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The problem with "Broken Britain" hyperbole is it risks becoming self-fulfilling because it rolls the pitch for political extremists and populist charlatans (no names no pack drill). They are the main beneficiaries of this sentiment going mainstream. That's why they work so hard to promote it.

Again, straight out of the Trump playbook.

Depressingly so. An instruction manual for all the wrong people, a warning for everyone else.

I agree with you btw about this feeling like a crux few years for us. But for me the absolute biggest short term priority is preventing far right populism getting its mitts on government. So long as we manage to stop that we have a chance of meeting some of our many challenges. If not, forget it and we'll be looking back at today quite wistfully.

Man who threatened Farage sentenced to 5 years in jail

Paid for by us. And he gets to stay.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj97lkmd23po

He came in by inflatable boat, gave a false name to authorities here, had 17 previous convictions in Sweden, including for carrying a knife, threatening behaviour and vandalism and was also jailed in June 2019 after using threatening behaviour towards a public servant.

Why on earth wasn't he deported never to be allowed in again? What is this country becoming?

He will probably be able to claim he's at risk of persecution/execution if deported to Afghanistan. Or they don't want to accept him. Or it's impossible to prove he's from there etc etc.

And he actually has a machine gun tattoo on his face. Why on earth would we want him in our country?

Why aren't we assured that after his prison term (which will likely be less than 3 years) he is to be immediately deported? Who do we hold to account when this doesn't happen?

This is from the House of Commons Library paper on the deportation of criminals which I happened to be looking at this morning:

"The Immigration Act 1971 originally envisaged deportation being discretionary. A person would be liable to deportation if the Home Office decided it was conducive to the public good or a judge recommended it at the point of sentencing.8
Discretionary deportation decisions have largely been overtaken by statutory deportation rules. Under section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007, the Home Secretary “must make a deportation order” against a person given a prison sentence of 12 months or more for a crime committed in the UK.9 This converts the discretionary power of deportation into a duty in relevant cases. It also makes criminal court recommendations for deportation largely redundant.10
Exceptions to the duty
Although section 32 is titled “automatic deportation”, a 12-month prison sentence does not inevitably result in deportation. Various exceptions apply.11
In particular, deportation is not automatic if it would breach the European Convention on Human Rights, UN Refugee Convention or Council of Europe Convention Against Trafficking in Human Beings. Human rights appeals against deportation are covered in section 2 below.
Other exceptions include people who were under 18 on the date of conviction, or who are being extradited.
EU citizens and their family members with residence rights under the post-Brexit Withdrawal Agreement are also exempt from automatic deportation if their criminal act took place before 31 December 2020.12 Such people are instead considered for deportation under a framework derived from EU free movement law, which offers stronger protections against deportation. No particular length of prison sentence triggers deportation.13
By contrast, EU citizens whose offence has been committed since 31 December 2020 are liable to automatic deportation (except for Irish citizens).14"

The case I was looking at it for was for someone of Pakistani origin who was supposed to have a sentencing diet tomorrow. He has been in this country since he came here illegally on a false passport in 2005. He has now been convicted of a serious criminal offence. He was caught before and taken to a detention centre but then let go (again) on the basis that he would sign on at the local police station (he didn't).

It's cases like this that drive me mad. He has been in this country with no legal status for 20 years. Border Force is nothing short of a farce. And, in this case at least, someone ended up getting seriously hurt because of their failures.

Election Maps UK
@ElectionMapsUK
·
12m
Westminster Voting Intention:

RFM: 27% (=)
LAB: 20% (=)
CON: 17% (=)
LDM: 16% (-1)
GRN: 13% (+1)
SNP: 3% (-1)

Via
@YouGov
, 12-13 Oct.
Changes w/ 5-6 Oct.



Full results:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/overview/survey-results

There's something very odd about these numbers. Perhaps the sampling. Is there an VI analysis by socio-economic group?

Right now, Yougov's sample skews well to the left of other pollsters'.

Do we know that? Other reasons could be how they weight their sample.

It’s not that they skew left it is they are much more strict with habitual non voters, others like Find Out Now are much more generous.

Plenty of Reform’s support comes from voters who haven’t don’t vote in general elections this century, 2019 apart if at all since 2001.

I am really warming to Donald Trump.

Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions

Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP

The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).

This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.

And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.

And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?

She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?

It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.

I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.

If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.

If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?

Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.

There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.

There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).

I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.

Happy Last Ever Patch Tuesday for Windows 10 users who have not sold their soul to Microsoft for an extra year of updates Day.

In a world where computers now regularly last for 5-8 years without too much trouble in domestic environments, this probably goes down as one of Microsoft’s worst decisions of all time.

When they launched W10, the idea was that it would be basically the last Windows O/S, with everything afterwards just being updates.

W11 added little new apart from adverts, telemetry, and forcing Microsoft Account on everyone. It’s purely a commercial decision to get rid of W10, at the cost of hundreds of millions of computers.

W10 was still sold regularly only three years ago, this is the sort of thing that antitrust regulators should be all over.

I am really warming to Donald Trump.

Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions

Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP

The woman in the fish and chip shop is running out of visa. She has a degree in something or other but could not find a job in that field (assuming it was a field).

This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.

And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.

And that sucks for her as an individual, but is it the wrong thing for society?

She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?

It's not just her – that's the problem. It's everyone. Even the doctors who can't find jobs while we have a shortage of doctors.

I don’t buy the “can’t” find jobs.

If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.

If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?

Real problem of two bits of the health system not talking to each other.

There's been an expansion of the first bit of medical training (five years at Uni to get to call yourself "Doctor") without the necessary expansion of speciality training (five to ten years effective apprenticeship to actually become independently useful). That's created a bottleneck halfway through the system. Horrible for the people involved, wasteful for the nation and utterly predictable. Our Foxy friend has been flagging it for what feels like ages.

There is some sort of pending disaster with GP training - there are apparently thousands of new doctors who can't find a placement, and weirdly there is an issue with some GPs being forced to go part time because there isn't the funding available (but the GP practices themselves are very busy).

I don't know the details because I can't even feign an interest in it, much to my partner's frustration. She has said - "you should tell your weird online friends on PB about this" however.

Is the issue location? I can imagine a reluctance among some young doctors to take a job in rural Lincolnshire or Wales.

Ok a couple of caveats here: I don't know about GP training which will be greater and I am looking at many decades ago, but trainee doctors went to wherever the roles were. You were expected to move to a new hospital in a new area. For instance my wife went from Aberdeen to Leicester to London (St Georges). I know Foxy went in the reverse direction, ending up in Leicester from London.

That’s still the case. For example, a Foundation Dr in the North might be placed at James Cook in Teesside, Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle, or the RVI in Newcastle, amongst others.

The NHS training, recruitment and staffing systems appears to have been designed by people who thought that the Imperial Japanese Navy were a bunch of softies.

Strangely, if you treat your staff like a 19th Cent. mill owner, you get poor industrial relations.

Morning all

Rather like the Northern Rock crisis showed our dependence on a viable banking system and the inherent risk to both economic and social order from a failure of that system, yesterday's Vodafone outage showed how dependent we are on Broadband and mobile phone coverage.

The confusion of when what you expect and rely on isn't there is at the heart of this - even something as obvious as a tube strike or engineering works confuses those who walk up in ignorance to the station and expect a train service to be running.

Perhaps because I'm of that generation whose formative experience was power cuts, three day weeks and frequent strikes, I react differently to younger souls who have become used to it all always being there.

Resilience isn't just an infrastructural concept - it's also personal. I try to have plans for all kinds of scenarios such asd what would I do if I locked myself out of Stodge Towers accidentally?

Contrary to some, my experience of the pandemic was the resilience provided by our network of corner shops here in East Ham who never ran out of anything and rarely closed. The supermarket panics were largely a function of the disruption of the JIT system and we've seen it at other times when a particular product is either short in supply or long in demand.

The other side is adaptability and ingenuity - one might argue the strength of a dynamic capitalist economy. The pandemic saw some firms redirect their business - we sourced meat, vegetables and milk (among other things) from companies who normally supplied restaurants and cafes but they switched to providing a service for domestic customers.

MY experience of this in the working environment was dealing with the Emergency Planning function at a local council - copies of all their protocols and procedures were on paper in fireproof safes for dealing with contingencies from plane crashes to nuclear war. The pandemic response illustrated some failings but mostly, I thought, local Government did very well co-ordinating with the NHS, Police and other groups via a Resilience Forum which had been set up to deal with civil contingencies.