The political week in 5 points
By: Jamie Pow
Tags: Bipartisanship, Barack Obama, Antisemitism, Brexit, Allen Weisselberg

America mourns the loss of war hero and political maverick, John McCain. Taken captive when his plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he was repeatedly tortured by the North Vietnamese until his release five years later, having refused to cooperate. When he entered politics in 1983, he became a fierce advocate against torture and for the promotion of democracy around the world. McCain first stood for the presidency in 2000, losing the Republican Party’s nomination to George W Bush, and again in 2008, when he lost the general election to Barack Obama. As Senator for Arizona, he earned a reputation for independent thinking and bipartisanship, sponsoring landmark legislation on campaign finance reform and championing immigration reform. One of his final legislative acts was to cast the decisive vote in saving Obamacare from repeal. It has been reported that McCain has requested former Presidents Obama and Bush (43) to deliver eulogies at his funeral.

Donald Trump implicated in criminal conspiracy by former lawyer as legal net tightens. In a dramatic week in Washington the former manager of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, was found guilty of eight counts of fraud. Within an hour Michael Cohen, the President’s former ‘fixer’, pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Not only did he admit to paying ‘hush money’ to two women who claim to have had affairs with Trump; he also claimed to have done so “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” He claims to have information of interest to Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election, and has pledged to cooperate with the special counsel. Meanwhile, the Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, has been granted immunity by prosecutors in the Cohen investigation. Carl Bernstein, the veteran journalist who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, offered his view on the unprecedented developments: “What we are watching in the Trump presidency is worse than Watergate.”

UK government publishes ‘no deal’ impact papers, with an exception for Northern Ireland. The 24 papers are mainly technical in nature, advising businesses and organisations what they should do in the event that no agreement is reached on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the future relationship between the two. They are also designed to show the EU that the UK is prepared to walk away from negotiations, rather than accept a ‘bad deal’. However, the Chancellor repeated his previous warning that such a scenario would have “large fiscal consequences,” with a projected 7.7% decline in GDP. Meanwhile, the government has avoided publishing ‘no deal’ contingency plans for Northern Ireland’s electricity market, which has operated under of an all-island market since 2007. The Times reported that draft proposals would see “mass importation of generators, some placed on barges, to ensure sufficient capacity.” It also quoted a senior official involved in the preparatory work: “When we looked at this we found there weren’t enough readily available generators in the world for what would be needed.”

Pope Francis visits Ireland with plea for forgiveness. It was estimated that up to 300,000 people gathered for Papal Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, around a million fewer than the number attending during Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979. The Pope confronted the shame of the Catholic Church over institutional abuse, seeking forgiveness for “abuses in Ireland, abuses of power, conscience and sexual abuses.” He met with victims and survivors, one of whom was Marie Collins. She asked Pope Francis about the Church’s handling of abuse, but was disappointed with his response: “In answer to [my] question of setting up a tribunal and what sort of concrete measures there’s going to be, it would appear that there’s not going to be anything more.” The visit highlighted the palpable sense of anger that remains across Ireland, and the diminished role of the Catholic Church as an institution. The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, notably called for a new relationship between the Church and state, with the former “no longer at the centre of society.”

Jeremy Corbyn faces new criticism over antisemitism. A video emerged of the Labour leader making a speech in 2013 in which he says “Zionists … clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either … So I think they needed two lessons, which we can perhaps help them with.” The comments were widely interpreted as prejudicial against Jews. Mr Corbyn rejected allegations of antisemitism, claiming to have used the term ‘Zionist’ “the accurate political sense [ideological support for Israel as a Jewish national state] and not as a euphemism for Jewish people.” He added: “I am now more careful with how I might use the term ‘Zionist’ because a once self-identifying political term has been increasingly hijacked by antisemites as code for Jews.” The Labour Party’s own report on antisemitism, published in 2016, acknowledged “the way in which the word ‘Zionist’ has been used personally, abusively, or as a euphemism for ‘Jew’.”