Best Of

I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.

https://x.com/ziayusufuk/status/1945212705721192806?s=46

I don't think Zia is helping himself with Reform going in studs up on Suella (or Jenrick for that matter)
I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly 'doesnt want to spend his time getting Reform elected' again

The consistency in the polls is such that Reform really need to start thinking about how they would govern. Labour had been out of power for an age but they could still lean on plenty of serving MPs and grandees with experience of government.

Seems to me Farage would be well served by having a couple of ex cabinet ministers in his ranks to help navigate the den of vipers in Whitehall. The first job of a leader is to recruit well and we’ve not seen a lot of evidence Farage is much good at it. As 2029 inches closer will be fascinating to see what he does.

A point I made on Sunday, to two quite prominent members of that party. You aren't a party of protest any longer, you are likely to win if not the next election, then the one after that, and you have to prepare your core voters for some hard choices (like dropping the triple lock).

It shows a lack of aspiration.

I imagine a lot of people actually prefer just to be a party of protest.

The problem is that much of the British establishment has shown over and again, that it has nothing but contempt for the people that it governs; that it will lie to them repeatedly (believing this to be "noble cause" lying); that it will cover up scandalous conduct; that it does not consider the voters' wishes or aspirations to be their priority; that their own mutual advancement is their most important guiding principle; that beyond a certain level, there are no penalties for failure or corruption.

And, it will keep on doing so, just like the late medieval Papacy, or the ancien regime nobility.

That has left perhaps a majority of voters now wanting to burn down the establishment, and they see Reform as the party that can do that.

I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.

https://x.com/ziayusufuk/status/1945212705721192806?s=46

This should not be reduced to an anti-immigration hobbyhorse. It's a serious matter of democratic accountability.

Reading between the lines on here, I would conclude that Baldy Ben, who I like and respect (Braverman and Jenrick - I'll just spit that out) did the right and proper thing with 24,000 Afghans who looked after our boys and girls in Helmand. Why Healy with the support of the Speaker kept the injunction going seems to be where the problem lies.

Reform really are a bucket of sh*t for trawling the original safety issue up and turning it onto a skin toned race issue. They are nonetheless welcome to chase down this government for the subsequent cover-up. Healy and Hoyle should be gone!

You've got it the wrong way round.

The Afghans weren't looking after 'our boys and girls in Helmand', our boys and girls were looking after the Afghans.

At very considerable cost in British lives and money.

I do not remember any government minister telling us that the reason we were in Afghanistan was to give ever increasing numbers of Afghans an entitlement to migrate to Britain.

It seems for at least the last ten years in Afghanistan our purpose there was setting up a future immigration program.

It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.

You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.

We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.

We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.

Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?

There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?

It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.

You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?

Many of the Uber drivers I've spoken to in the last year have been Afghans ; a hugely varied collection of people, I've found. Some who seem to look, dress and think almost indistinguably from Mediterranean Europeans, some moderate family men with science backgrounds, some reasonably conservative, and about 20% very conservative.

Well, we don't want more conservatives, do we. Look at the harm they've done to the country over recent years!

I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.

https://x.com/ziayusufuk/status/1945212705721192806?s=46

It's cutting through - number 2 story on the BBC Most Read, which is my primary index of engagement. But Wallace has - admirably - stuck his head above the parapet, and the story is entirely about the cock up and an explanation of why there needed to be secrecy.

The sexual assault angle hasn't gone anywhere outside the Leonosphere. Yet.

The Mail had an interesting tit bit they are under a second injunction that they are forbidden from discussing individual cases.

Can PBers be clearer when they refer to 'Wallace' in postings? I immediately start thinking there's been an important new development with No Underpants Gate.

Too many Wallaces. Phonetically, I thought that you meant Wrong Trousers Gate.

Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?


I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.

It is an huge betrayal of public trust.

Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.

thetimes.com/uk/defence/art…

https://x.com/trussliz/status/1945206550089314477?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q

Technically in formal English 'an huge' is correct, as is 'an hotel' 'an hearing' etc. H was for centuries treated as a silent letter, in effect a glottal stop, so it was common to take the vowel sound from after it (in some dialects it still is, of course).

It's just it's very seldom used as it 'feels' wrong so I'm assuming it's a typo.

(This is your PB crazy fact for this morning.)

An is only correct where the h is in an unaccented syllable, so yes an hotel is correct but it's a hearing.

However if the h in huge is silent, it's pronounced yooge and y counts as a consonant

Not always.

The vowel sound rule can be the reverse of the letter in both directions.

So you might go to "a university" to study chemistry where you might come across "an yttrium" chunk of metal.