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The Rwanda policy just reinforces negative views of the Tories – politicalbetting.com
The Rwanda policy just reinforces negative views of the Tories – politicalbetting.com
Fiona Bruce repeatedly asks if ANYONE in the Conservative majority audience supports the Rwanda plan, no one puts their hand up.Helen Whately then gives her second car crash monologue of the evening #BBCQT pic.twitter.com/SsAVuAE8oP
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If it were working you'd get a different response but audience members will think they'd be asked to defend a Government policy failure.
Otherwise, give us a plan that will enable them to be prevented from coming over, and deal with ones who are already here.
As far as I can tell, Labour's plan will take years to come to fruition, and will do nothing about current arrivals.
The government is spending three billion a year detaining immigrant, in a state if enforced economic idleness.
So yes, they were being asked whether they would defend a moral and practical utter failure. That's the point.
Sunak to unveil ‘radical’ vision to transform the health service by building up army of apprentice medics, and cutting agency staff bill
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/29/rishi-sunak-nhs-long-term-workforce-plan-announced/ (£££)
and also
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/29/steve-barclay-nhs-will-have-healthy-future-modernisation/ (£££)
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
However, at least their plan seems more solid than Labour's, which appears somewhat wishy-washy. The problem is that it is an incredibly difficult issue due to its international nature, and the fact that no Eu country really wants these people to come in via illegal routes.
But both the government's and Labour's plan appear to be somewhat at the "steal underpants" stage. It's an incredibly difficult issue; but one that if not addressed, could lead to really negative effects on the country. We saw how the relatively minor issue of the EU led to the rise of UKIP. Failure to tackle illegal immigration may lead to the same, or much worse.
Britain is not a despotism, and the Government's hands are tied by a complex structure of moral and legal (both domestic and international) obligations that leave it almost powerless to act. There is nothing in human rights legislation or the UN convention on refugees that places any limit on the number of applicants that a country is obliged to consider, so we can't simply reject arrivals because there are more of them coming than the resident population feels either willing or able to accept for starters.
We can't expect the French to bail us out by stopping the boats from leaving to begin with, firstly because it's impractical for them to mount a cast iron, round the clock defence of their entire coastline against small groups of people trying to launch from beaches in dinghies, and secondly because they receive more asylum applications than we do and they don't really want to be stuck with our unwanted migrants as well as their own. Pushback is a complete non-starter as a strategy, again because the French don't want the migrants back, and because they'll just fall or jump into the sea from their flimsy rafts during any confrontation and the ship sent to repel them will then be obliged to pick them up anyway.
Once the boat people are here then there are no legal options for sending them anywhere outside of our own jurisdiction to deal with them. It matters not how much pious cant is uttered about making people claim asylum in the first safe country they enter - if that principle actually meant anything then there's be a pass-the-parcel of sealed trains shunting all these people back through Europe to the Mediterranean countries, which would be jam packed full of refugee camps and in a state of revolt. Offshoring to a supposedly safe third country has now been shown not to work, because the only kinds of places we can find to accept refugees in this way - essentially, relieving the UK of its own unwanted arrivals in exchange for fat bribes - are quasi-dictatorships like Rwanda with highly questionable human rights records, which simply means that the judges won't entertain deportations to them. And, critically, once people start making their claims here, the large bulk of them are going to be allowed to stay, for various reasons.
It's usually at this stage in any counsel of despair on the matter that some bright spark comes along and attempts to assert the principle of Parliamentary absolutism. The law of the land is whatever Parliament says it is. We can simply pass a law stating that all the boat people are personae not grata and not entitled to claim asylum, lock them up in some kind of internment camp (possibly a massive oubliette constructed in the Falklands,) and leave them there until they either die or give up and plead to be sent somewhere else. This also doesn't work, on several levels. It means saying that, because we don't want the ballache of dealing with asylum seekers, we're going to rip up all our international obligations with respect to refugees specifically, and human rights more generally, so that we can treat these people as a different, inferior category of human being to everyone else. It entails brutalizing them (and once we do that to them, why not start stripping the rights of other unfavoured groups? It'd probably start with criminals, but that almost certainly wouldn't be the end of it.) It also entails severing the United Kingdom from its network of international obligations and turning it into a pariah. And the act of abrogating the ECHR would blow up the entire architecture of our relationship with our neighbours, undermining the Belfast Agreement, the TCA with the EU, and infuriating Washington in the process. And yes, I know the Australians managed to "stop the boats," but they had to deal with many fewer arrivals coming in actual ships rather than dinghies, had a much wider moat, and when they started offshoring they weren't obliged to sneak the wheeze past Strasbourg.
But this stupid government has made it such a shibboleth of their migration policy that they will pursue it at all costs. I wouldn’t remind betting that it’s this aspect that makes it so unpopular with Tories and people in general who want to control migration - the fact that it doesn’t work, and distracts from actual productive efforts.
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
*If* that is true, then it leads to two things:
1) More attempts to stop them stepping foot in the country; i.e. more boats sinking and tragedies.
2) Increased social division. It's all very well saying "a sufficiency of decent accommodation"; the truth is that we have a brilliant country that vast numbers of people around the world want to come to. How many new houses can we build to support them, can we build them, and should we build them?
Any honest discussion about irregular migration should therefore ask how many migrants the country can cope with, without causing fiscal and social problems - and then how we limit it to those numbers.
The economy and the cost of living crisis will be the main issues that motivate people to vote. People's wages and standard of living has stagnated. That will motivate people to vote and, rather like with the Brexit vote, if the party that is not the status quo is offering what people see as a credible, viable, alternative that will improve their lot in life they will go for it.
As for the show of hands on TV, so what. Means nothing. There is plenty of polling data which shows what people really think about this policy. A show of hands on a TV show means nothing.
I know people in the blue wall, tory voters, who dislike this policy but it's not what will decide their vote.
The bigger hit to the tories overnight is the news that the lending banks have, again, raised their mortgage interest rates. This, and close-to-home cost of living issues are the killer to the tories.
It was not based on the standard of living for a person living in Rwanda.
If you're going to comment on this, you do have a responsibility to do so based on the actual content of the judgment.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Asylum2022/2?:language=en-US&:embed=y&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=1&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share
Small boat arrivals only really started when port security tightened on the lorry parks.
You have to be pretty iron-willed to put your hand up on national television to declare that you're a nasty right-wing xenophobe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect
Vast majority of lawyers agree it is illegal
Court says it is illegal
Govt appeals
Govt burning through cash and credibility defending the policy
I wonder why the govt is unpopular.
We could withdraw from the convention on asylum and make it illegal if we wanted, but we haven't.
The government's Rwanda policy tries to make it illegal while not grasping the nettle. Which is one of several reasons that it isn't working. There is no legal way to claim asylum without entering the country first.
https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/status/1674544007001636864?t=Cp04c3spJPjfXymLpj-Z6Q&s=19
The numbers would simply increase to the point for percentage points of the population per year.
So what to do? The reason that many are coming here is a mix of economic and political reasons. With an emphasis of economic. This is why they don’t want to stay in France.
It is fairly simple to demand that employers are legally responsible for the status of their employers. In fact they are, already. Just add bigger fines. And the touch that half the fine goes to the person giving evidence against the employer. And any illegal immigrant gets indefinite leave to remain on conviction of the employer.
So, instead of shipping people to Rwanda, offer them a huge pile of money and papers to give evidence against those who are usually exploiting them. Better yet, this will result in a wave of private prosecutions - no government effort required.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
If the Rwanda scheme does happen, it will take no more than 100 people a year, so the risk of being sent to Rwanda will be small, providing no deterrent effect. What will provide a better deterrent effect is spending the same money on processing asylum claims, so that those who don’t have a valid asylum claim can be deported promptly, and those who do can transition to a new life where they allowed to work and give back to the community.
The number of Albanians coming over on boats has been successfully reduced by a large amount. A rare success for the Government. What worked there was a specific deal with the Albanian government. We should work on more deals like that. We need better relations with France and the rest of the EU; the loss of the Dublin arrangement having a big effect here.
And what about some good, old-fashioned policing work, in cooperation with the French, to arrest people smugglers?
I would bet money that the next government (Labour) will abolish this scheme. And replace it with something so similar that you won’t be able to the difference.
There must be at least two billion people with an arguable and good case for asylum in the free world, if they wanted to and can find a way to get to such a place. Many of course also want a better life in economic terms as well as having a refugee claim.
Compared with Uganda, Chad, Turkey and Bangladesh our refugee numbers are tiny.
We have net lawful migration each year with record numbers arriving.
We are short of strawberry pickers and all the other jobs our WFH HR coordinators and compliance box tickers don't want to do.
Most of those with the wit to get here on a lilo/raft have strong drive and motivation.
Answer: Act to keep the numbers lower than infinite but let them in on condition they do the jobs we need.
We can't send them back to France or Belgium because we have no returns agreement. We can't send them to their countries of origin because we don't actually know who they are and they have no documents to prove it. The countries they have come from don't want them anyway. The UK is at the end of a very long international migration chain that stretches back across Europe into Africa and the Middle East - unless the UK has a cunning plan to solve the factors that drive this migration, then people will keep coming.
The Government is basically pissing into the global winds of choas enveloping the world and I think the public has clocked that.
That isn't the issue. Yes its clear that the Tory plan does not work as they continue to pour across the channel. But if it *did* work, I dont think we would see support for it either.
There is a fundamental gap between the small number of pro-gollywog voters the government think represents the majority of voters, and the actual moral majority of voters. The government have tried to "other" various groups, describing them in proto-nazi language and then treating them in various inhumane and illegal ways.
The majority of British people are not the amoral cold-hearted shits that Braverman etc wants them to be. And even the ones who voted Tory last time have seen through to the crux of the mater and are sickened by it.
Why does this matter? Because the Tory election plan is to go hyper-negative. That's all they have left. But dog-whistle politics written with Braverman's crayon only work if there are actual dogs to listen to it.
Incidentally my medical school is putting places into clearing for the first time this year, so it seems the pool of good applicants is not inexhaustible.
What could possibly be putting people off a career in medicine in the UK at present?
What is needed is an international effort. The kind cut off by Boris! in his Brexity zeal.
A recruitment drive, increased training, increasing the quantity of people going through training. All seems to make sense as this is looking to increase the supply of staff through increased quantities of people going through training.
They should also offer to write off a portion of the training/degree costs trainees will be expected to reimburse for each year they are in the NHS.
What’s that? He was and they were?
The issue with the boats is more fundamental than a few asylum seekers/refugees/economic migrants rocking up and expecting a new life. It shows the govt is incapable of protecting our borders.
I suspect France and Belgium are more than happy to see these people head over the channel to the UK as they have their own issues with various groups of wilfully and non wilfully displaced persons.
When it comes to an electoral reckoning it will be just another in a long line of failures or failed initiatives from this govt.
73 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters and 42 per cent of voters overall back sending migrants to Rwanda to have their claims processed
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2022/10/31/3c056/2
Immigration may mean a variety of things. There will be some who do not think we have enough inward migration like former Chancellor Phillip Hammond. There will be some who think we should just accept anyone who comes across as a refugee/migrant, and there will be people whose concern is integration and infrastructure to support the large quantities of net inward migration.
It certainly won;t be the case that everyone who has a concern about immigration is against it.
In addition the physical evidence of employment will be fairly easy to find, once the case is brought. So the conviction would not, probably, rely on their testimony alone.
In every job I have worked in, the employer has asked for a photocopy of my passport. A relative who runs a building business does similar for the people he employs. Cast iron protection against the existing laws on employing the undocumented
His vast wealth is an issue. It shouldn't be but it is an issue. We live in an era of cheap politics and cheap politicians.
Also coming this winter. Power cuts. It has passed under the radar but the owners of two coal power stations, who were asked to keep them on line as a back up for this winter, have refused and the decommissioning will continue. This will simply make the risk of power cuts this winter, especially if we have another cold snap where the wind does not blow like we did last December, even greater.
Although this will be the cumulative fault of inept energy policy going back 25 or 30 years and covering multiple govts it will be on his watch and he will get the blame.
Lutz has told the Tories their only remaining lever is go very negative. The 2023 version of Stop The Boats is a law more inhumane than the 2022 Stop The Boats law. So the 2024 edition will go totally tonto. And as we're already seeing, Tory voters have gone past the tipping point where they are no longer prepared to stomach these policies especially when told "these are your priorities"
We can expect the Tory vote to crater even lower than it is now.
I wonder if what has happened is the government losing the benefit of the doubt on everything. When the Rwanda plan was launched, the split was roughly equal between "this is awful" and "it's worth a try". But if the government can't make anything work in any area, you're left with just the theatrical performance, and who wants to be associated with that?
I get the dislike of ID cards, but many of our current problems follow from the lack of a single, consistent proof of identity and residency that everyone has.
We have higher numbers of immigrants of other - denominations? Economic, family etc.
The thing is, that being an economic or asylum migrant is a continuum. Not a binary choice. Most are a mix of both.
My wife came to the U.K. as an economic migrant. Though a portion of her decision was based on the civil war in her country.
Edit: reference here. Note that the upset MP was a *Tory* one.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ourbeeb/is-question-time-s-audience-producer-really-fascist/
Back when Cameron was leader, he used to do a thing called Cameron Direct. He would show up at a factory, office, hospitals etc. and get questioned by the assembled staff. Open mike and no editing. The audience (and questioners) were the people who worked there. The whole thing was videoed and put online.
The BBC and other broadcasters refused to show it. Because they wanted control - to “salt” the audience with activists to stir controversy, plant questions and generally make it fake.
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
My only Twitter account is an old work one I use for my consultancy business, I’m sure as hell not using that to go browsing politics feeds.
I’ve been mostly supportive of the changes at Twitter, but forcing the content behind the login screen makes it more like Facebook and less like the town square. A big own goal.
Apparently, a random selection of people wasn’t balanced, unless salted with opposition activists. And without planted questions, it would be too bland.
What he didn’t say, was the most interesting bit of the whole thing, to me.
Cameron was relying on the fact that most people will hold back from being rude and aggressive on camera - that ordinary people, when confronted with a senior politician and being recorded, won’t go postal on them.
In a separate incident, some years before, I was having a coffee near the South Bank centre. A film crew was interviewing people coming over the footbridge.
They were trying to get a controversial response to a political question. Each time they got a blandly liberal one, they stopped the interview. Next. Etc
Amused by this, I started to film it, using a very early smart phone. A minute later the interviewer stormed over to demand why I was harassing a news crew. This amused me more - filming people filming people is harassing who exactly?
She has a brother in Germany and another in Turkey, neither of whom can get visas to visit.
We have doubled our prison population, and it will soon break historic records as a percentage if the population. To no great end.
Neither will have much economic benefit - HS2 for at least a decade, as its construction is so slow, and prisons not at all.
Typifies the government's grasp of economic strategy.
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Around a million people enter and leave the UK every day. That's the real 'securing the borders' problem.
1. Does anyone who isn’t a very political activist watch QT any more?
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t stopped then it’s a failure. I’m still not sure he understands the expectations of the electorate, even if many of them won’t put their hand up in public.
I don’t particularly like the guy, although he doesn’t deserve to have his bank accounts closed, but it’s not difficult to see the return of Farage or someone like him at the next election, running on boats as a single issue campaign.
I expect Rishi is longing for the summer recess and hopefully take a long and considered review of not only Rwanda, but his cabinet generally, and in particular reshuffle Braverman away from the home office which is toxic under her
Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh backlash over stealth taxes after official figures showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has risen by 40 per cent in the past three years.
Almost 5.6 million people, equivalent to one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the government froze the threshold at which people start paying it
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sunak-in-stealth-tax-row-as-higher-rate-snares-40-more-workers-7px2nt887
DM upset because a new prison doesn't have iron bars on the windows. Read the DM for the most modern penology.
A survey of people with assets of more than £250,000 found that the majority — 79 per cent — were supporting their adult children.
The most common reason was to help with private school fees. Independent school fees increased by 5.6 per cent this year, the biggest amount since the financial crash of 2009. They are expected to rise even more next year.
The fourth Saltus Wealth Index report surveyed 2,000 wealthy people, which it refers to as “high net worth individuals”. Among those who were helping their adult children, 42 per cent were covering school fees for grandchildren, 23 per cent were contributing to mortgage payments, 20 per cent to rent and 32 per cent to weekly grocery bills.
Many independent schools froze their fees during the pandemic but have now put them up considerably. The Independent Schools Council 2023 census said the fees could be likened to government levels of wage inflation.
The average day-school fee is £16,656, up by 37 per cent from the £12,153 in 2013. The average boarding fee is £39,000, up by 41 per cent from £27,600 ten years ago.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-bank-of-granny-and-grandad-keeps-children-in-private-schools-nqsnrcjgg
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
This is what othering does. It makes these people not human. That they aren't making the horrendous choice to get on a boat because to not do so is worse. That we don't need to and worse should not have a human response.
Do I need to post that horrendous photo of Alan Kurdi lying dead on that beach in Greece to illustrate that these people are human? The Tories want to demonise these people. To secure the votes of the pro-golliwog people. I'm not surprised that nobody on QT put their hands up in support. Its shameful and immoral. And sadly for the Tories voters actually do have human feelings still.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-12248525/Nest-eggs-dividends-raided-24bn-savings-tax-bombshell.html?ico=mol_desktop_money-newtab&molReferrerUrl=https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/index.html
@Foxy my wife worked in Leicester, although I suspect you were in short trousers when she was a junior doctor there. She ended up in St George's London teaching.
Interested in your views on the announcement today. My wife has often commented that on qualifying she was as useful as a chocolate teapot in the real job initially so even then it was years of on the job training.
It's a bit like conducting, as we have for the last 50 years, a 'war on drugs'.
If Rishi had a sense of humour he would offer Farage the job of 'boats czar'.