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.
The US certainly made a mess, and we partly have Ed Miliband to thank that it didn't become an even worse nightmare than the one already seen, but it is important to also note that the first wave of protests, which helped to create the Free Syrian Army, definitely did have a strong non-sectarian current, as part of the wave of the Arab Spring.
A key problem, both in Egypt and Syria, is that the liberal middle class was too small, relative to the more devout working class, to sustain it.
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.
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.
Ancient history was never my strong point, but wasn't Israel created AFTER Nazi Germany went kaput?
There was no Ryanair in those days and people had to walk.
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.
Why is smiling selfie-taking a dead giveaway of an economic migrant? I'd be pretty fecking happy to be picked up, irrespective of how I came to be there in the first place.
And I think maybe you haven't been to Africa very much. You sound as if you think economic migrants are after 120 in amoled TVs, when actually quite often they are after not starving to death or dying of preventable disease.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
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.
Are Brexiteers a class now? I must have missed that at my Marxist training camp.
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.
The US certainly made a mess, and we partly have Ed Miliband to thank that it didn't become an even worse nightmare than the one already seen, but it is important to also note that the first wave of protests, which helped to create the Free Syrian Army, definitely did have a strong non-sectarian current, as part of the wave of the Arab Spring.
A key problem, both in Egypt and Syria, is that the liberal middle class was too small, relative to the more devout working class, to sustain it.
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%
I've never seen calculations of fair share for refugee numbers before? Do you have a citation or calculation for this?
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.
Mr Meeks has been driven mad by Brexit. His anger and rage have taken over, it's sad to see. I think that's why he doesn't post BTL anymore.
I feel genuinely sorry for him. It's not nice to see someone so bitter, twisted and angry. I hope he feels better soon.
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
They tried [edit] uniting tigether in 2014, and not even for a GE but for indyref 1. Doing that killed Labour and the LDs almost completely. Doing it in a [edit] Holyrood election would give them the coup de grace.
Also - what would London HQ think for Labour and the LDs?
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?
There was no Ryanair in those days and people had to walk.
They say they mechanised the war So what the f are we marching for?
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.
If you look at actual deaths of Calais migrants the vast majority die on and in lorries and trains, not rubber dinghies. Suicides and violence at the camps are a bigger risk than dinghies. Doesnt make the same headlines for some reason, it seems to have parallels with fishing rights - the nationalistic sections of the media love anything on the high seas, maybe reminds them of Britain ruling the waves.
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
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.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
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%
I've never seen calculations of fair share for refugee numbers before? Do you have a citation or calculation for this?
I read it years ago, and am pretty sure there is no mention of quotas in there. Indeed, this Australian Parliament research document says that lack of quotas is a big problem with the Convention.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your 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
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
I agree with the Gettysburg Address, it doesn't make it funny.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
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?
There was no Ryanair in those days and people had to walk.
Being a pedant and overly literal "neither" is problematic for me in this question.
I guess I am supposed to answer neither if I think neither is competent.
But I am actually being asked which is more competent, so neither would only apply if they were exactly equally competent, an extremely unlikely scenario.
Could pollsters not take a few minutes thinking about correct wording of their questions.
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.
Nothing is irreversible.
Indeed it isn't.
I would say that nothing is truly reversible. Cats can never be put back in bags.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
I agree with the Gettysburg Address, it doesn't make it funny.
Not sure it was trying to be a great work of satire.
What sort of things and comedians do you find funny, out of interest?
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.
If you look at actual deaths of Calais migrants the vast majority die on and in lorries and trains, not rubber dinghies. Suicides and violence at the camps are a bigger risk than dinghies. Doesnt make the same headlines for some reason, it seems to have parallels with fishing rights - the nationalistic sections of the media love anything on the high seas, maybe reminds them of Britain ruling the waves.
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
Three years ago we were.
We then fixed it and they've now shifted to dinghies.
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%
I've never seen calculations of fair share for refugee numbers before? Do you have a citation or calculation for this?
Sadly I was looking for something else at the time so didn't think to book mark it and was just a comment that the uk had been suggested it needed to 22k. Didnt probe into it as was looking for different info
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?
There was no Ryanair in those days and people had to walk.
They chartered boats I think.
Yes, both before and after the war.
We set up an offshore camp for interceptions in Cyprus as I recall.
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.
Mr Meeks has been driven mad by Brexit. His anger and rage have taken over, it's sad to see. I think that's why he doesn't post BTL anymore.
I feel genuinely sorry for him. It's not nice to see someone so bitter, twisted and angry. I hope he feels better soon.
However, it's not just them. I can be driven mad at times the other way with creeping veganism, white liberal preaching, wokedom and the culture wars more broadly.
I really wish we could go back to having nuanced discussions on all these issues like we used to. But I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.
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.
Why is smiling selfie-taking a dead giveaway of an economic migrant? I'd be pretty fecking happy to be picked up, irrespective of how I came to be there in the first place.
And I think maybe you haven't been to Africa very much. You sound as if you think economic migrants are after 120 in amoled TVs, when actually quite often they are after not starving to death or dying of preventable disease.
You can think what you've like.
I've travelled over much of Eastern and Southern Africa and have friends from there too, and family living there.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
Not saying they did I merely wondered where he stopped before heading to palestine as doesn't seem many safe countries between germany and palestine
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
I agree with the Gettysburg Address, it doesn't make it funny.
Not sure it was trying to be a great work of satire.
What sort of things and comedians do you find funny, out of interest?
Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, anything Armando Iannucci is involved in including Alan Partridge, Peter Kay, Billy Connolly, Seinfeld, Curb Your enthusiasm, the Fast Show; when I lived in the States I loved the Daily Show and - even more - the Colbert Report. Far superior to any recent UK efforts at satire. All a bit male pale and stale, sorry.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
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
Even if such a temporary coalition comes into being, WHY would it chose as standard bearer a leader from the Conservatives, by definition associated with the the Thatcher-Johnson legacy (or rather lead weight) north of the border?
Wouldn't make more sense to find a non-partisan for this role, rather than ANY of the usual suspect politicos?
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.
Nothing is irreversible.
Indeed it isn't.
I would say that nothing is truly reversible. Cats can never be put back in bags.
Cats? Cats can be put in a bag.
But, try getting a Themorest back in its compression sack after you've used it - even just the once.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
It's not the politics that makes it funny or not.
HIGNFY is tired. It should be put out of its misery. Mock the Week used to be good but when Russell Howard span off on his own his own stand up shows are far better than Mock The Week.
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.
If you look at actual deaths of Calais migrants the vast majority die on and in lorries and trains, not rubber dinghies. Suicides and violence at the camps are a bigger risk than dinghies. Doesnt make the same headlines for some reason, it seems to have parallels with fishing rights - the nationalistic sections of the media love anything on the high seas, maybe reminds them of Britain ruling the waves.
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
Three years ago we were.
We then fixed it and they've now shifted to dinghies.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
Not saying they did I merely wondered where he stopped before heading to palestine as doesn't seem many safe countries between germany and palestine
There were plenty before 1939, they just became unsafe later.
Anne Frank took refuge in Amsterdam from Germany for example. It was quite safe in the 1930's.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
I agree with the Gettysburg Address, it doesn't make it funny.
Not sure it was trying to be a great work of satire.
What sort of things and comedians do you find funny, out of interest?
Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, anything Armando Iannucci is involved in including Alan Partridge, Peter Kay, Billy Connolly, Seinfeld, Curb Your enthusiasm, the Fast Show; when I lived in the States I loved the Daily Show and - even more - the Colbert Report. Far superior to any recent UK efforts at satire. All a bit male pale and stale, sorry.
Thanks for your answer. That's a great list. I love those shows.
(I don't do Woke so the apology in your last sentence is unnecessary.)
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.
If you look at actual deaths of Calais migrants the vast majority die on and in lorries and trains, not rubber dinghies. Suicides and violence at the camps are a bigger risk than dinghies. Doesnt make the same headlines for some reason, it seems to have parallels with fishing rights - the nationalistic sections of the media love anything on the high seas, maybe reminds them of Britain ruling the waves.
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
Three years ago we were.
We then fixed it and they've now shifted to dinghies.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
Not saying they did I merely wondered where he stopped before heading to palestine as doesn't seem many safe countries between germany and palestine
There were plenty before 1939, they just became unsafe later.
Anne Frank took refuge in Amsterdam from Germany for example. It was quite safe in the 1930's.
He hadn't mentioned a year `when it happened.... we could just let him answer of course rather than people who don't know making suppositions
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
It's not the politics that makes it funny or not.
HIGNFY is tired. It should be put out of its misery. Mock the Week used to be good but when Russell Howard span off on his own his own stand up shows are far better than Mock The Week.
Hmm. I find Russell Howard studenty and rather juvenile.
I'm to be convinced that the BBC could conjure up any new format, today, that would be funny. It's too crippled by Wokedom.
By contrast NTNN should be massively dated, given it was written for the contemporary scene in 1980-82, but I still absolutely wet myself watching it.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
I agree with the Gettysburg Address, it doesn't make it funny.
Not sure it was trying to be a great work of satire.
What sort of things and comedians do you find funny, out of interest?
Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, anything Armando Iannucci is involved in including Alan Partridge, Peter Kay, Billy Connolly, Seinfeld, Curb Your enthusiasm, the Fast Show; when I lived in the States I loved the Daily Show and - even more - the Colbert Report. Far superior to any recent UK efforts at satire. All a bit male pale and stale, sorry.
IF you are interested in cutting-edge political satire (albeit from the mid-1960s) then check out episodes of 'Rocky and Bullwinkle" on YouTube.
The orginal NOT crap re-creations or crass movie ripoffs. Original was funny as heck back in the day, and just as funny today - if not more so.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
And it's increased twelvefold in the last 2 years. Who knows what the limit might be?
It's an even bigger problem across the EU.
It's important to get ahead of the curve and reform now to maintain public confidence.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
There are three issues:
Firstly, our asylum system is ridiculously slow. It takes years to make decisions, when a quick triage might accept 20% easily, and send 35% home easily. Instead, we have appeals processes and people who don't speak English, and we've tried to save money by not employing people to get on top of cases quickly. This results in us spending more, not less. (And also results in more of issue three.)
Secondly, we don't currently recieve that many asylum requests (25-35,000). But during the "Arab Spring", we had a couple of years of 80,000/year.
Thirdly, people who think their asylum request will be denied abscond from the system and enter the twilight zone of illegal immigrants working without documentation.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
It's not the politics that makes it funny or not.
HIGNFY is tired. It should be put out of its misery. Mock the Week used to be good but when Russell Howard span off on his own his own stand up shows are far better than Mock The Week.
Angus Deayton's quips were the big attraction of HIGNFY for me. It went downhill as soon as he left.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
Not saying they did I merely wondered where he stopped before heading to palestine as doesn't seem many safe countries between germany and palestine
Both the UK and US made terrible mistakes with their stance on jewish refugees, both in humane and self-interested terms. Roosevelt was hostile ; many of the still largely anti-semitic and vaguely fascist-sympathetic, in Wodehousian terms, Tory parliamentary party of the earlier 1930s, worked to ensure Einstein didn't get citizenship, after a bill was proposed to provide him.
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.
If you look at actual deaths of Calais migrants the vast majority die on and in lorries and trains, not rubber dinghies. Suicides and violence at the camps are a bigger risk than dinghies. Doesnt make the same headlines for some reason, it seems to have parallels with fishing rights - the nationalistic sections of the media love anything on the high seas, maybe reminds them of Britain ruling the waves.
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
Three years ago we were.
We then fixed it and they've now shifted to dinghies.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
Not saying they did I merely wondered where he stopped before heading to palestine as doesn't seem many safe countries between germany and palestine
There were plenty before 1939, they just became unsafe later.
Anne Frank took refuge in Amsterdam from Germany for example. It was quite safe in the 1930's.
He hadn't mentioned a year `when it happened.... we could just let him answer of course rather than people who don't know making suppositions
Do you think Anne Frank was safe in Amsterdam, or should her family have tried to move to a country non adjacent to Germany?
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
I agree with the Gettysburg Address, it doesn't make it funny.
Not sure it was trying to be a great work of satire.
What sort of things and comedians do you find funny, out of interest?
Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, anything Armando Iannucci is involved in including Alan Partridge, Peter Kay, Billy Connolly, Seinfeld, Curb Your enthusiasm, the Fast Show; when I lived in the States I loved the Daily Show and - even more - the Colbert Report. Far superior to any recent UK efforts at satire. All a bit male pale and stale, sorry.
Thanks for your answer. That's a great list. I love those shows.
(I don't do Woke so the apology in your last sentence is unnecessary.)
Thanks. Wasn't really trying to be woke, I just think it's unlikely that straight white men have a monopoly on being funny so I suspect my list is incomplete.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
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.
If you look at actual deaths of Calais migrants the vast majority die on and in lorries and trains, not rubber dinghies. Suicides and violence at the camps are a bigger risk than dinghies. Doesnt make the same headlines for some reason, it seems to have parallels with fishing rights - the nationalistic sections of the media love anything on the high seas, maybe reminds them of Britain ruling the waves.
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
Three years ago we were.
We then fixed it and they've now shifted to dinghies.
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Which safe country did he stop in prior to israel/palestine?
Well, the UK was refusing to admit boatloads of Jewish refugees, and the North Aftican countries were either at war or actively hostile, so Jews from Germany didn't have that much in the way of choices.
Not saying they did I merely wondered where he stopped before heading to palestine as doesn't seem many safe countries between germany and palestine
There were plenty before 1939, they just became unsafe later.
Anne Frank took refuge in Amsterdam from Germany for example. It was quite safe in the 1930's.
He hadn't mentioned a year `when it happened.... we could just let him answer of course rather than people who don't know making suppositions
Do you think Anne Frank was safe in Amsterdam, or should her family have tried to move to a country non adjacent to Germany?
Of course not. I merely asked him a question because I was curious....the way everyones giving me what if's while no the squareroot of f all about his fathers situation is bizarre. I didn't accuse him of eating babies or even being a lib dem. I asked a simple question out of curiousity. You can't answer it so why keep what ifing
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
Even if such a temporary coalition comes into being, WHY would it chose as standard bearer a leader from the Conservatives, by definition associated with the the Thatcher-Johnson legacy (or rather lead weight) north of the border?
Wouldn't make more sense to find a non-partisan for this role, rather than ANY of the usual suspect politicos?
They did get the Labour Party [edit] - mnore precvisely, leading politicians from it - to front the 2014 anti-independence consortium. Labour fell /for it and became the penal battalion clearing the minefield for the Tories. Will they make that mistake again? I don't know.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
And it's increased twelvefold in the last 2 years. Who knows what the limit might be?
It's an even bigger problem across the EU.
It's important to get ahead of the curve and reform now to maintain public confidence.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
As all sides accepted at the time that IndyRef1 was a once in a generation issue it would seem to me that before even thinking about Ref2 the opinions of the rest of the UK should be considered. I don't see why one side in this four nations issue should be permitted to trump all the other considerations now that the Scots have decisively voted to stay with the UK.
The question of whether we in England (or Wales or NI) want to be independent of Scotland is a relevant consideration too. One unilateral chance for the Scots to require the rest of us to go independent of Scotland is enough for now.
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.
That surprises me.
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
It's not the politics that makes it funny or not.
HIGNFY is tired. It should be put out of its misery. Mock the Week used to be good but when Russell Howard span off on his own his own stand up shows are far better than Mock The Week.
Angus Deayton's quips were the big attraction of HIGNFY for me. It went downhill as soon as he left.
For the record, I will offer 10-1 that the number of people seeking asylum in the UK will be down in 2020 on 2019. (Probably very substantially down.)
Is that not more down to a global pandemic though than the actual desire to migrate
Of course. Don't forget that something like 80% of the 35,000 people claiming asylum in 2018 came via International airports. Crossing the Channel has always been a pretty minority sport.
Also, don't forget that the number of boats attempting the crossing will collapse in the winter months.
So, if every single person who previously attempted the truck route came via boat it would be 7,000 people crossing the Channel. But I suspect even that's too high: 5,000 max will arrive, and probably more like 3-4,000.
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
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
Maybe manipulation is the wrong word,
Shall we say instead that the people who think its not an issue use the 5833 figure to make it seem a trivial problem and why are you bothering about it when the numbers are small.
Those more concerned about it use the 126+45k pending figure to make the problem appear potentially huger that it is.
It doesn't alter the fact that actual figures are being used in a manipulative way for political ends depending on what someone wants you to think and it would be so much better if we could have a discussion about proper figures where both sides use the same count method
As all sides accepted at the time that IndyRef1 was a once in a generation issue it would seem to me that before even thinking about Ref2 the opinions of the rest of the UK should be considered. I don't see why one side in this four nations issue should be permitted to trump all the other considerations now that the Scots have decisively voted to stay with the UK.
The question of whether we in England (or Wales or NI) want to be independent of Scotland is a relevant consideration too. One unilateral chance for the Scots to require the rest of us to go independent of Scotland is enough for now.
An argument utterly destroyed byu the repeated insistencve that voting No in 2014 was the ONLY way for Scotland to remain in the EU.
Lying ********s.
Especially when dealing with a country that's 70% yes, more or less.
"Meanwhile, the ONS report — which is released every Tuesday — showed deaths from all causes are lower than the five-year average for the eighth week in a row.
A total of 8,945 Britons passed in the latest reporting period, which is more than 150 deaths (1.7 per cent) below what was expected.
ONS experts explained that Covid-19 likely sped up the deaths of people who would have died of other causes, meaning the year's fatalities have been front-loaded.
As a result, fewer people are now dying of causes such as heart disease and dementia because they have already succumbed to the coronavirus."
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?
It wasn't called Israel at the time. But it is called Israel now. I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
How many of the migrants sneaking into the UK on cross-channel boats are escaping persecution in France?
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
Maybe manipulation is the wrong word,
Shall we say instead that the people who think its not an issue use the 5833 figure to make it seem a trivial problem and why are you bothering about it when the numbers are small.
Those more concerned about it use the 126+45k pending figure to make the problem appear potentially huger that it is.
It doesn't alter the fact that actual figures are being used in a manipulative way for political ends depending on what someone wants you to think and it would be so much better if we could have a discussion about proper figures where both sides use the same count method
My point is that fixating on the boats is like fixating on the wall, it's displacement activity.
You don't solve the problem by making it a little bit harder to cross the Channel or the Rio Grande, because that adds the square root of bugger all to the cost of any kind of migrant.
You solve it by quickly processing the people who arrive so there isn't a backlog of 100,000 people (or whatever the number is), and there isn't ample opportunity for people to disappear into the black market.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
And it's increased twelvefold in the last 2 years. Who knows what the limit might be?
It's an even bigger problem across the EU.
It's important to get ahead of the curve and reform now to maintain public confidence.
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
Lol. Weren't you promoting the idea of Swinson running for Holyrood and leading the Unionist fight back a few months ago? That's not quite as loonball as an alliance led by Baroness Line in The Sand spending most of her time in London in an effort to bring 'democracy' to the HoL (and incidentally pocket the £300 a day expenses).
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
And it's increased twelvefold in the last 2 years. Who knows what the limit might be?
It's an even bigger problem across the EU.
It's important to get ahead of the curve and reform now to maintain public confidence.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
What's the Swiss and Norwegian example?
Incentivise illegal immigrants to shop the people who employ and house them.
They get a work permit, and the person who employed them goes to prison.
Norway estimates it now has fewer than 300 illegal immigrants (against 100x that number in next door Sweden), as people self deport.
Yes but the vast majority of neithers are forced to make a choice between the two because of the FPTP system
I just did this survey and voted for neither, so neither is now officially in the lead.
We preach to the world about democracy whilst maintaining a system that forces voters to choose between two flavours of sh*t or alternatively casts their vote directly into the bin.
Yes but the vast majority of neithers are forced to make a choice between the two because of the FPTP system
I just did this survey and voted for neither, so neither is now officially in the lead.
We preach to the world about democracy whilst maintaining a system that forces voters to choose between two flavours of sh*t or alternatively casts their vote into the bin.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
What's the Swiss and Norwegian example?
Massively punitive fines and jail sentences for employers and amnesty for employees. Becoming an illegal worker in Switzerland is a very easy path to citizenship for an illegal immigrant and a very quick path to jail for would be exploiters. Illegal work in Switzerland is almost non-existent, though you do still get the usual exploitation of illegals by other illegals. My wife tells me that Swiss people are not afraid to shop illegal workers and employers either, there isn't a taboo around it as there is in the UK.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
What's the Swiss and Norwegian example?
Incentivise illegal immigrants to shop the people who employ and house them.
They get a work permit, and the person who employed them goes to prison.
Norway estimates it now has fewer than 300 illegal immigrants (against 100x that number in next door Sweden), as people self deport.
That’s the real lie about illegal immigration in the US. It could be stopped in an instant if the US adopted the Swiss approach of making anyone who employed an illegal responsible in law. But far too many of the rich and powerful in America rely upon their cheap labour to ever allow this to happen.
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
What's the Swiss and Norwegian example?
Incentivise illegal immigrants to shop the people who employ and house them.
They get a work permit, and the person who employed them goes to prison.
Norway estimates it now has fewer than 300 illegal immigrants (against 100x that number in next door Sweden), as people self deport.
That’s the real lie about illegal immigration in the US. It could be stopped in an instant if the US adopted the Swiss approach of making anyone who employed an illegal responsible in law. But far too many of the rich and powerful in America rely upon their cheap labour to ever allow this to happen.
More people were prosecuted for hiring illegal immigrants in Geneva (71) last year than in the whole of the US (49).
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
Lol. Weren't you promoting the idea of Swinson running for Holyrood and leading the Unionist fight back a few months ago? That's not quite as loonball as an alliance led by Baroness Line in The Sand spending most of her time in London in an effort to bring 'democracy' to the HoL (and incidentally pocket the £300 a day expenses).
Those PB’ers who backed their life savings on HY’s firm assurances that Chuka will be our next PM after Boris might be starting to wonder precisely how this will come about?
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
Maybe manipulation is the wrong word,
Shall we say instead that the people who think its not an issue use the 5833 figure to make it seem a trivial problem and why are you bothering about it when the numbers are small.
Those more concerned about it use the 126+45k pending figure to make the problem appear potentially huger that it is.
It doesn't alter the fact that actual figures are being used in a manipulative way for political ends depending on what someone wants you to think and it would be so much better if we could have a discussion about proper figures where both sides use the same count method
My point is that fixating on the boats is like fixating on the wall, it's displacement activity.
You don't solve the problem by making it a little bit harder to cross the Channel or the Rio Grande, because that adds the square root of bugger all to the cost of any kind of migrant.
You solve it by quickly processing the people who arrive so there isn't a backlog of 100,000 people (or whatever the number is), and there isn't ample opportunity for people to disappear into the black market.
I would agree that boats are the least of the issues, however being tough in the way you suggest would not be popular in some segments of society and they would write strongly worded comments on twitter
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
There's also a correlation with the huge population growth and lack of opportunities in Africa. I expect this will get worse too due to increasing geopolitical tension and climate change.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I also think this is displacement activity.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
No, that matches. As each case including appeals often takes a few years, one would expect that sort of number to be in the pipeline at any one time.
If you quote a figure of circa 6k then its realised for every accepted refugee there are 30 more waiting to find out I think most people would regard your 6k figure as deliberately downplaying the issue was the point I meant especially when I believe it was you pointing out we end up accepting 90% in any case
55% are accepted according to government figures, so maybe 11 000 applications per year, 4 years typical duration makes for 45 000 cases at any one time.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Well see you figures dont match, the government is saying half your figure of 11k accepted in 2018
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
I don't think there's much manipulation - I think there's an overly complex system that has been starved of funds, plus an ongoing issue with people who "disappear" into the black market.
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
Maybe manipulation is the wrong word,
Shall we say instead that the people who think its not an issue use the 5833 figure to make it seem a trivial problem and why are you bothering about it when the numbers are small.
Those more concerned about it use the 126+45k pending figure to make the problem appear potentially huger that it is.
It doesn't alter the fact that actual figures are being used in a manipulative way for political ends depending on what someone wants you to think and it would be so much better if we could have a discussion about proper figures where both sides use the same count method
My point is that fixating on the boats is like fixating on the wall, it's displacement activity.
You don't solve the problem by making it a little bit harder to cross the Channel or the Rio Grande, because that adds the square root of bugger all to the cost of any kind of migrant.
You solve it by quickly processing the people who arrive so there isn't a backlog of 100,000 people (or whatever the number is), and there isn't ample opportunity for people to disappear into the black market.
I would agree that boats are the least of the issues, however being tough in the way you suggest would not be popular in some segments of society and they would write strongly worded comments on twitter
Yet the Government are basically proposing to do that, do you honestly think the Government gives a toss what people like me think? Of course not.
You're always blaming somebody else, when the Government is just utterly incompetent, that's the truth.
Anyway, I know Pagan gets terribly upset when I even look his way, being inferior to him in every way, including his incredible ability to be so pleasant, I'm going to leave him to it from here
I try to avoid considering Scottish politics and especially the issue of independence as it gets some on here to hyper-ventilate.
I can understand the Conservative desire not to be the ones who "lost" Scotland on their watch - Cameron took a risk and had the referendum gone the other way his career would have ended a couple of years sooner than it did.
It would resonate much more with a Conservative England if Labour could be "blamed" for the "loss" of Scotland.
My view is IF, in a free and fair vote, the Scottish people vote to leave the UK, that has to be respected and enacted in a far more timely and less mean-spirited way than was the 2016 EU Referendum. I would wish an independent Scotland nothing but the best and would want the rest of the UK to enable that independence to happen as smoothly as possible.
As to whether an independent Scotland could, should or would join the EU, NATO or anything else, that's up to an independent Scotland.
Comments
A key problem, both in Egypt and Syria, is that the liberal middle class was too small, relative to the more devout working class, to sustain it.
And I think maybe you haven't been to Africa very much. You sound as if you think economic migrants are after 120 in amoled TVs, when actually quite often they are after not starving to death or dying of preventable disease.
I suppose I could have said Palestine. Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter since the example shows you are wrong.
Ohhh
I feel genuinely sorry for him. It's not nice to see someone so bitter, twisted and angry. I hope he feels better soon.
Also - what would London HQ think for Labour and the LDs?
So what the f are we marching for?
If we want to reduce migrant deaths, focus on lorries and trains not dinghies.
See: https://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/pubs/rp/rp0001/01rp05
I'd have thought their politics would be very much to your taste.
So, I don't think the current framework is fit for purpose. The bigger problem of stabilising, fixing and developing those countries is an even harder one.
I guess I am supposed to answer neither if I think neither is competent.
But I am actually being asked which is more competent, so neither would only apply if they were exactly equally competent, an extremely unlikely scenario.
Could pollsters not take a few minutes thinking about correct wording of their questions.
What sort of things and comedians do you find funny, out of interest?
We then fixed it and they've now shifted to dinghies.
We set up an offshore camp for interceptions in Cyprus as I recall.
It's a funny thing.
However, it's not just them. I can be driven mad at times the other way with creeping veganism, white liberal preaching, wokedom and the culture wars more broadly.
I really wish we could go back to having nuanced discussions on all these issues like we used to. But I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.
I've travelled over much of Eastern and Southern Africa and have friends from there too, and family living there.
So your comment is unwarranted and baseless.
In the last year for which numbers were available (2018), the UK accepted 5,833 asylum seekers, and another 600 or so were granted relief to stay for other reasons.
Yes, we need to do a better job of deporting economic migrants, rather than have people hanging around for years (and potentially disappearing into the black market) at the taxpayers expense.
But 5,833 accepted asylum seekers a year is a trivially small number.
https://www.refugee-action.org.uk/about/facts-about-refugees/#:~:text=Are there many refugees and,of the UK's total population.
by the end of 2018 there were 126,720 refugees, 45,244 pending asylum cases
It suggests there is somewhat of a tale not told somewhere here
Wouldn't make more sense to find a non-partisan for this role, rather than ANY of the usual suspect politicos?
But, try getting a Themorest back in its compression sack after you've used it - even just the once.
HIGNFY is tired. It should be put out of its misery. Mock the Week used to be good but when Russell Howard span off on his own his own stand up shows are far better than Mock The Week.
Anne Frank took refuge in Amsterdam from Germany for example. It was quite safe in the 1930's.
(I don't do Woke so the apology in your last sentence is unnecessary.)
I'm to be convinced that the BBC could conjure up any new format, today, that would be funny. It's too crippled by Wokedom.
By contrast NTNN should be massively dated, given it was written for the contemporary scene in 1980-82, but I still absolutely wet myself watching it.
The orginal NOT crap re-creations or crass movie ripoffs. Original was funny as heck back in the day, and just as funny today - if not more so.
It's an even bigger problem across the EU.
It's important to get ahead of the curve and reform now to maintain public confidence.
Firstly, our asylum system is ridiculously slow. It takes years to make decisions, when a quick triage might accept 20% easily, and send 35% home easily. Instead, we have appeals processes and people who don't speak English, and we've tried to save money by not employing people to get on top of cases quickly. This results in us spending more, not less. (And also results in more of issue three.)
Secondly, we don't currently recieve that many asylum requests (25-35,000). But during the "Arab Spring", we had a couple of years of 80,000/year.
Thirdly, people who think their asylum request will be denied abscond from the system and enter the twilight zone of illegal immigrants working without documentation.
As so many are successful on appeal, one has to doubt the quality of the initial judgements.
Source?
The source I quoted said 126k refugees and 45k asylum cases. I have no idea where you get your 11k from as you don't quote a source whereas robert did for the 5833 and I did for the 45k pending. Leaves me wondering what the 126k are doing are they pending to be pending?
Regardless there seems a lot of manipulation of figures somewhere in here
Better triaging - plus following the Swiss and Norwegian examples for illegal immigrants more generally - would help solve the problem fairly easily.
The question of whether we in England (or Wales or NI) want to be independent of Scotland is a relevant consideration too. One unilateral chance for the Scots to require the rest of us to go independent of Scotland is enough for now.
Also, don't forget that the number of boats attempting the crossing will collapse in the winter months.
So, if every single person who previously attempted the truck route came via boat it would be 7,000 people crossing the Channel. But I suspect even that's too high: 5,000 max will arrive, and probably more like 3-4,000.
Shall we say instead that the people who think its not an issue use the 5833 figure to make it seem a trivial problem and why are you bothering about it when the numbers are small.
Those more concerned about it use the 126+45k pending figure to make the problem appear potentially huger that it is.
It doesn't alter the fact that actual figures are being used in a manipulative way for political ends depending on what someone wants you to think and it would be so much better if we could have a discussion about proper figures where both sides use the same count method
Lying ********s.
Especially when dealing with a country that's 70% yes, more or less.
"Meanwhile, the ONS report — which is released every Tuesday — showed deaths from all causes are lower than the five-year average for the eighth week in a row.
A total of 8,945 Britons passed in the latest reporting period, which is more than 150 deaths (1.7 per cent) below what was expected.
ONS experts explained that Covid-19 likely sped up the deaths of people who would have died of other causes, meaning the year's fatalities have been front-loaded.
As a result, fewer people are now dying of causes such as heart disease and dementia because they have already succumbed to the coronavirus."
You don't solve the problem by making it a little bit harder to cross the Channel or the Rio Grande, because that adds the square root of bugger all to the cost of any kind of migrant.
You solve it by quickly processing the people who arrive so there isn't a backlog of 100,000 people (or whatever the number is), and there isn't ample opportunity for people to disappear into the black market.
Weren't you promoting the idea of Swinson running for Holyrood and leading the Unionist fight back a few months ago? That's not quite as loonball as an alliance led by Baroness Line in The Sand spending most of her time in London in an effort to bring 'democracy' to the HoL (and incidentally pocket the £300 a day expenses).
My 5,000 number for channel crossings is probably going to be about right as we're now heading into the winter months.
They get a work permit, and the person who employed them goes to prison.
Norway estimates it now has fewer than 300 illegal immigrants (against 100x that number in next door Sweden), as people self deport.
We preach to the world about democracy whilst maintaining a system that forces voters to choose between two flavours of sh*t or alternatively casts their vote directly into the bin.
You're always blaming somebody else, when the Government is just utterly incompetent, that's the truth.
With you the problem is always somewhere else.
I try to avoid considering Scottish politics and especially the issue of independence as it gets some on here to hyper-ventilate.
I can understand the Conservative desire not to be the ones who "lost" Scotland on their watch - Cameron took a risk and had the referendum gone the other way his career would have ended a couple of years sooner than it did.
It would resonate much more with a Conservative England if Labour could be "blamed" for the "loss" of Scotland.
My view is IF, in a free and fair vote, the Scottish people vote to leave the UK, that has to be respected and enacted in a far more timely and less mean-spirited way than was the 2016 EU Referendum. I would wish an independent Scotland nothing but the best and would want the rest of the UK to enable that independence to happen as smoothly as possible.
As to whether an independent Scotland could, should or would join the EU, NATO or anything else, that's up to an independent Scotland.