Background Briefing: July 9, 2018
The British Government’s Impending Collapse Over Brexit
We begin with disarray in the British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet following the resignation of her chief negotiator on Brexit David Davis who is joined today by Britain’s Foreign Minister Boris Johnson who quit in protest of May’s Brexit plan. The author of “Brexit – Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union”, Harold Clarke, the co-investigator of the British Election Study at the University of Manchester where he also is a visiting professor, joins us. We discuss this political earthquake rattling the British government which is likely to lead to a leadership challenge and a power struggle within the ruling Tory party who hold a slim majority. And with President Trump scheduled to visit the U.K. on Thursday, we assess what further mischief Trump might cause given his support for Brexit and his sympathy for the Brexiteers like Boris Johnson who makes rosy promises about a halcyon new world of free trade while wanting a crash exit or hard break from Europe and damn the consequences.
Collateral Damage From Putin’s Poisoners
Then with today’s death of a British citizen from contact with the Russian nerve agent Novichok which was used in an assassination attempt to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy and his daughter, we will look into how callous and sloppy Putin’s poisoners appear to have been in discarding the container of the deadly nerve agent which was smeared on the door handle of the Skripals home in Salisbury, resulting in the collateral damage of a lethal dose killing Dawn Sturgess and leaving her partner Charlie Rowley critically ill. Luke Harding, the former Moscow Bureau Chief of The Guardian and author of “A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin’s war with the West” whose latest book is “Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House”, joins us to discuss the growing outrage in the U.K.