Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Excellent post.
It resonates because its uncontrolled. Control of a nation's borders is very visceral - no Government could tolerate or shrug off illegal intrusions like this, which are very easily reported - as it makes it look incompetent, useless and creates the perception that if it can't control something basic like that then it has no firm control on anything.
It also strikes against the British sense of fair play. Everyone knows the vast majority are healthy young men, who can afford to pay the smugglers, who are tutored to ditch their papers, contact the right lawyers, claim persecution, and stick to the right story to get asylum when they get here. Meanwhile there are thousands of vulnerable others in genuine real need who get tortured or killed under oppressive and authoritarian regimes.
I've said before that the British would accept higher levels of legitimate and legal asylum claimants provided they had control and the process was fair.
So this tiresome racist v.anti-racist narrative that's made out of it is just tedious culture war hogwash by preening narcissists.
In which case why is it so rare to see people calling out for a fair, legal way to claim asylum in the UK for genuine asylum seekers?
That's surely what's missing here, yet the narrative never suggests huge demand for the government to go down that route.
Cameron was advocating taking claimants directly from the camps.
One problem I think is that there's no "cap". If we let anyone in the world apply at any British embassy we'd be inundated, and we can't take millions each year.
I think up to 100k (in extremis) would be just about tolerable but there must be limits.
Why the formerly downgraded students are disadvantaged? Because the ones who were not have already accepted. Therefore, withdrawing that acceptance would be breach of contract and subject to legal action.
That is one good reason why this should have been sorted in advance.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Their view was Boris Johnson and the Tories will deny Scotland a referendum for as long as they are in power then let Labour take the can for losing Scotland.
Boris Johnson being Boris Johnson doesn't want to be seen as the modern day Lord North.
If they deny Scotland a referendum they won't be in power for long, it will get very messy. The Lord North analogy is an interesting one: as I recall Britain's North American colonies have done alright for themselves since becoming independent.
The United States has not done that well, really. When it was a colony it had the longest life expectancy in the world, and the highest incomes. On a relative basis, it's done nothing but decline since independence.
I'd be surprised if a country with such a huge enslaved population had the longest life expectancy in the world, or indeed the highest per capita incomes, but I certainly don't have any numbers with which to refute your assertion. I don't think there is a great desire in the US to restore their colonial status, let's put it that way.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
Titania McGrath has her moments, she can be genuinely funny, but never really brilliant? Godfrey Elfwick had moments of genius
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Excellent post.
It resonates because its uncontrolled. Control of a nation's borders is very visceral - no Government could tolerate or shrug off illegal intrusions like this, which are very easily reported - as it makes it look incompetent, useless and creates the perception that if it can't control something basic like that then it has no firm control on anything.
It also strikes against the British sense of fair play. Everyone knows the vast majority are healthy young men, who can afford to pay the smugglers, who are tutored to ditch their papers, contact the right lawyers, claim persecution, and stick to the right story to get asylum when they get here. Meanwhile there are thousands of vulnerable others in genuine real need who get tortured or killed under oppressive and authoritarian regimes.
I've said before that the British would accept higher levels of legitimate and legal asylum claimants provided they had control and the process was fair.
So this tiresome racist v.anti-racist narrative that's made out of it is just tedious culture war hogwash by preening narcissists.
In which case why is it so rare to see people calling out for a fair, legal way to claim asylum in the UK for genuine asylum seekers?
That's surely what's missing here, yet the narrative never suggests huge demand for the government to go down that route.
Cameron was advocating taking claimants directly from the camps.
One problem I think is that there's no "cap". If we let anyone in the world apply at any British embassy we'd be inundated, and we can't take millions each year.
I think up to 100k (in extremis) would be just about tolerable but there must be limits.
100k is far too many as we also have 300k on top of that of migrants and until we start making our infrastructure match the population increase it is not fair on those that already live here.
If we increase our housing stock, health service, roads, etc enough to absorb 400k a year without degrading the service to those that live here already then fair enough but we know that will happen just after hell freezes over
Off topic, just catching up with other news. I think Huawei will go out of business within 12 months, the government should plan accordingly wrt 5G. The US has completely and utterly destroyed the Huawei supply chain with the latest round of sanctions. I don't see how they will be able to source anything now that companies who use US software can no longer sell to them or lose access to US technologies.
It does go to show just how powerful the US is. They are bringing down the Chinese national champion before our very eyes with basically no international coordination and unilateral action to freeze Huawei out of the US derived supply chain. If the next president has half of this gumption then they could truly bring China to its knees very quickly. Being a customer is always more powerful than being the retailer, it turns out. I also hope Germany are paying very close attention, there is a lot of unease in the US (in both parties) about the size of the US/Germany deficit sanctions targeting the EU due to national security concerns around the Nord Stream pipeline could be something to look out for. We've seen how China have been incapable of resisting these kinds of sanctions and Huawei will fall, I hope that Germany doesn't ignore this lesson.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
The UK government (like most governments, I would assume) has a very clear policy of not paying ransoms to kidnappers. This isn't because of indifference to the welfare of people who get kidnapped, or because of stinginess. It's because paying ransoms would (a) put money into the pockets of criminals and (b) encourage them to commit more crimes (kidnappings).
Replace 'kidnappers' with 'people traffickers' and 'paying ransoms' with 'towing boats to Dover' and we have a compelling argument for not allowing the current situation to continue.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Their view was Boris Johnson and the Tories will deny Scotland a referendum for as long as they are in power then let Labour take the can for losing Scotland.
Boris Johnson being Boris Johnson doesn't want to be seen as the modern day Lord North.
If they deny Scotland a referendum they won't be in power for long, it will get very messy. The Lord North analogy is an interesting one: as I recall Britain's North American colonies have done alright for themselves since becoming independent.
The United States has not done that well, really. When it was a colony it had the longest life expectancy in the world, and the highest incomes. On a relative basis, it's done nothing but decline since independence.
I'd be surprised if a country with such a huge enslaved population had the longest life expectancy in the world, or indeed the highest per capita incomes, but I certainly don't have any numbers with which to refute your assertion. I don't think there is a great desire in the US to restore their colonial status, let's put it that way.
The slaves weren't citizens.
I don't think that matters when it comes to the statement you made. What you cite as going backwards in relative performance may simply be that the whole population rather than a privileged subset is now being counted.
I agree that the migrants coming on boats across the channel is numerically a tiny issue and they have my sympathy, but the fact that every one of them is risking life and limb to flee that infamous tyranny which is France, a country which takes far more refugees than we do, must raise even for centrist moderates and liberals the possibility that there is more in this than meets the eye. Anyone any idea what?
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
16 000 from the camps was the figure cited here as being accepted:
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
It's not contrarian. If only.
It's utterly predictable and me-too ish.
Yeah, hating on refugees is such a minority pursuit, only half of PB, most of the press, Nigel Farage, the government, Vote Leave and a few other lonely voices in the wilderness.
Wow, it's getting like the comments section on Guido on here. I don't think I've ever seen so much negative stereotyping of "foreigners" on a short thread than the last hour on here. Except of course those from Hong Kong, who are all splendid, hard-working people who would integrate just fine.
Incidentally, over on Conservative Home there are many posters who have a different, negative view about the prospects of an influx from Hong Kong, including avowed Brexiteers.
I agree that the migrants coming on boats across the channel is numerically a tiny issue and they have my sympathy, but the fact that every one of them is risking life and limb to flee that infamous tyranny which is France, a country which takes far more refugees than we do, must raise even for centrist moderates and liberals the possibility that there is more in this than meets the eye. Anyone any idea what?
Probably that they'd be largely destitute and living in unpleasant banlieue in France, jobless and actively discriminated against rather than the "microaggressions" you get here.
By contrast virtually every nation in the world is represented here with some community, it's safe, you can earn and live a far more pleasant life even at the margins.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
I agree that the migrants coming on boats across the channel is numerically a tiny issue and they have my sympathy, but the fact that every one of them is risking life and limb to flee that infamous tyranny which is France, a country which takes far more refugees than we do, must raise even for centrist moderates and liberals the possibility that there is more in this than meets the eye. Anyone any idea what?
They have family here? They speak English better than French? They have seen what the French police are like? They like English football?
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
That’s a great argument to win people over. Some of these refugees may be useless but there are plenty of others here who are useless so it doesn’t matter
There's no point saying they're all going to be Nobel prize winners because it's obviously not true. I'm simply saying that they are people just like you and me and they shouldn't be treated like some kind of invading army, or used as a political football.
Anybody who wants to win elections in England in the future will have to get immigration right.
And that means seeing England as a football club and the government as the chief scout.
The only problem with this cultural-financial argument, however, is that Brexit, at a stroke, has wiped out a whole stream of immigration from europe that has added large amounts to the UK exchequer. Just London alone has for decades been full of high-earning French, Germans, and Southern Europeans, etc. There are very likely as many wealthy French, Italians and Greeks in South Kensington, for instance, as there are in whole provinces of their home countries.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
16 000 from the camps was the figure cited here as being accepted:
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
Sorry an application or appeal succeeding is not proof of the fact they are refugees in the first place. There are all sorts of reasons that appeals and applications pass that are to do with what happens after they get here. The big one being the right to family life via the echr. Citing these figures proves nothing unless you remove those who come up with reasons they should be permitted to stay from actions subsequent to arriving
Do not assume a Nationalist majority is inevitable.
I think it increasingly likely all Unionist parties will combine under 1 Unionist Alliance ticket led by Ruth Davidson, just standing one Unionist candidate at constituency level at Holyrood against the SNP, with the Unionist parties only standing separately against each other as Tories, Labour and LD on the Holyrood list.
Thus maximising the number of Unionist MSPs to stop a Nationalist SNP or SNP and Green majority
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
Do not assume a Nationalist majority is inevitable.
I think it increasingly possible all Unionist parties will combine under 1 Unionist Alliance ticket led by Ruth Davidson, just standing one candidate at constituency level at Holyrood against the SNP, with the Unionist parties only standing separately against each other as Tories, Labour and LD on the Holyrood list.
Thus maximising the number of Unionist MSPs to stop a Nationalist SNP or SNP and Green majority
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Many are (and it's pretty obvious when you see the news reports) economic migrants from sub-saharan Africa. They smile and take selfies on their mobiles as soon as Border Force pick them up, for obvious reasons.
Many claim to be Iranian (suffering neither civil war nor oppression) but able to afford flights into Serbia and then to pay traffickers to get them into the UK.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
There is no question you can possibly ask where the reply will be rejoin unless the country goes to the dogs over the next few years. I think most people will barely notice so not likely to happen
Wow, it's getting like the comments section on Guido on here. I don't think I've ever seen so much negative stereotyping of "foreigners" on a short thread than the last hour on here. Except of course those from Hong Kong, who are all splendid, hard-working people who would integrate just fine.
Incidentally, over on Conservative Home there are many posters who have a different, negative view about the prospects of an influx from Hong Kong, including avowed Brexiteers.
I suppose the positive thing is that it's good to be exposed to other views. Doesn't always feel like that though.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Many are (and it's pretty obvious when you see the news reports) economic migrants from sub-saharan Africa. They smile and take selfies on their mobiles as soon as Border Force pick them up, for obvious reasons.
Many claim to be Iranian (suffering neither civil war nor oppression) but able to afford flights into Serbia and then to pay traffickers to get them into the UK.
I sort of will differ there you certainly suffer oppression in Iran if you are gay, a woman, a non muslim, a man who can't grow a decent beard
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
"MELANIE PHILLIPS MP should be named — along with his accuser Open justice means neither former minister nor complainant in rape case ought to be anonymous" (£)
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
It really doesn't matter what starmer goes for. We will be in an economic crisis due to Covid still. This country has never put labour in power when the economy is dodgy.
Add to that the fact this is probably the most left wing governement since the 70's for splashing the cash around and the fact those on the left are claiming it to be far right and a lot of the country will be thinking if this is far right exactly how far further to the left do you want to go.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Tbh they were never on my follow list, I only ever saw whatever was posted on here, which usually involved Muslims and/or transgender stuff.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
It's not contrarian. If only.
It's utterly predictable and me-too ish.
Yeah, hating on refugees is such a minority pursuit, only half of PB, most of the press, Nigel Farage, the government, Vote Leave and a few other lonely voices in the wilderness.
It's post like this that debase the discussion into its lowest culture war denominator.
Very disappointing. Try thinking for yourself with an original thought for a change.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
It really doesn't matter what starmer goes for. We will be in an economic crisis due to Covid still. This country has never put labour in power when the economy is dodgy.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Tbh they were never on my follow list, I only ever saw whatever was posted on here, which usually involved Muslims and/or transgender stuff.
Worth checking out in full. I'm sure there's something you'd be very tickled by.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Being ideologically aligned definitely helps though. I'm not regularly exposed to left wing satire, but I do think it probably has to work harder to make me laugh. There's of course times when you just have to give it to something for being sheer brilliance.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
It's not contrarian. If only.
It's utterly predictable and me-too ish.
Yeah, hating on refugees is such a minority pursuit, only half of PB, most of the press, Nigel Farage, the government, Vote Leave and a few other lonely voices in the wilderness.
It's post like this that debase the discussion into its lowest culture war denominator.
Very disappointing. Try thinking for yourself with an original thought for a change.
Most people are not hating on refugees. What most are doing is saying there are downsides to taking refugees and recognising it. Something the left mostly fail at.
Only when we can have a conversation about down sides and upsides can we have an adult conversation. Those that refuse to acknowledge any downsides are the ones preventing that.
To spell it out the first duty of any government of any colour is to care for the people that live here. Once that is done if there is extra left over we can see what we can do to help others.
The left position tends to be we should take anyone with a sob story because they might be worse off if we believe them. Bit by bit though that degrades the countries ability to look after those here. Slowly we slide into a position there is so many we cannot provide adequate health care, education, housing etc
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
Interesting post. The media commentariat and political class is certainly still not alert to the combined damage of Brexit and Covid coming down the line, and how that will bear comparison with our European neighbours.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
16 000 from the camps was the figure cited here as being accepted:
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
Sorry an application or appeal succeeding is not proof of the fact they are refugees in the first place. There are all sorts of reasons that appeals and applications pass that are to do with what happens after they get here. The big one being the right to family life via the echr. Citing these figures proves nothing unless you remove those who come up with reasons they should be permitted to stay from actions subsequent to arriving
It is a simple fact that the majority of applications are ultimately successful, so by that measure our own Home Office accepts their claim as legitimate.
It doesn't seem possible to break it down by mechanism of arrival, so we cannot compare with those who arrive on other visas then claim asylum for example.
The majority of the people that I know who are refugees (Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi) actually arrived by other visas, and applied for permanent residence that way, rather than the asylum route, but that may be because of their being doctors.
One Iranian colleague of mine was sent here in the Eighties by his parents aged 14 with his brother to go to boarding school. They came on education visas, but the real purpose was to keep them from being conscripted as cannon fodder by the Revolutionary Guards in the Iran/Iraq war. They didn't go home until they had British nationality, years later. Their story does have echoes of Kinder-transport.
Of course, if they weren't males from a wealthy family, they wouldn't have made it, but that doesn't make them fakes.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
I don't think so because the two tribes are too firmly dug in now and Brussels wouldn't reaccept us unless there was political consensus - they don't want us yo-yoing in and out every 8-10 years.
But, it's very possible SKS takes us into an EEA or similar under those circumstances.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
16 000 from the camps was the figure cited here as being accepted:
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
Sorry an application or appeal succeeding is not proof of the fact they are refugees in the first place. There are all sorts of reasons that appeals and applications pass that are to do with what happens after they get here. The big one being the right to family life via the echr. Citing these figures proves nothing unless you remove those who come up with reasons they should be permitted to stay from actions subsequent to arriving
It is a simple fact that the majority of applications are ultimately successful, so by that measure our own Home Office accepts their claim as legitimate.
It doesn't seem possible to break it down by mechanism of arrival, so we cannot compare with those who arrive on other visas then claim asylum for example.
The majority of the people that I know who are refugees (Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi) actually arrived by other visas, and applied for permanent residence that way, rather than the asylum route, but that may be because of their being doctors.
One Iranian colleague of mine was sent here in the Eighties by his parents aged 14 with his brother to go to boarding school. They came on education visas, but the real purpose was to keep them from being conscripted as cannon fodder by the Revolutionary Guards in the Iran/Iraq war. They didn't go home until they had British nationality, years later. Their story does have echoes of Kinder-transport.
Of course, if they weren't males from a wealthy family, they wouldn't have made it, but that doesn't make them fakes.
I wasn't claiming all were fakes. However we do often hear about people who would have been deported if it were not for they fathered a child etc while here/
I doubt figures are available but this is part of the problem. Government hides these figures from us. I may be totally wrong and most asylum claims might be legitimate, you might be totally wrong and most hinge on what they do after getting here to build a human rights case. Neither of us knows because our governments aren't transparent
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Being ideologically aligned definitely helps though. I'm not regularly exposed to left wing satire, but I do think it probably has to work harder to make me laugh. There's of course times when you just have to give it to something for being sheer brilliance.
I can find both funny but something definitely happened over the last 5 years.
Mock the Week and HIGNFY used to be required viewing; mocking everyone.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
It really doesn't matter what starmer goes for. We will be in an economic crisis due to Covid still. This country has never put labour in power when the economy is dodgy.
1926, 1945, 1964, 1975, were all Labour GE victories with a fair amount of economic crisis surely?
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Many are (and it's pretty obvious when you see the news reports) economic migrants from sub-saharan Africa. They smile and take selfies on their mobiles as soon as Border Force pick them up, for obvious reasons.
Many claim to be Iranian (suffering neither civil war nor oppression) but able to afford flights into Serbia and then to pay traffickers to get them into the UK.
I sort of will differ there you certainly suffer oppression in Iran if you are gay, a woman, a non muslim, a man who can't grow a decent beard
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
It really doesn't matter what starmer goes for. We will be in an economic crisis due to Covid still. This country has never put labour in power when the economy is dodgy.
1926, 1945, 1964, 1975, were all Labour GE victories with a fair amount of economic crisis surely?
My bad I meant to put in the last 50 years. Since the populace got more educated no doubt as we kept being told when we questions the ever increasing a grades
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
16 000 from the camps was the figure cited here as being accepted:
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
Sorry an application or appeal succeeding is not proof of the fact they are refugees in the first place. There are all sorts of reasons that appeals and applications pass that are to do with what happens after they get here. The big one being the right to family life via the echr. Citing these figures proves nothing unless you remove those who come up with reasons they should be permitted to stay from actions subsequent to arriving
It is a simple fact that the majority of applications are ultimately successful, so by that measure our own Home Office accepts their claim as legitimate.
It doesn't seem possible to break it down by mechanism of arrival, so we cannot compare with those who arrive on other visas then claim asylum for example.
The majority of the people that I know who are refugees (Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi) actually arrived by other visas, and applied for permanent residence that way, rather than the asylum route, but that may be because of their being doctors.
One Iranian colleague of mine was sent here in the Eighties by his parents aged 14 with his brother to go to boarding school. They came on education visas, but the real purpose was to keep them from being conscripted as cannon fodder by the Revolutionary Guards in the Iran/Iraq war. They didn't go home until they had British nationality, years later. Their story does have echoes of Kinder-transport.
Of course, if they weren't males from a wealthy family, they wouldn't have made it, but that doesn't make them fakes.
I wasn't claiming all were fakes. However we do often hear about people who would have been deported if it were not for they fathered a child etc while here/
I doubt figures are available but this is part of the problem. Government hides these figures from us. I may be totally wrong and most asylum claims might be legitimate, you might be totally wrong and most hinge on what they do after getting here to build a human rights case. Neither of us knows because our governments aren't transparent
Yes, but the fact is that 55% do establish to a hostile Home Office that theirs is a legitimate claim.
There are many aspects of the worldwide refugee issue, but these are in the main genuine refugees.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
On the other hand you could argue that countries like Syria were given the independence they desired in the 1950s and 1960s and have made a complete mess of it, and that's their fault, not the fault of the West.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
It's not contrarian. If only.
It's utterly predictable and me-too ish.
Yeah, hating on refugees is such a minority pursuit, only half of PB, most of the press, Nigel Farage, the government, Vote Leave and a few other lonely voices in the wilderness.
It's post like this that debase the discussion into its lowest culture war denominator.
Very disappointing. Try thinking for yourself with an original thought for a change.
Most people are not hating on refugees. What most are doing is saying there are downsides to taking refugees and recognising it. Something the left mostly fail at.
Only when we can have a conversation about down sides and upsides can we have an adult conversation. Those that refuse to acknowledge any downsides are the ones preventing that.
To spell it out the first duty of any government of any colour is to care for the people that live here. Once that is done if there is extra left over we can see what we can do to help others.
The left position tends to be we should take anyone with a sob story because they might be worse off if we believe them. Bit by bit though that degrades the countries ability to look after those here. Slowly we slide into a position there is so many we cannot provide adequate health care, education, housing etc
I think people want to be generous but up to a point and only within the rules of fair play.
That's the median British view but the discussion only ever takes place between two absurd extremes.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
I believe under 1951 calculations our fair share of refugees is calculated by the un as 22000 we take about double that. I wouldnt call that lip service/ I would be like germany committing to spend 3% of gdp on military for nato and spending 6%
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Don't forget Iraq, the country from which we probably have the greatest obligation to take refugees.
We did actually take a fair number of iraqui refugee children. I certainly remember at the time that an event I was at was asked to come see what we could do to entertains a load of iraqi girls, probably about 40 to 50 between 12 and 16 which were being housed at a scout camp. Should we have done more probably. We didn't do the nothing however that some would suggest.
16 000 from the camps was the figure cited here as being accepted:
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
Sorry an application or appeal succeeding is not proof of the fact they are refugees in the first place. There are all sorts of reasons that appeals and applications pass that are to do with what happens after they get here. The big one being the right to family life via the echr. Citing these figures proves nothing unless you remove those who come up with reasons they should be permitted to stay from actions subsequent to arriving
It is a simple fact that the majority of applications are ultimately successful, so by that measure our own Home Office accepts their claim as legitimate.
It doesn't seem possible to break it down by mechanism of arrival, so we cannot compare with those who arrive on other visas then claim asylum for example.
The majority of the people that I know who are refugees (Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi) actually arrived by other visas, and applied for permanent residence that way, rather than the asylum route, but that may be because of their being doctors.
One Iranian colleague of mine was sent here in the Eighties by his parents aged 14 with his brother to go to boarding school. They came on education visas, but the real purpose was to keep them from being conscripted as cannon fodder by the Revolutionary Guards in the Iran/Iraq war. They didn't go home until they had British nationality, years later. Their story does have echoes of Kinder-transport.
Of course, if they weren't males from a wealthy family, they wouldn't have made it, but that doesn't make them fakes.
I wasn't claiming all were fakes. However we do often hear about people who would have been deported if it were not for they fathered a child etc while here/
I doubt figures are available but this is part of the problem. Government hides these figures from us. I may be totally wrong and most asylum claims might be legitimate, you might be totally wrong and most hinge on what they do after getting here to build a human rights case. Neither of us knows because our governments aren't transparent
Yes, but the fact is that 55% do establish to a hostile Home Office that theirs is a legitimate claim.
There are many aspects of the worldwide refugee issue, but these are in the main genuine refugees.
Or to be cynical they know what to say and the Home Office can't prove otherwise.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
Thanks... I think. Might lay off the cheese tonight.
It's curious, though. The way to embed Brexit as a 50 year project is surely to make the path gentle but decisive. Don't scare the horses. Or at the very least, with rigourous preparation. Here are the safety belts, be ready to use them. The government's route is high-stakes, badly managed. It could all come tumbling down, and the efforts to prevent that don't impress.
What is it? Hubris? Impatience? Or a deep desire to see the world burn?
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
Thanks... I think. Might lay off the cheese tonight.
It's curious, though. The way to embed Brexit as a 50 year project is surely to make the path gentle but decisive. Don't scare the horses. Or at the very least, with rigourous preparation. Here are the safety belts, be ready to use them. The government's route is high-stakes, badly managed. It could all come tumbling down, and the efforts to prevent that don't impress.
What is it? Hubris? Impatience? Or a deep desire to see the world burn?
It's a fear it won't happen unless they force it through hard, quickly and irreversibly.
But, yes, the rest of your post would have been the wiser course.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Being ideologically aligned definitely helps though. I'm not regularly exposed to left wing satire, but I do think it probably has to work harder to make me laugh. There's of course times when you just have to give it to something for being sheer brilliance.
I can find both funny but something definitely happened over the last 5 years.
Mock the Week and HIGNFY used to be required viewing; mocking everyone.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
1. A lot 2. Don't do it again 3. We still need to meet our objectives, and I think we should do this by having asylum processing centres overseas that can offer a comprehensive service to genuine refugees whilst discouraging non-genuine ones.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Being ideologically aligned definitely helps though. I'm not regularly exposed to left wing satire, but I do think it probably has to work harder to make me laugh. There's of course times when you just have to give it to something for being sheer brilliance.
I can find both funny but something definitely happened over the last 5 years.
Mock the Week and HIGNFY used to be required viewing; mocking everyone.
Now, they've both taken sides.
The Last Leg can be hilarious at times but doesn't even attempt to hide what side it takes on issues. I still find it funny, if anything the anger and upset sometimes goes so far I find it even funnier knowing that I often don't share their opinion.
I think the fact the comics are genuinely funny on that helps. Better than comics half pretending to be neutral and half pretending to be funny but not succeeding in either.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
Thanks... I think. Might lay off the cheese tonight.
It's curious, though. The way to embed Brexit as a 50 year project is surely to make the path gentle but decisive. Don't scare the horses. Or at the very least, with rigourous preparation. Here are the safety belts, be ready to use them. The government's route is high-stakes, badly managed. It could all come tumbling down, and the efforts to prevent that don't impress.
What is it? Hubris? Impatience? Or a deep desire to see the world burn?
It's a fear it won't happen unless they force it through hard, quickly and irreversibly.
But, yes, the rest of your post would have been the wiser course.
They fear it wont happen because they know it was built on a pile of steaming lies.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
It only applied to non european refugees from the late Sixties as I recall. I think with modern transport links and social mores that is impossible to sustain now.
The distinction between political and economic migrants is a grey area too, as economic policy is very political, for example the East African Asians, or Czarist Jewish refugees.
Legality of Scotsref2 is important via a vis Madrid and EU membership. But Scotland is in an act of union with England, not part of' the Kingdom of England' as Wales was folded up into - so I think there's enough law on the Mats side to force it regardless of Johnson's wishes if push comes to shove
No. Boris will not grant a referendum because of the reason Meeks cites: there's a good chance he will lose it (though remember these polls could change, volatility is the order of the day).
He will use the "once in a generation" line, and the fact this *might* cause extra grievance in Scotland will not bother him, given that he's likely to lose anyway. Better to wait, hand over the mess to the next government. He is determined not to be the PM that loses the Union. He will not risk it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court the govt will win, referendums are a reserved matter: an issue for Westminster. This isn't a legal grey area.
All that said, Meeks is right on his central point, a massive constitutional brouhaha is a-coming, which will reach its peak in the late 2020s. What joy.
I see two ways of defusing it:
1, a huge royal commission establishing a proper Federal Britain with a new House of Federal Lords (in Edinburgh?)
2, Labour promising a new referendum in 2024, taking us back into the EU. The more I think about it, the more I see this as possible. We're in for a torrid few years and by 2023 rejoining the EU might seem quite seductive: and it would likely solve the Scottish problem (and give Starmer some Scots MPs)
Interesting. How torrid is torrid?
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
I mean: a horrific crash in the UK economy (worse than our neighbours France, Germany etc) partly because of the implosion of central London.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
Thanks... I think. Might lay off the cheese tonight.
It's curious, though. The way to embed Brexit as a 50 year project is surely to make the path gentle but decisive. Don't scare the horses. Or at the very least, with rigourous preparation. Here are the safety belts, be ready to use them. The government's route is high-stakes, badly managed. It could all come tumbling down, and the efforts to prevent that don't impress.
What is it? Hubris? Impatience? Or a deep desire to see the world burn?
It's a fear it won't happen unless they force it through hard, quickly and irreversibly.
But, yes, the rest of your post would have been the wiser course.
But yes, it hasn't been reported on any news outlet, or would you like me to post some more links?
BBC ?
I've not watched the BBC today, so I can't comment, but we can agree your earlier comment of 'There has been no reporting of the ONS death figures on any news outlet. I wonder why?' was a lot like my boxer shorts, full of bollocks.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
On the other hand you could argue that countries like Syria were given the independence they desired in the 1950s and 1960s and have made a complete mess of it, and that's their fault, not the fault of the West.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Being ideologically aligned definitely helps though. I'm not regularly exposed to left wing satire, but I do think it probably has to work harder to make me laugh. There's of course times when you just have to give it to something for being sheer brilliance.
I can find both funny but something definitely happened over the last 5 years.
Mock the Week and HIGNFY used to be required viewing; mocking everyone.
Now, they've both taken sides.
The Last Leg can be hilarious at times but doesn't even attempt to hide what side it takes on issues. I still find it funny, if anything the anger and upset sometimes goes so far I find it even funnier knowing that I often don't share their opinion.
I think the fact the comics are genuinely funny on that helps. Better than comics half pretending to be neutral and half pretending to be funny but not succeeding in either.
Looking at the sainted Titania's tweets from 12/8 (last date available) there seems to be some satirical "healthnormative" advice on not taking medicine so I'm guessing the Twitter algorithm that looks for dodgy Covid-19 advice noticed too, and that and not wokeness is the problem.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
Many are (and it's pretty obvious when you see the news reports) economic migrants from sub-saharan Africa. They smile and take selfies on their mobiles as soon as Border Force pick them up, for obvious reasons.
Many claim to be Iranian (suffering neither civil war nor oppression) but able to afford flights into Serbia and then to pay traffickers to get them into the UK.
Of course there are a significant number of sub-Saharan economic migrants. And of course they shouldn't be allowed to break the rules and benefit from it. We, as a country, need to quickly process and return those who are not genuine. (And it is of no credit to us that we make it a drawn out process that benefits no-one.)
But at the same time, there is a massive correlation between numbers of asylum seekers arriving in the UK and the level of "trouble" in the world. In the last 20 years, the number arriving has varied from perhaps 5,000 to as many as 100,000
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are economic migrants.
Perhaps someone more familiar with the oeuvre of Titania McGrath (& who presumably finds it funny) could clarify, is it deliberate that she physically resembles the somewhat overfed Camilla Long? I thought the latter was more a wannabe Hartley-Brewer or Pearson.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humour.
I've found Titania McGrath as unfunny as Godfrey Elfwick, like most things it must be a matter of taste.
I'm surprised at that. "Her" sense of windup humour is very similar to yours.
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Absolutely not.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Titania McGrath is by any measure biting, witty and (hilariously) punctures the absurdities of wokeness on a regular basis. She's a hugely important satirist and a brilliant one.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
Being ideologically aligned definitely helps though. I'm not regularly exposed to left wing satire, but I do think it probably has to work harder to make me laugh. There's of course times when you just have to give it to something for being sheer brilliance.
I can find both funny but something definitely happened over the last 5 years.
Mock the Week and HIGNFY used to be required viewing; mocking everyone.
Now, they've both taken sides.
HIGNFY hasn't been funny in about twenty years, and Mock the Week has never been funny. The standards of political satire in recent times have been terrible, except for non-topical stuff like the Thick of it, and that's hardly recent.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
On the other hand you could argue that countries like Syria were given the independence they desired in the 1950s and 1960s and have made a complete mess of it, and that's their fault, not the fault of the West.
Syria is a modern dictatorship with some democratic trappings. A wide variety of faiths are not just tolerated but integrated - this is a country where the Muslim President goes to Easter service in Church. Women have equal rights to men. It had a successful economy. How is this 'making a complete mess of it' exactly?
The 'complete mess' was made when the US saw the opportunity in protests (by protestors who didn't like the multi-faith tolerance thing) to change the regime. For something worse.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are ecomonic migrants.
The vast majority do go to the nearest safe country. Turkey has several million Syrian refugees, Pakistan a similar number of Afghans, South Africa lots of Zimbabweans, Bangladesh Burmese Rohingya etc.
The percentage coming to developed countries is quite minimal in comparison, despite the fact that we have often fueled the conflict that they are fleeing.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are ecomonic migrants.
Brilliant! My great uncle fleeing Nazi Germany turns out to be an economic migrant because he went to Israel.
It seems rather odd to me that those who claim to be most concerned about the welfare and rights of migrants and asylum seekers are also those who complain about measures taken to discourage migrants from paying human traffickers to put them in an inflatable dinghy and risk their lives on a very dangerous crossing.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are ecomonic migrants.
The vast majority do go to the nearest safe country. Turkey has several million Syrian refugees, Pakistan a similar number of Afghans, South Africa lots of Zimbabweans, Bangladesh Burmese Rohingya etc.
The percentage coming to developed countries is quite minimal in comparison, despite the fact that we have often fueled the conflict that they are fleeing.
So we are in agreement that those who pick and choose which country they go to are in fact economic migrants.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence" That Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
If 3mn HK Chinese turn up I am certain they will face plenty of hostility, including from the tabloid press. The fact is, neither you nor I know anything about the people crossing the channel right now. Some of them might have been doctors or engineers in their own country. To simply assert that they have no skills and nothing to contribute is ridiculous. And even if some of them are a burden, we have obligations to host refugees. It's not as if we don't already have plenty of useless people here already - indeed many of them are running the country.
Who cares? they are not coming on our terms. They are coming on their terms. They are coming on the people traffickers terms.
Jurgen Klopp does not take 20 random footballers who want to play for Liverpool on the off chance there might be a Messi in there.
They are watched. They are scouted. They are tapped up. They are selected. They sign contracts that demand levels of commitment and conduct.
THAT is what many of the voters of England want for their immigration system. Crucially Farage understands that. Very few others do.
In a world where refugees exist you can't simply take in who you want, unless you think refugees are someone else's problem (many people in this country thought that in the 1930s, I think they were wrong then and now). This is where your football team analogy falls down.
These people are not refugees. Its as if Paris St Germain took on a huge contingent of random footballers and we decided to pay a fortune for a contingent of them. Untested. Untrialled. Unsifted. With no strings.
Its not good enough and it won;t be accepted as good enough in the future, I don;t think.
I think that's a little harsh. If you look at the nationalities of the myriad flow of asylum seekers, they likely mostly come from places with civil wars or other insurrection.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
That isn't a reason to admit more of them - it's a reason to be far more cautious. Those coming from Syria (for example) are likely to have no small proportion of insurrectionists. These are not cuddly people, they're jihadi heart-eaters. I grant you it's highly hypocritical to attempt to inflict them on Syria and refuse to take them in when it doesn't work, but it's hypocrisy I'm willing to live with.
That's a perfectly logical point of view.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
I believe under 1951 calculations our fair share of refugees is calculated by the un as 22000 we take about double that. I wouldnt call that lip service/ I would be like germany committing to spend 3% of gdp on military for nato and spending 6%
There are around 35,000 *applications* a year, and we end up accepting about half.
I think Nerys has a point in that virtually no-one will know that six times as many people are now dying from flu and pneumonia than Covid –– in summer!
Yes, there are stories out there if you look hard enough, but what should be headline news, simply isn't.
Moreover, I very much doubt the UK population is widely aware that:
• there are only about 500 Covidians in hospital in the whole UK
• The number of under-50s who have died form Covid absent comorbidities is fewer than 100 (last time I looked)
• They are having debauched pool parties in Wuhan because no-one has had Covid since the spring
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are ecomonic migrants.
Brilliant! My great uncle fleeing Nazi Germany turns out to be an economic migrant because he went to Israel.
Ancient history was never my strong point, but wasn't Israel created AFTER Nazi Germany went kaput?
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are ecomonic migrants.
The vast majority do go to the nearest safe country. Turkey has several million Syrian refugees, Pakistan a similar number of Afghans, South Africa lots of Zimbabweans, Bangladesh Burmese Rohingya etc.
The percentage coming to developed countries is quite minimal in comparison, despite the fact that we have often fueled the conflict that they are fleeing.
So we are in agreement that those who pick and choose which country they go to are in fact economic migrants.
Mr Meeks is a fine writer, but this is one of the worst sentences - in so many ways - that I have ever seen on PB
"The number of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel does not begin to fill the gaps left by all those people who needlessly died with Covid-19 owing to the government’s negligence"
Tasteless, toneless, valueless, pointless.
He's right though, isn't he?
You completely miss the point. Completely. It isn;t about numbers.
Why do you think there is so much concern about migrant boats, and yet when we offer 3m HK chinese pathways to passports nobody bats an eyelid?
Here's why.
Brexiteers see Britain as the Real Madrid and Manchester United of immigration rolled into one.
They think we have our pick. We can choose exactly who we want to play for our team, when we want them to play and the size of the squad we want from overseas players. The demand is enormous. Patently.
Brexitters are tired of what they see as third division players with no skills who are also not team players and cost a fortune to maintain.
And I'll tell you what. Labour will never form a government again until they grasp this simple truth
Yes, that’s true and something Farage was at pains to point out numerous times during the brexit debates?
I don't know whether its true or not, but voters are utterly sick of the attitude of many modern politicians, whereby we're told by that Britain is at the same time a lovely haven for refugees fleeing persecution, and also a land choc full of knuckle dragging shaven headed racists.
Well I'm a voter, and what I'm utterly sick of is the modern politicians who exploit the arrival of a handful of desperate refugees to distract from the many serious problems facing the country and their complete incompetence in attempting to tackle them. I hope that is sufficiently contrarian for you.
Refugees from where? France?
As you well know they have come through France from Syria,Libya and other war torn countries. Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
If they are genuine refugees, then they will go to the nearest safe countries, if they pick and choose which country they go to, they are ecomonic migrants.
Brilliant! My great uncle fleeing Nazi Germany turns out to be an economic migrant because he went to Israel.
Also depends on languages spoken, cultural associations, where family members are going etc. That's before you get on to the destination countries' policies towards those refugees.
What a tasteless and unpleasant opening to an article, even by Mr Meeks’ standards.
Not reading the rest. Just wanted to note my regret at how this site has fallen from its heyday.
It was about betting once, rather than political opinion pieces with a tenuous link to betting thrown in.
It's interesting to have some political opinion pieces as well, and Alastair has written some very good ones (I'm not just thinking of ones I agree with). This piece is not one of them however - a mixture of thinly-veiled class hatred and no attempt to acknowledge (let alone engage with) his opponents' arguments.
Comments
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1295738322854150144?s=20
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1295739057293668352?s=20
One problem I think is that there's no "cap". If we let anyone in the world apply at any British embassy we'd be inundated, and we can't take millions each year.
I think up to 100k (in extremis) would be just about tolerable but there must be limits.
That is one good reason why this should have been sorted in advance.
That's why (apart from Ms Merkel's foolish invitation) there was the massive flood of them seven or eight years ago: the revolutions, and civil wars, and subsequent repression in North Africa and the Middle East created a flood of people leaving.
Go back a decade before, and there were a lot of Afghanis.
https://semipartisansam.com/2016/03/07/tales-from-the-safe-space-part-4-guardian-article-or-satire/
If we increase our housing stock, health service, roads, etc enough to absorb 400k a year without degrading the service to those that live here already then fair enough but we know that will happen just after hell freezes over
It has also been discussed here
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/breaking-lowest-number-coronavirus-deaths-22538735
and here
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8639223/Coronavirus-deaths-fall-low-Flu-pneumonia-killing-six-times-people.html
But yes, it hasn't been reported on any news outlet, or would you like me to post some more links?
Replace 'kidnappers' with 'people traffickers' and 'paying ransoms' with 'towing boats to Dover' and we have a compelling argument for not allowing the current situation to continue.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-refugee-resettlement-vulnerable-persons-middle-east-a8962046.html
Over all 55% of asylum applications in recent years have been accepted as bonefide:
"Of all applications received in the period 2012 to 2016 with a known outcome as of May 2019 (116,390, which excludes withdrawn applications), 38% resulted in a grant of asylum, humanitarian protection, or another form of leave at initial decision.
Over this period, around three-quarters (78%) of the applicants who were rejected at the initial decision stage appealed. Of these appeals with a known outcome, 40% were successful. This increased the grant rate from 38% at initial decision to 55% after appeal"
From: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migration-to-the-uk-asylum/
It couldn't have anything to do with the fact the creator was a Brexiteer, I suppose?
Incidentally, over on Conservative Home there are many posters who have a different, negative view about the prospects of an influx from Hong Kong, including avowed Brexiteers.
By contrast virtually every nation in the world is represented here with some community, it's safe, you can earn and live a far more pleasant life even at the margins.
But that isn't an excuse to take everyone in.
I find many Brexiteers funny and hilarious.
Your flippant tone does you a disservice on a serious subject.
But jeez.
I think it increasingly likely all Unionist parties will combine under 1 Unionist Alliance ticket led by Ruth Davidson, just standing one Unionist candidate at constituency level at Holyrood against the SNP, with the Unionist parties only standing separately against each other as Tories, Labour and LD on the Holyrood list.
Thus maximising the number of Unionist MSPs to stop a Nationalist SNP or SNP and Green majority
https://twitter.com/GdnPolitics/status/1295751063945936897
Given that the midpoint British view right now seems to be "This is very possibly a mistake, but we have to go through with it", how wrongly does it have to go for a "Shall we return to the loving arms of Mother Brussels" to be an attractive question in 2024? Because SKS is a proven lawyer, and will only ask a question whose answer he knows already.
So it's not only Nats who have lurid fantasies.
Many claim to be Iranian (suffering neither civil war nor oppression) but able to afford flights into Serbia and then to pay traffickers to get them into the UK.
Doesn't always feel like that though.
Add to that a 2nd Covid wave, a messy Brexit (which satisfies no one), continuing economic stagnation, and the looming constitutional crisis in Scotland.
Remainerism could return in force as Rejoinerism, as it might seem a panacea. Rejoining also,of course, solves the Scottish problem in one go (if we Rejoin).
There's no way a Tory leader would ever countenance it, but if all these ducks line up I could see Starmer going for it: with the added bonus that it would boost Labour in Scotland in 2024 (if they get a decent leader).
I don't see this as likely, But it is now certainly possible.
If you don't find her funny then you're choosing not to because of her politics.
MP should be named — along with his accuser
Open justice means neither former minister nor complainant in rape case ought to be anonymous" (£)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/mp-should-be-named-along-with-his-accuser-gp39lxvpz
Add to that the fact this is probably the most left wing governement since the 70's for splashing the cash around and the fact those on the left are claiming it to be far right and a lot of the country will be thinking if this is far right exactly how far further to the left do you want to go.
Very disappointing. Try thinking for yourself with an original thought for a change.
Only when we can have a conversation about down sides and upsides can we have an adult conversation. Those that refuse to acknowledge any downsides are the ones preventing that.
To spell it out the first duty of any government of any colour is to care for the people that live here. Once that is done if there is extra left over we can see what we can do to help others.
The left position tends to be we should take anyone with a sob story because they might be worse off if we believe them. Bit by bit though that degrades the countries ability to look after those here. Slowly we slide into a position there is so many we cannot provide adequate health care, education, housing etc
It doesn't seem possible to break it down by mechanism of arrival, so we cannot compare with those who arrive on other visas then claim asylum for example.
The majority of the people that I know who are refugees (Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi) actually arrived by other visas, and applied for permanent residence that way, rather than the asylum route, but that may be because of their being doctors.
One Iranian colleague of mine was sent here in the Eighties by his parents aged 14 with his brother to go to boarding school. They came on education visas, but the real purpose was to keep them from being conscripted as cannon fodder by the Revolutionary Guards in the Iran/Iraq war. They didn't go home until they had British nationality, years later. Their story does have echoes of Kinder-transport.
Of course, if they weren't males from a wealthy family, they wouldn't have made it, but that doesn't make them fakes.
But, it's very possible SKS takes us into an EEA or similar under those circumstances.
I doubt figures are available but this is part of the problem. Government hides these figures from us. I may be totally wrong and most asylum claims might be legitimate, you might be totally wrong and most hinge on what they do after getting here to build a human rights case. Neither of us knows because our governments aren't transparent
Mock the Week and HIGNFY used to be required viewing; mocking everyone.
Now, they've both taken sides.
The question for me is what responsibility do we, in the West, have for causing instability in the region?
And if we do, what is the best response to that?
There's another question, which we should also address head on. We - in the UK - are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention. Do we want to continue to live with that? Or should we leave it? What we shouldn't do, is be a signatory and pay it lip service, while choosing to ignore it.
There are many aspects of the worldwide refugee issue, but these are in the main genuine refugees.
That's the median British view but the discussion only ever takes place between two absurd extremes.
It's curious, though. The way to embed Brexit as a 50 year project is surely to make the path gentle but decisive. Don't scare the horses. Or at the very least, with rigourous preparation. Here are the safety belts, be ready to use them. The government's route is high-stakes, badly managed. It could all come tumbling down, and the efforts to prevent that don't impress.
What is it? Hubris? Impatience? Or a deep desire to see the world burn?
But, yes, the rest of your post would have been the wiser course.
2. Don't do it again
3. We still need to meet our objectives, and I think we should do this by having asylum processing centres overseas that can offer a comprehensive service to genuine refugees whilst discouraging non-genuine ones.
I think the fact the comics are genuinely funny on that helps. Better than comics half pretending to be neutral and half pretending to be funny but not succeeding in either.
The distinction between political and economic migrants is a grey area too, as economic policy is very political, for example the East African Asians, or Czarist Jewish refugees.
People on here *just know* they're economic migrants/not genuine.
But at the same time, there is a massive correlation between numbers of asylum seekers arriving in the UK and the level of "trouble" in the world. In the last 20 years, the number arriving has varied from perhaps 5,000 to as many as 100,000
The 'complete mess' was made when the US saw the opportunity in protests (by protestors who didn't like the multi-faith tolerance thing) to change the regime. For something worse.
The percentage coming to developed countries is quite minimal in comparison, despite the fact that we have often fueled the conflict that they are fleeing.
Not reading the rest. Just wanted to note my regret at how this site has fallen from its heyday.
It was about betting once, rather than political opinion pieces with a tenuous link to betting thrown in.
See: http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf
Yes, there are stories out there if you look hard enough, but what should be headline news, simply isn't.
Moreover, I very much doubt the UK population is widely aware that:
• there are only about 500 Covidians in hospital in the whole UK
• The number of under-50s who have died form Covid absent comorbidities is fewer than 100 (last time I looked)
• They are having debauched pool parties in Wuhan because no-one has had Covid since the spring