Welsh Tory leader Andrew RT Davies resigns after controversies
The leader of the Welsh Tories, Andrew RT Davies, has resigned after dismal UK general election results and concern over comments he has made on subjects ranging from halal meat to the country’s divisive 20mph speed limit law.Nine members of the Welsh parliament’s Tory group, including Davies himself, backed Davies in a confidence vote on Tuesday while seven were against him.However, in a letter to the chair of the Welsh Conservative party, Bernard Gentry, Davies wrote that a group of Senedd members had threatened to resign from the shadow cabinet if he did not step down, making his position untenable.Davies wrote that he had hoped to unite the centre-right vote in Wales.He said campaigns against expanding the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, the 20mph speed limit law, and backing “Welsh farmers against Labour’s ideologically motivated policies” had won strong public support.
But he said this “clarity of message” was being undermined by some members of the Senedd group,Davies, a farmer from Cowbridge in south Wales, is one of the most recognisable figures in Welsh politics, having twice led the Tories in Wales, from 2011 to 2018 and then again from 2021, but his leadership has come under scrutiny in recent months,The Tories were completely wiped out in Wales at the UK general election,They are now the second biggest party in the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, but a poll published this week put them in fourth place behind Plaid, Labour and Reform UK when people were asked who they would vote for in the next Senedd elections in 2026,Tackling the threat from Reform UK will be a priority for the next leader.
Davies has faced criticism for arguing that children should not be “forced to eat halal school lunches”, in an article for GB News, after a constituent alleged she had been told non-halal meat was not available at her daughter’s school.He was criticised for a post on social media from the Vale of Glamorgan county show inviting people to have their say on abolishing the Senedd – not a Tory policy.Davies was also reprimanded for bringing the Senedd into disrepute by calling Wales’s 20mph speed limit a “blanket” policy, which is wrong because there are exemptions.Davies said he would not stand in the leadership contest.Welsh Labour accused the Tories of focusing on themselves rather than the people of Wales.
Welsh Labour has had a terrible year itself, with its former leader and first minister Vaughan Gething forced to resign after an election donation scandal.Reform UK said: “True to form, the Tories have turfed out another leader thinking that will resurrect their failing party.They care more about jousting for position than they do about serving Welsh people.”Laura McAllister, professor of public policy at Cardiff University, said: “There’s always been an ideological tension within [the Conservative] group between those who feel the Conservatives’ role is to become a potential party of government and those – of whom Andrew is one – who feel it’s their job to criticise very vocally and directly the Welsh Labour governments that have been there since the start of devolution.That’s a pretty big schism.
”Darren Millar, who was first elected to the Welsh parliament in 2007 and is the group’s chief whip, was the first to say he will stand in a leadership contest.
Why Silicon Valley panicked over Australia’s under-16 social media ban
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Happy belated Thanksgiving to my American readers, and I hope everyone enjoys a good holiday party this weekend. I’m excited to bake Grittibänz for the Feast of St Nicholas. This week in tech: Australia incites a panic, Bluesky poses the question of custom feeds, and the online things that brought me joy on holiday.On Thursday, Australia passed a law banning children under 16 from social networks
Meta says it has taken down about 20 covert influence operations in 2024
Meta has intervened to take down about 20 covert influence operations around the world this year, it has emerged – though the tech firm said fears of AI-fuelled fakery warping elections had not materialised in 2024.Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at the company that runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said Russia was still the No 1 source of the adversarial online activity but said in a briefing it was “striking” how little AI was used to try to trick voters in the busiest ever year for elections around the world.The former British deputy prime minister revealed that Meta, which has more than 3 billion users, had to take down just over 500,000 requests to generate images on its own AI tools of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, JD Vance and Joe Biden in the month leading up to US election day.But the firm’s security experts had to tackle a new operation using fake accounts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal at the rate of more than one every three weeks. The “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” incidents included a Russian network using dozens of Facebook accounts and fictitious news websites to target people in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan
‘It feels like a startup energy’: Google’s UK boss on the advent of AI
While the tech giant wrestles with an US antitrust case, its managing director in London is pushing hard on the commercial possibilities of artificial intelligenceGoogle’s central London office cost as much as a tech unicorn and the company’s UK boss, Debbie Weinstein, says it pulses with a similar spirit.“It feels like a startup energy,” she says.However, we are meeting on a morning when Google has been threatened with a reckoning reserved for members of the corporate establishment, not tech ingenues: a breakup.Hours earlier, the US Department of Justice had asked a federal judge to order the sale of Google’s Chrome browser, along with a host of other actions including making its search index – a database of all the webpages it has crawled – available to competitors. It follows a ruling by the same judge in August that the $2tn company has built an illegal monopoly in the search market
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‘Russia can turn the lights off’: how the UK is preparing for cyberwar
The Swedish government checklist for surviving a war would not have looked out of place decades ago: bottled water; sleeping bags; extra batteries; enough cash for a week; and non-perishable food such as rice and cereal.Without being mentioned in name, Russia once more lurks in the background as it did during the cold war. But the nature of the threat it poses in the pamphlet, called “In case of crisis or war”, has changed.Alongside raising the possibility of “an armed attack against Sweden”, the guide also mentions “cyber-attacks” and “disinformation campaigns”.As well as coping with the threat of nuclear conflict or an armed border incursion, Europe must now contend with a very 21st-century foe: cyberwarfare
UK underestimates threat of cyber-attacks from hostile states and gangs, says security chief
The UK is underestimating the severity of the online threat it faces from hostile states and criminal gangs, the country’s cybersecurity chief will warn.Richard Horne, the head of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, will cite a trebling of “severe” incidents amid Russian “aggression and recklessness” and China’s “highly sophisticated” digital operations.In his first major speech as the agency’s chief, Horne will say on Tuesday that hostile activity in UK cyberspace has increased in “frequency, sophistication and intensity” from enemies who want to cause maximum disruption and destruction.In a speech at the NCSC’s London HQ, Horne, who took on the role in October, will point to “the aggression and recklessness of cyber-activity we see coming from Russia” and how “China remains a highly sophisticated cyber-actor, with increasing ambition to project its influence beyond its borders”.“And yet, despite all this, we believe the severity of the risk facing the UK is being widely underestimated,” he will say
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