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The Channel Migrant tragedy on many of the front pages – politicalbetting.com
The Channel Migrant tragedy on many of the front pages – politicalbetting.com
The awfulness of the tragedy in the Channel inevitably gets a lot of coverage this morning and one of the issues is that there appears to be no obvious solution.
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https://www.libdems.org.uk/plan-immigration
https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/asylum-community/
Pro rata that would be about 270 000 in the UK, 90 000 pending cases.
In the UK there are 77 000 pending cases at present.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1464005676842184705
Interestingly, the AZN antibody cocktail seems to hold up better than Regeneron etc.
The UK has the correct strategy, to pick up those seeking asylum directly from war zones and places of unrest, such as Afghanistan, Syria and Hong Kong.
I agree that the apparent inability to deport people is a big problem. There needs to be immediate deportation following the first appeal, with further appeals both from overseas and at the person’s own expense.
"Between 25 November 2011 and 30 June 2021, 37,473 people who sought asylum by boat were given bridging visa E. As of 30 June 2021, 11,891 of these people were still in the community (9,610 on a bridging visa E and the other 2,281 waiting for a further BVE). The rest of the people, which amounts to 25,582 people, were either granted a substantive visa, left Australia, detained or deceased."
It seems the vast majority are in the community on bridging visa E, which includes the right to work, currently 21 000* or so. There are less than 300 on the offshore camp in Nauru.
*there are also BVE visas for arrivals by air.
Of concern, certainly.
Bit of a shame. I was looking at Botswana/Namibia for a holiday this year. Isle of Wight again I suppose.
Good header Mr S! One of the ironies is that around the time Ms P's parents came here there were bitter arguments about the rightness or otherwise of 'allowing' them in. (IIRC they arrived just before the Amin announcement.)
One of the issues of course is that if someone's asylum application is refused, to where should they be deported?
Is there not some means where by we can operate 'reception centres' in Calais?
Of course, if Queen Mary Tudor hadn't lost ownership of Calais, we wouldn't be in quite this mess.
Still wait and see mode, I guess, but the insights given from this kind of technique are fascinating.
There's no need to turn the country outright into a fortress, but by the same token having open borders with a region of something like half-a-billion people, and an excessively permissive attitude towards migration from the whole of the rest of the world, is deeply stupid. After half-a-century and more of struggling painfully for the rights of women and gay people, the last thing on Earth we bloody need is a constant stream of social and religious conservatives from the developing world. Nor is it sensible to import masses of people from low and middle income countries willing to put up with crap wages and working conditions (and therefore permitting scalper bosses to perpetuate them,) or to persist with the population Ponzi scheme: importing young people to try to shore up the tax base and solve our tremendous elderly care problem, at the cost of making the country ever more crowded, hiking property prices higher and higher, and simply creating even more acute problems for the next generation to solve. Indeed, I would argue that, from the point of view both of easing human pressure on the environment and improving the sheer liveability of the country, we should be looking at promoting a managed decline in our oversized population - not endlessly increasing it by compensating for below replacement birth rates by importing many hundreds of thousands of people each year to plug the gaps.
Bottom line is, the current electorate doesn't want a limitless number of migrants and there's every reason to suppose that upper middle class leftists (who wish to display internationalist virtue, whilst ever-so-conveniently reinstating their endless supply of cheap nannies and other domestics) do. You wouldn't trust a Lib Dem to run an immigration system in line with the priorities and wishes of the public any more than you'd trust a Tory to build a railway to Leeds. It's as simple as that.
Tim Paine: Former Australia captain to take immediate break from the game
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/59345925
So not only will Australia have a better captain, but a better keeper and a stronger middle order.
A simpler compromise that wouldn't require UK to take as many would be an agreement with France to return Channel crosssers but swap them for a larger number (to give France some incentive to do it, say 20% more) who were applying to come to the UK at processing sites in France away from the channel. That does however give France a perverse incentive to not prevent Channel crosssers (as now, of course).
All and any of those - including your suggestion - require the vast majority of Channel crosssers to be caught before landing and dispersing, of course.
https://twitter.com/simonjonesnews/status/1464130103630344197?s=21
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Most, if not all, of those presently waiting in N. France would be an asset to this country, although, of course we have, in concert with the EU, to do 'something' about the continued drift of people to Northern and Western Europe.
The Lib Dem policy linked above seems incoherent.
On the one hand they propose breaking the legs of the current detention system - a judicial decision require d to prolong beyond 3 days, on the second hand to do all kinds of things to open borders, and on the third hand to present themselves as the party of the Nimby and not build houses when we have a very small number of empties.
It does not add up, Corporal Jones.
The truth is we don’t know what the aim and pull into Britain is. If it’s to get work via the black economy nothing is going to stop the migration flow, if it’s to claim asylum a method within France is required.
As for your final point The drift North and West really hasn’t started yet
Why, you'll be saying the government's lying about its railway policy next. And then you'll be on to saying Donald Trump is a threat to democracy...
- tunnel would cost up to £208bn
- bridge would be up to £335bn https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1464137949776384002/photo/1
1 self-congratulate and take moral high ground
2 make letter public, to enhance 1
3 tell France and EU to do more to patrol a border that the UK left EU in order to regain control over
Breathtaking
https://twitter.com/PedderSophie/status/1464139057915650061
What do we think happened to those vulnerable would be refugees without the letters of transit?
As for who is playing politics with the migrant crisis - the politicians are! Why? because it's a political problem; when the UK points out the weaknesses in the French approach they naturally respond by pointing out the unfairness of the characterisation and quickly follow up with some naked grandstanding of their own - this is actually as it should be - if voters want the issue handled they need to choose politicians who will do that. We spend far too much time wanting "independent" (ie unaccountable) bodies, "objective" assessments. For better or worse we live in democracies - the voters need to own that and not keep moaning about issues being 'political'.
As we all know it's an impossible situation which means Boris has to blame France as that's the only optioon he has left.
This is all made worse by the coming French election, as a UK-France spat plays equally well for Macron in France.
With these two in charge we will always get bouts of grandstanding and tension in public, hopefully things are calmer in private but each public spat makes that harder to maintain.
2 French policemen encounter 30 odd migrants trying to launch a boat - no matter what people say neither policeman is going to do much when you are out numbered 15 to one.
RCS1000 was right yesterday, we need to do more about illegal workers (and that will require counter intuitive items like automatic "right to remain" for reporting employers using illegal migrants).
The greatest irony of the film is that the actor who plays Major Strasser, the Nazi baddie, was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Indeed, the whole film was made by European emigrees, which perhaps explains why it is so sympathetic to the plight of refugees.
The insolubility of all this suggests we are looking in the wrong place. The quality of governance in a number of countries, all members of the UN and other international bodies, is the problem.
The right to refuge should be very specific, time and place limited and with an international UN led plan to return all refugees home within a limited period.
A planet in which hundreds of millions, even billions, of people have a right to choose where else they live because of the quality of state governance is unsustainable.
David Miliband is the very man to lead this project.
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these
refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
https://boris-johnson-lies.com/
We've put another dozen posts up overnight.
https://boris-johnson-lies.com
https://twitter.com/OborneTweets/status/1464146981136261122
CRIKEY! LET'S DO BOTH!
The UN has been around a long time. By now the right to refugee status should be rare, specific and time limited. It is not realistic, decades after first being made, that hundreds of millions of citizens of countries who are UN members should have an uncontestable claim upon the goodwill of other UN members without the UN having parallel jurisdiction over the states from which people are fleeing.
There are millions of migrants each year, some of whom want to come to the UK, some for trivial reasons. None of that should be surprising or considered mad when you start with a global pool of many millions.
This person was from Eritrea - exactly what is he fleeing from. It's not Syria, Iraq or Oman... The Ethiopian Eritrea war finished 21 years ago.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pm-wants-joint-patrols-in-france-after-migrant-channel-deaths-nh8s7j363
https://twitter.com/2FRsur3/status/1464145836292595741?s=20
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1463977292108079111?s=20
So we don't need too many lectures on how sophisticated and liberal the French are, certainly when it comes to border control
The interview didn't state if the person offered managerial skills.
Parish really didn't think much of the government's plans, which he thought were either unworkable or likely to be counter-productive. And he felt the government had overlooked some big issues, like FIFA/UEFA corruption and ineptitude, and a visa system that penalises signing players from overseas before they have reached a "big league" thus draining money from the UK to our rivals.
It's hard to say whether or not Parish is right, but it sure sounded like a demolition of government policy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10245249/France-CANCELS-meeting-Priti-Patel-wake-deaths-27-migrants.html
nice to see UK / French political relationships at their usual levels.
What does? I'm not sure, but making legal applications from abroad easier instead of harder would be a start. If we say "We might well grant you asylum but you have to put a foot on UK soil before we'll consider it" is absolutely an invitation to try to cross the Channel.
The answer to that question is yes, we could, they could and it would have been even better if we had acted together to avoid what a happened.
The subsequent response shames us further.
An open system of making applications from abroad which would either be so successful that it is domestically unacceptable to voters, or so unsuccessful that it would not solve the boat problem.
The UN shows a massive disproportion between the duties of receiving states and the non duties of exporting states, all within its own membership.
And add tidal, mini-nukes, interconnectors to Moroccan solar...