On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
What is missing is how we deal with those who arrive here without paperwork to avoid being deported.
10. those who refuse reveal where they come from will be deemed to have arrived from (insert cheap 3rd world country here who we are paying to relocate people to).
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
Everyone in the Labour party knew that Clause 4 was a crock by the time Blair took it out behind the woodshed with an axe.
The modern Labour party is deeply committed (among the membership) to free movement, and often, to opposing all limits on immigration*
*When asked, such individuals will say that they don't believe in unlimited immigration. "Obviously", "Don't be ridiculous" etc etc. But they will be opposed to every single measure restricting immigration, employment of immigrants etc.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Interesting. How does the maths stack up? Boris would definitely hold on to those Tories who regard Farage as grotty little oik. But could Farage seize the Red-Wallers and the Tory Rees-Mogg faction? Would that be enough?
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
Unfortunately the silent majority really want no more brown people at all i fear hence a Tory bounce everytime they sound tough on immigration
If SKS announced that do you really think Boris would be able to just sound tough - the Tories current plan is nowhere near as tough as that.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
Everyone in the Labour party knew that Clause 4 was a crock by the time Blair took it out behind the woodshed with an axe.
The modern Labour party is deeply committed (among the membership) to free movement, and often, to opposing all limits on immigration*
*When asked, such individuals will say that they don't believe in unlimited immigration. "Obviously", "Don't be ridiculous" etc etc. But they will be opposed to every single measure restricting immigration, employment of immigrants etc.
Leadership requires persuasion and truth-telling. One would think Sir KS, QC, would be well-qualified.
Fionna O'Leary, 🕯Flag of European Union @fascinatorfun · 48m Flight arriving in London from Gauteng (the most affected Flag of South Africa province) this morning
So…the passengers did what? Just got on the Trains or into taxis after an 11.5 hour flight, plus all the mixing in the airport before and after?
How many? 300?
What do you expect from our bunch of incompetents?
12 GW being generated by wind of 32 GW total demand. It's not good enough, it ought to be at least double that when there's a moderate storm about.
In the longer run what we would actually need is something like 45GW (to pick a number at random) and the capacity to store the surplus efficiently for use when it is not windy. Whilst 24 GW would clearly be an improvement it too is not sufficient. Still, at least our gas consumption is temporarily reduced.
Given the increase in electricity consumption implied by electrifying land transport and domestic heating and industry I would think we need to aim for closer to ten times our current wind capacity.
And add tidal, mini-nukes, interconnectors to Moroccan solar...
There's 24GW of installed wind in the UK. Unless you are planning absolutely massive storage facilities, I don't see how the UK could possibly just that much - even including the electrification of domestic heating and road transport.
It may be 24GW in theory but most of the time it is 20% of that.
If it were up to me I would indeed be aiming for 10x that figure, which would increase our general wind from the 5-10GW range to the 50-100GW range and when we have more wind than we need then we should be able to export it via interconnectors.
Furthermore we should have a lot of storage (which will inevitably come once cars are plugged into a smart network they would act as a distributed storage network too).
Finally for those times when we really have more cheap power than we can need then there should be some low-labour, high-energy on-demand businesses that can consume that energy and turn it into something productive, while shutting down when energy is low and expensive. One example could be the electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
We don't need quite so much excess capacity, though we will need some. Far more cost effective would be investment in trans-European and North African high voltage interconnects.
There's a good reason I named interconnectors before storage in my comment.
But a lot more storage than people realise is inevitably going to exist in this country. Which will primarily assist those with off-road parking, which is why I've been adamant for years as much new housing as possible should have off-road parking as standard.
Once almost all of the cars and trucks in this country are electric then that's going to provide a big shift in the amount of distributed storage that exists in the country. I imagine that smart chargers combined with smart meters will be able to ensure that this distributed storage as much as possible is charged while electricity generation is plentiful and thus cheap.
If an electric car battery holds 75 kWh and at any one point in time there might be ~5 million of such batteries plugged into the network (less than 1/6th of the cars on the road), then unless I'm misunderstanding things isn't that a distributed storage of 375 GWh plugged into the grid? That seems pretty substantial to me and that's without considering any other storage.
Overall the cars on the road would have a storage capacity measured in the TWh.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
The British consulate in Nice announces that it is taking ayslum applications. To be processed there. The applicant will have to show up at the consulate once every 3 days to keep the application going, for however long it takes.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
This person is both evil and sick. Evil; needs keeping away from anywhere or anyone where 'he' can do, or be, evil. Sick; needs treatment. Broadmoor or somewhere of that type is the place. Until fit to be released. If ever.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Or Keir. If he was as Machiavellian as great statesman must be.
(Which he isn’t).
If Farage does return to “Reform”, it could be profound.
So by 2024 we will have President Trump and Prime Minister Farage. Scenes
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
He is a criminal.
This is very, very straightforward Bayes' Theorem for dummies. Do you think there are more devious heterosexual males, or genuine trans women in the world? Do you think that it never, ever, ever happens that a dhm decides to masquerade as trans for devious purposes? Never, ever, ever, ever, ever? Not once? If it does happen, why on earth shouldn't we say it is happening, when not saying that it is happening does such a huge disservice to genuinely trans women?
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Or Keir. If he was as Machiavellian as great statesman must be.
(Which he isn’t).
If Farage does return to “Reform”, it could be profound.
So by 2024 we will have President Trump and Prime Minister Farage. Scenes
Oh dear, Fraser Nelson is asking in the Telegraph whether Brexit was “worth it after all”.
I liked this that I found on last night's thread. Particularly in this age of the simple (otherwise known as the Hartlepool) soundbite. This is a train worth jumping on.....
It would ensure the likes of Johnson would never again have unfettered power and more important I like free movement and a common currency.
You mean it stops the voters from having unfettered power.
The likes of Johnson etc only have power if the voters give it to him - and if he uses it in a way we dislike then the voters can entrust someone else with that power instead.
By giving the power to unelected bodies instead you're not disempowering Johnson who'll be retired before long, you're disempowering the voters instead.
"By giving the power to..." = by electing someone who wants to....
Just as democratic as any other process in the UK. We voted to join the EU and then we voted to leave.
I fail to see where there is a compromise in sovereignty. As does of course David Davis.
Except we don't elect an EU government.
Sovereignty may not be compromised, but democracy is. Iran and China are sovereign but they're not democratic.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
12 GW being generated by wind of 32 GW total demand. It's not good enough, it ought to be at least double that when there's a moderate storm about.
In the longer run what we would actually need is something like 45GW (to pick a number at random) and the capacity to store the surplus efficiently for use when it is not windy. Whilst 24 GW would clearly be an improvement it too is not sufficient. Still, at least our gas consumption is temporarily reduced.
Given the increase in electricity consumption implied by electrifying land transport and domestic heating and industry I would think we need to aim for closer to ten times our current wind capacity.
And add tidal, mini-nukes, interconnectors to Moroccan solar...
There's 24GW of installed wind in the UK. Unless you are planning absolutely massive storage facilities, I don't see how the UK could possibly just that much - even including the electrification of domestic heating and road transport.
It may be 24GW in theory but most of the time it is 20% of that.
If it were up to me I would indeed be aiming for 10x that figure, which would increase our general wind from the 5-10GW range to the 50-100GW range and when we have more wind than we need then we should be able to export it via interconnectors.
Furthermore we should have a lot of storage (which will inevitably come once cars are plugged into a smart network they would act as a distributed storage network too).
Finally for those times when we really have more cheap power than we can need then there should be some low-labour, high-energy on-demand businesses that can consume that energy and turn it into something productive, while shutting down when energy is low and expensive. One example could be the electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
We don't need quite so much excess capacity, though we will need some. Far more cost effective would be investment in trans-European and North African high voltage interconnects.
There's a good reason I named interconnectors before storage in my comment.
But a lot more storage than people realise is inevitably going to exist in this country. Which will primarily assist those with off-road parking, which is why I've been adamant for years as much new housing as possible should have off-road parking as standard.
Once almost all of the cars and trucks in this country are electric then that's going to provide a big shift in the amount of distributed storage that exists in the country. I imagine that smart chargers combined with smart meters will be able to ensure that this distributed storage as much as possible is charged while electricity generation is plentiful and thus cheap.
If an electric car battery holds 75 kWh and at any one point in time there might be ~5 million of such batteries plugged into the network (less than 1/6th of the cars on the road), then unless I'm misunderstanding things isn't that a distributed storage of 375 GWh plugged into the grid? That seems pretty substantial to me and that's without considering any other storage.
Overall the cars on the road would have a storage capacity measured in the TWh.
The super charging stations on motorways etc will moving, in the near future, to using stored power to time shift electricity. X mWh per site.
There are already conversation happening about increasing the size of them beyond the basic requirement - so that they can store electricity for the generating companies (in effect).
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Or Keir. If he was as Machiavellian as great statesman must be.
(Which he isn’t).
If Farage does return to “Reform”, it could be profound.
So by 2024 we will have President Trump and Prime Minister Farage. Scenes
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Or Keir. If he was as Machiavellian as great statesman must be.
(Which he isn’t).
If Farage does return to “Reform”, it could be profound.
So by 2024 we will have President Trump and Prime Minister Farage. Scenes
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
Everyone in the Labour party knew that Clause 4 was a crock by the time Blair took it out behind the woodshed with an axe.
The modern Labour party is deeply committed (among the membership) to free movement, and often, to opposing all limits on immigration*
*When asked, such individuals will say that they don't believe in unlimited immigration. "Obviously", "Don't be ridiculous" etc etc. But they will be opposed to every single measure restricting immigration, employment of immigrants etc.
Leadership requires persuasion and truth-telling. One would think Sir KS, QC, would be well-qualified.
Politics also requires highlighting the problems but not revealing your solutions so they can't be stolen.
You wait until the Tories have released their 2023 manifesto and then you announce Cyclefree's plan.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
Your analogy does not work. We do not sell dangerous goods to those under-age precisely because of the harm that might ensue
She is not a woman. This is a man.
This man - regardless of the fact that they call themselves Chloe - should not be put in a woman's prison. The crime they have committed should not be recorded as a crime committed by a woman. They should not be allowed to enter women's spaces. We do not have self-ID in this country (nor should we). If this man genuinely suffers from dysphoria - and I am sceptical given that the name change so conveniently happened after a load of sex offences and just before this offender sought to evade legal restrictions on him - then he can seek medical help.
Biology is real. Womanhood is not a feeling, changing a name and wearing lipstick. It is nonsense on stilts to say so.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
He is a criminal.
This is very, very straightforward Bayes' Theorem for dummies. Do you think there are more devious heterosexual males, or genuine trans women in the world? Do you think that it never, ever, ever happens that a dhm decides to masquerade as trans for devious purposes? Never, ever, ever, ever, ever? Not once? If it does happen, why on earth shouldn't we say it is happening, when not saying that it is happening does such a huge disservice to genuinely trans women?
I am saying that there are all flavours of criminal and he or she is one of them. I'm not sure about your Bayes Theorem. We can say that the criminal acted criminally. What is the relevance of gender or sex or whichever one it is.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
You average EU migrant isn't coloured and attempting to catch a dinghy from France.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
He is a criminal.
This is very, very straightforward Bayes' Theorem for dummies. Do you think there are more devious heterosexual males, or genuine trans women in the world? Do you think that it never, ever, ever happens that a dhm decides to masquerade as trans for devious purposes? Never, ever, ever, ever, ever? Not once? If it does happen, why on earth shouldn't we say it is happening, when not saying that it is happening does such a huge disservice to genuinely trans women?
I am saying that there are all flavours of criminal and he or she is one of them. I'm not sure about your Bayes Theorem. We can say that the criminal acted criminally. What is the relevance of gender or sex or whichever one it is.
The fact that calling this wanker a woman propagates a stereotype that trans women are perverts who like exposing themselves and molesting pre teenage girls.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
I think that any party would win if it adopted the sort of policies that Cyclefree puts forward, most of which are models of good sense.
Weirdly I agree with you on this, even i though I disagree with you on everything.
Is Cyclefree a kind of universal ideological adaptor?
This must be the strangest - but also the most wonderful - anonymous compliment I've ever received.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Or Keir. If he was as Machiavellian as great statesman must be.
(Which he isn’t).
If Farage does return to “Reform”, it could be profound.
So by 2024 we will have President Trump and Prime Minister Farage. Scenes
Happily I emigrated to Scotland...
FM Salmond
That ship has, I think, sailed. Not sure about Farage's, sadly.
I have to say I fear that when I next go abroad I will not be as happy to say I'm British as I have been.
Morning all. Has the latest Johnsonian bridge been discussed? I see the report prices it at 335bn smackers. Quoted from Graun feed just now, with a nice bit of no shite Morse at the start:
"The consequence of these parameters for either a tunnel or a bridge is that they are expensive. The indicative cost estimate for the full route, including optimism bias (at P95), is £335bn for a bridge crossing and £209bn for a tunnel crossing. The bridge or tunnel, and the associated very significant works on either side for a railway and possibly for roads would take a very long time. Planning, design, parliamentary and legal processes, and construction would take nearly 30 years before the crossing could become operational, even given a smooth passage of funding and authority to proceed.
Whilst the economic and social effects would be transformational, the costs would be impossible to justify, given the government’s already very significant commitment to long term transport infrastructure improvement for levelling up, and the further likely significant expenditure which would result from the further studies I am suggesting in my main UCR report."
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
Your analogy does not work. We do not sell dangerous goods to those under-age precisely because of the harm that might ensue
She is not a woman. This is a man.
This man - regardless of the fact that they call themselves Chloe - should not be put in a woman's prison. The crime they have committed should not be recorded as a crime committed by a woman. They should not be allowed to enter women's spaces. We do not have self-ID in this country (nor should we). If this man genuinely suffers from dysphoria - and I am sceptical given that the name change so conveniently happened after a load of sex offences and just before this offender sought to evade legal restrictions on him - then he can seek medical help.
Biology is real. Womanhood is not a feeling, changing a name and wearing lipstick. It is nonsense on stilts to say so.
And I said nothing about the pyromaniac being under age. I said a pyromaniac.
Yes they are criminal (we are both backing off the pronouns now...). But it is just one of several methods that criminals employ to be a criminal.
Should the destination be a women's prison? Above my pay grade as you say probably requiring the view of a doctor. If all the doctors are fooled and he is a he playing a game then that is bad of course. But it should not be beyond the legal and medical profession to cope.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
Good news for everyone except the Portuguese and Ethiopians then...
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Being serious, a global effort to get as many people as possible jabbed is needed. Fewer cases equals fewer opportunities for variants to appear. Too late for Nu, but not too late for whatever letters are left between Nu and Omega. And of course it will save a lot of lives.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
Good news for everyone except the Portuguese and Ethiopians then...
We invaded Ethiopia in 1940 or so. Admittedly to free it from the Italians and restore Haile Selassie toileting the throne.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
He is a criminal.
This is very, very straightforward Bayes' Theorem for dummies. Do you think there are more devious heterosexual males, or genuine trans women in the world? Do you think that it never, ever, ever happens that a dhm decides to masquerade as trans for devious purposes? Never, ever, ever, ever, ever? Not once? If it does happen, why on earth shouldn't we say it is happening, when not saying that it is happening does such a huge disservice to genuinely trans women?
I am saying that there are all flavours of criminal and he or she is one of them. I'm not sure about your Bayes Theorem. We can say that the criminal acted criminally. What is the relevance of gender or sex or whichever one it is.
The fact that calling this wanker a woman propagates a stereotype that trans women are perverts who like exposing themselves and molesting pre teenage girls.
Ah yes I see. So yes, but first off we don't know - there is obviously psychological damage whatever he or she is. I haven't seen a medical report not sure if you have.
As for propagating that stereotype well there are plenty of stereotypes that are unfortunate. If for example it turns out that one of the largest property developers in the country is Jewish or the global 110m hurdle winner is black does that propagate a stereotype? Man tries to pass himself off as woman to get himself into a women's prison (because whatever the gender there has been a criminal act) is surely a rare enough event such as not to shape policy on account of it. But I don't have the stats. Perhaps there are legions of male criminals using this as a test case. In which case we come back to the legal/medical side.
If it is ever proved that this uncannily infectious, weirdly clever virus came from the lab (which it surely did) then there must be trials. And executions
Mr. Rentool, a comment here today or yesterday pointed out that animal infections meant even 100% vaccination of the human race would not eliminate the pool from which variants could arise.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
You average EU migrant isn't coloured and attempting to catch a dinghy from France.
Boris would be fighting last years battle.
He would still be able to keep Farage at bay though as that move gave him cred with immigration sceptic Leavers, as did the fact he voted against May's Deal twice.
Sunak, Truss and Starmer however would be less likely to be able to contain Farage. Truss and Starmer were both Remainers and Sunak voted for May's deal 3 times and is hardly a leader tailor made to appeal to the white working class
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Son has just expended significant sums to get himself and his family here from Thailand to be with Granny and Grandpa for Christmas. Hmmm.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
Good news for everyone except the Portuguese and Ethiopians then...
We invaded Ethiopia in 1940 or so. Admittedly to free it from the Italians and restore Haile Selassie toileting the throne.
Did we? That episode of WW2 passed me by. Honestly, the manpower we had to be in so many places is just mind-boggling. Did you mean 'toileting'? Or was that a strange autocorrect of 'to'?
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
You average EU migrant isn't coloured and attempting to catch a dinghy from France.
Boris would be fighting last years battle.
He would still be able to keep Farage at bay though as that move gave him cred with immigration sceptic Leavers.
Sunak, Truss and Starmer however would be less likely to be able to contain Farage, Truss and Starmer were both Remainers and Sunak voted for May's deal 3 times and all 3 are social liberals
Do you think your average anti immigrant voter is going to care about what the Tories did x years ago?
That was last years issue, now deal with this years...
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
Or Keir. If he was as Machiavellian as great statesman must be.
(Which he isn’t).
If Farage does return to “Reform”, it could be profound.
So by 2024 we will have President Trump and Prime Minister Farage. Scenes
Happily I emigrated to Scotland...
FM Salmond
That ship has, I think, sailed. Not sure about Farage's, sadly.
I have to say I fear that when I next go abroad I will not be as happy to say I'm British as I have been.
Betting question: Farage as PM or Salmond as FM, most likely?
Oliver Barnes @mroliverbarnes · 22m And Belgian health authorities now saying they have two suspected cases of B.1.1.529. Any bets on when first UK case will crop up? Within 12 or within 24 hours? twitter.com/mroliverbarnes…
The British consulate in Nice announces that it is taking ayslum applications. To be processed there. The applicant will have to show up at the consulate once every 3 days to keep the application going, for however long it takes.
Or the British govt announces that there will be two flights per week from Paris CDG free for asylum seekers on a first come first serve basis. Cue thousands of migrants heading to Paris at which point Macron realises its actually a French problem and they need to deter migrants from getting to France in the first place…..
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
You couldn't have this more back to front if you tried with both hands for a week. Does it do the cause of the genuinely trans more good if we say This is an example of trans woman, or This is indeed a pervert in a dress? Which it is, unless you dispute the charges/convictions, or contend that the guy only wore skirts?
look at it in gambling terms. There are 12 trans women among the 500 women in Scotland's prisons. have a think about what spread bets you'd be comfortable with on the genuine vs taking the piss ratio among them.
Morning all. Has the latest Johnsonian bridge been discussed? I see the report prices it at 335bn smackers. Quoted from Graun feed just now, with a nice bit of no shite Morse at the start:
"The consequence of these parameters for either a tunnel or a bridge is that they are expensive. The indicative cost estimate for the full route, including optimism bias (at P95), is £335bn for a bridge crossing and £209bn for a tunnel crossing. The bridge or tunnel, and the associated very significant works on either side for a railway and possibly for roads would take a very long time. Planning, design, parliamentary and legal processes, and construction would take nearly 30 years before the crossing could become operational, even given a smooth passage of funding and authority to proceed.
Whilst the economic and social effects would be transformational, the costs would be impossible to justify, given the government’s already very significant commitment to long term transport infrastructure improvement for levelling up, and the further likely significant expenditure which would result from the further studies I am suggesting in my main UCR report."
I believe the new unit of spending is Useless Test & Trace System, e.g. a bridge would cost just over nine UTTS while Scotland's annual largesse from Barnett is a bit less than one UTTS.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Quite possibly.
This may blow over but then again when Covid first came up towards the end of 2019, there were posters (one in particular) who told us this was going to be huge. The reset of us laughed. Tragic....
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
Your analogy does not work. We do not sell dangerous goods to those under-age precisely because of the harm that might ensue
She is not a woman. This is a man.
This man - regardless of the fact that they call themselves Chloe - should not be put in a woman's prison. The crime they have committed should not be recorded as a crime committed by a woman. They should not be allowed to enter women's spaces. We do not have self-ID in this country (nor should we). If this man genuinely suffers from dysphoria - and I am sceptical given that the name change so conveniently happened after a load of sex offences and just before this offender sought to evade legal restrictions on him - then he can seek medical help.
Biology is real. Womanhood is not a feeling, changing a name and wearing lipstick. It is nonsense on stilts to say so.
The next development will be as follows: adults celebrating their weird sexual peversions in public, and liberal woke parents exposing their children to it, so as to deter them from kink shaming. You heard it here first.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
You couldn't have this more back to front if you tried with both hands for a week. Does it do the cause of the genuinely trans more good if we say This is an example of trans woman, or This is indeed a pervert in a dress? Which it is, unless you dispute the charges/convictions, or contend that the guy only wore skirts?
look at it in gambling terms. There are 12 trans women among the 500 women in Scotland's prisons. have a think about what spread bets you'd be comfortable with on the genuine vs taking the piss ratio among them.
My guess would be of that 12 less than 2 would be genuine. How many people are genuinely trans? I in 5000? 1 in 20000? In my 40-something years on the planet, I have only come across one. Clearly such people do exist, but surely in much lower numbers than 12 in 500.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
You average EU migrant isn't coloured and attempting to catch a dinghy from France.
Boris would be fighting last years battle.
He would still be able to keep Farage at bay though as that move gave him cred with immigration sceptic Leavers.
Sunak, Truss and Starmer however would be less likely to be able to contain Farage, Truss and Starmer were both Remainers and Sunak voted for May's deal 3 times and all 3 are social liberals
Do you think your average anti immigrant voter is going to care about what the Tories did x years ago?
That was last years issue, now deal with this years...
Which would be a problem if Boris went, as Sunak or Truss and Starmer would not have stopped EU free movement as Boris did nor proved themselves able to stop the boats either.
So while Boris is seeing some leakage over boats to RefUK, that could become a flood to RefUK if Farage became its leader and Sunak or Truss replaced Boris as PM
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
Pervert in a dress sums him up.
Right. So we could all agree this sounds a bad news person and move on. But it's being offered (I think) as evidence to support a particular point of view about transgender people and how they should be treated and I was trying to explore that a bit.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
Good news for everyone except the Portuguese and Ethiopians then...
We invaded Ethiopia in 1940 or so. Admittedly to free it from the Italians and restore Haile Selassie toileting the throne.
Did we? That episode of WW2 passed me by. Honestly, the manpower we had to be in so many places is just mind-boggling. Did you mean 'toileting'? Or was that a strange autocorrect of 'to'?
LOL. The latter.
Wikipedia says... troops from the United Kingdom, South Africa, British India, Uganda Protectorate, Kenya, Somaliland, West Africa, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Sudan and Nyasaland participated in the campaign. These were joined by the Allied Force Publique of Belgian Congo, Imperial Ethiopian Arbegnoch (resistance forces) and a small unit of Free French.
One of said British troops was an uncle of mine, who had also fought in France 1914-18. Not a Regular, either. He went on the fight in the North African campaign.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
Good news for everyone except the Portuguese and Ethiopians then...
We invaded Ethiopia in 1940 or so. Admittedly to free it from the Italians and restore Haile Selassie toileting the throne.
We certainly trampled over a large part of Portugal during the Peninsular War, albeit to expel the French.
Con 36%, Lab 35%, Green 8%, Lib Dem 7%, Reform 6%, SNP 5%.
High Green share is hurting Labour. Labour needs to pivot to a green agenda pretty damn quick - it's a vote winner when the Tories are hardly green and the Lib Dems pretend to be green.
Oliver Barnes @mroliverbarnes · 22m And Belgian health authorities now saying they have two suspected cases of B.1.1.529. Any bets on when first UK case will crop up? Within 12 or within 24 hours? twitter.com/mroliverbarnes…
It is already here. That doesn’t mean we should abandon attempts to keep more of it out.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
It wouldn't be the first time a politician has said something scary with the qualifier 'may' without the science having been done.
If it is ever proved that this uncannily infectious, weirdly clever virus came from the lab (which it surely did) then there must be trials. And executions
I’m quite serious
We discussed this last night. The power elites in China and the US don’t want to talk about it. Which is easy to understand. But neither do the global masses. Which requires a more nuanced understanding of the human condition than I have.
But yes, actions that result in more premature deaths than the Holocaust, deserve trials and executions. Let us never forget that many months after it became clear to Beijing there was a serious problem and while they were deep into planning an historically unprecedented state of martial law across half a continent, they kept up the most severe diplomatic pressure to keep international flights open. Lab or otherwise, there are people who deserve to burn for that.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
Your analogy does not work. We do not sell dangerous goods to those under-age precisely because of the harm that might ensue
She is not a woman. This is a man.
This man - regardless of the fact that they call themselves Chloe - should not be put in a woman's prison. The crime they have committed should not be recorded as a crime committed by a woman. They should not be allowed to enter women's spaces. We do not have self-ID in this country (nor should we). If this man genuinely suffers from dysphoria - and I am sceptical given that the name change so conveniently happened after a load of sex offences and just before this offender sought to evade legal restrictions on him - then he can seek medical help.
Biology is real. Womanhood is not a feeling, changing a name and wearing lipstick. It is nonsense on stilts to say so.
The next development will be as follows: adults celebrating their weird sexual peversions in public, and liberal woke parents exposing their children to it, so as to deter them from kink shaming. You heard it here first.
I doubt it. It's conservatives who tend to be into weird sexual shit. I'm a "liberal woke parent" and I've never watched a second of pornography or slept with anyone except my wife.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
This is best understood as a reaction to the fact that they got delta wrong, so they are being cautious this time around until they know the full picture. They need to justify the cautious stance and everything is heavily caveated. They would look stupid if they closed the border whilst trying to reassure people that there is nothing to worry about.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Got a better idea?
Not really. Above my paygrade! My main point is that a sustainable solution is impossible unless the rich target countries co-operate to get an international agreement.
But in a binary referendum on PT's options, (A) provide safe and legal passage here vs (B) ship them all to Africa for processing, I'd vote for (A).
Go for A and it's a magnet that will attract more and more to Calais continually. You need B in place just to remove the magnet you've just created.
What is the difference between an asylum processing centre in Rwanda and an asylum processing centre in Rhyl.
Asylum seekers are processed and if accepted can live in the UK and if not then "sent back" (to where?).
It is the processing that is the issue not the location or severity of the disincentive.
Why do you think Australia’s offshore processing scheme is successful? Why do you think almost no-one attempts to enter Oz, as they know they will be sent to Nauru?
Nauru is a protectorate isn't it? Do we have one of those? But who cares. Borders are porous and we simply don't want to do much about ours. Otherwise we would do or have done it.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
Good news for everyone except the Portuguese and Ethiopians then...
We invaded Ethiopia in 1940 or so. Admittedly to free it from the Italians and restore Haile Selassie toileting the throne.
We certainly trampled over a large part of Portugal during the Peninsular War, albeit to expel the French.
Not to mention seriously reshaping part of it, vide the Lines of Torres Vedras, and creating large areas of devastation in front to starve the Monsieurs. But that was in conjunction with the Portuguese.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Is she really a woman? Should she be sent to an all female prison?
No, of course not.
Let me repost what I posted last night when this was first posted.
There is more to this story.
This man was convicted of sexual offences against children and was ordered to be put on the sexual offenders' register. He was also made subject to various notification requirements. In breach of these he set up a Tik Tok account aimed at children in the female name he is now using. But failed to notify the police. This was brought to the attention of the court.
The formal name change only occurred after all these offences. It is not even clear if this man is claiming to be trans. There has been no medical diagnosis or treatment. This man is a sex offender who is using the trans label or, rather, the gullibility and stupidity of the authorities to try and gain access to children and women.
And, sadly, there are politicians and others who think this is ok, who think that men like him - male sex offenders - should be allowed easy access to women and children, to their spaces, should be allowed to be housed in a womens' prison, should be called a woman in statistics etc.
This is not just stupid. It is wrong. It is evil because it allows evil men to get away with harm to others, to some of the most vulnerable in our society.
No. Just no.
It is a method that a sex offender uses to offend. It seems in this case to have been using a female identity. And then the sex offender claimed that he is a woman. That she is a woman as we now say.
She is a criminal and criminals will be criminals. You are shooting the messenger or seeking to ban the sale of matches for fear that a pyromaniac might buy them.
Your analogy does not work. We do not sell dangerous goods to those under-age precisely because of the harm that might ensue
She is not a woman. This is a man.
This man - regardless of the fact that they call themselves Chloe - should not be put in a woman's prison. The crime they have committed should not be recorded as a crime committed by a woman. They should not be allowed to enter women's spaces. We do not have self-ID in this country (nor should we). If this man genuinely suffers from dysphoria - and I am sceptical given that the name change so conveniently happened after a load of sex offences and just before this offender sought to evade legal restrictions on him - then he can seek medical help.
Biology is real. Womanhood is not a feeling, changing a name and wearing lipstick. It is nonsense on stilts to say so.
The next development will be as follows: adults celebrating their weird sexual peversions in public, and liberal woke parents exposing their children to it, so as to deter them from kink shaming. You heard it here first.
That's not next, that's been going on for years. The point is the definition of weird sexual perversion keeps getting advanced so that no one notices.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
Strangely South Africa is not talking about a lockdown and are criticising the travel ban as too harsh.
This variant is likely to have been there for 4-6 weeks so some effect on serious illness/hospitalisations should have come through by now
[snip] Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
AIUI, he said that because the scientists who have been studying the mutations in this new variant have found that there are multiple mutations which relate to the parts of the virus which the vaccines target. That's not definitive evidence that the vaccines will be significantly less effective against the variant, but it's enough to justify what he said.
I was musing on the classic 1942 film Casablanca the other day. There are several plot strands but perhaps the most interesting is the "letters of transit" stolen by the Peter Lorre character and hidden by Bogarts character Rick, who later passes them on. These stolen documents permit the bearer free travel to neutral Portugal, and then onwards to the USA.
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Casablanca (in the film at least) was indeed full of people traffickers. They are not portrayed as noble but as vultures, exploiting the vulnerable. Remember the scene with the Bulgarian couple and the roulette game? Captain Renault was not a nice person.
Certainly Rick was depicted as noble, and the refugees vulnerable.
What do we think happened to those vulnerable would be refugees without the letters of transit?
There were only two letters of transit in the film. The rest of the refugees had to make other arraignments, such as midnight trips on fishing boats with several thousand francs in cash.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
We will have to see more data but yes if Nu is taking off in Africa it's likely reinfecting people and natural immunity from exposure isn't making much difference from preventing that.
How will this variant do in countries with a large percentage of the population that is vaccinated remains to be seen.
Keep in mind we have millions not jabbed or partially jabbed. I wonder how children will manage with this new variant who we decided to expose to the virus instead of vaccinating?
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
Strangely South Africa is not talking about a lockdown and are criticising the travel ban as too harsh.
This variant is likely to have been there for 4-6 weeks so some effect on serious illness/hospitalisations should have come through by now
Balloux says likely to have been circulating for 2 - 3 months looking at the mutations.
Oliver Barnes @mroliverbarnes · 22m And Belgian health authorities now saying they have two suspected cases of B.1.1.529. Any bets on when first UK case will crop up? Within 12 or within 24 hours? twitter.com/mroliverbarnes…
It is already here. That doesn’t mean we should abandon attempts to keep more of it out.
Indeed. Especially if test and trace is working properly and we can isolate quickly those with it.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
My answers:
1. The existing GRA requirements are sufficient. There should be no change to them. 2. Unless a person has received a medical diagnosis of dysphoria they should not be treated as anything other than their sex. 3. Male sex offenders - to be clear all sex offenders with a male body - should not be housed in womens' prisons. Have a special wing for them in a male prison. 4. Existing practices - in prisons and elsewhere - which effectively are permitting self-ID even though this is not legal and even though those with a GRC have exactly the same legal rights as everyone else under the 2010 Equality Act should be stopped. 5. Data in censuses / in courts / collected by the police should be based on sex so that it is accurate. 6. The practice of forcing rape victims in court to call their attacker "she" if the latter insist or of punishing female prisoners for calling a man a man should be stopped.
Whether these are genuinely dysphoric people or those simply taking advantage of soft-headed officialdom, is hard to say. The fact that so many are sex offenders makes me sceptical that this is a genuine increase in a medical condition.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It would involve withdrawing from various refugee conventions which is I think unthinkable for our political class and others. But it will have to be done I suspect.
What is needed is something along the following lines:
1.Good quality immigrants are an asset and Britain welcomes them. 2. What qualifies as "good quality" is a range of factors: skills, willingness and ability to integrate etc 3. But there has to be a numerical limit to the number welcomed in every year. 4. The number of asylum seekers is potentially unlimited and conflicts with point 3 above and also point 2. 5. The difference between being a refugee and an economic migrant is now so often so blurred as to be meaningless and leads to people trying to shoehorn themselves into particular categories and/or entrusting themselves to people smugglers. This perpetuates an evil trade and is unfair to others who may be better immigrants from Britain's perspective but are not able or willing to use the people-smuggling route. 6. So a claim to refugee status will no longer be deemed to lead to automatic entry to Britain. Other factors will be needed. In some limited cases Britain may choose to have exemptions to this rule eg Afghani interpreters. 7. All applications for a visa for Britain will be processed at British embassies and consulates. Not in Britain. There will be a number every year and all those who are successful will be flown safely into Britain. 8. Any appeals against a refusal will have to happen outside Britain. There will only be one appeal at the potential migrant's expense. 9. Patrolling of the British coastline and territorial waters will be massively increased and anyone caught will be deported or detained. If the latter, their attempt to evade migration controls will count massively against them should they later seek to apply legally.
Points 7, 8 and 9 will require oodles of money to be spent but should save money in the long run.
None of this will happen of course and it is not a short-term solution.
If Keir wants to win the election, he (or maybe his invisible shadow Home Secretary) just needs to say a cut down version of above.
The problem is that the a significant chunk of the Labor party would lose their shit over such a policy.
A mirror image of the "zero immigrants" types on the Right.
Fuck ‘em. Clause 4 moment.
A free thinking friend of mine, who often makes uncannily accurate predictions, texted me this just now:
“my prediction: Farage MP within 12 months. PM within 3 years.”
A risk if the Tories depose Boris. Much as many despise Boris on here he does reach the same type of voters Farage reached, particularly working class and lower middle class Leave voters. Sunak, Truss and Starmer do not have the same appeal as Boris does to those voters
But Boris is in power - so when Farage says more needs to be done to stop migrants - Boris can't just say yes as Farage will say you've had 4 years WTF have you spent that time not doing anything about it.
Boris can say he was the PM who ended EU free movement however
You average EU migrant isn't coloured and attempting to catch a dinghy from France.
Boris would be fighting last years battle.
He would still be able to keep Farage at bay though as that move gave him cred with immigration sceptic Leavers.
Sunak, Truss and Starmer however would be less likely to be able to contain Farage, Truss and Starmer were both Remainers and Sunak voted for May's deal 3 times and all 3 are social liberals
Do you think your average anti immigrant voter is going to care about what the Tories did x years ago?
That was last years issue, now deal with this years...
Which would be a problem if Boris went, as Sunak or Truss and Starmer would not have stopped EU free movement as Boris did nor proved themselves able to stop the boats either.
So while Boris is seeing some leakage over boats to RefUK, that could become a flood to RefUK if Farage became its leader and Sunak or Truss replaced Boris as PM
You seem to inhabit your own surreal world of political certainty and detached from reality
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
Strangely South Africa is not talking about a lockdown and are criticising the travel ban as too harsh.
This variant is likely to have been there for 4-6 weeks so some effect on serious illness/hospitalisations should have come through by now
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
You couldn't have this more back to front if you tried with both hands for a week. Does it do the cause of the genuinely trans more good if we say This is an example of trans woman, or This is indeed a pervert in a dress? Which it is, unless you dispute the charges/convictions, or contend that the guy only wore skirts?
look at it in gambling terms. There are 12 trans women among the 500 women in Scotland's prisons. have a think about what spread bets you'd be comfortable with on the genuine vs taking the piss ratio among them.
How have I got it back to front? I said 3 things. (1) I can't diagnose whether this person is genuinely trans or not. (2) There will be men who change gender for dubious reasons. (3) Such cases will imo be a tiny minority cf those who are genuine.
Then I asked what this case is making people want to change about how transgender people are treated.
But, ok, to develop your prison point. You are saying that all trans women convicted of a crime should go to a male prison because the odds are that a fair proportion of them are fakes, men masquerading as women in order to prey on women - Is that right?
The Times lead is exactly the sort of wooly headed thinking that could switch my voting intention back to Conservative. The idea that people in wealthy Western Europe are "desperate" is ridiculous. They are choosing to maximize their economic return in a language they prefer. Just because some other migrants are doing the right thing doesn't change the fact that those in Calais are refusing to claim asylum on the continent.
If we are going to help people then it should be minorities like Kurds, Syriacs, Yazidis. And of course people that worked for the British armed forces. And they should be the most deserving, not the ones who have travelled the furthest.
Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and Singapore join the UK and Israel in banning all flights from Southern Africa
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
Aren't South African Hospitals the place to watch, if this variant is more severe then they will fill up pretty quickly.
Yes. We may have to wait weeks for Porton Down but we should know more in a few days by looking at South Africa
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
South Africa's prior infection rate is nowhere near vaccination levels in developed countries.
I was musing on the classic 1942 film Casablanca the other day. There are several plot strands but perhaps the most interesting is the "letters of transit" stolen by the Peter Lorre character and hidden by Bogarts character Rick, who later passes them on. These stolen documents permit the bearer free travel to neutral Portugal, and then onwards to the USA.
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Casablanca (in the film at least) was indeed full of people traffickers. They are not portrayed as noble but as vultures, exploiting the vulnerable. Remember the scene with the Bulgarian couple and the roulette game? Captain Renault was not a nice person.
Certainly Rick was depicted as noble, and the refugees vulnerable.
What do we think happened to those vulnerable would be refugees without the letters of transit?
There were only two letters of transit in the film. The rest of the refugees had to make other arraignments, such as midnight trips on fishing boats with several thousand francs in cash.
The refugees in Casablanca were Jews, not ethnic Germans looking for a better life.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
I am guessing the boringly statistical one that there are many orders of magnitude more devious predatory heterosexual male shits in the world than there are women trapped in mens' bodies, and that anyone defending this arse's utterly ludicrous claim to be a woman with a penis is enabling predatory heterosexual male shittery under cover of particularly ill thought out wokery.
And severely damaging the cause of genuine trans women btw.
Well I'm certainly not defending that claim. There will be men who change gender for nefarious reasons. But would this group not be a tiny minority compared to those who are genuine? I'd think so.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender? Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces? Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
My answers:
1. The existing GRA requirements are sufficient. There should be no change to them. 2. Unless a person has received a medical diagnosis of dysphoria they should not be treated as anything other than their sex. 3. Male sex offenders - to be clear all sex offenders with a male body - should not be housed in womens' prisons. Have a special wing for them in a male prison. 4. Existing practices - in prisons and elsewhere - which effectively are permitting self-ID even though this is not legal and even though those with a GRC have exactly the same legal rights as everyone else under the 2010 Equality Act should be stopped. 5. Data in censuses / in courts / collected by the police should be based on sex so that it is accurate. 6. The practice of forcing rape victims in court to call their attacker "she" if the latter insist or of punishing female prisoners for calling a man a man should be stopped.
Whether these are genuinely dysphoric people or those simply taking advantage of soft-headed officialdom, is hard to say. The fact that so many are sex offenders makes me sceptical that this is a genuine increase in a medical condition.
Expect death threats from SNP loyalists, Ms. Cyclefree. Avoid twitter.
Comments
10. those who refuse reveal where they come from will be deemed to have arrived from (insert cheap 3rd world country here who we are paying to relocate people to).
He was right to promise a referendum.
He got everything after that wrong.
The modern Labour party is deeply committed (among the membership) to free movement, and often, to opposing all limits on immigration*
*When asked, such individuals will say that they don't believe in unlimited immigration. "Obviously", "Don't be ridiculous" etc etc. But they will be opposed to every single measure restricting immigration, employment of immigrants etc.
One would think Sir KS, QC, would be well-qualified.
But a lot more storage than people realise is inevitably going to exist in this country. Which will primarily assist those with off-road parking, which is why I've been adamant for years as much new housing as possible should have off-road parking as standard.
Once almost all of the cars and trucks in this country are electric then that's going to provide a big shift in the amount of distributed storage that exists in the country. I imagine that smart chargers combined with smart meters will be able to ensure that this distributed storage as much as possible is charged while electricity generation is plentiful and thus cheap.
If an electric car battery holds 75 kWh and at any one point in time there might be ~5 million of such batteries plugged into the network (less than 1/6th of the cars on the road), then unless I'm misunderstanding things isn't that a distributed storage of 375 GWh plugged into the grid? That seems pretty substantial to me and that's without considering any other storage.
Overall the cars on the road would have a storage capacity measured in the TWh.
The British consulate in Nice announces that it is taking ayslum applications. To be processed there. The applicant will have to show up at the consulate once every 3 days to keep the application going, for however long it takes.
Broadmoor or somewhere of that type is the place. Until fit to be released. If ever.
This is very, very straightforward Bayes' Theorem for dummies. Do you think there are more devious heterosexual males, or genuine trans women in the world? Do you think that it never, ever, ever happens that a dhm decides to masquerade as trans for devious purposes? Never, ever, ever, ever, ever? Not once? If it does happen, why on earth shouldn't we say it is happening, when not saying that it is happening does such a huge disservice to genuinely trans women?
Sovereignty may not be compromised, but democracy is. Iran and China are sovereign but they're not democratic.
We recently took 24,000 Afghans and many Syrians as explained by the immigration minister the other day.
So it's quite obvious that to be a successful refugee who the UK will welcome, the UK must have at some recent point invaded your country.
There are already conversation happening about increasing the size of them beyond the basic requirement - so that they can store electricity for the generating companies (in effect).
You wait until the Tories have released their 2023 manifesto and then you announce Cyclefree's plan.
She is not a woman. This is a man.
This man - regardless of the fact that they call themselves Chloe - should not be put in a woman's prison. The crime they have committed should not be recorded as a crime committed by a woman. They should not be allowed to enter women's spaces. We do not have self-ID in this country (nor should we). If this man genuinely suffers from dysphoria - and I am sceptical given that the name change so conveniently happened after a load of sex offences and just before this offender sought to evade legal restrictions on him - then he can seek medical help.
Biology is real. Womanhood is not a feeling, changing a name and wearing lipstick. It is nonsense on stilts to say so.
https://twitter.com/standingforxx/status/1463961318214492168?s=21
Boris would be fighting last years battle.
But what I'm trying to understand is, what does this story make people want to do -
Make it even harder than now to change gender?
Have a blanket ban on male born people using female spaces?
Other stuff?
Otherwise it just reads as "oh yuck, pervert in a dress".
I have to say I fear that when I next go abroad I will not be as happy to say I'm British as I have been.
"The consequence of these parameters for either a tunnel or a bridge is that they are expensive. The indicative cost estimate for the full route, including optimism bias (at P95), is £335bn for a bridge crossing and £209bn for a tunnel crossing. The bridge or tunnel, and the associated very significant works on either side for a railway and possibly for roads would take a very long time. Planning, design, parliamentary and legal processes, and construction would take nearly 30 years before the crossing could become operational, even given a smooth passage of funding and authority to proceed.
Whilst the economic and social effects would be transformational, the costs would be impossible to justify, given the government’s already very significant commitment to long term transport infrastructure improvement for levelling up, and the further likely significant expenditure which would result from the further studies I am suggesting in my main UCR report."
Edited extra bit: upon checking, Ladbrokes have Farage at 101 for next PM which seems rather tight.
And I said nothing about the pyromaniac being under age. I said a pyromaniac.
Yes they are criminal (we are both backing off the pronouns now...). But it is just one of several methods that criminals employ to be a criminal.
Should the destination be a women's prison? Above my pay grade as you say probably requiring the view of a doctor. If all the doctors are fooled and he is a he playing a game then that is bad of course. But it should not be beyond the legal and medical profession to cope.
Hmm
I’ve got bad vibes about this. I know we must wait for Porton Down and WHO to formally announce how everything is fucked - or not - but the frantic, urgent action by major governments tell me that something is up. They already suspect the worst. And yes Javid’s eyes were set to maximum terror-boggle mode last night on Sky
Brace
A Nu World Order.
Being serious, a global effort to get as many people as possible jabbed is needed. Fewer cases equals fewer opportunities for variants to appear. Too late for Nu, but not too late for whatever letters are left between Nu and Omega. And of course it will save a lot of lives.
As for propagating that stereotype well there are plenty of stereotypes that are unfortunate. If for example it turns out that one of the largest property developers in the country is Jewish or the global 110m hurdle winner is black does that propagate a stereotype? Man tries to pass himself off as woman to get himself into a women's prison (because whatever the gender there has been a criminal act) is surely a rare enough event such as not to shape policy on account of it. But I don't have the stats. Perhaps there are legions of male criminals using this as a test case. In which case we come back to the legal/medical side.
I’m quite serious
Sunak, Truss and Starmer however would be less likely to be able to contain Farage. Truss and Starmer were both Remainers and Sunak voted for May's deal 3 times and is hardly a leader tailor made to appeal to the white working class
Con 36%, Lab 35%, Green 8%, Lib Dem 7%, Reform 6%, SNP 5%.
Did you mean 'toileting'? Or was that a strange autocorrect of 'to'?
That was last years issue, now deal with this years...
@mroliverbarnes
· 22m
And Belgian health authorities now saying they have two suspected cases of B.1.1.529. Any bets on when first UK case will crop up? Within 12 or within 24 hours? twitter.com/mroliverbarnes…
look at it in gambling terms. There are 12 trans women among the 500 women in Scotland's prisons. have a think about what spread bets you'd be comfortable with on the genuine vs taking the piss ratio among them.
This may blow over but then again when Covid first came up towards the end of 2019, there were posters (one in particular) who told us this was going to be huge. The reset of us laughed. Tragic....
How many people are genuinely trans? I in 5000? 1 in 20000? In my 40-something years on the planet, I have only come across one. Clearly such people do exist, but surely in much lower numbers than 12 in 500.
One of the things that might be freaking world governments is this: although SA has low vax rates (which is due to misrule and vax hesitation btw, not mean western governments) they were presumed to have high levels of prior immunity due to enormous beta and delta waves
Yet the nunu explodes nonetheless. This suggests it can reinfect previous victims and probably evade vaccines, at least in part?
Javid specifically said “this may well evade our present vaccines”. How can he say such a scary thing unless some science has already been done?
So while Boris is seeing some leakage over boats to RefUK, that could become a flood to RefUK if Farage became its leader and Sunak or Truss replaced Boris as PM
Wikipedia says... troops from the United Kingdom, South Africa, British India, Uganda Protectorate, Kenya, Somaliland, West Africa, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Sudan and Nyasaland participated in the campaign. These were joined by the Allied Force Publique of Belgian Congo, Imperial Ethiopian Arbegnoch (resistance forces) and a small unit of Free French.
One of said British troops was an uncle of mine, who had also fought in France 1914-18. Not a Regular, either.
He went on the fight in the North African campaign.
11% of 2019 Labour voters now going Green, just 2% of 2019 Labour voters going Conservative.
31% of 2019 LD voters now backing Starmer Labour
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/prf6ceddy2/TheTimes_VI_211125_W.pdf
But yes, actions that result in more premature deaths than the Holocaust, deserve trials and executions. Let us never forget that many months after it became clear to Beijing there was a serious problem and while they were deep into planning an historically unprecedented state of martial law across half a continent, they kept up the most severe diplomatic pressure to keep international flights open. Lab or otherwise, there are people who deserve to burn for that.
This variant is likely to have been there for 4-6 weeks so some effect on serious illness/hospitalisations should have come through by now
How will this variant do in countries with a large percentage of the population that is vaccinated remains to be seen.
Keep in mind we have millions not jabbed or partially jabbed. I wonder how children will manage with this new variant who we decided to expose to the virus instead of vaccinating?
https://twitter.com/shoe0nhead/status/1459015384598786092
MAPS = minor attracted person(s).
Or what used to be called paedophiles. Kiddy fiddlers. Jimmy Saviles.
1. The existing GRA requirements are sufficient. There should be no change to them.
2. Unless a person has received a medical diagnosis of dysphoria they should not be treated as anything other than their sex.
3. Male sex offenders - to be clear all sex offenders with a male body - should not be housed in womens' prisons. Have a special wing for them in a male prison.
4. Existing practices - in prisons and elsewhere - which effectively are permitting self-ID even though this is not legal and even though those with a GRC have exactly the same legal rights as everyone else under the 2010 Equality Act should be stopped.
5. Data in censuses / in courts / collected by the police should be based on sex so that it is accurate.
6. The practice of forcing rape victims in court to call their attacker "she" if the latter insist or of punishing female prisoners for calling a man a man should be stopped.
As for numbers, according to the MoJ, the numbers of male transwomen in prisons has jumped by a 5th in 2 years. The vast majority do not have a GRC. In effect they are self-ID'ing. See here - https://archive.md/2021.11.25-003832/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/24/transgender-prison-population-climbs-fifth-two-years-moj-figures/.
Whether these are genuinely dysphoric people or those simply taking advantage of soft-headed officialdom, is hard to say. The fact that so many are sex offenders makes me sceptical that this is a genuine increase in a medical condition.
Oh for data.
Israel has imposed no travel from most of Africa
Then I asked what this case is making people want to change about how transgender people are treated.
But, ok, to develop your prison point. You are saying that all trans women convicted of a crime should go to a male prison because the odds are that a fair proportion of them are fakes, men masquerading as women in order to prey on women - Is that right?
If we are going to help people then it should be minorities like Kurds, Syriacs, Yazidis. And of course people that worked for the British armed forces. And they should be the most deserving, not the ones who have travelled the furthest.