LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer is treading a fine line on UK-EU relations as hard-right populists make gains at a time when Brexit and immigration remain toxic issues in Britain.
The Labour leader will host European Union chiefs in London on Monday for a major summit designed to progress a deeper relationship between the UK and the bloc than the one negotiated by the previous Conservative government.
But Starmer will be wary of giving ammunition to arch-Euroskeptic Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, while also conscious that US President Donald Trump views the EU negatively.
“He’s walking two tightropes at the same time,” said British foreign policy expert Richard Whitman, describing immigration as a “salient” issue in the UK and Trump’s attitude to the EU as “hostile.”
“Starmer is balancing this big international issue and also the domestic politics one, and that’s what makes it so tricky for the prime minister,” the politics professor told AFP.
The anti-immigration Reform was founded in 2018 — two years after Britons voted to leave the EU — as the Brexit Party, with the aim of advocating for Britain to depart the bloc without a withdrawal agreement.
Renamed the Reform UK Party in 2021, it has gained significant ground.
Last month, it won more than 670 local council seats, its first two mayoral posts, and gained an additional parliamentary MP in local English elections.
Farage’s upstarts are also leading national opinion polls as they tap into concerns about net migration, which stood at 728,000 in the 12 months to last June, and the struggling economy.
Starmer hopes closer relations with the bloc can spur his main ambition of economic growth but he has vowed to honor the Brexit result, not rejoin the single market, customs union or return to free movement of people.
He has been publicly reticent about an EU-proposed youth mobility scheme that would allow British and European 18- to 30-year-olds to study and work in the UK and vice versa, although the UK government has made warmer noises in recent weeks about a possible controlled program.
An announcement seems unlikely on Monday given that it comes just a week after Starmer said he wanted to “significantly” reduce immigration in a speech intended to appeal to potential Reform voters.
“To announce something like that would be a bit perilous politically,” said Whitman, deputy director of the Global Europe Center at the University of Kent.
Starmer and EU bosses Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa are instead expected to seal a defense pact at the summit — a deal seen as the lowest hanging fruit for negotiators.
“There’s nothing in his proposals that is a dial-shifter in terms of economic growth,” said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank.
While Starmer is squeezed on the right, he is also under pressure from pro-European lawmakers within Labour who want him to get closer to the EU.
“We must not let Brexit hold us back from our national interest,” Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe group, told AFP.
“Both sides must move on from the disagreements and red lines to seeking to reduce the paperwork and red tape we face as a result.”
A poll for the internationalist think-tank Best for Britain last month found that 53 percent of voters believe a closer relationship with the EU would be positive for the UK economy.
Britain’s traditional third party, the Liberal Democrats, wants to rejoin the single market and is also surging in popularity, as are the left-wing Greens as UK politics fractures.
“I think Labour are underplaying the danger of losing votes to their left,” said Menon.
He thinks Starmer — who voted to remain at the 2016 referendum — can afford to be bolder considering his 156-majority in parliament and the fact that Reform only has five out of 650 MPs.
“Everything is done in a sort of defensive crouch,” Menon said of the prime minister’s approach.
“It’s kind of apologetic, rather than, ‘This is what I think is good for the country, this is why I’m doing it’.
“I would advise him to start winning the argument.”
Under pressure from hard-right, Starmer takes cautious approach to EU ‘reset’
https://arab.news/py962
Under pressure from hard-right, Starmer takes cautious approach to EU ‘reset’
Sweden accuses Israel of war crimes over Gaza aid blockade
- Lifesaving humanitarian help must never be politicized or militarized, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard says
STOCKHOLM: Israel’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and its targeting of aid distribution points is causing civilians to starve, which constitutes a war crime, Sweden’s foreign minister said on Thursday.
In early June, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said deadly attacks on civilians around aid distribution sites in the Gaza Strip constituted “a war crime,” while several rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accused Israel of genocide.
Israel has vehemently rejected that term.
“To use starvation of civilians as a method of war is a war crime. Lifesaving humanitarian help must never be politicized or militarized,” Maria Malmer Stenergard said at a press conference.
“There are strong indications right now that Israel is not living up to its commitments under international humanitarian law,” she said.
“It is crucial that food, water, and medicine swiftly reach the civilian population, many of whom are women and children living under wholly inhumane conditions,” she said.
Sweden announced in December 2024 that it was halting funding to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, after Israel banned the organization, accusing it of providing cover for Hamas militants.
Swedish International Development Minister Benjamin Dousa told Thursday’s press conference that Stockholm was now channeling aid through other UN organizations, and was “the fifth-biggest donor in the world ... (and) the second-largest donor in the EU to
the humanitarian aid response in Gaza.”
The country’s humanitarian aid to Gaza since the start of the war in October 2023 currently amounts to more than 1 billion kronor ($105 million), while funding earmarked for Gaza for 2025 totals 800 million kronor, he said.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority said Internet and fixed-line communication services were down in Gaza following an attack on the territory’s last fiber optic cable.
“All Internet and fixed-line communication services in the Gaza Strip have been cut following the targeting of the last remaining main fiber optic line in Gaza,” the PA’s Telecommunications Ministry said in a statement, accusing Israel of attempting to cut Gaza off from the world.
“The southern and central Gaza Strip have now joined Gaza City and the northern part of the Strip in experiencing complete isolation for the second consecutive day,” the ministry said
in a statement.
It added that its maintenance and repair teams had been unable to safely access the sites where the fiber optic cable
was damaged.
“The Israeli occupation continues to prevent technical teams from repairing the cables that were cut yesterday,” it said, adding that Israeli authorities had prevented repairs to other telecommunication lines in Gaza “for weeks and months.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent said the communication lines were “directly targeted by occupation forces.”
It said the Internet outage was hindering its emergency services by impeding communication with first responder teams in the field.
“The emergency operations room is also struggling to coordinate with other organizations to respond to humanitarian cases.”
Maysa Monayer, spokeswoman for the Palestinian Communication Ministry, said that “mobile calls are still available with very limited capacity” in Gaza for the time being.
Now in its 21st month, the war in Gaza has caused massive damage to infrastructure across the Palestinian territory, including water mains, power lines and roads.
37 months in prison for ex-CIA analyst Asif Rahman who leaked docs on Israeli strike
- Rahman worked for CIA since 2016, held top secret security clearance
- Rahman was arrested by the FBI in Cambodia in November last year
WASHINGTON: A former CIA analyst who leaked top secret US intelligence documents about Israeli military plans for a retaliatory strike on Iran was sentenced to 37 months in prison this week, the Justice Department said.
Asif Rahman, 34, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency since 2016 and held a top secret security clearance, was arrested by the FBI in Cambodia in November last year.
In January, Rahman pleaded guilty at a federal courthouse in Virginia to two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.
He faced a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Iran unleashed a wave of close to 200 ballistic missiles on Israel on October 1 in retaliation for the killings of senior figures in the Tehran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups.
Israel responded with a wave of strikes on military targets in Iran in late October.
According to a court filing, on October 17 Rahman printed out two top secret documents “regarding a United States foreign ally and its planned kinetic actions against a foreign adversary.”
He photographed the documents and used a computer program to edit the images in “an attempt to conceal their source and delete his activity,” it said.
Rahman then transmitted the documents to “multiple individuals he knew were not entitled to receive them” before shredding them at work.
The documents, circulated on the Telegram app by an account called Middle East Spectator, described Israeli preparations for a possible strike on Iran but did not identify any actual targets.
According to The Washington Post, the documents, generated by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, described aviation exercises and movements of munitions at an Israeli airfield.
The leak led Israeli officials to delay their retaliatory strike.
One passenger reportedly survived India plane crash
- Indian media widely reported the survivor Vishwash Kumar Ramesh had been sitting in seat 11A
- BBC spoke to his cousin in the city of Leicester, Ajay Valgi, who reported that Ramesh had called his family to say he was “fine”
AHMEDABAD: The miracle report of a lone survivor from a London-bound passenger plane that crashed Thursday in the Indian city of Ahmedabad with 242 on board offered a glimmer of hope.
Indian rescue teams with sniffer dogs clawed through smoldering wreckage through the night searching for clues for what had caused the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London’s Gatwick Airport to explode in a blazing fireball soon after takeoff from the western city of Ahmedabad.
Bodies from Air India’s flight 171 were lifted out of the torn fuselage, as well as being pulled out of the charred buildings of the medical staff hostel that the airplane smashed into, killing several there too.
The death toll currently stands at 260, police said.
But hours after police said that there “appears to be no survivor in the crash,” officials reported the initially seemingly impossible account that one man had walked out alive.
“One survivor is confirmed,” Dhananjay Dwivedi, principal secretary of Gujarat state’s health department, told AFP.
The person was being treated in hospital, he added without further details.
India’s Home Minister Amit Shah, who visited the crash site and then the hospital, said he was “pained beyond words by the tragic plane crash” in Ahmedabad, the main city in Gujarat state, where Shah is a lawmaker.
But he also told reporters he had heard the “good news of the survivor” and was speaking to them “after meeting him.”
Indian media widely reported the survivor had been sitting in seat 11A, after videos shared on social media showed a man — in a bloodied t-shirt and limping, but walking toward an ambulance.
He shared a boarding card that named him as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, one of 53 UK citizens on board.
AFP was not able to confirm the reports, but the BBC spoke to his cousin in the city of Leicester, Ajay Valgi, who reported that Ramesh had called his family to say he was “fine.”
Britain’s Press Association news agency also spoke to his brother, Nayan Kumar Ramesh, 27, also in Leicester.
“He said, I have no idea how I exited the plane,” his brother told PA.
But while Ramesh’s reported survival offered a chance of hope, stories also flooded in of heartbreaking loss: elderly parents going to visit children in Britain, or family returning home.
Air India is organizing relief flights — one from the capital New Delhi and another from financial hub Mumbai — to Ahmedabad for “the next of kin of passengers and Air India staff,” the information ministry said in a statement.
They will have to take part in the grim task of identifying the bodies, many of which were reported to have been badly burned.
The plane, which was full of fuel as it took off for a long-haul flight to London, exploded into a burst of orange flame, videos of the crash showed.
Dwivedi, the health official, said DNA collection facilities had been set up at BJ Medical College in Ahmedabad.
“DNA testing arrangements have been made,” he told reporters.
“Families and close relatives of the flight passengers, especially their parents and children, are requested to submit their samples at the location so that the victims can be identified at the earliest.”
Air India crash adds to Boeing’s recent troubles
- Air India tragedy is first fatal crash since the Dreamliner went into service in 2009
- Cause of accident still unknown but comes after series of setbacks for the manufacturer
The crash of a Boeing 787 passenger jet in India minutes after takeoff on Thursday is putting the spotlight back on a beleaguered manufacturer though it was not immediately clear why the plane crashed.
The Air India 787 went down in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad with more than 240 people aboard shortly after takeoff, authorities said. It was the first fatal crash since the plane, also known as the Dreamliner, went into service in 2009, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. Boeing shares fell more than 5 percent in pre-market trading.
The 787 was the first airliner to make extensive use of lithium ion batteries, which are lighter, recharge faster and can hold more energy than other types of batteries. In 2013 the 787 fleet was temporarily grounded because of overheating of its lithium-ion batteries, which in some cases sparked fires.
737 Max
The Max version of Boeing’s best-selling 737 airplane has been the source of persistent troubles for Boeing after two of the jets crashed. The crashes, one in Indonesia in 2018 and another in Ethiopia in 2019, killed 346.
The problem stemmed from a sensor providing faulty readings that pushed the nose down, leaving pilots unable to regain control. After the second crash, Max jets were grounded worldwide until the company redesigned the system.
Last month, the Justice Department reached a deal to allow Boeing to avoid criminal prosecution for allegedly misleading US regulators about the Max before the two crashes.
Worries about the plane flared up again after a door plug blew off a Max operated by Alaska Airlines, leading regulators to cap Boeing’s production at 38 jets per month.
Financial woes
Boeing posted a loss of $11.8 billion in 2024, bringing its total losses since 2019 to more than $35 billion.
The company’s financial problems were compounded by a strike by machinists who assemble the airplanes plane at its factories in Renton and Everett, Washington, which halted production at those facilities and hampered Boeing’s delivery capability.
For the first three months of 2025, Boeing reported a narrower loss of $31 million compared with the previous year. CEO Kelly Ortberg said Boeing made progress on stabilizing operations during the quarter.
Orders and deliveries
The stepped-up government scrutiny and the workers’ strike resulted in Boeing’s aircraft deliveries sliding last year.
Boeing said it supplied 348 jetliners in 2024, which was a third fewer than the 528 that it reported for the previous year.
The company delivered less than half the number of commercial aircraft to customers than its main rival Airbus, which reported delivering 766 commercial jets in 2023.
Still, Boeing’s troubles haven’t turned off airline customers from buying its jets. Last month the company secured big orders from two Middle Eastern customers. The deals included a $96 billion order for 787 and 777X jets from Qatar, which it said was the biggest order for 787s and wide body jets in the company’s.
Air India crash leaves UK’s Indian community ‘deeply shocked’
- MP who campaigned to open direct flights between Ahmedabad, London praises Gujarati community
- Former PM Rishi Sunak, who recently watched IPL final in the city, sends prayers to families of victims
LONDON: The Indian community in the UK has been left in deep shock after an Air India airplane bound for London Gatwick crashed in Ahmedabad on Thursday.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner carrying 242 people burst into flames when it hit buildings in Gujarat state’s largest city shortly after takeoff.
Among those on board were 53 British passengers and 169 Indian nationals, many of whom would have been on their way to visit relatives in the UK.
The former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he and his wife Akshata Murty were “deeply shocked and distressed” by the tragedy.
Sunak and Murty were in Ahmedabad earlier this month to watch the Indian Premier League cricket final at the Narendra Modi Stadium.
Sunak said on X: “There is a unique bond between our two nations and our thoughts and prayers go out to the British and Indian families who have lost loved ones today.”
The High Commission of India in London said it was “deeply saddened by the tragic crash,” and that “thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by this devastating incident.”
It urged those affected to follow official updates from India’s civil aviation ministry and added that High Commission staff would assist the next of kin of the victims in the UK.
With the UK and India’s deep historic, political and trade ties, the Indian community in the UK is thought to number around 1.8 million. At least 600,000 are part of the diaspora from Gujarat, the state where the Air India plane crashed.
MP Bob Blackman, whose constituency of Harrow East is home to one of the largest Gujarati communities in the UK, said almost all the Indian nationals on board would have been on their way to visit relatives in Britain.
“The community is shocked by what’s happened,” he told BBC radio. “A third of my constituents come from Gujarat originally, and they will all have family and friends there. It’s a very close community and so they’ll all be affected by this.”
Blackman had campaigned to get direct flights set up between Ahmedabad and the UK.
The route was among the promises made by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who is from Gujarat — during a visit to the UK in 2015. Air India finally opened the route to Gatwick in 2023.
Blackman said: “It’s taken a long time to get these flights underway and that’s also what makes it even more of a tragedy: that one of these should crash and so many people have unfortunately lost their lives as a result.”
The MP praised the Gujarati community in the UK, saying that wherever they go throughout the world they bring improvements to education and the economy.
He added: “They’re hard-working people who look after their families and make sure everyone is protected, so when something like this happens it's a tragedy that’s felt by the whole community.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the scenes of the crash in Ahmedabad as “devastating.”
He added: “My thoughts are with the passengers and their families at this deeply distressing time.”
King Charles III said he was “desperately shocked” by the tragedy.
“Our special prayers and deepest possible sympathy are with the families and friends of all those affected by this appallingly tragic incident across so many nations, as they await news of their loved ones,” he said.
The crash comes a month after the UK and India signed a trade deal in the latest boost to their historic economic ties.
The accident stunned the business community operating between the two countries.
The UK India Business Council said it was deeply saddened by the crash.
“Our thoughts are with the victims, their families, and all those affected by this tragedy,” it said.
The UK branch of the Friends of India Society International said: “Our heartfelt condolences go out to the families and loved ones of those on board.”
