DTNZ: Milei vows to ‘recover’ Falklands

Argentine President Javier Milei has intensified Buenos Aires’ long-running claim to the Falkland Islands, declaring the British Overseas Territory to be Argentine and warning that his government will act against companies involved in a major offshore oil development.

In a nationally televised address, Milei opened with an unequivocal assertion of sovereignty over the islands, known in Argentina as Las Malvinas.

Brendan O'Neill: For the love of God, stop the boats

It is a crime against sovereignty that hundreds of men are permitted to intrude on British soil every week.

Nine hundred and eleven. That’s how many people have illegally intruded into our country since Sunday. Just shy of a thousand foreigners, mostly blokes, sailed on to our shores and met not so much as a cough of opposition from border guards. An unresisted tide of newcomers washing upon a sleeping nation. It is intolerable. It is a grotesque insult to the hard-won liberty of this kingdom that armadas of men from distant, regressive lands are permitted to come, week after week after week. For the love of God, stop these boats.

Brendan O'Neill: Who would take up arms for Broken Britain?

A survey has found that only six per cent of Brits would fight for the nation. I hate that I understand why.

Putin will be over the moon. Caves in Iraq will echo with the laughter of whatever remains of ISIS. For a new poll has found that a measly six per cent of Britons would take up arms if we faced an ‘imminent invasion’. Armies of mad Islamists could be amassing on our beaches and just one in 17 of us would ask for a gun. ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be’, said Churchill. Not anymore, we won’t.

Matt Ridley: The gas price shock will expose Britain’s catastrophic energy misjudgment

Since a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas has to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, it is no surprise that the price we pay for natural gas has spiked sharply upwards. That’s bad news for people trying to heat their homes, use electricity, start an AI business, make chemicals, find employment or buy almost anything. Energy is the lifeblood of the economy.

Dr Will Jones: Trump to Hit Britain With Tariffs Over Greenland

Donald Trump has announced tariffs on the UK and other European countries for their opposition to a US takeover of Greenland as he ratchets up the pressure in his move to acquire the Danish Arctic territory. The Telegraph has more.

Melanie Phillips: Britain’s cultural emergency

A deadly combination of Islamist intimidation and indigenous cultural collapse is roaring out of control

There’s been deep shock that a Jewish MP, Damien Egan, was barred by a school in his constituency, Bristol Brunel Academy, from visiting it last September after being invited to speak there about democracy and public service.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, teachers and activists from the school and the National Education Union objected to him being given a platform on the grounds that he is vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

The union wrote gloatingly in September:

Brendan O'Neill: It is not racist to tell the truth about Britain’s rape gangs

Why is the left so hell-bent on burying the truth of what was done to working-class girls?

Here’s a surefire way to know if you’ve lost the moral plot – you get angrier about the public discussion of mass rape than you do about the mass raping itself. Your moral conscience gets more fired up by people talking about the industrial-scale abuse of working-class girls than it does by the abuse itself. You’re more horrified by the phrase ‘Pakistani rape gang’ than you are by the existence of Pakistani rape gangs. If any of that applies to you, then your morals have been well and truly shattered on the wheel of cultural relativism, classism and cowardice.

Melanie Phillips: The fantasy state of "Palestine"

Time for the US and the Jewish world to start holding their supposed champions’ feet to the fire

In his barnstorming speech this week at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he lobbed one uncomfortable home truth after another at member states, US President Donald Trump told the world body itself that it was useless. Instead of stopping wars and saving lives, he said, it produced only empty words.

The problem with the UN is rather more acute than that. Supposedly the guardian of peace and justice in the world, it has become instead an avatar of evil.

Michael Rainsborough: Britain’s Descent Towards Civil War is No Accident

Having lived in Australia for the past three years, I sense that this country is the least advanced down the road towards the multicultural dystopia confronting much of Europe. That is not to say there is room for complacency: Australia has its own canaries in the coal mine, echoing trends observable across the Western world. Yet relative prosperity, firm immigration policies, a distinct welfare regime (mandatory health insurance, means tested pensions), a robust federal system, and above all a unique electoral framework of three-year cycles and compulsory voting all help, willy-nilly, to keep politicians on a short leash and broadly tethered to the popular will.

Dr Will Jones: Norway’s Threat to Cut Off the UK Leaves Labour’s Net Zero Plans in Tatters

As Norway threatens to cut off the UK from electricity at times of low wind speeds, it’s a sign of a growing energy nationalism globally that leaves Labour’s short-sighted Net Zero plans in tatters, says Andy Mayer in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.

Rupert Darwall: Britain shows why net zero would be a disaster for the U.S.

The UN and the Biden Administration want Net Zero for the U.S - While China opts for energy realism

Six days after this November’s presidential election, the annual United Nations climate change talks will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan. Unlike the election, no one is holding their breath. Baku will be the twenty-ninth in the series. Climate change regularly draws gatherings of world leaders like no other. When the U.S. president shows up, everyone who is anyone turns up, too. These events often represent milestones in the upward ascent of global climate action.

David Thunder: Unrest in Britain - The Other Half of the Story

The official story circulating on BBC and echoed by government and police spokespersons is that the riots and unrest seen in the UK in recent weeks are the product of a tiny minority of “far-right” hooligans and criminals, egged on by “disinformation” about the circumstances of the awful murder of innocent children in Southport, in particular the identity of the 17-year-old assailant, who was initially alleged to be a Muslim refugee, and later turned out to be a Welsh-born citizen born to Rwandan parents. This official story is not, strictly speaking, false. But it is only half the story.

Brendan O'Neill: We must be free to blaspheme against the gender cult

The sacking of a teacher for refusing to use ‘preferred pronouns’ is a grave assault on freedom of conscience.

So we can now add Britain to the list of countries where you can be sacked for refusing to bow down to the state religion. Only where in Iran it’s Muhammad you must venerate if you wish to dodge officialdom’s long finger of judgement, in the UK it’s the gender ideology. How else to explain the sacking of a schoolteacher for refusing to use a student’s ‘preferred pronouns’. This is a clear case of someone being punished for failing to profess a doctrine, for refusing to embrace a faith. Agnosticism, it seems, is a sackable offence under the gender cult.

James Kierstead: Why Britain is in the Pacific

On March 31st, at a meeting of member-countries, it was agreed that the UK would join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

The CPTPP is one of the world’s largest free-trade blocs, accounting for 13% of global GDP, 15% of global trade, and 500 million people.

New Zealand is a founding member of the agreement as well as its depositary – the nation to whom an international treaty is entrusted. New Zealand is also the chair of the CPTPP this year, though its role in helping Britain to the table goes back further, to when New Zealand sent trade negotiators to the UK after the Brexit vote.

Brendan O'Neill: Britain is a political wasteland

The Truss premiership was a new low for our democracy.

So Liz Truss is out. After just 44 days her premiership is no more. ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’, she said in parliament yesterday, and now she’s quit. Her premiership deserves to live in ignominy. Not necessarily because her blunders were so spectacular – though many of them were – but because of what this strangled-at-birth stint in Downing Street tells us about British politics more broadly. Which is that it’s a wasteland. An ideological void. A dustbowl of ideas. The lack of even the faintest glimmer of leadership material anywhere in the Westminster circus is horrifying to me. Trussism is but a symptom of a wider malady afflicting our political class.

First, her mistakes. Where to start?

Point of Order: UK newspaper raises questions (of particular concern to NZ) about the future of the Commonwealth

How long will the Commonwealth survive? It’s a question that hasn’t aroused much attention in New Zealand, but – along with the whole relationship with the monarchy – it could become a major issue.

Commonwealth membership and the role of the monarch have a special importance for this country, because the Crown is at the centre of this country’s constitutional arrangements.

So we can’t say we haven‘t been warned when the headline on a feature in The Guardian in London asks:

After that disastrous royal tour, is the sun finally setting on the Commonwealth realms?

Michael Bassett: Reforming the United Nations

When I heard Ukraine’s President Zelensky arguing for a fundamental overhaul of the United Nations, and especially of the Security Council, I recalled our greatest New Zealand Prime Minister and World War Two leader, Peter Fraser. He envisaged just the sort of issue we face today with Russia’s war on Ukraine. Old Peter, a wily, highly intelligent Scotsman, was one of the world’s few prime ministers to attend the San Francisco conference in 1945 that set up the rules for a postwar body to monitor the peace. With support from nearly all the smaller countries represented at the conference, Fraser objected strenuously to the great power veto that enabled any of the five victorious powers – the US, Britain, France, Russia and China – to block any substantive move the Security Council might want to take in the event of a breach of the UN Charter, even if all other countries favoured action. Peter Fraser pointed out that by allowing a veto, one of the five might behave as it pleased, and then act as judge and jury in its own cause. He was right. That’s exactly what has happened several times since 1945. The US has done it and Russia much more often. The veto is why today the United Nations is such a toothless tiger. It is unable to protect Ukraine, one of its member states, from the ruthless onslaught from neighboring Russia. The recent motion to condemn Russia passed the Security Council with a significant majority. Several Security Council members abstained from voting or absented themselves, but Russia exercised its veto, thereby preventing what should have resulted in international punishment, with Russia having to pay reparations for the damage it has done.