Weekend Box: Cleverly in Israel, Google on trial & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
Photo credit: Flickr/ UK government - Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visits Israel
WALKING THE DIPLOMATIC TIGHTROPE
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visited Israel this week and saw his diplomatic language closely scrutinised for meaning, given the circumstances of his visit. Cleverly tweeted ‘United by our unwavering belief in democracy. Thank you for the warm welcome to Israel, @netanyahu’ on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, having met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the evening before the country's Supreme Court began ruling on a government policy that risks a democratic and constitutional crisis.
Israel is often referred to as the region’s only democracy and retains close ties with the UK. Its legal systems even have some British roots, such as in the ‘reasonableness standard’ under which Israeli judges can overturn government policy based on it being unreasonable.
In July, Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition passed an amendment in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that removed the right for judges to nullify legislation on this basis. The amendment was to a ‘basic law’, essentially a set of laws that constitute Israel’s constitution. This challenge by lawmakers to the powers of the independent judiciary disrupts Israel’s separation of powers, in which the judiciary acts as the only check on the executive and legislature. It has provoked widespread protests, which continued this week as the Supreme Court met to examine this challenge to its own powers.
Cleverly’s two-day visit was split between Israel and Palestine and covered ongoing free trade negotiations between the UK and Israel, the beleaguered ‘two-state solution’ for Israel and Palestine, and Israel’s efforts to curtail Iran’s production of nuclear weapons and use of its proxy forces in the West Bank to attack Israel.
During the meetings, Mr Cleverly encouraged Mr Netanyahu to “seek any judicial reform through the achievement of the broadest possible consensus”, echoing similar calls by many of Israel’s closest allies in recent months. The Supreme Court’s hearings continue.
GOOGLE VS THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE
We feel we can trust Google to help us with whatever query we put to it (unless you use a different search engine; because surely, someone out there uses Bing…). But the tactics that the tech giant may have used to gain a hegemony and be the go-to search engine for internet users have put it at the centre of “the anti-trust monopolisation trial of a generation.”
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice and state attorneys commenced their legal battle with Google, alleging that the search engine pays $10bn a year in deals with the likes of Apple and Samsung in order to be the default for US users. Google not only stands to take hits to both its reputation and its default status, but the entire tech landscape may shift as Big Tech’s anti-competitive practices come under scrutiny.
Since the suit was originally filed in 2020, Big Tech has seen off legal challenges from the US government with seemingly little trouble. However, this case may be an exception. So far, the DoJ has called Google’s chief economist Hal Varian and former executive Chris Barton as witnesses, and shown that the search engine “saw the importance early on of making deals and securing its position as the default … on devices.”
If the DOJ are successful, American users may see this Google suddenly disappear from this position it has enjoyed for many years. Harvard Business School’s Shane Greenstein suggests that details made public during the case may give the European Union what it needs to pass similar anti-competitive rules. Analysts also argue that the case may give an advantage to competitors such as Microsoft’s ChatGPT and Bing.
Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai is expected to testify. Let us hope for their sake that he comes to court with a stronger argument than Google’s lead attorney John Schmidtlein, who argued on Tuesday that they simply have the better product.
MEXICO AWAITS “MADAME PRESIDENT”
Mexico will almost certainly have its first female president next year now that the two leading candidates will both be women. Since gaining its independence from Spain in the 1820s, Mexico has had 65 presidents, all of them men.
Claudia Sheinbaum was picked as the choice for the governing MORENA party, which is part of a leftist national alliance. Meanwhile, Xóchitl Gálvez will lead PAN, the conservative opposition.
Ms. Sheinbaum was the Mayor of Mexico City until she stood down to run for president. She is a former Environment Minister with a PhD in energy engineering. Although she is a close ally of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), her style is considerably more technocratic than that of the man she hopes to replace. Ms Sheinbaum is expected to ride the wave of popularity that MORENA is enjoying, swelled in no small part by AMLO’s charisma.
But the emergence of Ms Gálvez, her contender, has added some drama and uncertainty. Xóchitl Gálvez is a Senator and entrepreneur. She has what could be a politically advantageous personal narrative: she was born to an indigenous family and climbed her way out of rural poverty to become a successful businesswoman. Her more “upbeat” and “unpredictable” style will make an intriguing contrast with the relatively “stiff” Sheinbaum.
Mexico is a member of the G20 and has experienced impressive economic growth this century, but it remains dogged by inequality, poverty, and gang-related drug crime. With the election scheduled for July 2024, both candidates face a long campaign to convince voters of who is best to harness Mexico’s growth and tackle its significant social challenges.
BREAKING THE CARE CEILING
This week the Audley team supported First Star Scholars UK, a charity that provides educational opportunities for children in care, in their launch of a new report called ‘Breaking the Care Ceiling’. Researched by independent thinktank Civitas, it has exposed the gulf of opportunity between those who have been in care, and those who have not.
It found that just 14% of care leavers go to university in the UK, compared to 47 percent of young people who didn’t grow up in care. Those from the poorest fifth of households are more than twice as likely to go to university before the age of 19 as a young person who grew up in care.
With a new league table, the report also lifts the lid on the underperformance of Russell Group universities when it comes to the representation of care leavers. While the University of East London topped the league with 295 undergraduate care leavers, the University of Oxford came in last place, with only five care leavers studying for an undergraduate course.
We spoke with Lorna Goodwin who is the Executive Director of First Star, an organisation which provides children in care with a four-year university prep programme to help them into higher education. She said: “100,000 young people are in care today, but they continue to be underrepresented in higher education. Now is the time to break the ‘care ceiling’ that exists in the UK and encourage ambition among our care leavers.” The report, which received cross-party support at its launch this week in Houses of Parliament, is calling on the government to set meaningful targets to ‘break the care ceiling’. It recommends a Scottish-style ‘scholarship’ that has seen a tripling of the number of care leavers at Scottish universities in recent years. First Star Scholars continues to push for a better future for those who didn’t have the easiest start in life and this week called on the UK government to do the same.
BOTANICAL BEATS
‘Plant whispering’ has long been an accepted phenomenon in the horticultural world. As far back as 2015, B&Q employed its first professional plant communicators, employees instructed to chat to the company stock of flowers and ‘say nice things…to get them to bloom in the right way’. Numerous studies have been published about the listening powers of plants, proving that plants are responsive to different sounds.
Scientists have shown that plants grow substantially larger when they are played Buddhist chants rather than Western pop music, and that the noise of traffic stunts growth and produces stress compounds. In a 2014 study, Dr Heidi Appel and Dr Reginald Cocroft played plants the vibrations of hungry caterpillars, to which the plants responded by producing the defensive chemicals they would engineer had the caterpillars actually been present.
This year, it has been proven that plants have noise-producing abilities too. Scientists in Tel Aviv recorded a sound a ‘bit like bubble wrap being popped’ in tomato and tobacco plants when dehydrated or having had their stems cut. Researchers found that stressed plants emitted 30-50 pops per hour, much more frequently than unstressed plants, which could be detected up to five meters away.’ Scientists were even able to differentiate between plants that had been cut and those that had been dehydrated, as well as the type of plant, thanks to differences in the noise produced.
There is no evidence that this is an intentional sound, but the fact that plants can both hear and produce sounds has potentially significant implications for our ability to farm. If farmers could conduct Appel and Cocroft’s experiment on a mass scale, for example by using drones or small microphones in the field, they might be able to ward off pest invasions before they’ve even begun. By listening to their crops, they could develop an early-warning system for plants in distress. And think of the implications for scores of office workers struggling to keep their plants going in the corporate world. The Audley team for one could use all the help we can get.
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audleyadvisors.com.
For now, that’s The Weekend Box officially closed.