate did not arise for a number of reasons, but the main one was the uneasy consensus behind the project. Those in charge were divided on its meaning, on a spectrum from the hardest to the softest versions, and so was the opposition. Seeking a definitive answer to the question of what it was all about risked opening up divisions and alienating supporters. Though both leaders of the two main political parties supported Remain, they were both always lukewarm in this position. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was on record rejecting the EU as a restraint on a proper socialist platform. Theresa May, as home secretary, had tried to cut back on migration and was aware of the limits on what she could do while the UK was still a member of the EU’s single market. She became prime minister mainly on account of her rivals’ self-destruction, and was not seriously challenged on how she saw the project being taken forward. Her slogan ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a means of reassuring Leavers that she would not let them down, and of asserting her authority over the Conservative Party, but its banality underscored the lack of clear, agreed objectives and principles informing the project. Both parties described desirable outcomes while ducking questions of whether they were at all negotiable, as if pointing out legal and technical difficulties were bad form and self-defeating. The administrative class in particular saw their task as largely one of damage limitation. Some ardent Remainers were still in key positions in both the cabinet and shadow cabinet. Accordingly, the consensus encompassed varying degrees of enthusiasm and high degrees of blandness.

 

The EU was fed up with British demands

May tried to give herself more authority over the process by calling an election for May 2017, intended to strengthen her parliamentary majority. Despite starting with a 20% lead over the Labour Party, a lacklustre campaign left her without a majority at all, in power only with the assistance of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party – a dependency that became increasingly important as the border between the North and the Republic of Ireland became an increasingly vexed issue. May’s political weakness affected every stage of the subsequent negotiations with the EU, as she could take very few risks. Her compromises had to be tentative and on occasion were withdrawn. To make matters worse, she had called the election just after invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, starting the clock on the UK’s withdrawal. Two years later, on 29 March 2019, the UK would be out of the EU with or without an acceptable withdrawal agreement unless the 27 remaining members agreed to extend the deadline.

 

Invoking Article 50 lost the UK whatever leverage it might have had to shape the course of the negotiations. This catered to the preference of the EU, which held that there could be no negotiations with the UK prior to this formal step. Negative referendums in other countries had been followed by efforts to find concessions and then new votes that yielded more positive results, but the UK referendum appeared too momentous to be handled in this way. Moreover, the EU had already been through some unsatisfactory negotiations with May’s predecessor, David Cameron, prior to the announcement of the referendum, and was reluctant to entertain more special pleading. In short, it was already fed up with British demands, especially after negotiated opt-outs from the euro and Schengen, and budget rebates. Brussels also wanted the UK out before the May 2019 elections for the European Parliament.

 

The American election was also a factor. In other circumstances, the US government would have seen such disunity in Europe as a major problem and worked to help broker a solution. But Barack Obama’s presidency was coming to an end. Trump supported Brexit and was generally hostile to the EU. This coloured the stances of European leaders. They tended to see Trump and Brexit as part of the same phenomenon, which encouraged a strong stand against both. They wished to keep their distance from Trumpism and demonstrate to Britain that if it wanted to leave the EU it would be on the EU’s terms. Elections had to be respected and the American and British governments dealt with, but there was no need to appease them.

 

If May had not been in such a hurry to get the process started, orderly and substantive discussions of possible ways of taking the issue forward might still have been possible because then there would have been pressure on the EU to help move the process along. More time would also have enabled the UK to work out exactly what leaving the EU would mean in practice. Instead, May embarked on a process for which the country had not been prepared, then failed to boost her electoral mandate, and was then left moving forward with a divided government, a febrile parliament and a confused country. This led to a strategy of incremental capitulation, edging towards a position that the EU could accept, hoping she might be offered something in exchange to make it look more like a substantive negotiation, trimming each concession to avoid triggering an unmanageable parliamentary revolt. The strategy became more fraught as its logic became apparent, although it lasted longer than many might have expected. It required shifting the choice from what Britain wanted to what Britain could get, with an alternative of no deal at all.

 

Meanwhile the EU held together. Leavers looked for signs of splits among the EU27, hoping that their predictions that the Union was about to fall apart would come true sooner rather than later. The EU certainly had big problems to address, not least the developing tensions with countries such as Poland and Hungary, and the risks posed by the Italian government to the eurozone. But Brexit made little difference to how these issues would unfold, and they gave the UK no leverage. It was not terribly difficult for the 27 to stay united and let the lead negotiator, Michel Barnier, do the best he could. Few in the EU blamed problems in the negotiations on the European Commission. Most saw them as the result of a lack of realism on the UK’s part. Some might have had a grudging admiration for the British trying to honour a democratic vote with a magnificent stubbornness. Others just assumed the country had taken leave of its senses.

 

Divided and bored

Even with a strong majority, May would have struggled with the essential contradiction at the heart of the UK position. From the start she stressed two aspects in particular – taking the UK out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and ending freedom of movement. Whatever some Leavers said about the great trading opportunities away from the EU, migration was the issue that had most animated voters and with which May herself had the greatest sympathy. It was the area in which David Cameron had sought relief from the EU prior to the referendum. The problem was that ending freedom of movement meant no longer being part of the single market, just as the desire to negotiate trade deals separate from the rest of the EU meant leaving the customs union. To the business and financial communities, that meant inevitable economic harm. The single market, which had been energetically promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s government during the 1980s, had contributed to Britain’s recent prosperity and the country’s ability to present itself as a global hub.

 

The UK government understood that some migration was necessary and that trade was good. This set it on a path of what the EU saw as ‘cherry-picking’ – that is, seeking to secure as many benefits as possible of the single market and customs union without accepting the full package of European Court of Justice jurisdiction and freedom of movement. Strictly speaking, this was an issue for post-withdrawal, and a transition period was agreed during which the future trading arrangements with the EU would be set. Awkwardly for the British (and to a degree for the EU), the Irish border had to be settled as part of the withdrawal agreement. Dublin insisted on maintaining an open border as agreed under the Good Friday Agreement. As this is the UK’s only land border, the issue raised questions that might have been left for the transition. If border checkpoints were not to be set up and Northern Ireland not separated from the rest of the UK, it was hard to see how something close to the single market and customs union could be avoided. This of course was anathema to the hardline Leavers.

 

Throughout 2018, May tried to find a formula that would feel like an actual Brexit while building in a realistic transition period to iron out the details of a future trading relationship and avoid disrupting too many lives, whether of EU citizens living in the UK or UK citizens living in the EU. As she tried to find the formula, she struggled against the somewhat unimaginative EU approach of waiting for UK proposals and then finding them wanting. The main problem lay in a country that was divided on the issues of principle while progressively bored with the technical matters of negotiation. It was hard for voters to express a preference for ‘Norway minus’ or ‘Canada plus’ as visions for the future, and unclear whether May could get a parliamentary majority behind any deal. The Labour Party wanted to force another election, although it was not clear they would improve on their 2017 position. Remainers, frustrated with Labour’s equivocation, increasingly organised around demands for a second referendum; the only reason to suspect a different result was the hostile reaction of Leavers to the very idea.

 

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking and the prospect of the country simply crashing out of the EU without any withdrawal agreement growing, with the potential for a huge economic and political crisis. This would affect the rest of the EU, although the UK would suffer most. While most of the withdrawal agreement had been drafted for some time, the fixation on the Irish border problem meant that many of its other provisions were left largely unscrutinised. Some of the ministers from the Leave camp charged with responsibility for the negotiations left when it was clear that May was prepared for a softer Brexit than they wished. When released from cabinet responsibility, they were conspicuously unable to come up with a credible alternative, doing little more than demanding a tougher negotiating stance.

 

Assuming the UK manages to extract itself from the EU, the Remainers will stress the damage done to the country’s standing and the many inconveniences to which UK citizens are subject. Of course, they may well be joined by Leavers lamenting that the project had been betrayed or ineptly handled. If somehow the country – as a result perhaps of a second referendum – decided to reverse its position and stay in, the Leavers would be in full told-you-so mode, as either the drive for an ever-closer union resumed, or the EU became more fractious and dysfunctional because of nationalist objections to continued migration and the restraints of the eurozone. In counterpoint, Remainers might highlight the damage inflicted on Britain’s ability to influence events by three chaotic years.

 

***

 

Trumpism and Brexit were never the same. Both were symptomatic of divided countries, but Trump was associated with clear policy preferences that his victory allowed him to carry through. In the end, his victory reflected a stage in the normal political cycle. The referendum mandated a more detached relationship between the UK and the EU, but left unclear how detached and in precisely what areas. The idea behind the referendum was to settle the European issue in British politics once and for all, but all it achieved was to escalate the issue to a new and more vexatious level and stoke arguments and recriminations likely to continue for years to come.

 

Another obvious difference between Trumpism and Brexit was that, whereas Trump has relished his chance to disengage from a whole range of international treaties and obligations, and has taken pride in his ability to upset allied governments, May needed all the international support she could get to make Brexit happen and then forge new trading relationships. In 2017, she tried to get close to the newly elected Trump, but on successive issues – Jerusalem, Iran, climate change – she has sided with other European leaders. The president’s slogan was ‘America First’; the prime minister’s was ‘Global Britain’. Post-Brexit Britain was not going to be strong enough to demand consideration from others. It was going to have to work hard to demonstrate that whatever happened with the EU, it would be a good citizen elsewhere – for example, in the UN and NATO. Yet in one respect Trump and Brexit did seem to be part of the same phenomenon. These two countries had, in their times, been world leaders. But even before Trump’s ascendance, the US was tiring of that role and the UK was increasingly unable to marshal the resources required to play it effectively. As the Brexit debate raged, there was a separate but related one about whether Britain really could – or should – be considered a major military power anymore. France and Germany are found together at summits on Ukraine or Syria, while the UK is absent.

 

Since 1962, the British establishment has been pondering Dean Acheson’s jibe that it had lost an empire and failed to find a role. The special relationship with the US was one remedy, and London’s determination to be central to almost any international initiative was another. ‘Global Britain’ carries the implication that the UK is still a country to be reckoned with. But there was always another answer to Acheson: that the country did not need a role. Surrounded by water and protected by its own nuclear deterrent, well away from the world’s worst trouble spots, the UK arguably could dispense with leadership positions and making extraordinary exertions to address other people’s problems. Trump claimed to be about Making America Great Again, although he seemed to mean that to be in the sense of economic and military strength rather than any concrete achievements. UK foreign policy has tended to depend on a big joint project with the US – the Second World War, the Cold War and its end, globalisation and then the war on terror. If there are to be no more great projects shared with the US, then the UK will have little to latch on to. An alternative might have been some sort of shared leadership role in Europe, but that was also ruled out. Nobody said so explicitly, and all British politicians might deny the inference, but one interpretation of Brexit was that it represented a moment when Britain decided to retire from greatness and lead a quieter life.

 

 

 

the cultural impact of Brexit

Gregg Wallace says complaints came from ‘middle-class women of a certain age’

 

Gregg Wallace says complaints came from ‘middle-class women of a certain age’

 

Wallace stepped back from role on MasterChef last week while allegations of sexual misconduct are investigated

 

Josh Halliday

Sun 1 Dec 2024 09.42 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/dec/01/gregg-wallace-says-complaints-came-from-middle-class-women-of-a-certain-age-masterchef

 

The MasterChef host Gregg Wallace has said accusations about him making sexual comments towards staff and guests have come from “middle-class women of a certain age”.

 

Speaking in a video posted on his Instagram page, the 60-year-old said: “I’ve been doing MasterChef for 20 years, amateur, celebrity and professional MasterChef, and I think, in that time, I have worked with over 4,000 contestants of all different ages, all different backgrounds, all walks of life.

 

“Apparently now, I’m reading in the paper, there’s been 13 complaints in that time. In the newspaper, I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age, just from Celebrity MasterChef. This isn’t right.

 

“In 20 years, over 20 years of television, can you imagine how many women, female contestants on MasterChef, have made sexual remarks, or sexual innuendo? Can you imagine?”

 

Wallace went on to claim that “absolutely none” of the staff on his other shows had complained about him.

 

He said: “Look, this is important to me. Twenty years of doing Celebrity Masterchef, amateur, professional, Eat Well for Less?, Inside the Factory. Do you know how many staff, all different sorts of staff, you imagine the people I’ve worked with. Do you know how many staff complained about me in that time? Absolutely none. Zero. Seriously.”

 

Wallace stepped back from his role on MasterChef last week while allegations of historical misconduct are investigated.

 

An investigation by BBC News revealed that Wallace was facing allegations of inappropriate sexual comments from 13 people who worked with him over a 17-year period.

 

Channel 5 is also looking into allegations of inappropriate behaviour by the presenter while making the programme Gregg Wallace’s Big Weekends in 2019.

 

The Observer revealed this weekend that a letter detailing some of the allegations was sent to the BBC in 2022, including complaints of sexualised comments and of Wallace appearing topless in front of colleagues.

 

It was also reported that a BBC executive warned Wallace in 2017 that his behaviour was “unacceptable and cannot continue” after complaints made by the broadcaster Aasmah Mir, who appeared on the 12th series of Celebrity MasterChef.

 

Kate Phillips, who oversees unscripted programmes for the BBC, said she would ensure that she was “informed straight away” should further allegations be made against the MasterChef host, the Sunday Times reported.

 

Mir apparently wrote in an email forwarded to Phillips in November 2017: “Should anything happen in the future, I don’t want to feel guilty when people say ‘why wasn’t anything said before?’, or for producers or editors to claim they didn’t know.”

 

Wallace’s lawyers have denied that he engages in sexually harassing behaviour.

 

The celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall described Wallace’s decision to come out on the attack as “not wise”. Speaking on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, he said: “I think it’s likely that Gregg has what we might call a bawdy sense of humour. Clearly that’s offended people.

 

“I think one of the issues is that down the years people have not felt able to tell him when he might want to rein it in a bit and clearly he’s crossed some lines.”

 

Fearnley-Whittingstall added: “I don’t think it’s smart to come out talking like that at the moment when he should probably be listening.”

 

BBC News reported last week that an internal investigation in 2018 looked into allegations of “sexual jokes” and other sexualised language that reportedly made colleagues “feel uncomfortable” and concluded that aspects of Wallace’s behaviour had been “unacceptable and unprofessional”.

 

The presenter Kirsty Wark has said Wallace, a former greengrocer, told stories and jokes of a “sexualised nature” when she was a Celebrity MasterChef contestant in 2011. The musician Rod Stewart claimed Wallace had “humiliated” his wife, Penny Lancaster, on the show in 2021.

 

In October, Wallace posted to his Instagram account a denial of claims that he’d talked about his sex life and taken his top off in front of a colleague, saying: “I didn’t say anything sexual.”

 

MasterChef’s production company, Banijay UK, has launched an investigation into the complaints and said Wallace was “committed to fully cooperating throughout the process”.

 

The company said last week “it is appropriate to conduct an immediate external review to fully and impartially investigate” and that anyone with issues or concerns could contact speakup@banijayuk.com in confidence.

MasterChef's Gregg Wallace says a 'handful of middle class women of a certain age' behind claims

TikTok’s Romanian reckoning

 

TikTok’s Romanian reckoning

Regulators suspect foul play in how far-right firebrand Călin Georgescu used the Chinese-owned app to sway voters.

Allegations have been swirling that Călin Georgescu’s rise wasn’t just boosted by catchy, viral content.  |

 

November 29, 2024 4:22 am CET

By Pieter Haeck, Carmen Paun, Laurens Cerulus and Seb Starcevic

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-romania-reckoning-calin-georgescu-election-bytedance-china-russia/

 

The shock victory of an ultranationalist, pro-Russian candidate in the first round of Romania's presidential election is turning into a defining test of accountability for TikTok.

 

For years, the Chinese-owned social media app has brushed off security concerns in the United States and Europe that it could be used for mass manipulation, but it now faces an intense regulatory storm in Bucharest over whether it played a role in skewing the democratic process in an EU country of 19 million people.

 

Media regulators and election observers are zeroing in on how Călin Georgescu — an unknown, far-right NATO-skeptic fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin — was suddenly catapulted from obscurity, in what some politicians and experts suspect is a covert operation conducted through thousands of fake accounts.

 

For TikTok — owned by ByteDance, a company headquartered in Russia's Communist ally China — it is a moment of reckoning. The backlash in Romania is reminiscent of what Facebook faced in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum vote and the revelations that big data firm Cambridge Analytica had helped the leave campaign by gaming social media and influencing users in opaque, nefarious ways.

 

The catchy TikTok clips that powered Georgescu's unexpected surge were accompanied by dramatic music and subtitles. He was shown barely breaking a sweat on the running track, flipping opponents in judo — à la Putin — and riding a white horse in a traditional Romanian shirt.

 

The authorities in Bucharest have flagged “various irregularities” over TikTok's general handling of the election, opacity over who paid for Georgescu’s online campaign, and frustration with TikTok over the app’s slow responses to authorities’ requests.

 

Romania's Supreme Council of Defense found cyberattacks had attempted to swing the election, and strongly suggested that Russia could have played a role.

 

Specifically, the council said in a statement that TikTok had failed to mark one unnamed candidate — presumed to be Georgescu — as an electoral candidate, meaning his videos weren’t categorized under an election code, as required by Romanian law. This increased his visibility significantly, the council said, and had an impact on the final result in contravention of the rules.

 

The defense council is asking that law enforcement authorities investigate TikTok further over violations of Romanian electoral law. Romania's top court is also asking for an election recount.

 

TikTok denies that Georgescu was treated differently. "It is categorically false to claim his account was treated differently to any other candidate," spokesperson Paolo Ganino said, adding the far-right winner was treated "in the same way as every other candidate on TikTok, and subject to exactly the same rules and restrictions."

 

The company earlier denied it saw anything resembling foreign interference or misuse of its platform, with Ganino calling reports of potential election interference "highly speculative" and "inaccurate and misleading."

 

Other observers have suggested that Georgescu simply followed the hard right’s conventional playbook that in the past year has seen populists beat governing centrists in countries from France to Austria and the United States, in part by sidestepping mainstream media and targeting voters with direct messaging on social media and other platforms.

 

Test case for Brussels

Taking the battle onto the European stage, the Romanian authorities are calling in European Union social media regulators for backup — and the case is now turning into a test of Brussels’ new regulatory powers over social media.

 

In 2022, the 27-country bloc passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), a powerful legal framework requiring online platforms to fight “systemic risks,” including disinformation and election interference.

 

The largest such platforms, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, fall under the oversight of the European Commission. The EU executive has the power to fine non-compliant firms up to 6 percent of their global turnover — and even block an app across Europe.

 

Romanian authorities have shared their findings with Brussels about TikTok’s measures during the election, they said this week. The European Commission will now meet TikTok and other social media platforms ahead of the second round of the presidential election on Dec. 8, it told POLITICO.

 

“If the Commission suspects a breach on the basis of the evidence at our disposal, it can open proceedings to look into TikTok’s compliance with the DSA obligations,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier said.

 

At the same time, “the Commission does not interfere in national elections and seeks to ensure within its competences a level playing field for all candidates,” Regnier stressed.

 

Brussels doesn’t want to be blamed for meddling in a national vote either.

 

Georgescu goes viral

For Romanian politicians, TikTok was too large to ignore when running their 2024 presidential campaign. The app has a whopping 8 million users in the country.

 

This is significant because online media are a bigger source of news than TV or print. Most Romanians have generally soured on news coverage: Only 27 percent trust the news, down from 42 percent in 2021, according to the Reuters Institute.

 

Political parties “have tried to leverage the fact that a lot of internet users are no longer reading the traditional media,” said Bogdan Manolea, executive director of the Association of Technology and Internet, a Romania-based NGO.

 

Georgescu harnessed that force best. He was “effective” in using TikTok “to convey simplistic nationalistic messages that resonated with voters in terms of dissatisfaction with mainstream political groups,” said Keith Kiely, coordinator for the Bulgarian Romanian Observatory of Digital Media.

 

On TikTok he touched on that sense of disillusionment, especially among young people.

 

All four main candidates had significant followings on TikTok, but Georgescu’s final sprint sounded alarm bells. In the final two months, especially, he surged in popularity, landing him 120 million views, the EU-funded European Digital Media Observatory said this week.

 

Authorities, observers and TikTok itself are now scouring the data to determine whether that surge was legitimate.

 

“How did he manage to use this algorithm of TikTok in order to rise so high in the trending topics?” asked Elena Calistru, founder of Funky Citizens, an NGO that works on disinformation and teamed up with TikTok for a media literacy campaign before the elections.

 

Bots and influencers

Allegations have been swirling that Georgescu’s rise wasn’t just boosted by catchy, viral content.

 

Researchers and NGOs have pointed to two questionable tactics that Georgescu could have relied on for his account to be picked up by TikTok’s algorithm: Either fake accounts were deployed in a coordinated campaign to push his account, or influencers were paid to directly promote his account.

 

Disinformation expert Felix Kartte, who works at Stiftung Mercator and previously worked at the European External Action Service disinformation unit, said 5,000 “seemingly coordinated accounts” had been spotted, noting they were “claiming to be affiliated with Georgescu and looking kind of fishy.”

 

Manolea added: “There’s a wave of thousands of fake accounts that are just being used … with similar names to the candidate names … that are just being used to put out fake publicity.”

 

TikTok has fiercely rejected these claims.

 

“To date, we have found no evidence of a Covert Influence Operation on our platform within the last several weeks for the ongoing presidential election in Romania, nor evidence of foreign influence,” the platform said in a letter, which was addressed to Romanian authorities and seen by POLITICO.

 

TikTok added it had “removed over 150 impersonation accounts linked to” Georgescu and more than 650 accounts linked to other candidates.

 

A second string of concerns touches on whether influencers played a role in pushing Georgescu’s account, whether they were paid and by whom.

 

The electoral authority has already asked police investigators to scrutinize Georgescu’s campaign funding, flagging the suspicious fact that the far-right candidate reported no expenses at all.

 

“There’s an increased number of allegations, already very credible, from journalists that show that there are at least a few cases of influencers that say that they were paid in order to promote this content,” Calistru said.

 

TikTok has a general ban on political advertising. Paying influencers to promote a political account or hashtag would be a way to circumvent that.

 

Romania's defense council had no doubt TikTok was in the wrong.

 

"The TikTok social network ... for certain did not respect the legal rules that regulate the conduct of the electoral process, with an impact on its final result," it said.

 

Brendan Bordelon and Zoya Sheftalovich contributed reporting.