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I asked the question that heads this post in The Nationalyesterday, starting by noting that:
IN the 1960s the US writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said “I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.” His message was simple. He was saying that what people said about their attitude towards racism did not matter; it is what they did that counts. I think we should apply that lesson to Rachel Reeves, and her approach to tax abuse.
I concluded, having appraised the evidence, suggesting that:
So, to go back to James Baldwin and his instruction that we should not believe what someone says, but that we should look at what they do, is it really the case that Rachael Reeves is serious about tackling tax abuse?
Or has she, by choosing advisors on this issue people who appear remarkably poorly qualified for the task given their previous occupations or comments, sent out the very clear message that she might have filled the hole in her spreadsheet for the time being but that she has no real intention of tackling tax abuse in the UK?
I will watch what she does, but I am not optimistic. Labour seems to be in the habit of making policy claims that do not stack, and this looks like another one of them.
As is the case with so much that Labour is doing, nothing seems to add up on Reeves' new policy. I wish it were otherwise.
European authorities say they have rounded up a criminal gang who stole rare antique books worth €2.5 million from libraries across Europe.
Police rumble gang stealing antique books across Europe
The very slightest editing of an FT headline this morning makes it read as follows: Rail chaos on England’s West Coast line as Link to
Read the full article…
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Suddenly, Chinese spies seem to be popping up all over Europe
Warsaw: One of the men, a young Briton known for his hawkish views on China, worked as an aide to a prominent member of the British Parliament. Another, a German citizen of Chinese descent, was an assistant to a member of the European Parliament representing Germany’s far-right.
Chinese sailors perform signals to mark the PLA Navy’s 75th anniversary in Qingdao, China, last week. One of the people charges allegedly passed on sensitive information about German marine propulsion systems – useful for a navy.
Chinese sailors perform signals to mark the PLA Navy’s 75th anniversary in Qingdao, China, last week. One of the people charges allegedly passed on sensitive information about German marine propulsion systems – useful for a navy.CREDIT: GETTY
On Friday, as the two Britons made an initial court appearance in London, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the latest effort by the two rivals to keep communications open even as disputes escalate over trade, national security and geopolitical frictions.
The espionage cases in Britain and Germany, the first of their kind in two countries that once cultivated warm relations with Beijing, served as eye-catching exclamation points in Europe’s long, often anguished break-up with China.
Shortly after British and German officials announced the charges, Dutch and Polish authorities raided the offices of a Chinese security equipment supplier as part of a crackdown by the European Union on what it sees as unfair trading practices.
The Chinese flag flies in front of the Chinese embassy in Ber;in on Monday.
The Chinese flag flies in front of the Chinese embassy in Ber;in on Monday.CREDIT: DPA/AP
It was the first time that the bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, had used a new anti-foreign subsidy law to order a raid on a Chinese company.
In early April, Sweden expelled a Chinese journalist who had been a resident of the country for two decades, saying the reporter posed a threat to national security.
After years of regular tiffs over trade followed by reconciliation, Europe “has lost patience with China,” said Ivana Karaskova, a Czech researcher at the Association for International Affairs, an independent research group in Prague, who until last month served as an adviser to the European Commission on China.
China still has steadfast friends in the EU, notably Hungary, she added, in “the multidimensional chess game” between the world’s two largest economies after the US. But Europe, Karaskova said, has moved from a position of “total denial” in some quarters over the danger posed by Chinese espionage and influence operations to “take a less naive view, and wants to defend European interests vis-à-vis China”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday.CREDIT: AP
Accusations last week that China was using spies to burrow into and influence the democratic process in Germany and Britain caused particular alarm, as they suggested a push to expand beyond already well-known, business-related subterfuge into covert political meddling, something previously seen as a largely Russian specialty.
But, according to China experts, those accusations and the flurry of charges indicated not so much that Beijing was ramping up espionage but that European countries had stepped up their response.
“Countries have been forced to get real,” said Martin Thorley, a British China expert and the author of All That Glistens, a forthcoming book detailing how what London trumpeted a decade ago as a “golden era” of Sino-British friendship during the prime ministership of David Cameron made it easy for China to suborn politicians and businesspeople. The “golden era” has been widely mocked as a “golden error”.
Cameron, who is now Britain’s foreign secretary, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of China. “A lot of the facts changed,” he said during a visit to Washington in December, declaring that China had become “an epoch-defining challenge”.
Australia, US and Japan deepen defence ties to deter China
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Australia, US and Japan deepen defence ties to deter China
New air defence strategy agreed by Australia, Japan and US to counter Chinese threats in Pacific.
His change of heart mirrors a wider shift across much of Europe in attitudes to a rising superpower that long counted on European countries, particularly Germany, to push back against what it denounces as “anti-China hype” emanating from Washington.
Germany’s security service has been warning publicly about the risk of trusting China since 2022, when, shortly after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the head of its domestic intelligence agency, Thomas Haldenwang, told parliament, “Russia is the storm, China is climate change”.
The agency, known by its German acronym, BfV, said in an unusual public warning last year, “In recent years, China’s state and party leadership has significantly stepped up its efforts to obtain high-quality political information and to influence decision-making processes abroad”.
Germany’s political leadership, however, has until this week been far more equivocal. Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently made a state visit to China, Germany’s biggest trading partner, to discuss trade and market access.
But its interior minister, Nancy Faeser, has now given a blunt assessment of China’s activities. “We are aware of the considerable danger posed by Chinese espionage to business, industry and science,” she said. “We are looking very closely at these risks and threats and have issued clear warnings and raised awareness so that protective measures are increased everywhere.”
China’s Foreign Ministry responded by dismissing the accusations as a groundless “slander and smear against China,” demanding that Germany “stop malicious hype” and “halt anti-China political dramas”.
Mareike Ohlberg, a China expert and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that “for a long time China was spared big public warnings”. Now, she said, German authorities are “more willing to call things out, or no longer have the patience not to call things out.”
Three of the four people arrested in Germany, a husband and wife and one other man, appear to have been involved in economic espionage using a company called Innovative Dragon to pass on sensitive information about German marine propulsion systems – of great value to a superpower interested in building up its navy.
They also used the company to buy a high-powered, dual-use laser, which they exported to China without permission.
The fourth person, in what prosecutors called “an especially severe case”, was Jian Guo, a Chinese-German man who has been accused of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. His regular job was as an assistant to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament for the far-right party Alternative for Germany – a rising political force friendly to China and Russia – and its top candidate for elections in June.
Since then, the public prosecutor in Dresden has begun a “pre-investigation” into how much Krah knew of his employee’s ties to China. On Wednesday, his party decided to keep supporting Krah’s bid for reelection to the European Parliament but disinvited him from campaign stops.
Thorley said the spying cases had sounded the alarm over Chinese activities but were only a small part of efforts by China to gain influence and information. More important than traditional espionage, he said, is China’s use of a “latent network” of people who do not work directly for the Ministry of State Security but who, for commercial and other reasons, are vulnerable to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and its myriad offshoots.
“This has been bad for a while and has been left far too long,” he said.
The two men accused of espionage in London – Christopher Cash, 29, and Christopher Berry, 32 — were arrested in March 2023 but released on bail and were not named publicly until they were charged.
Cash was a parliamentary researcher with links to the governing Conservative Party and a former director of the China Research Group, a body that often takes a hardline view on China and hosts podcasts with critics of Chinese interference.
His former colleagues include Alicia Kearns, a member of the governing Conservative Party who heads parliament’s influential Foreign Affairs Committee, and her predecessor in that role, Tom Tugendhat, who is now the security minister.
In a statement this week, London’s Metropolitan Police said Cash and Berry were charged with violating the Official Secrets Act and had provided information “intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy.” It added: “The foreign state to which the above charges relate is China.”
“It took a hell of a long time to wake up, but we finally see some movement,” said Peter Humphrey, a British citizen whom China accused of illegally obtaining personal information while doing due-diligence work for pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline, and who spent two years in a Shanghai jail with his wife.
He was in jail suffering from cancer when Cameron visited the city in 2013 with a delegation of British businesspeople. “It was sickening,” recalled Humphrey, an external research fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies. “Nobody in the higher levels of the British government,” he said, “wanted to hear a bad word about China because of business interests.”
When Xi travels to Europe next month, he will skip Germany and Britain and instead visit Hungary and Serbia, China’s last two staunch allies on the Continent, and France
This article originally appeared in The New
York
Times.
Gizmodo AI Can Tell Your Political Affiliation Just by Looking at Your Face: “A study recently published in the peer-reviewed American Psychologist journal claims that a combination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology can accurately assess a person’s political orientation by simply looking at that person’s blank, expressionless face. The study was authored by researchers at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Researchers write that, prior to the experiment, they had 591 participants answer a political questionnaire that provided insights into their political beliefs.
Those same participants were then scanned by researchers’ AI algorithm, which attempted to assess where they fell on the political spectrum. The algorithm could generally tell what a person’s political orientation was with a high degree of accuracy, even when that person’s identity was “decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity,” researchers write.
The “algorithm’s predictive accuracy was even higher” when it had access to “participants’ age, gender, and ethnicity,” researchers write. The levels of accuracy were broken down in different situations and expressed in formulas, but the researchers summarized it as being “on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness.”
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