Weekend Box: The Party Fault Line, I’m With Cupid & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
Image credit/Keir Starmer on Flickr/License
LABOUR: THE PARTY FAULT LINE
“Remember Keir: Israel has the right to defend herself and Hamas is responsible.”
You can imagine the conversation between Keir Starmer and his staffers as he approached his LBC interview with Nick Ferrari. Here was an opportunity to reinforce the strong stance he had taken since Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7th and to demonstrate how much he had done to change his party since the dark days of Jeremy Corbyn.
You don’t need to be with the Labour leader long before he starts talking about this. Rebuilding relations with the Jewish community has been central to the detoxification strategy that he hopes will sweep him to power next year.
And so it was that when asked if it was “appropriate” for Israel to conduct a siege of Gaza, including cutting off water to the territory, he replied “I think Israel does have that right.”
That response sparked huge concern among Labour members, leading to councillor resignations and hastily convened meetings with MPs. Supporting Israel in the face of terrorism is one thing. Appearing to condone human rights violations is quite another. The Labour leader is now under pressure to call for a ceasefire and to differentiate himself from the government.
Starmer faces a dilemma: stick to his position and alienate his party, or give them what they want and stand accused of showing weakness. Either option risks creating a row that could undermine his entire detoxification strategy. And with an estimated 30 seats heavily influenced by the votes of Muslim communities, the electoral peril is clear too.
There are more important things at play in Israel and Gaza this weekend, but the deliberations going on in Keir Starmer’s Westminster office may yet have a significant impact on the future here.
It had all been going so well but events, dear boy, events.
Image credit/NordForsk on Flickr/License
STRIKE-LAND: ICELAND PM LEADS EQUALITY STRIKE
1975 was the last time Iceland saw its female population on strike in the name of equality. It is estimated that 90% of women took to the streets on the "kvennafrí," or ‘women’s day off,’ forcing the male population to consider the importance of women within the economy. A year later, the Icelandic parliament passed an equal pay law, and four years after that in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was the first woman in the world to be democratically elected a head of state.
48 years later, Iceland’s women and non-binary people are on strike again, refusing paid and unpaid work including household chores, and this time with Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir leading the charge. In an interview ahead of the protest she said, "I will not work this day, as I expect all the women [in cabinet] will do as well."
The strike intends to highlight how typically female-dominated sectors such as teaching are often undervalued, despite the important function they play in a fully working economy, and to encourage a greater appreciation of them.
Despite progress in the last few decades towards gender equality, the World Economic Forum still estimates it will take 131 years to close the gender pay gap between men and women, with no country as of yet achieving full gender parity.
Iceland has ranked top of The Global Gender Gap Index for the past 14 years, yet in spite of this, in certain industries Icelandic women earn 21% less than men.
What is clear, is that if Iceland is still working at closing the gap as world leaders in gender parity, then we in the UK – sitting at 15 in the Index – still have our work cut out.
ARGENTINA: MILEI’S MALAISE
For a time, it seemed Argentina was poised to become the latest country to swing to the right under a post-Trump, populist leader. However, Javier Milei’s disruptive ambitions for the Argentine political establishment met a setback on Sunday, as he fell behind his opponent Sergio Massa in the race to become president.
Widely regarded as the frontrunner in Argentina’s elections until Sunday, Milei ultimately received 29.9% of the vote to Massa’s 36.6%. The results came as a surprise, as it had appeared the outsider candidate would ride to power on the wave of popular discontent with the left-wing Peronist government. With inflation in Argentina nearing 140%, Milei has campaigned on a series of radical reforms to appeal to a country that has seen 40% of its 46 million inhabitants enter poverty, including shutting down the central bank and ditching the peso for the US dollar.
However, some of his other radical proposals – including a referendum on Argentina’s three-year-old law legalising abortion and legalising the sale of human organs – may have been his undoing, leading the Peronist economist Sergio Massa to gain a lead on him; the embodiment of the very establishment Milei’s promised to dismantle. Voters will go to the polls again on November 19th for a run-off election. Massa has promised to form a unity government based on “dialogue and consensus” should he win.
Leftist leaders in South America have welcomed the results, with Brazil’s President Lula reportedly messaging Massa personally to congratulate him. Across the aisle, Milei has called on opponents of the Peronist government to unite against them, and fellow conservative candidate Patricia Bullrich has suggested she will endorse him.
Will Massa’s message of unity resonate with voters, or will a united front from the right ultimately triumph? In a little over three weeks, we’ll find out.
Image credit/Anthony Quintano on Flickr/License
TECH-TONICS
This week Big Tech has made a comeback with Meta, Google, and Microsoft posting strong quarterly earnings and sales. These results are hot on the heels of mass layoffs and cost-cutting moves as the sector responded to macroeconomic uncertainty.
Despite its gamble on the metaverse backfiring and its subsequent pivot to AI, Meta in particular soared past analyst expectations with a third quarter revenue of $34.15bn, up 23% year-over-year.
What all of these tech titans have in common is their multibillion-dollar investment in AI, with each trying to get a leg up in the global AI race. However, many experts are calling for a halt to what they describe as a “race to the bottom,” due to the risks unchecked innovation could have for the economy, society, and people’s lives. Given Meta was hit with a lawsuit this week by the attorneys general of 41 states in the US for ‘intentionally addicting children’ to its platform Facebook, putting the shared future of AI in the hands of a few companies without robust regulation is rightly a cause for concern.
This is an issue that the UK government will certainly seek to tackle in its forthcoming AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November. The Prime Minister this week vowed to tackle fears around AI by creating an AI safety body and publishing a first-of-its-kind paper on the technology’s capabilities and risks. While he said he was in no rush to regulate AI, Sunak walks a tightrope between leveraging its economic benefits and mitigating its threats.
This week Audley attended the Bloomberg Tech Summit and after hearing from the industry, it was evident that aside from the threats of AI, the UK has a problem when it comes to AI startups staying, growing, and listing here. It was stark in this week’s run of tech earnings that the UK is yet to produce any Google-sized tech giants and there are cultural issues that must be addressed if the UK is to fulfil the Prime Minister’s ambition to be a ‘tech superpower.’
I’M WITH CUPID
For some, the very idea of choosing a potential suitor via an online platform is anathema to romance. For the majority of young people today, it’s the reality of single life and the most straightforward and efficient way of getting a date. In the UK, research showed that 63% of single adults are going online to find love.
But all that swiping is hard work, not to mention time consuming. ‘Dating app burnout’ is a common phrase in the parlance of regular users. A Singles Reports survey this year showed that nearly 80% of users surveyed said they experienced emotional burnout or fatigue with online dating.
Enter Tinder’s new feature, Matchmaker, which allows users to outsource their swiping activity to friends or family. The account owner can give up to 15 people within a 24-hour period access to their potential matches and source recommendations. As Tinder’s pressroom explains, the feature ‘makes modern dating a team sport.’
While a user’s friends and family can offer recommendations, they can’t swipe or message on their behalf. So far, so efficient. However, the feature has raised some queries about data privacy. There is no requirement for those issuing recommendations to have a Tinder account themselves, meaning users might find their profile being shared with a wider audience than the other singles you intended.
Dating apps have faced some scrutiny about their data practices in recent years, but this is nothing new. Users have to accept that dating apps will have access to their personal information: images, geolocation, sexual identity (and occasionally preferences). But isn’t that the whole point? Probably: they need this insight into your most personal information in order to make suitable matches.
Whether you want to share this with your mum is another question entirely.
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.