- Cameron prepares to form Conservative government after election victory
Unexpected results deliver Tories overall Commons majority and claim leadership scalps of Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage
The Guardian May 08, 2015
David Cameron is preparing to form his first government comprised solely of Conservative cabinet members afterbeing delivered an overall Commons majority by a tumultuous election.
The result claimed the scalps of an unprecedented three party leaders in one day as Labour’s Ed Miliband, the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage of Ukip announced their resignations on Friday.
Cameron and his wife, Samantha, travelled to Buckingham Palace where he accepted the invitation of the Queen to form a government.
In an election suffused with historical and political significance, the Tories won 330 seats, four more than the 326 required for an overall majority, while Labour collapsed to 232, worse than its dismal 2010 performance. The result confounded a string of opinion polls that suggested Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck, and that Britain was heading for a constitutional stalemate.
Cameron’s position means, paradoxically, that he is more reliant on the support of his backbenchers than in the last government, when the combined strength of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition meant he enjoyed a stronger majority in the Commons.
In Scotland, Labour found its citadel sacked, securing only one seat – Edinburgh South – in what had once been its heartland. The SNP took 56 of the 59 seats north of the border.
The Liberal Democrats were devastated across Britain, collapsing from 57 seats to eight. Its most senior ministerial figures, including Ed Davey, Danny Alexander, Simon Hughes, Vince Cable and David Laws were ejected by an electorate that had lost trust in Clegg’s party.
Speaking on the steps of Downing Street, Cameron promised to restore the Conservative party’s one-nation credentials and recommitted himself to holding an in-out European Union referendum by 2017. He has also promised to try to reach out to backbenchers, ending the sense of cliquishness around the leadership.
The prime minister said: “ I want my party, and I hope a government I would like to lead, to reclaim a mantle that we should never have lost – the mantle of one nation, one United Kingdom.”
- Honest enough
A fruitful visit to America by Shinzo Abe has deepened a decades-old alliance
The Economist Apr 30th, 2015
SHINZO ABE’s visit to America was already a success before its high point on April 29th, when he became the first Japanese prime minister to address a joint session of Congress. The mood music had grown exuberant on April 27th, amid the announcement of new joint-defence guidelines to bolster America and Japan’s security partnership. The promise that Japan could soon conclude a bilateral deal with America for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade grouping, also gratified Mr Abe’s audience. And the Americans were delighted to hear him reaffirm his commitment to the relocation of an unpopular base for American Marines in the southern island prefecture of Okinawa, in the teeth of fierce local opposition.
But the hardest part of Mr Abe’s visit was always going to be the question of Japan’s reckoning with history, in the run-up to the highly charged 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Here too Mr Abe scored well before his American audience. An unexpected early gesture was a visit he made to Arlington National Cemetery, America’s most sacred military burial ground. Barack Obama declared that with this observance Mr Abe showed how “the past can be overcome, former adversaries can become the closest of allies, and that nations can build a future together”.
Congress received Mr Abe’s speech warmly. Not long ago the White House found it tricky to read his views on history. His visit to Tokyo's militaristic Yasukuni shrine in December 2013 aroused some mistrust. Yet his statement before the assembled congressmen, that Japan’s actions during the war “brought suffering to the peoples in Asian countries”, was straightforward. “We must not avert our eyes from that,” he acknowledged.
He also affirmed that he upholds apologies for Japan’s wartime atrocities that were made by previous prime ministers, and used the same phrase, “deep remorse” as did Tomiichi Murayama, a Socialist prime minister who set the standard for Japan’s statements of regret and apology in 1995. Joe Biden, America’s vice president, dubbed the speech “clear” as well as “very, very tactful and meaningful”.
Mr Abe also visited a memorial in Washington, DC to the victims of the second world war, and evoked battles named there: Pearl Harbour, the battles of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines and the Coral Sea battle off Australia. He offered his “deep repentance”—language he has not before used—as well as condolences for American lives lost. Yet he did not directly acknowledge the horror of the enforced march that followed the battle at Bataan, which killed thousands of Filipino and American prisoners.
Nor did he offer the personal apology that some of his critics had demanded. They were on their guard, after his past prevarications over history. The reaction from China has so far been muted. South Korea had lobbied strongly through Korean-American groups for a public display of contrition over Japan’s wartime treatment of so-called comfort women, or sex slaves. In answer to questions, Mr Abe repeated that he upholds a previous statement on the comfort women by Yohei Kono, a former chief cabinet secretary, in 1993.
Yet in the sole specific reference to the comfort women during his speech to Congress (apart from referring in general to the suffering Japan caused), Mr Abe remarked merely that women have always suffered the most in armed conflicts. That will cause disappointment in South Korea, wrote Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
- As Russia Remembers War in Europe, Guest of Honor Is From China
The New York Times MAY 8, 2015
President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met at the Kremlin on Friday. Mr. Xi will join Mr. Putin to review a military parade in Moscow on Saturday as part of a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis in Europe.
BEIJING — When Russiacelebrates the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis on Saturday, the most prominent leader standing with PresidentVladimir V. Putin to review a military parade will not be from the United States or Britain,Russia’s wartime allies.
Rather, it will be China’s leader, Xi Jinping, an imperfect symbol of the wartime past and an uncertain one for Russia’s future.
During his two years in office, Mr. Xi has traveled widely to advanceChina’s international prestige, and he is in Moscow in part because he wants to make sure that his country’s costly fight against Japan is not lost amid the celebrations of the defeat of Germany.
Mr. Putin, for his part, is happy to have Mr. Xi as evidence that his highly public pivot to the Far East — as a counterweight to the economic muscle of the West — is bearing fruit. However, there are several awkward factors that impinge on the images that both Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin aspire to project.
First, although Mr. Xi may be the paramount leader of the Chinese Communists, and while his father was a prominent Communist commander, it was not the Communists who bore the brunt of the fighting against the Japanese during World War II, when 14 million to 20 million Chinese died. Rather, it was the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, backed by the United States and Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, who deployed most of the troops against the Japanese.
“There has been an inconvenient truth at the heart of China’s discomfort about remembering the war until quite recently,” Rana Mitter, a British historian and the author of “China’s War With Japan,” said. “During the years 1937 to ’45, the vast majority of the set piece battles fought by China against Japan were carried out by Nationalist, not Communist, troops.”
The Communists, still a band of feisty guerrillas in the 1940s, carried out important attacks on the Japanese. But without the Nationalist war effort, China probably would have collapsed by 1938, he said.
In many respects, the Communists gained a great advantage in the war years over the Nationalists, who by the end were depleted and demoralized. The Communists, who had held back and were comparatively fresher, then crushed the Nationalists in the civil war that followed the victory over Japan.
Little of the domestic history that fails to burnish the Communist Party’s war record is likely to be recalled during the festivities in Moscow. In preparation for Saturday’s parade, an honor guard of Chinese troops sang the Russian wartime love song “Katyusha” in Chinese as they marched through the streets in the past week in snappy new olive green uniforms designed for the occasion, according to CCTV, the state run television station.
Instead, during his three days in Moscow there will be plenty of time for Mr. Xi to show off China’s friendship with Russia, a courtship that began in earnest after Europe and the United States imposed economic sanctions on Russia to penalize Mr. Putin for his bullying tactics in Ukraine.
