Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
Looking at the numbers and I hope I'm reading them right from here:
It seems half of asylum applications are approved (49%) in the year ending March 2025 compared with 61% in the year ending March 2024 and of the 109,000 requests for asylum, a third came from those arriving on "small boats" and just over a third had come to the UK on a visa.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
We had no choice.
France and Russia would have both been defeated (Russia was as it is, and France came close in 1917) and we'd have faced a totally German dominated Europe. They could have united the fleets of up to 4 navies against us, and would have occupied the low countries and the Channel coast, which would have meant the UK's safety and its links to the Empire would have been utterly at its mercy. The Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to protect our independence.
We want to believe it was avoidable due to the terrible cost. But, whilst a catastrophe, the alternative for this country would have been worse.
We had to fight.
No, I don't really think that holds water. Even with whatever survived of France and Russia's Navies that had not been scuttled or come to us, Germany would not have been a serious naval threat. And where is the solid evidence that the Kaiser would have been more successful in conquering Russia than Napoleon before him?
A Germany that had only recently united itself acting as the overlord of an annoyed Europe would have had far more pressing problems than attacking Britain at sea.
It was just a catastrophical error. We have to accept it, forgive, and move on.
I suppose the evidence is that in 1918 Germany had successfully conquered Russia.
Remarkable similarity in the extent of the German conquest in 1918 compared with 1941/1942, only the 1918 conquest didn't quite reach Stalingrad/Tsaritsyn (only as far as Rostov)!
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
We had no choice.
France and Russia would have both been defeated (Russia was as it is, and France came close in 1917) and we'd have faced a totally German dominated Europe. They could have united the fleets of up to 4 navies against us, and would have occupied the low countries and the Channel coast, which would have meant the UK's safety and its links to the Empire would have been utterly at its mercy. The Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to protect our independence.
We want to believe it was avoidable due to the terrible cost. But, whilst a catastrophe, the alternative for this country would have been worse.
We had to fight.
No, I don't really think that holds water. Even with whatever survived of France and Russia's Navies that had not been scuttled or come to us, Germany would not have been a serious naval threat. And where is the solid evidence that the Kaiser would have been more successful in conquering Russia than Napoleon before him?
A Germany that had only recently united itself acting as the overlord of an annoyed Europe would have had far more pressing problems than attacking Britain at sea.
It was just a catastrophical error. We have to accept it, forgive, and move on.
I suppose the evidence is that in 1918 Germany had successfully conquered Russia.
Yes, one only needs to read the Treaty of Brest-Litovskt. For France, look at the annexed territory in Alsace-Lorraine in 1871.
The Royal Navy had about 36 dreadnoughts to 21 German, roughly a 60% advantage, but nothing like an insurmountable one.
A German victory would have annexed the low countries, disarmed along the Channel and absorbed most of the French Navy. It would certainly want to profit from its victory, and not have to worry about Britain again by ensuring it was strong enough to dictate terms.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
We had no choice.
France and Russia would have both been defeated (Russia was as it is, and France came close in 1917) and we'd have faced a totally German dominated Europe. They could have united the fleets of up to 4 navies against us, and would have occupied the low countries and the Channel coast, which would have meant the UK's safety and its links to the Empire would have been utterly at its mercy. The Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to protect our independence.
We want to believe it was avoidable due to the terrible cost. But, whilst a catastrophe, the alternative for this country would have been worse.
We had to fight.
No, I don't really think that holds water. Even with whatever survived of France and Russia's Navies that had not been scuttled or come to us, Germany would not have been a serious naval threat. And where is the solid evidence that the Kaiser would have been more successful in conquering Russia than Napoleon before him?
A Germany that had only recently united itself acting as the overlord of an annoyed Europe would have had far more pressing problems than attacking Britain at sea.
It was just a catastrophical error. We have to accept it, forgive, and move on.
I suppose the evidence is that in 1918 Germany had successfully conquered Russia.
Remarkable similarity in the extent of the German conquest in 1918 compared with 1941/1942, only the 1918 conquest didn't quite reach Stalingrad/Tsaritsyn (only as far as Rostov)!
There was nearly nothing in France’s or Russia’s navies to help us. Interestingly, the massive economic boom in Russia would have lead to huge Dreadnought fleet by 1918 or so. But in 1914, nothing.
The German plan was to levy vast indemnities on France and use that to fund further naval expansion. In addition taxation from conquered territories.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
You can argue that it only became a world war when Germany invaded Poland, Japan in China may have been the first conflict, but it was a skirmish in the scheme of things.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I think it's pretty obvious we need to reform the convention - something that hasn't kept up with the increased mobility of people around the world. It's particularly urgent if the models are broadly correct and some of the poorest and most populous parts of the world get hammered by climate change.
And like gay marriage for the Conservatives, it's actually a Labour government that has the best chance of making that stick and finding a consensus.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
France did but, pace de Gaulle, did not last all the way through. (And I did asterisk the start but China alone does not really count, any more than Czechoslovakia and Austria.)
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
We had no choice.
France and Russia would have both been defeated (Russia was as it is, and France came close in 1917) and we'd have faced a totally German dominated Europe. They could have united the fleets of up to 4 navies against us, and would have occupied the low countries and the Channel coast, which would have meant the UK's safety and its links to the Empire would have been utterly at its mercy. The Royal Navy wouldn't have been able to protect our independence.
We want to believe it was avoidable due to the terrible cost. But, whilst a catastrophe, the alternative for this country would have been worse.
We had to fight.
No, I don't really think that holds water. Even with whatever survived of France and Russia's Navies that had not been scuttled or come to us, Germany would not have been a serious naval threat. And where is the solid evidence that the Kaiser would have been more successful in conquering Russia than Napoleon before him?
A Germany that had only recently united itself acting as the overlord of an annoyed Europe would have had far more pressing problems than attacking Britain at sea.
It was just a catastrophical error. We have to accept it, forgive, and move on.
I suppose the evidence is that in 1918 Germany had successfully conquered Russia.
Remarkable similarity in the extent of the German conquest in 1918 compared with 1941/1942, only the 1918 conquest didn't quite reach Stalingrad/Tsaritsyn (only as far as Rostov)!
There was nearly nothing in France’s or Russia’s navies to help us. Interestingly, the massive economic boom in Russia would have lead to huge Dreadnought fleet by 1918 or so. But in 1914, nothing.
The German plan was to levy vast indemnities on France and use that to fund further naval expansion. In addition taxation from conquered territories.
France had around seven dreadnoughts and Russia about the same.
Added to the German fleet it would have achieved parity with the Royal Navy. When other ships were added, perhaps exceeded it.
For a full German victory it would have been the logical thing to do to neuter its main remaining enemy, and assure it wouldn't be in a position to intervene in Europe, or stand in its way overseas, and dictate how it traded - effectively risking the UK becoming a vassal.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
The book I read recently, Dreadnought and the path to WW1, tells very lucidly how a Liberal government which absolutely didn't want war in any way (made up of people like @stodge@Foxy and @Cicero ) tried incredibly hard to keep Germany from escalating it, and were stonewalled, and how they fell silent and went white as a sheet around the Cabinet table when Germany invaded Belgium and they knew they'd have to fight.
Maybe it's me, but whilst we almost certainly had to fight; I find the idea that good men around the cabinet table realising that sending half a million young men to their untimely deaths caused them to go white as a sheet a pretty good one. Certain politicians in certain countries (*cough Putin *cough - though include Hitler in this category too) don't give a shit about their own young men and gleefully send them to their deaths. Those latter 'politicians' aren't politicians at all. They're just grade-A shits and mass murderers.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Change the judges….
If judges become legislators, which I think is how Lord Bingham saw them becoming, ultimately politicians will pack the Courts with their own supporters, as in the USA.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
You can argue that it only became a world war when Germany invaded Poland, Japan in China may have been the first conflict, but it was a skirmish in the scheme of things.
A skirmish with 10 million dead?
When was that for?
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945?
So not 1937 then!
I don't get your point. Between 7 July 1937 and September 1939 there was all-out fighting between Japan and China. Events such as the Rape of Nanking, deliberate flooding of low-lying areas, capture of Wuhan, and the successful defence of Changsha,
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I think it's pretty obvious we need to reform the convention - something that hasn't kept up with the increased mobility of people around the world. It's particularly urgent if the models are broadly correct and some of the poorest and most populous parts of the world get hammered by climate change.
And like gay marriage for the Conservatives, it's actually a Labour government that has the best chance of making that stick and finding a consensus.
It was the LDs who got gay marriage through in the Coalition, most Conservative MPs voted against
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
There are too many people sat on enormous property wealth or reliant on the state for benefits/work for some sort of violent revolution to take place.
In fact, I think you could make a tenuous link to the power of the small boats issue and the lack of appetite for rioting. People love to play by the rules in the UK, and enjoy enforcing them too. People on council estates don't hate the government or a big corporation - it's the person at the end of the street fraudulently claming PIP (or so they think) that really riles them up.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I think it's pretty obvious we need to reform the convention - something that hasn't kept up with the increased mobility of people around the world. It's particularly urgent if the models are broadly correct and some of the poorest and most populous parts of the world get hammered by climate change.
And like gay marriage for the Conservatives, it's actually a Labour government that has the best chance of making that stick and finding a consensus.
It was the LDs who got gay marriage through in the Coalition, most Conservative MPs voted against
Shame on them
I have good friends and family who are gay and are every bit in love as you may be
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
It’s not “rhetoric”. Neither am I doing it to troll or provoke: I am expressing my sincere feelings
These feelings disturb me. I have never before felt that my government is entirely illegitimate and I have never felt before that I could easily side with the enemy in a war - depending on the enemy
This messes with my head. I’m a patriot, instinctively. But this is what I am thinking
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Change the judges….
If judges become legislators, which I think is how Lord Bingham saw them becoming, ultimately politicians will pack the Courts with their own supporters, as in the USA.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
Was Bingham the old fashioned establishment type who disliked democracy? He doesn't strike me as the revolutionary sort.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
There are too many people sat on enormous property wealth or reliant on the state for benefits/work for some sort of violent revolution to take place.
In fact, I think you could make a tenuous link to the power of the small boats issue and the lack of appetite for rioting. People love to play by the rules in the UK, and enjoy enforcing them too. People on council estates don't hate the government or a big corporation - it's the person at the end of the street fraudulently claming PIP (or so they think) that really riles them up.
For the purposes of clarity, I don’t think a violent revolution is remotely “imminent”. But nor do I think it is impossible, as I would have said a decade ago
We are an ancient democracy and this national muscle memory will see us through for a while. My guess is that in 2028 the voters will opt for the most radical change possible - probably Reform (but who knows what might happen interim)
The chance of something more turbulent will rise, sharply, if this radical government is unable to make the changes people want
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
You can argue that it only became a world war when Germany invaded Poland, Japan in China may have been the first conflict, but it was a skirmish in the scheme of things.
A skirmish with 10 million dead?
When was that for?
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945?
So not 1937 then!
I don't get your point. Between 7 July 1937 and September 1939 there was all-out fighting between Japan and China. Events such as the Rape of Nanking, deliberate flooding of low-lying areas, capture of Wuhan, and the successful defence of Changsha,
Point being there weren’t 10 million dead in 1937-1939. In terms of the 1941-45 period, it was a minor affair. Not to thise concerned, of course. But a world war needs more than that to be called world.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
There are too many people sat on enormous property wealth or reliant on the state for benefits/work for some sort of violent revolution to take place.
In fact, I think you could make a tenuous link to the power of the small boats issue and the lack of appetite for rioting. People love to play by the rules in the UK, and enjoy enforcing them too. People on council estates don't hate the government or a big corporation - it's the person at the end of the street fraudulently claming PIP (or so they think) that really riles them up.
For the purposes of clarity, I don’t think a violent revolution is remotely “imminent”. But nor do I think it is impossible, as I would have said a decade ago
We are an ancient democracy and this national muscle memory will see us through for a while. My guess is that in 2028 the voters will opt for the most radical change possible - probably Reform (but who knows what might happen interim)
The chance of something more turbulent will rise, sharply, if this radical government is unable to make the changes people want
I remember you here 10 years ago and it was the same nonsense as today about your radical solutions to the issue of Muslims.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
There are too many people sat on enormous property wealth or reliant on the state for benefits/work for some sort of violent revolution to take place.
In fact, I think you could make a tenuous link to the power of the small boats issue and the lack of appetite for rioting. People love to play by the rules in the UK, and enjoy enforcing them too. People on council estates don't hate the government or a big corporation - it's the person at the end of the street fraudulently claming PIP (or so they think) that really riles them up.
For the purposes of clarity, I don’t think a violent revolution is remotely “imminent”. But nor do I think it is impossible, as I would have said a decade ago
We are an ancient democracy and this national muscle memory will see us through for a while. My guess is that in 2028 the voters will opt for the most radical change possible - probably Reform (but who knows what might happen interim)
The chance of something more turbulent will rise, sharply, if this radical government is unable to make the changes people want
I remember you here 10 years ago and it was the same nonsense as today about your radical solutions to the issue of Muslims.
Is that the wisest example for you to choose, in the circumstances?
Incredible thread on the ways HMG tried to censor entirely legitimate but “concerning” opinions online last year. They even tried to censor the fact some freedom of information requests were refused
They will use the disgusting Online Safety Act to push this further
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
You can argue that it only became a world war when Germany invaded Poland, Japan in China may have been the first conflict, but it was a skirmish in the scheme of things.
A skirmish with 10 million dead?
When was that for?
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945?
So not 1937 then!
I don't get your point. Between 7 July 1937 and September 1939 there was all-out fighting between Japan and China. Events such as the Rape of Nanking, deliberate flooding of low-lying areas, capture of Wuhan, and the successful defence of Changsha,
Point being there weren’t 10 million dead in 1937-1939. In terms of the 1941-45 period, it was a minor affair. Not to those concerned, of course. But a world war needs more than that to be called world.
Looks like total Chinese dead from 1937 to 1945 estimated at 20 million.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I think it's pretty obvious we need to reform the convention - something that hasn't kept up with the increased mobility of people around the world. It's particularly urgent if the models are broadly correct and some of the poorest and most populous parts of the world get hammered by climate change.
And like gay marriage for the Conservatives, it's actually a Labour government that has the best chance of making that stick and finding a consensus.
It was the LDs who got gay marriage through in the Coalition, most Conservative MPs voted against
Shame on them
I have good friends and family who are gay and are every bit in love as you may be
There were already civil unions before gay marriage came in, marriage was more a religious term which is why there were more votes against it than for civil unions and a very close member of my own family is in a same sex partnership
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Change the judges….
If judges become legislators, which I think is how Lord Bingham saw them becoming, ultimately politicians will pack the Courts with their own supporters, as in the USA.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
Was Bingham the old fashioned establishment type who disliked democracy? He doesn't strike me as the revolutionary sort.
Which was the whole point. Instead of the politicians and the ghastly Head Count who vote for them, Top Judges in an Ivory Tower would rule. Plato’s Philosopher Kings made manifest.
“Keep the coinage and the courts. Let the rabble have the rest”
The slight problem is that the judges are remarkably unable to tell when their opinions are political opinions, not the perfectly balanced musings of a theorist following Pure Law.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
You can argue that it only became a world war when Germany invaded Poland, Japan in China may have been the first conflict, but it was a skirmish in the scheme of things.
A skirmish with 10 million dead?
When was that for?
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945?
So not 1937 then!
I don't get your point. Between 7 July 1937 and September 1939 there was all-out fighting between Japan and China. Events such as the Rape of Nanking, deliberate flooding of low-lying areas, capture of Wuhan, and the successful defence of Changsha,
Point being there weren’t 10 million dead in 1937-1939. In terms of the 1941-45 period, it was a minor affair. Not to those concerned, of course. But a world war needs more than that to be called world.
Looks like total Chinese dead from 1937 to 1945 estimated at 20 million.
Personally I'd say our decision to go to war with France and Russia against Germany in 1914 was where it all started to go wrong.
It killed almost a million men over some inconsequential tracts of Flanders, beggared the Empire, strengthened the United States, led to the Russian Revolution and Labour Governments and eventually to the Second World War.
Honourable mentions to Lloyd George's 1909 Budget that set us on the disastrous road to the current welfare junkie tax and spend doom loop, and the Attlee government that pushed us further in that direction and passed the current disastrous planning system.
This is Peter Hitchens' view IIRC.
It is - of course - worth remembering that British foreign policy for the last 500 years has been to avoid a European continental hegemon emerging. It led to us fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701–1714; the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to 1815, and then both the World Wars in the 20th Century.
The view - rightly or wrongly - was that Britain was strongest when Europe was fractured. (And I would argue that the fracturing of the European continent was -mostly- good for citizens too. It meant countries were competing and innovating.)
So... you can argue that Britain should have avoided the First World War, but you do have to remember that would have had consequences too.
The stronger argument, based purely on national self-interest and putting all morality aside, is for sitting out the second war and allowing the two totalitarian dictatorships to slug it out, intervening at the end to finish off whoever was left.
Thus speaks hindsight. Recall that in 1939 and 1940 Germany and Russia had signed a pact. This only broke down when Britain refused to stop fighting and Hitler then gambled on defeating Russia (USSR for purists) as a way to remove Britains last hope. We know that defeating Russia to gain lebensraum was his ultimate aim, but that was not necessarily certain in 1939.
There are some murky chapters of British history but one thing we can be proud of is that we fought the second world war from the start (asterisk) to the end, and for a noble principle, to defeat Nazism. The other major powers joined only after being themselves attacked.
Didn't France declare war the same day as us in 1939?
In any case WW2 was 2 years old in China by then.
You can argue that it only became a world war when Germany invaded Poland, Japan in China may have been the first conflict, but it was a skirmish in the scheme of things.
A skirmish with 10 million dead?
When was that for?
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945?
So not 1937 then!
I don't get your point. Between 7 July 1937 and September 1939 there was all-out fighting between Japan and China. Events such as the Rape of Nanking, deliberate flooding of low-lying areas, capture of Wuhan, and the successful defence of Changsha,
Point being there weren’t 10 million dead in 1937-1939. In terms of the 1941-45 period, it was a minor affair. Not to those concerned, of course. But a world war needs more than that to be called world.
Looks like total Chinese dead from 1937 to 1945 estimated at 20 million.
Which *nearly * became the weapon it was supposed to be.
If Barnes Wallis had actually gone to America to learn how pressure cabins for aircraft could be built - rather than bolting boilers to the noses of Wellingtons… well, we might have had a force capable of striking from 45,000 feet. The pre war RAF had a faction interested in ultra high altitude aircraft.
Combine that with Oboe - the increased altitude would have had Oboe ops all across Germany possible.
"India’s head coach clashes with Oval staff before fifth Test as tempers flare Gambhir in angry exchange with groundkeeper Fortis tells coach ‘you can’t tell us what to do’"
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
That’s the sort of small change that I don’t understand why it hasn’t been made. Why not simply say you get one appeal not multiple. Bring everything you have got - no new evidence but essentially a review of your application with fresh eyes.
"India’s head coach clashes with Oval staff before fifth Test as tempers flare Gambhir in angry exchange with groundkeeper Fortis tells coach ‘you can’t tell us what to do’"
"Students ‘will spend 25 years on their mobiles’ Smartphones wreck our ability to study, with most people surveyed unable to focus for an hour without using them Mark Sellman, Technology Correspondent" (£)
It's good. Doesn't address the question "Wouldn't Britain be better if everything were exactly the same but house prices were half what they are" though.
"India’s head coach clashes with Oval staff before fifth Test as tempers flare Gambhir in angry exchange with groundkeeper Fortis tells coach ‘you can’t tell us what to do’"
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
That’s the sort of small change that I don’t understand why it hasn’t been made. Why not simply say you get one appeal not multiple. Bring everything you have got - no new evidence but essentially a review of your application with fresh eyes.
Limiting it to one appeal would be attacked as breaching human rights.
The issue is a philosophy - that the ECHR is expandable and should expand to create a virtual constitution.
@SeanT bangs on about civil strife. The real thing will be Parliamentary Primacy vs the Courts.
@taz, can I thank you for your nice comment on the last thread. I hope you enjoy your cruise. I am avoiding cruises like the plague as I enjoy my food and booze too much They would be rolling me off the gang plank. I guess I will eventually succumb. I used to enjoy activity holidays (skiing, sailing, etc), but I am past that at 70, although I do cycle every year in France. This year was sight seeing in Spain and Italy in June and May, cycling in September down the Canal du Midi then for a regular birthday celebration of my cousin in Portugal. Might pop over to France in October house hunting.
Our cruise is also the start of our new life as my wife is retiring and returning to the NHS and accessing her pension. Retiring really is the best thing I’ve ever done. You’ll succumb to a cruise eventually, I’m sure 😀
Good evening
Many congratulations on your news and enjoy your cruise
We have been on many cruises including Southampton - Canada - New York and back, Vancouver to Beijing via Alaska, Japan, Russia and South Korea, and for our retiremernt we joined an expedition ship to Antartica, South Georgia and the Falklands with the most amazing majestic scenery and wildlife
We only went on cruises for the destinations, and did not join the social life or shows, but did enjoy lectures on our destinations and the culture of the places we visited
We are unable to travel now due to our age and health, but we did it when we could and we always advise those in advancing years to do their buckets lists as soon as they can
Would you have attended lecture(s) on political betting on your cruises? I have a relative that does cruises and she mentioned the lectures. I think I could run up a set of lectures on the subject and I'd like to spend some time honing my craft when I retire.
No - I have no desire to bet and never have
The lectures were all about our locations, history and culture and no politics
Indeed most cruise lectures relate to the ships destinations
I've just been on a 14 day cruise in the Queen Anne around Iceland.
The highlights for me were a series of lectures on quantum mechanics and gravity waves, and dancing with Lily, an acrobatic dancer, in the nightclub.
Could Palestine do to Labour what Europe did to the Tories?
Actually, Starmer is in a bit of a difficult position. He's seen on the Left as a Jew-lover for being married to Victoria, and now he's seen on the Right as an appeaser of Hamas.
Does that not sum up what most of us think here, even general-supporters of what the Govt is doing such as me, and general to very strong opponents ?
FFFFFFS IGNORE THE NOISES OFF AND GET ON WITH IT !!
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Change the judges….
If judges become legislators, which I think is how Lord Bingham saw them becoming, ultimately politicians will pack the Courts with their own supporters, as in the USA.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
Was Bingham the old fashioned establishment type who disliked democracy? He doesn't strike me as the revolutionary sort.
Which was the whole point. Instead of the politicians and the ghastly Head Count who vote for them, Top Judges in an Ivory Tower would rule. Plato’s Philosopher Kings made manifest.
“Keep the coinage and the courts. Let the rabble have the rest”
The slight problem is that the judges are remarkably unable to tell when their opinions are political opinions, not the perfectly balanced musings of a theorist following Pure Law.
I think that Lord Bingham took the view that large areas of policy-making should simply be removed from the political sphere.
The Head Count could still argue over things like changes in tax rates, but human rights law (which inevitably compasses immigration law, criminal justice, the rights and obligations of citizens and those of non-citizens), and even large swathes of foreign policy were far too important to be determined by elected politicians.
"Students ‘will spend 25 years on their mobiles’ Smartphones wreck our ability to study, with most people surveyed unable to focus for an hour without using them Mark Sellman, Technology Correspondent" (£)
I remember back in maybe 2007/8 encountering this with 'the youngsters'. Whichever year it was - it was the MySpace era. But the incessant need to check in, have I missed out on something? Do I have a reply on Bebo?
I'm not sure it's really 'device' specific. It was realistically pre-iphone so very few people had anything approaching 'the internet in their pocket'. Just seemed to be a very rapid adaptation of monkey-brain reward signals that social media glommed onto like magnetic sharks.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
There are too many people sat on enormous property wealth or reliant on the state for benefits/work for some sort of violent revolution to take place.
In fact, I think you could make a tenuous link to the power of the small boats issue and the lack of appetite for rioting. People love to play by the rules in the UK, and enjoy enforcing them too. People on council estates don't hate the government or a big corporation - it's the person at the end of the street fraudulently claming PIP (or so they think) that really riles them up.
For the purposes of clarity, I don’t think a violent revolution is remotely “imminent”. But nor do I think it is impossible, as I would have said a decade ago
We are an ancient democracy and this national muscle memory will see us through for a while. My guess is that in 2028 the voters will opt for the most radical change possible - probably Reform (but who knows what might happen interim)
The chance of something more turbulent will rise, sharply, if this radical government is unable to make the changes people want
I remember you here 10 years ago and it was the same nonsense as today about your radical solutions to the issue of Muslims.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
Leaving the ECHR allows you to take the necessary steps. After which you simply make it a rock hard, no exceptions rule that anyone entering the uk illegally will be barred for life from ever entering the uk again. Sweep them off the beach into a detention facility before swiftly deporting them to country of origin regardless of their relationship with their home government. If they have tossed their ID into the sea, then it’s the morning flight to [Rwanda]. You are not an asylum seeker if you’re coming from France, the end.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Change the judges….
If judges become legislators, which I think is how Lord Bingham saw them becoming, ultimately politicians will pack the Courts with their own supporters, as in the USA.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
Was Bingham the old fashioned establishment type who disliked democracy? He doesn't strike me as the revolutionary sort.
Which was the whole point. Instead of the politicians and the ghastly Head Count who vote for them, Top Judges in an Ivory Tower would rule. Plato’s Philosopher Kings made manifest.
“Keep the coinage and the courts. Let the rabble have the rest”
The slight problem is that the judges are remarkably unable to tell when their opinions are political opinions, not the perfectly balanced musings of a theorist following Pure Law.
I think that Lord Bingham took the view that large areas of policy-making should simply be removed from the political sphere.
The Head Count could still argue over things like changes in tax rates, but human rights law (which inevitably compasses immigration law, criminal justice, the rights and obligations of citizens and those of non-citizens), and even large swathes of foreign policy were far too important to be determined by elected politicians.
After turnout dropped below 60% at the 2001 general election a lot of people started to worry about voter apathy. Perhaps some people saw it as an opportunity?
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
See the recent judgements in Ireland and France. It’s not the ECHR - it’s activist legal theory using things like the right to family life to overrule nearly any attempts at removal.
Change the judges….
If judges become legislators, which I think is how Lord Bingham saw them becoming, ultimately politicians will pack the Courts with their own supporters, as in the USA.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
Was Bingham the old fashioned establishment type who disliked democracy? He doesn't strike me as the revolutionary sort.
Which was the whole point. Instead of the politicians and the ghastly Head Count who vote for them, Top Judges in an Ivory Tower would rule. Plato’s Philosopher Kings made manifest.
“Keep the coinage and the courts. Let the rabble have the rest”
The slight problem is that the judges are remarkably unable to tell when their opinions are political opinions, not the perfectly balanced musings of a theorist following Pure Law.
I think that Lord Bingham took the view that large areas of policy-making should simply be removed from the political sphere.
The Head Count could still argue over things like changes in tax rates, but human rights law (which inevitably compasses immigration law, criminal justice, the rights and obligations of citizens and those of non-citizens), and even large swathes of foreign policy were far too important to be determined by elected politicians.
After turnout dropped below 60% at the 2001 general election a lot of people started to worry about voter apathy. Perhaps some people saw it as an opportunity?
I rewatched "The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer" a while back. A very iffy film, but it keeps coming back to me as more plausible as time goes by.
It is. Just the subheading alone is a useful antidote to some (one in particular) posters on here: The country has serious problems but the right’s vision of it has become hysterical.
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
There was an article over at LDV today about that by a former Councillor with gypsy background, which talks about the racism side (which is fair enough), but ignores the reality that trespass is important, and so are that organised and petty crime are part of some sections of the traveller community - just as for every other community.
I can point to travellers who have settled in successfully here - obtained a plot and PP and built chalet bungalows, criminal elements ("They do not realise that I can rustle up a mob of men in 30 minutes")m and some who have had initial tensions and then calmed down.
But the trespass etc needs to be addressed beyond shouts of "Racism".
Apart from anything else, RefUK will make it a wedge issue to set the minds of their fringe supporters, and Jenrick will start making videos.
One interesting aside is a quiet religious revival along Pentecostal lines now encompassing 20k or so in the gypsy community in the UK in a movement called "Light and Life", following a mission visit from the similar French movement in the early 1980s.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
It's good. Doesn't address the question "Wouldn't Britain be better if everything were exactly the same but house prices were half what they are" though.
It’s absolute shite. One of the worst columns he’s ever written
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
It’s embarrassingly glib, dim and complacent. Like a parody of metropolitan smugness delivered from a position of true and wilful ignorance
Quite astonishing that anyone here admires it. A new low for PB
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Really? Thats not my experience in Leics. I can't remember when we had either a blackout or a water outage.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Really? Thats not my experience in Leics. I can't remember when we had either a blackout or a water outage.
Not even during Tuesdays civil war.
We had a blackout in Ilford, must have been 20 years ago, for a few hours.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Really? Thats not my experience in Leics. I can't remember when we had either a blackout or a water outage.
Not even during Tuesdays civil war.
Last water outage here was about 3 weeks ago. The local borehole pump failed yet again.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
Population growth isn't a problem so long as there's a commensurate growth in all forms of infrastructure, including housing, roads etc
The problem is that we have the population growth but not the infrastructure - and, worse, we have people determining policies on migration without any intention whatsoever to cost for, accrue or account for infrastructure when measuring costs and benefits.
The two rational choices are to grow the population and invest in infrastructure, or don't invest in infrastructure and don't grow the population. I'd prefer the former, I respect the latter, but we instead have a mess.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Fortunately Ofgem and the National Grid provide comprehensive data on blackouts, through two sets of metrics:
CI (Customer Interruptions): how many interruptions occur per 100 customers each year, for outages lasting 3 minutes or more.
CML (Customer Minutes Lost): the average outage duration (in minutes) per customer per year.
You will be pleased to know that CMLs are pretty much at record lows, and are down about 90% in the last quarter century.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
Population growth isn't a problem so long as there's a commensurate growth in all forms of infrastructure, including housing, roads etc
The problem is that we have the population growth but not the infrastructure - and, worse, we have people determining policies on migration without any intention whatsoever to cost for, accrue or account for infrastructure when measuring costs and benefits.
The two rational choices are to grow the population and invest in infrastructure, or don't invest in infrastructure and don't grow the population. I'd prefer the former, I respect the latter, but we instead have a mess.
It is a problem when the vast majority of people don't support it.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
Population growth isn't a problem so long as there's a commensurate growth in all forms of infrastructure, including housing, roads etc
The problem is that we have the population growth but not the infrastructure - and, worse, we have people determining policies on migration without any intention whatsoever to cost for, accrue or account for infrastructure when measuring costs and benefits.
The two rational choices are to grow the population and invest in infrastructure, or don't invest in infrastructure and don't grow the population. I'd prefer the former, I respect the latter, but we instead have a mess.
It is a problem when the vast majority of people don't support it.
The vast majority of people want low taxes, high expenditure, great public services etc etc etc
Its the job of our politicians to balance those competing demands, and if they don't balance them right we can kick them out and elect others.
But there's no point pointing at any individual competing metric and saying 'the public want that' while disregarding the rest of the competing elements the public also wants.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Fortunately Ofgem and the National Grid provide comprehensive data on blackouts, through two sets of metrics:
CI (Customer Interruptions): how many interruptions occur per 100 customers each year, for outages lasting 3 minutes or more.
CML (Customer Minutes Lost): the average outage duration (in minutes) per customer per year.
You will be pleased to know that CMLs are pretty much at record lows, and are down about 90% in the last quarter century.
Its important to differentiate between types of blackouts too when saying 'they happen' and CML helps show that.
A tree in sticksville falling over and taking a power line with it, knocking some homes off the grid until it can be repaired is one thing.
The grid falling over and tens of thousands or more going without power is something completely different.
Yes it’s amazing that a wealthy upper middle class Remainer FT journalist thinks Britain is doing absolutely fine, there’s no crisis, his favourite Shoreditch restaurant is still open, nothing really bad is happening (except Brexit)
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
He has no clue. To take one example: “When was the last blackout”. They happen all the time outside the main urban centres. As does water supply interruption. Mobile internet & fftp are a joke. Then there’s the roads.
Fortunately Ofgem and the National Grid provide comprehensive data on blackouts, through two sets of metrics:
CI (Customer Interruptions): how many interruptions occur per 100 customers each year, for outages lasting 3 minutes or more.
CML (Customer Minutes Lost): the average outage duration (in minutes) per customer per year.
You will be pleased to know that CMLs are pretty much at record lows, and are down about 90% in the last quarter century.
Its important to differentiate between types of blackouts too when saying 'they happen' and CML helps show that.
A tree in sticksville falling over and taking a power line with it, knocking some homes off the grid until it can be repaired is one thing.
The grid falling over and tens of thousands or more going without power is something completely different.
Absolutely: and it is worth noting that in the last 25 years there have been some mega blackouts in developed countries. There was Spain earlier this year, Texas in 2021 or 2022, and the Great Northeastern US blackout of 2004 (which I was actually in New York for).
The rise of both renewables and natural gas remove some of the natural stabilizers in grids, and mean there are going to be challenges ahead. But at the same time, we need to avoid rose tinted glasses, and think that power cuts are more frequent now than in the past. In the UK, they are very definitely less common than they were just 20 years ago
Starmer is adept at U-Turns so he should just admit cancelling Rwanda was a bad idea, sent totally the wrong message, and bring it make with a tweak and call it the Labour version.
Simply because Labour knows it wouldn't work just as the Conservatives probably did.
In truth, no one has come up with a coherent, legal, practical, workable and above all inexpensive solution to the problem of "the boats". If such a solution existed, it would have been implemented by either this Government or the last Government.
If withdrawing from the ECHR is the panacea some seem to think it would have been done by this Government or the last Government.
You could try the Greek response and immediately arrest and deport all those who come over illegally but that wouldn't stop them coming.
I feel like maybe we should give the Greek response a go. Starmer could get away with that if we committed to maintaining or increasing the number of people we grant asylum via direct entry from UK Embassies in Turkey, Pakistan etc.
It's the queue-jumping that is really toxic here. Brits are typically exceptionally tolerant, and welcoming of refugees and even economic migrants, but a sense of of fair play is keenly felt. It's why there is a such a deep loathing of travellers in rural areas - when someone leaves litter all over the place and trespasses on someone's field for weeks...
The problems are not really political, they are legal. Rwanda would probably work. Vastly reducing the grant rate would (less quickly and showily) work. Reducing the eligibility of coming to the UK by housing asylum seekers in less comfortable conditions would have an effect. Foxy's Danish solution sounds quite good. But the fact is that any attempt to implement any such solutions would (and do) simply get rugby tackled down by legal challenges. Asylum seekers don't even get deported when their claims are rejected - they can challenge the verdict legally an unlimited number of times.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
I now see why reasonably peaceful countries - England in the 1640s springs to mind - plunge into civil war, nonetheless
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Hmmmm
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
It’s also historically ignorant. The ‘English’ civil war essentially started in Scotland, and wasn’t limited to England (war of the three kingdoms is sometimes used as an alternative, and arose from attempting to force a simplistic solution onto a complicated problem.
Comments
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-march-2025/summary-of-latest-statistics#asylum-claims-outcomes-and-system
It seems half of asylum applications are approved (49%) in the year ending March 2025 compared with 61% in the year ending March 2024 and of the 109,000 requests for asylum, a third came from those arriving on "small boats" and just over a third had come to the UK on a visa.
Literally nobody has said leaving the ECHR is a panacea - that's a straw man argument. But it is looking like a necessary precursor to doing anything about this. I doubt we could even fudge or disapply bits of it these days, as again you'd have a judicial review.
The Royal Navy had about 36 dreadnoughts to 21 German, roughly a 60% advantage, but nothing like an insurmountable one.
A German victory would have annexed the low countries, disarmed along the Channel and absorbed most of the French Navy. It would certainly want to profit from its victory, and not have to worry about Britain again by ensuring it was strong enough to dictate terms.
NY Times
The German plan was to levy vast indemnities on France and use that to fund further naval expansion. In addition taxation from conquered territories.
Only major ructions can save us now. An overturning of the ancien regime. Let us pray this is non-violent
Change the judges….
And like gay marriage for the Conservatives, it's actually a Labour government that has the best chance of making that stick and finding a consensus.
Added to the German fleet it would have achieved parity with the Royal Navy. When other ships were added, perhaps exceeded it.
For a full German victory it would have been the logical thing to do to neuter its main remaining enemy, and assure it wouldn't be in a position to intervene in Europe, or stand in its way overseas, and dictate how it traded - effectively risking the UK becoming a vassal.
Why wouldn't it do it?
The response:
@SpencerHakimian
·
36m
The [US] government is literally not collecting actual inflation data anymore.
They’re just estimating what they think inflation is.
They “suddenly” changed this in May 2025.
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1950655636590694741
Whilst I agree with much of your concern about, say, attempts at censorship, I'm not sure this kind of rhetoric helps a lot. You can try to shock people out of their complacency but I sense a total determination to keep digging or just be even more defiant to the other side.
Either, you cut back the whole thicket of human rights law/adherence to international law, or you just accept that the judiciary are political actors, and make sure that your political actors get appointed to key positions.
In fact, I think you could make a tenuous link to the power of the small boats issue and the lack of appetite for rioting. People love to play by the rules in the UK, and enjoy enforcing them too. People on council estates don't hate the government or a big corporation - it's the person at the end of the street fraudulently claming PIP (or so they think) that really riles them up.
I have good friends and family who are gay and are every bit in love as you may be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhCmCARiXoo&list=PL40E63PqZdyPPVZyBGzlSmg1cadAK94LF
These feelings disturb me. I have never before felt that my government is entirely illegitimate and I have never felt before that I could easily side with the enemy in a war - depending on the enemy
This messes with my head. I’m a patriot, instinctively. But this is what I am thinking
We are an ancient democracy and this national muscle memory will see us through for a while. My guess is that in 2028 the voters will opt for the most radical change possible - probably Reform (but who knows what might happen interim)
The chance of something more turbulent will rise, sharply, if this radical government is unable to make the changes people want
An antidote to the Doomerism here:
https://bsky.app/profile/alastairmeeks.bsky.social/post/3lv6l3zx57c2x
It’s a shame. He’s a fine writer, sometimes brilliant. Yet prefers to talk to 3 like-minded people in a woke ghetto. Peculiar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
Compare UK deaths at 450,000.
“Keep the coinage and the courts. Let the rabble have the rest”
The slight problem is that the judges are remarkably unable to tell when their opinions are political opinions, not the perfectly balanced musings of a theorist following Pure Law.
https://www.ft.com/content/c34f7c3b-ffb8-43ea-af2b-e98b0aee83dd
Gambhir in angry exchange with groundkeeper
Fortis tells coach ‘you can’t tell us what to do’"
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/jul/29/india-head-coach-clashes-with-oval-staff-before-fifth-test-as-tempers-flare-cricket
Which *nearly * became the weapon it was supposed to be.
If Barnes Wallis had actually gone to America to learn how pressure cabins for aircraft could be built - rather than bolting boilers to the noses of Wellingtons… well, we might have had a force capable of striking from 45,000 feet. The pre war RAF had a faction interested in ultra high altitude aircraft.
Combine that with Oboe - the increased altitude would have had Oboe ops all across Germany possible.
Accuracy of +-50 feet. In all weathers
Smartphones wreck our ability to study, with most people surveyed unable to focus for an hour without using them
Mark Sellman, Technology Correspondent" (£)
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/average-young-person-25-years-phone-screen-time-hwt76mnpq
"Ve did not!"
"Yes, you did! You invaded Poland China!"
The issue is a philosophy - that the ECHR is expandable and should expand to create a virtual constitution.
@SeanT bangs on about civil strife. The real thing will be Parliamentary Primacy vs the Courts.
The highlights for me were a series of lectures on quantum mechanics and gravity waves, and dancing with Lily, an acrobatic dancer, in the nightclub.
FFFFFFS IGNORE THE NOISES OFF AND GET ON WITH IT !!
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/30/world/canada-recognize-palestinian-state-september-intl-latam
The Head Count could still argue over things like changes in tax rates, but human rights law (which inevitably compasses immigration law, criminal justice, the rights and obligations of citizens and those of non-citizens), and even large swathes of foreign policy were far too important to be determined by elected politicians.
Right now,, he wants lower interest rates.
I'm not sure it's really 'device' specific. It was realistically pre-iphone so very few people had anything approaching 'the internet in their pocket'. Just seemed to be a very rapid adaptation of monkey-brain reward signals that social media glommed onto like magnetic sharks.
https://bsky.app/profile/wsj.com/post/3lv72y6s25n2v
Perhaps they don't wear Rolex's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael_Rimmer
The country has serious problems but the right’s vision of it has become hysterical.
I can point to travellers who have settled in successfully here - obtained a plot and PP and built chalet bungalows, criminal elements ("They do not realise that I can rustle up a mob of men in 30 minutes")m and some who have had initial tensions and then calmed down.
But the trespass etc needs to be addressed beyond shouts of "Racism".
Apart from anything else, RefUK will make it a wedge issue to set the minds of their fringe supporters, and Jenrick will start making videos.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/racism-the-road-less-travelled-78005.html
One interesting aside is a quiet religious revival along Pentecostal lines now encompassing 20k or so in the gypsy community in the UK in a movement called "Light and Life", following a mission visit from the similar French movement in the early 1980s.
It’s just a shame that the first story underneath his fucking ludicrous “column” is:
“England and Wales population grows at near-record levels.
Increase driven almost entirely by international migration”
The reason they are buying is because London prices have plunged. Wonder why
Quite astonishing that anyone here admires it. A new low for PB
"Janan Ganesh: a defence of elites"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI1fC1_WrNc
Not even during Tuesdays civil war.
https://powercuts.nationalgrid.co.uk/power-cut-map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwPbPULXOg8
Not even a rural location.
Dial before you dig!
https://www.national-one-call.co.uk/
The problem is that we have the population growth but not the infrastructure - and, worse, we have people determining policies on migration without any intention whatsoever to cost for, accrue or account for infrastructure when measuring costs and benefits.
The two rational choices are to grow the population and invest in infrastructure, or don't invest in infrastructure and don't grow the population. I'd prefer the former, I respect the latter, but we instead have a mess.
CI (Customer Interruptions): how many interruptions occur per 100 customers each year, for outages lasting 3 minutes or more.
CML (Customer Minutes Lost): the average outage duration (in minutes) per customer per year.
You will be pleased to know that CMLs are pretty much at record lows, and are down about 90% in the last quarter century.
Its the job of our politicians to balance those competing demands, and if they don't balance them right we can kick them out and elect others.
But there's no point pointing at any individual competing metric and saying 'the public want that' while disregarding the rest of the competing elements the public also wants.
A tree in sticksville falling over and taking a power line with it, knocking some homes off the grid until it can be repaired is one thing.
The grid falling over and tens of thousands or more going without power is something completely different.
The rise of both renewables and natural gas remove some of the natural stabilizers in grids, and mean there are going to be challenges ahead. But at the same time, we need to avoid rose tinted glasses, and think that power cuts are more frequent now than in the past. In the UK, they are very definitely less common than they were just 20 years ago
Decision could leave door open for another presidential run
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/07/30/kamala-harris-will-not-run-california-governor/ (£££)
Members of Donald Trump’s administration monitoring Online Safety Act with ‘great interest and concern’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/07/30/white-house-warns-starmer-tech-online-safety-bill/
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-starmer-palestine-recognition-emboldens-enemies-9b3p58nh9 (£££)
Kemi writes for the Times.
A letter, signed by 40 peers, explains that the recognition of the territory could break the terms laid out for statehood in the Montevideo Convention
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/palestine-pledge-could-break-the-law-top-lawyers-warn-starmer-3lx0mv6lk (£££)
As pb discusses activist lawyers...
No government, no settled borders, and in future no Palestinian refugees as they'd be within their own new state.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/lucy-connolly-freed-jail-weeks-b1240757.html