Wednesdays are normally the most exciting day of the week at Westminster, because it’s PMQs, but today (unless we get some mega surprise) all the action is taking place somewhere else. In part, that’s because Andy Burnham is still at the Commonwealth summit in Antigua. But mostly because anyone in SW1 with even a passing interest in politics will be far more interested in the outcome of the US midterm elections.
You can catch up with all the drama on our US politics live blog. While the US results are undoubtedly fascinating, quite how relevant they are to the UK is a bit harder to discern. Donald Trump is still president for the next two years, and none of the chaos he has caused for Britain and other European allies is going to go away; conceivably, he could end up even more disruptive.
Trump was first elected president in 2016 only months after the UK voted for Brexit and there will be progressives in Britain hoping the US results show that what Ed Davey is this morning calling the “politics of hate, division and economic harm” might be on their way out this side of the pond too. But it is probably too soon to get carried away. Our US coverage is all here.
In so far as there is any interesting UK reaction, I will post it here. Back to the Commonwealth summit, and Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, has given an interview to the BBC in which he defended Burnham’s decision to open talks about a proper UK apology for slavery. In particular, Miliband was critical of Tony Blair’s attempts to settle this issue with what Miliband described as a “sorry not sorry” apology.
Miliband was referring to this statement that Blair issued in 2006, written up at the time by the Guardian here. Blair said the slave trade was “profoundly shameful” and he expressed “deep sorrow that it ever happened”. But he did not formally apologise.
In an interview with the BBC’s Newscast podcast, Miliband said Burnham wanted a different approach. He said: People have been honestly a bit bruised by the past, what happened in the past, the sense that we just really just wanted to sweep this issue under the carpet and not confront it. My sense is there’s a bit of a sigh of relief that, OK … at least there’s a sense of we’ve got a shared interest now in moving the Commonwealth on.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
