Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
There is nothing stopping someone being correct or left wing and wanting to change the Refugee Convention or leave it.
What has not been correct is the repeated lying by Tory ministers and cheerleaders about the laws arounding refugees, whilst refusing to leave international treaties and instead blaming refugees, lawyers, courts, the woke and lefties. The system we have now is a result of deliberate incompetence by a long succession of cynical Tories.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
So do you think that if the government for one month deported all boat arrivals to Rwanda immediately and without recourse to return to the country that any more would continue to arrive?
Even with just the threat of being deported to Rwanda there was a pretty big deterrent.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
That’s just not true. The Today programme was regularly reporting from the camps and interviewing potential boat people and various people working for charities there and they were clear that the Rwanda plan had cut through and was resulting in people waiting to see whether it would start or what the election result would be before paying and crossing.
The people they were interviewing were not from the Tory gov or reform but people who could easily have said it had no effect if they wanted to gaslight the public.
The people there are very well informed by tiktokkers producing updates and guides on the situation - you know this and are being disingenuous because you can’t accept that this isn’t all virtuous helping of those in danger needing asylum but is largely a massive movement of economic migrants hiding behind, and ruining it for, the people who really do deserve help.
There are clearly many people claiming asylum with dubious claims, who we could call economic migrants. There are clearly many people claiming asylum who have come from the most horrendous circumstances. At present, about half of all claims are refused and half are accepted and I think those decisions are probably reasonably accurate. I think those who claim they are nearly all economic migrants are wrong, and those who claim they are nearly all genuine refugees are wrong. Those who don't have good claims should be processed and deported as quickly as possible, and we should work with the countries they came from to expedite that process (as with Sunak's deal with Albania).
Received wisdom suggests that asylum-seekers come to the UK because of the generosity of the welfare state and the ease of finding work in the growing informal labour market, because the UK has no identity cards, and because of a fairly poor record on sending home unsuccessful asylum applicants. Based on interviews with 87 asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Colombia, Kosovo and Somalia, this paper suggests that the realities of asylum-seeking are quite different. Few of the respondents arrived with much knowledge of the UK, and their knowledge was limited to general impressions of the country; they knew little about asylum policy and practice. There are five main reasons why they knew so little: many had not chosen their own destination; surprisingly few had family or friends already in the UK; in some cases they had been provided with false or misleading information; many had departed their country of origin in a rush; and most were relatively poorly educated. Why they ended up in the UK was often linked to the role of smugglers, who often chose the final destination. In light of these findings, we question both the efficacy and the fairness of current UK asylum policy.
You don't solve a problem by misunderstanding what is going on in the first place. Too much asylum policy under the Tories was designed to achieve Daily Mail headlines rather than to be efficacious.
Ok so, based on numerically one dinghy load of asylum seekers, two of which countries of origin (Columbia and Kosovo) cannot justify illegal migration to the UK because they live in failed states, we are expected to be happy with people who have turned up with no knowledge of the UK, immigration policy or practice.
They don’t have any reason to be in the UK in particular, as they claim not to have family or friends here, so why not stay in safe France. In fact, as they seem to know so little how do they even know the UK is safe?
This is not a problem with the”fairness” of the UK immigration policy, it’s a failure of theUK not being noticeably unforgiving to anyone turning up via illegal routes.
If you use an illegal route or dispose of your official docs then no ability to claim asylum ever.
Spam the shit out of social media, announce it daily on the news, take out adverts around the world. Stop people from giving money to gangs by making it completely pointless.
Do you tow back the boats into French waters or the French ports ?
Do you ensure they have enough fuel and the boat isn’t overloaded or do you just leave the boat without fuel and in danger of capsizing ?
How exactly will this help French UK relations? And won’t the French just then let as many boats come across and you’ll never have enough vessels to intercept them .
The UK navy refused to undertake this , it would be up to the Border Force . And problems arise there because of safety concerns and the possibility of prosecutions for those involved if people drown.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
I suspect the only way we can fix the problem is if we send significant numbers back to France so the story gets back that it’s not worth it you will be back here in a month.
And I know that means bringing significant numbers in quickly from France but at least those will be able to work immediately
Just return them immediately, the next day after scanning finger prints. If those in the camps in France see everyone returning 24 hours later, banned from applying for asylum for attempted illegal entry, thousands of euros poorer, and it happens non stop for a couple of months the industry dies and the migrants have no reason to stay in the area so good for the UK and good for Calais Region in the longer term.
How hard would it be to fly a microlight across the Channel?
(Asking for a couple of unscrupulous entrepreneurs...)
He’s pledging £1 per repost up to £50k, for his war medals charity, which is trying to find a new home after the Imperial War Museum decided to close their exhibition.
Oh, and go see the exhibition if you’re anywhere near London this month.
To divert us for a moment: this 30 minutes of loveliness on competitive stone-skimming will make anyone's day a better one. If you don't have 30 minutes, just watch the first two: I challenge you not to be drawn in. Dougie Isaacs is my new favourite sportsman. He looks like Nick Cave and competes with a pint and a roll up in a Stone Roses t-shirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gEI33klgI
Something very satisfying about getting a stone to skim to the point where it briefly seems to float on the water.
And it's a high skill. You can't do it just with power. Only sweet spot trajectory plus sweet spot speed will create that. And even then you need a bit of luck.
Do you tow back the boats into French waters or the French ports ?
Do you ensure they have enough fuel and the boat isn’t overloaded or do you just leave the boat without fuel and in danger of capsizing ?
How exactly will this help French UK relations? And won’t the French just then let as many boats come across and you’ll ever have enough vessels to intercept them .
The UK navy refused to undertake this , it would be up to the Border Force . And problems arise there because of safety concerns and the possibility of prosecutions for those involved if people drown.
Maybe someone in France might have the revelation that if people know that they can use that part of France as a potential jump off point to try and get into the UK then the region will forever have to deal with thousands of immigrants camping and waiting.
If they clamp down hard with the British authorities, and do it seriously, then the people of the Calais region might find that the thousands of migrants have no reason to be there anymore and the associated costs and social problems will no longer be their issue.
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Yes he’s everywhere at the moment spouting nonsense .
No one goes on Bluesky anymore or reads any of these ludicrous “xeets” so I have no idea why you guys keep linking to this drivel
Yesterday I noticed that three or four of my favourite archeaologists - I like archeology - who loudly decamped to Bluesky a year ago - have now come back to X. Quietly
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done. There are no "just do this" magic wand solutions that actually work.
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
So your main objection to my “el Salvador” prison idea is “they’d be difficult to build”
I have a solution for that. It’s called mingulay. It’s the largest uninhabited island in the UK
The biggest El Salvador super prison is 0.2 sq km in size and holds 40,000 inmates. Mingulay is 10sq km so you could build four or five. Problem solved - because as soon as you started using them the boats would stop coming
There. I did it. I solved the boat people problem and I haven’t even had lunch
So how are you going to feed them
How are you going to get people to work there?
You haven’t solved any problem - you just think you have.
Er, buy food and pay wages? lol
Is that it? Is that your objection? “This won’t work because there is no way to get food from supermarkets to other places quite nearby”
You haven’t been to Mingulay, have you? It’s not a lot like Camden.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done. There are no "just do this" magic wand solutions that actually work.
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
It's easy to tow back. You put the boat in a bigger disposable drone boat, point it at France, watch it ground itself on the beach. We have thousands of Ukrainians developing drones in their sheds that are evolving so quickly you can use them for all the functions of an air force. Obviously we can do something similar for this problem.
We need to stop saying "nothing can be done". If the problem is properly formulated, the answer flows naturally. The problem is "how do we transfer tens or hundreds of human beings to a beach in France without the consent of them and the French govt?" Then it's just engineering.
Do you tow back the boats into French waters or the French ports ?
Do you ensure they have enough fuel and the boat isn’t overloaded or do you just leave the boat without fuel and in danger of capsizing ?
How exactly will this help French UK relations? And won’t the French just then let as many boats come across and you’ll never have enough vessels to intercept them .
The UK navy refused to undertake this , it would be up to the Border Force . And problems arise there because of safety concerns and the possibility of prosecutions for those involved if people drown.
You put them in offshore lifeboats procured for the purpose and already under tow. Tow them west to international waters but just outside the French territorial limit. Bribe one of the asylos a few grand to skipper the lifeboat to the French coast. Crucially, it only has enough fuel to reach France not the UK.
The thing about being in the Navy is, you don't get to refuse to do things.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
If they think those red lines are cuasing a serious risk, I wonder what they make of the Canary Wharf traffic light tree roundabout.....
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
That’s just not true. The Today programme was regularly reporting from the camps and interviewing potential boat people and various people working for charities there and they were clear that the Rwanda plan had cut through and was resulting in people waiting to see whether it would start or what the election result would be before paying and crossing.
The people they were interviewing were not from the Tory gov or reform but people who could easily have said it had no effect if they wanted to gaslight the public.
The people there are very well informed by tiktokkers producing updates and guides on the situation - you know this and are being disingenuous because you can’t accept that this isn’t all virtuous helping of those in danger needing asylum but is largely a massive movement of economic migrants hiding behind, and ruining it for, the people who really do deserve help.
There are clearly many people claiming asylum with dubious claims, who we could call economic migrants. There are clearly many people claiming asylum who have come from the most horrendous circumstances. At present, about half of all claims are refused and half are accepted and I think those decisions are probably reasonably accurate. I think those who claim they are nearly all economic migrants are wrong, and those who claim they are nearly all genuine refugees are wrong. Those who don't have good claims should be processed and deported as quickly as possible, and we should work with the countries they came from to expedite that process (as with Sunak's deal with Albania).
Received wisdom suggests that asylum-seekers come to the UK because of the generosity of the welfare state and the ease of finding work in the growing informal labour market, because the UK has no identity cards, and because of a fairly poor record on sending home unsuccessful asylum applicants. Based on interviews with 87 asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Colombia, Kosovo and Somalia, this paper suggests that the realities of asylum-seeking are quite different. Few of the respondents arrived with much knowledge of the UK, and their knowledge was limited to general impressions of the country; they knew little about asylum policy and practice. There are five main reasons why they knew so little: many had not chosen their own destination; surprisingly few had family or friends already in the UK; in some cases they had been provided with false or misleading information; many had departed their country of origin in a rush; and most were relatively poorly educated. Why they ended up in the UK was often linked to the role of smugglers, who often chose the final destination. In light of these findings, we question both the efficacy and the fairness of current UK asylum policy.
You don't solve a problem by misunderstanding what is going on in the first place. Too much asylum policy under the Tories was designed to achieve Daily Mail headlines rather than to be efficacious.
Ok so, based on numerically one dinghy load of asylum seekers, two of which countries of origin (Columbia and Kosovo) cannot justify illegal migration to the UK because they live in failed states, we are expected to be happy with people who have turned up with no knowledge of the UK, immigration policy or practice.
They don’t have any reason to be in the UK in particular, as they claim not to have family or friends here, so why not stay in safe France. In fact, as they seem to know so little how do they even know the UK is safe?
This is not a problem with the”fairness” of the UK immigration policy, it’s a failure of theUK not being noticeably unforgiving to anyone turning up via illegal routes.
If you use an illegal route or dispose of your official docs then no ability to claim asylum ever.
Spam the shit out of social media, announce it daily on the news, take out adverts around the world. Stop people from giving money to gangs by making it completely pointless.
I think spamming the shit out of social media that potential asylum seekers will see probably makes more sense than a policy campaign directed at Daily Mail readers, which appeared to be the Tories' strategy. Various countries, notably Norway, have tried this approach. How successful they are and what the best approach is, however, appear to be still disputed: e.g., see https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781800377509/book-part-9781800377509-18.xml Those running such campaign claim success, but rarely spend time on robust evaluations. The best review seems to be https://publications.iom.int/fr/system/files/pdf/evaluating_the_impact.pdf , which concludes:
Information campaigns designed to raise awareness of the potential risks of (irregular) migration have attracted much attention and investment across the world in recent years. Studies have repeatedly shown that many migrants start their journeys with limited or biased information and end up in vulnerable situations. In response, information campaigns have increased in number and the type, format, messages and strategy of such campaigns have diversified. This report presents the results from a systematic literature review of evaluations of such information campaigns in the field of migration.
The study reveals that the evidence base available for programming and policymaking in this area is strikingly limited. We find that the uptake in the use of information campaigns has far outpaced any rigorous assessment of the effects that different campaigns may have on their respective target groups. In the absence of reliable evidence, the debate on the potential of this policy tool often relies on largely anecdotal evidence. Better evidence can show how information campaigns can be designed to best achieve their intended effects given the particular circumstances.
So, there is potential here, but we need to make sure these methods are actually having the intended effect.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
A bit of pedantry - from the photo the council needs some white paint as the middles are barely white, being so badly eroded.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
If they think those red lines are cuasing a serious risk, I wonder what they make of the Canary Wharf traffic light tree roundabout.....
I think the implication is that actually standing in the middle of a roundabout doing the painting is causing a serious risk. Which is not unreasonable. It's also a pretty half arsed St. George's. They ought to properly paint the roundabout white, then paint a red cross of an appropriate width and straightness across the middle. That would be doing the job properly AND making a whiter circle than at present. But that would also involve spending quite a lot of time in the middle of a roundabout which people tend to drive over rather than around.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
A bit of pedantry - from the photo the council needs some white paint as the middles are barely white, being so badly eroded.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
All that wanking was bound to catch up with you sooner or later
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
A severe dose of wankers cramp? Edit: beaten by IanB2.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
Neither of those roundabouts was white in the middle. There is merely the ghostly suggestion that they were once white in the past.
I'm not convinced by that as an argument against fun painting of mini roundabouts.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
So do you think that if the government for one month deported all boat arrivals to Rwanda immediately and without recourse to return to the country that any more would continue to arrive?
Even with just the threat of being deported to Rwanda there was a pretty big deterrent.
If the government had fronted up the money to do that, then yes, it might have worked. As I’ve already said, multiple times.
The fact that they weren’t willing to do so shows exactly how unserious the last government was - they wasted 3/4 of a £billion of our money on a project that was bound to fail because they weren’t willing to follow through with what was actually required to make it work.
We would have been better off just making the Rwandan government a gift of half a billion or so. They would probably have made better use of it.
To divert us for a moment: this 30 minutes of loveliness on competitive stone-skimming will make anyone's day a better one. If you don't have 30 minutes, just watch the first two: I challenge you not to be drawn in. Dougie Isaacs is my new favourite sportsman. He looks like Nick Cave and competes with a pint and a roll up in a Stone Roses t-shirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gEI33klgI
Something very satisfying about getting a stone to skim to the point where it briefly seems to float on the water.
And it's a high skill. You can't do it just with power. Only sweet spot trajectory plus sweet spot speed will create that. And even then you need a bit of luck.
I don't claim to share these guys' skill, but I share their compulsion to skim. I could do it for hours.
A few years back, I was skimming on the beach in Rock. Some Chinese tourists came by and watched, astounded. They had never come across the concept. It was like witchcraft to them. I thought the urge to skim was universal, but perhaps it is not (though on the basis of that video clearly the Japanese and Hungarians do it). (Also new to these particular tourists was the concept of the sandcastle. Well, they were sort of aware of it being done to competition standard - but not the amateur 'build a castle and a channel for seawater then watch as the moat is filled than the castle washed away' approach.)
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
All that wanking was bound to catch up with you sooner or later
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
Protecting the borders is racism?
Violent protests outside asylum seekers’ accommodation is racism.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
A bit of pedantry - from the photo the council needs some white paint as the middles are barely white, being so badly eroded.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
I see the Italians have arrested somebody for blowing up that Nordstream pipe. If only the Carabinieri read pb.com they would know they have the wrong person because we were assured by po-faced wankers on here that the Ukrainians didn't do it.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
Three alumni of Dulwich College, two of them truly great, Chandler, Wodehouse and Farage.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
A bit of pedantry - from the photo the council needs some white paint as the middles are barely white, being so badly eroded.
The point is that the council fricking jump to it when they see a St. George's flag because they think it ain't very EDI.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
I did read that about 20% of people who voted Labour in 2005 now support Reform. Many of that cohort will have voted Conservative at various points between 2010-19.
The proportion is probably a lot higher in places like South Yorkshire and Durham.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
Fucking Hell, Shelob just ran across my living room floor. I could see its abs. Pray for me!
Araneus diadematus?
Autumn must be near...
It is. The local robins started singing the Autumn Song a week ago. And Mrs C's rowan trees' berries are red.
WINTER IS COMING
Summer: so slow to arrive, so swift to leave us.
We are a two-thirds of the way from solstice to equinox.
The nights are getting chillier; the horse chestnuts, always the first, are on the turn.
One day soon I will crack out Pulp's "David's Last Summer". Which is the best song about the end of summer I know. Four and a half minutes of breezy carefree summer pop, then, at 5 minutes, the mood changes, then changes again with two successive shiver down the spine key changes* and suddenly summer is over and autumn is here. They lyrics are superb but the music alone tells the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZVu4c5sJhE&list=RDu_UZwDYbJ-I&index=2
*I don't, technically, know what I'm talking about so this may be wrong.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
Was 2005 the last good government we have had......
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
He’s the Jonah who makes the wrong decision, time after time, more like.
Not surprising, when you consider that his insight is even smaller than his ****.
If that’s now the modal British voter, then maybe his personal solo Private Fraser tribute act actually has something to it….?
On flags - just seen the below. To be honest, while I have nothing against a bit of English-flag-displaying, I think 'don't be painting things on the middle of mini-roundabouts; you'll cause an accident' isn't an unreasonable line to take.
A bit of pedantry - from the photo the council needs some white paint as the middles are barely white, being so badly eroded.
The point is that the council fricking jump to it when they see a St. George's flag because they think it ain't very EDI.
We all know that.
Strangely no issues with the rules / regs when they were painting multi-colour zebra crossings, even when blind people were complaining they were finding it very difficult to cross.
If the councils had any sense they would get ahead of this and do a flag waving roundabout and say if you do it to others we will remove it and you will be in trouble.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
Mm. In 2022 the late Ms Cunningham was Labour, getting a (still winning) third place below an Independent and then the SNP, with the Conservatives as also rans just before the second SNP candidate. But unless I am missing something there was no Reform candidate at all. So it'll be interesting indeed.
"Greg Turner [Tory candidate] was suspended from the Conservatives on 21 April 2022, prior to the election, after being linked to derogatory online remarks against Catholics.[4] His name remained on the ballot paper, as the deadline for nominations had passed."
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
Protecting the borders is racism?
Violent protests outside asylum seekers’ accommodation is racism.
I don't think that's technically true. Clearly a 'violent protest' is bad, but there are violent protests for all sorts of things. So that aspect isn't racist. And I don't accept that objecting to asylum seekers is racist. So I don't therefore think it is. There will no doubt be racists that take part. But that's also true of shopping for fruit and vegetables, and that isn't racist.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
And he supported Trump in 2024, so he goes internationally too. Truly the median voter.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
Going up now, according to a friend who has good reason to know.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
I'm typing these by voice dictation because I've had surgery on both my hands. That's why it's all bit fucked with the clipped prose style of a Raymond Chandler novel.
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
Three alumni of Dulwich College, two of them truly great, Chandler, Wodehouse and Farage.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
Going up now, according to a friend who has good reason to know.
I think it's almost certainly the case that there is considerably less racism in the UK than there was when I was growing up in the 80s, and probably less still than in the 70s. I also wouldn't be surprised if there was more now than there was 20 years ago.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
Next, we'll have @bondegezou arguing for repatriation
That surprised me, too.
She says it should only be considered if all/most European countries agree to it together.
Haven't they been discussing just this for the last decade or more ? Any redraft of the convention would take many years.
Just leave and set up a new one. You'd get a few follow, perhaps a lot.
Countries distant from current conflict zones, like the UK, Ireland and Norway, have rather different views on how to handle refugees than those who are closer, like Greece and Italy. It's difficult to find something that everyone supports.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
Next, we'll have @bondegezou arguing for repatriation
That surprised me, too.
She says it should only be considered if all/most European countries agree to it together.
Haven't they been discussing just this for the last decade or more ? Any redraft of the convention would take many years.
Just leave and set up a new one. You'd get a few follow, perhaps a lot.
Countries distant from current conflict zones, like the UK, Ireland and Norway, have rather different views on how to handle refugees than those who are closer, like Greece and Italy. It's difficult to find something that everyone supports.
Sure, and if you try and renegotiate it with a145 countries it will fail or at best take far longer than any elected governments are going to survive.
So leave, set up a new organisation where we can frame the initial rules and invite anyone else who wants to join to do so. Greece and Italy may well prefer the UKs 2025 version to the UN one with the rules from 1951.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
The link goes to the Radio 4 livestream, which is currently playing the Archers.
Can we get a second source that Toynbee is resiling from the Refugee Convention?
I heard it live. Provided we stay in the ECHR, arguing that the definition of refugee needs redefining for the modern world isn’t an unreasonable proposition.
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention Amazing Politics are in flux as never before"
Next, we'll have @bondegezou arguing for repatriation
That surprised me, too.
She says it should only be considered if all/most European countries agree to it together.
Haven't they been discussing just this for the last decade or more ? Any redraft of the convention would take many years.
Just leave and set up a new one. You'd get a few follow, perhaps a lot.
Countries distant from current conflict zones, like the UK, Ireland and Norway, have rather different views on how to handle refugees than those who are closer, like Greece and Italy. It's difficult to find something that everyone supports.
Sure, and if you try and renegotiate it with a145 countries it will fail or at best take far longer than any elected governments are going to survive.
So leave, set up a new organisation where we can frame the initial rules and invite anyone else who wants to join to do so. Greece and Italy may well prefer the UKs 2025 version to the UN one with the rules from 1951.
If the rule is refugees have to seek asylum in the first country they come to, that's great for the UK, but terrible for Italy. I don't see Italy running to back that approach.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
That’s shocking, and totally unacceptable.
The likes of Leon, sitting in their underpants typing away on their bedsit PC, need to wise up as to the wider discontent that they are sowing.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
Doncaster Bentley will likely stay Reform although turnout will be very low.
It is not a great place - still lots of terraced houses in poor condition from the old mining community and also vulnerable to flooding.
The BNP when they were a thing used to get a fair proportion of the vote but never got near to winning the seat and it remained solid Labour for many years.
Reform have obviously gathered a coalition of the disenchanted (and to be fair, there is much to be disenchanted about).
Why they didn't put up a candidate at the general election [in Doncaster North, vs Ed Miliband] I have no idea.
"Tooth stem cell banking, also known as dental pulp cell banking, involves parents collecting and sending lost milk teeth to a laboratory where stem cells are harvested from the dental pulp. Firms that advertise tooth banking services claim these stem cells can be used in treatments for conditions such as diabetes as well as for autism.
The investigation, by Emma Wilkinson and published in the BMJ, found that three companies in the UK offer tooth stem cell banking – BioEden, Future Health Biobank and Stem Protect. The service costs about £1,900, with a £95 annual storage fee."
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
I think more people should accept that @Leon is now the archetypal floating voter who decides British elections. I think the last time he didn't vote for the election winner was in 2005.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
What's currently notable is that a large element within politics and the pundit class - who you'd expect to be the gatekeepers of careful analysis and moderate language - have leapt on the racial bandwagon and are egging on the mob in very inflammatory ways. We probably haven't seen that since the days of Powell and even he cut a more isolated figure back then.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
So do you think that if the government for one month deported all boat arrivals to Rwanda immediately and without recourse to return to the country that any more would continue to arrive?
Even with just the threat of being deported to Rwanda there was a pretty big deterrent.
If the government had fronted up the money to do that, then yes, it might have worked. As I’ve already said, multiple times.
The fact that they weren’t willing to do so shows exactly how unserious the last government was - they wasted 3/4 of a £billion of our money on a project that was bound to fail because they weren’t willing to follow through with what was actually required to make it work.
We would have been better off just making the Rwandan government a gift of half a billion or so. They would probably have made better use of it.
But then it wouldn't have cost £10bn, would it. Maybe closer to £1bn to forcibly remove all boat arrivals for a few weeks, even up to a couple of months and then watch as they become a trickle so the ongoing cost is close to nothing.
The Tory government was useless in that it didn't use the power it had to push through all enabling laws, override the HRA, override the courts and override any international blocking treaties with primary legislation, dare the courts to strike it down, dare the UN to try and stop it and if necessary use our veto to shut them up and just plain ignore the ECHR or any other international courts. It didn't have the cojones to do any of those and I don't know if Reform will either, though I think they will definitely get closer to it.
You may disagree with the method of removing them but removing them is necessary, the current situation is intolerable and good on the councils for fighting back. Having read the first hand accounts of what's been happening around those hotels I'm shocked that the protests haven't been going on for much longer.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
I believe it’s shortarses who are the real victims of prejudice,
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
I'm guessing that the lowest levels of racism in the UK were the early 2010s when the usual suspects were getting their knickers in a twist about the level of EU immigration from Eastern Europe. Back then, gammon ire was mostly directed at Polish plumbers and the like; black and brown people were either true Brits or our friends from the Commonwealth.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
I’m white, clearly middle(ish) class living in a middleish area of a middleish town and I’m definitely seeing more people being racist without anyone reacting.
And as an innocent bystander I’m not going to call people out on it - I just avoid seeing them in future
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
That's very sad to hear TSE. I think it's an inevitable consequence of uncontrolled and very visible illegal immigration. People are fed up of having their money and resources spent on these freeloaders and it's starting to boil over.
Labour really need to lance the boil and bring back a mass deportations scheme for boat arrivals. Do whatever it takes to get planeloads of new arrivals on the way to a third country and also remove the ones who are already here. If it upsets a few liberals and they need to enable it with very tough laws that override the courts and international treaties then that's what it will take.
This has been going on too long and just as with the OSA, it's law abiding citizens who will bear that brunt of the fallout, including any citizens who look like they are from an Asian or African country. The blame lies squarely on the politicians for ignoring the public on the subject of immigration for the past 20 years.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
Doncaster Bentley will likely stay Reform although turnout will be very low.
It is not a great place - still lots of terraced houses in poor condition from the old mining community and also vulnerable to flooding.
The BNP when they were a thing used to get a fair proportion of the vote but never got near to winning the seat and it remained solid Labour for many years.
Reform have obviously gathered a coalition of the disenchanted (and to be fair, there is much to be disenchanted about).
Why they didn't put up a candidate at the general election [in Doncaster North, vs Ed Miliband] I have no idea.
According to Andrew Teale they had an agreement with the SDP not to stand against them. They would have at least given Ed Milliband a fright if they had put up a candidate.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
That’s terrible,! A year ago the same person may have thought it, but now they are emboldened to say it to your face. I fear for the country if people like you are suffering blatant racism,
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
I'm surprised you say this: I would put most of East Renfrewshire down as probably one of the weakest areas in the entire UK for Reform. Middle-class Glasgow suburbs in general. If they get 15% in this ward it would be a good result imo.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
That's very sad to hear TSE. I think it's an inevitable consequence of uncontrolled and very visible illegal immigration. People are fed up of having their money and resources spent on these freeloaders and it's starting to boil over.
Labour really need to lance the boil and bring back a mass deportations scheme for boat arrivals. Do whatever it takes to get planeloads of new arrivals on the way to a third country and also remove the ones who are already here. If it upsets a few liberals and they need to enable it with very tough laws that override the courts and international treaties then that's what it will take.
This has been going on too long and just as with the OSA, it's law abiding citizens who will bear that brunt of the fallout, including any citizens who look like they are from an Asian or African country. The blame lies squarely on the politicians for ignoring the public on the subject of immigration for the past 20 years.
The politicians on the right haven't ignored it. They have been deliberately incompetent to worsen the situation for electoral gain.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
So do you think that if the government for one month deported all boat arrivals to Rwanda immediately and without recourse to return to the country that any more would continue to arrive?
Even with just the threat of being deported to Rwanda there was a pretty big deterrent.
If the government had fronted up the money to do that, then yes, it might have worked. As I’ve already said, multiple times.
The fact that they weren’t willing to do so shows exactly how unserious the last government was - they wasted 3/4 of a £billion of our money on a project that was bound to fail because they weren’t willing to follow through with what was actually required to make it work.
We would have been better off just making the Rwandan government a gift of half a billion or so. They would probably have made better use of it.
But then it wouldn't have cost £10bn, would it. Maybe closer to £1bn to forcibly remove all boat arrivals for a few weeks, even up to a couple of months and then watch as they become a trickle so the ongoing cost is close to nothing.
The Tory government was useless in that it didn't use the power it had to push through all enabling laws, override the HRA, override the courts and override any international blocking treaties with primary legislation, dare the courts to strike it down, dare the UN to try and stop it and if necessary use our veto to shut them up and just plain ignore the ECHR or any other international courts. It didn't have the cojones to do any of those and I don't know if Reform will either, though I think they will definitely get closer to it.
You may disagree with the method of removing them but removing them is necessary, the current situation is intolerable and good on the councils for fighting back. Having read the first hand accounts of what's been happening around those hotels I'm shocked that the protests haven't been going on for much longer.
The last Tory government passed primary legislation to overrule the British courts. They did all the legislative steps required. They said that a flight would leave the day after the election if they were re-elected.
So why not send flights before the election, see the boats stop over the summer, and hold an autumn election, which, according to some, they would then win at a canter?
I suspect the answer is that they knew it wouldn't work, had always known it wouldn't work, and the only value of the Rwanda scheme was to have Labour oppose it.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
I believe it’s shortarses who are the real victims of prejudice,
It is clearly the ginger, shortarse, muslim trans community who feel the brunt of it.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
I'm surprised you say this: I would put most of East Renfrewshire down as probably one of the weakest areas in the entire UK for Reform. Middle-class Glasgow suburbs in general. If they get 15% in this ward it would be a good result imo.
Barrhead is an old industrial town, whereas the rest of East Renfrewshire is prosperous commuter territory. It’s very different to the rest of the constituency.
Although there has always been significant racism in Britain, over the last year it seems to have changed from covert racism to overt racism. Although it’s better out in the open, it is becoming acceptable, which is not good.
There's never been less racism in Britain than now.
I disagree.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
I'm guessing that the lowest levels of racism in the UK were the early 2010s when the usual suspects were getting their knickers in a twist about the level of EU immigration from Eastern Europe. Back then, gammon ire was mostly directed at Polish plumbers and the like; black and brown people were either true Brits or our friends from the Commonwealth.
The most overt bit of racism I have experienced was in 2005 at the League Cup Final from Chelsea fans, when a couple of called me Osama and a terrorist, fortunately dozens of Liverpool fans came to my rescue.
"Tooth stem cell banking, also known as dental pulp cell banking, involves parents collecting and sending lost milk teeth to a laboratory where stem cells are harvested from the dental pulp. Firms that advertise tooth banking services claim these stem cells can be used in treatments for conditions such as diabetes as well as for autism.
The investigation, by Emma Wilkinson and published in the BMJ, found that three companies in the UK offer tooth stem cell banking – BioEden, Future Health Biobank and Stem Protect. The service costs about £1,900, with a £95 annual storage fee."
*2.5p to moderns.
'Future Health Biobank' seems a slightly suspect name - trying to get a veneer of respectability from Our Future Health and Uk Biobank?
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
So do you think that if the government for one month deported all boat arrivals to Rwanda immediately and without recourse to return to the country that any more would continue to arrive?
Even with just the threat of being deported to Rwanda there was a pretty big deterrent.
If the government had fronted up the money to do that, then yes, it might have worked. As I’ve already said, multiple times.
The fact that they weren’t willing to do so shows exactly how unserious the last government was - they wasted 3/4 of a £billion of our money on a project that was bound to fail because they weren’t willing to follow through with what was actually required to make it work.
We would have been better off just making the Rwandan government a gift of half a billion or so. They would probably have made better use of it.
But then it wouldn't have cost £10bn, would it. Maybe closer to £1bn to forcibly remove all boat arrivals for a few weeks, even up to a couple of months and then watch as they become a trickle so the ongoing cost is close to nothing.
The Tory government was useless in that it didn't use the power it had to push through all enabling laws, override the HRA, override the courts and override any international blocking treaties with primary legislation, dare the courts to strike it down, dare the UN to try and stop it and if necessary use our veto to shut them up and just plain ignore the ECHR or any other international courts. It didn't have the cojones to do any of those and I don't know if Reform will either, though I think they will definitely get closer to it.
You may disagree with the method of removing them but removing them is necessary, the current situation is intolerable and good on the councils for fighting back. Having read the first hand accounts of what's been happening around those hotels I'm shocked that the protests haven't been going on for much longer.
The last Tory government passed primary legislation to overrule the British courts. They did all the legislative steps required. They said that a flight would leave the day after the election if they were re-elected.
So why not send flights before the election, see the boats stop over the summer, and hold an autumn election, which, according to some, they would then win at a canter?
I suspect the answer is that they knew it wouldn't work, had always known it wouldn't work, and the only value of the Rwanda scheme was to have Labour oppose it.
They didn't do it ruthlessly enough and they didn't have a solution on overriding the HRA which bound the government to nonsense ECHR rulings. They needed to either repeal it or override it in new legislation and specifically say in cases of deportations the HRA is suspended, use the big stick of primary legislation and tell the judges to get back in their box.
The Tories were just too weak willed, they have lost more support than Labour because of the boats and because of uncontrolled immigration. They're down to about 20 points in the polls, Reform have eaten them alive so if they were somehow holding back for electoral gain it's completely backfired on them.
It's about time he left for the Tories. Wasn't he one of the gang of three that was on the cusp of crossing the floor years ago?
Actually, Stringer is more likely to go to Reform than the Tories - he could be the first Labour to Reform defector. Very pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, climate change denier. He and Farage would get on like a house on fire.
Reform are canabilising the Brexit coalition very effectively.
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
The by-election in Barrhead in East Renfrewshire will be a good indication of Reform progress. It’s the type of seat where they can expect to perform averagely well. Better than in the west end of Glasgow, but worse than in North Lanarkshire.
I'm surprised you say this: I would put most of East Renfrewshire down as probably one of the weakest areas in the entire UK for Reform. Middle-class Glasgow suburbs in general. If they get 15% in this ward it would be a good result imo.
The difficult bit is that the first runner last time was an Independent, so I can't guess how his voters would pan out. PLus there are no LDs this time round to vote for, *plus* an Abolish the Scottish Pmt candidate.
Yet the ward had a Brexit councillor before - albeit defected from the Tories! Though Reform [edit] *previously* abstained from standing in an agreement with the Tories.
Comments
@fharris2011
Hearing Polly Toynbee, Queen of Correct Left-Wing Thought, telling the BBC that the UK should suspend/renegotiate the Refugee Convention
Amazing
Politics are in flux as never before"
https://x.com/fharris2011/status/1958507154031174101
What has not been correct is the repeated lying by Tory ministers and cheerleaders about the laws arounding refugees, whilst refusing to leave international treaties and instead blaming refugees, lawyers, courts, the woke and lefties. The system we have now is a result of deliberate incompetence by a long succession of cynical Tories.
Even with just the threat of being deported to Rwanda there was a pretty big deterrent.
They don’t have any reason to be in the UK in particular, as they claim not to have family or friends here, so why not stay in safe France. In fact, as they seem to know so little how do they even know the UK is safe?
This is not a problem with the”fairness” of the UK immigration policy, it’s a failure of theUK not being noticeably unforgiving to anyone turning up via illegal routes.
If you use an illegal route or dispose of your official docs then no ability to claim asylum ever.
Spam the shit out of social media, announce it daily on the news, take out adverts around the world. Stop people from giving money to gangs by making it completely pointless.
Autumn must be near...
Do you ensure they have enough fuel and the boat isn’t overloaded or do you just leave the boat without fuel and in danger of capsizing ?
How exactly will this help French UK relations? And won’t the French just then let as many boats come across and you’ll never have enough vessels to intercept them .
The UK navy refused to undertake this , it would be up to the Border Force . And problems arise there because of safety concerns and the possibility of prosecutions for those involved if people drown.
(Asking for a couple of unscrupulous entrepreneurs...)
https://x.com/lordashcroft/status/1958444684583616555
He’s pledging £1 per repost up to £50k, for his war medals charity, which is trying to find a new home after the Imperial War Museum decided to close their exhibition.
Oh, and go see the exhibition if you’re anywhere near London this month.
If they clamp down hard with the British authorities, and do it seriously, then the people of the Calais region might find that the thousands of migrants have no reason to be there anymore and the associated costs and social problems will no longer be their issue.
https://andrewspreviews.substack.com/p/previewing-the-eight-council-by-elections
8 by-elections today in Doncaster in these council areas: Surrey (2), Runnymede, Hounslow, East Hampshire, Gwynedd, Doncaster, East Renfrewshire.
We need to stop saying "nothing can be done". If the problem is properly formulated, the answer flows naturally. The problem is "how do we transfer tens or hundreds of human beings to a beach in France without the consent of them and the French govt?" Then it's just engineering.
Tow them west to international waters but just outside the French territorial limit.
Bribe one of the asylos a few grand to skipper the lifeboat to the French coast.
Crucially, it only has enough fuel to reach France not the UK.
The thing about being in the Navy is, you don't get to refuse to do things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Light_Tree
Can we get a second source that Toynbee is resiling from the Refugee Convention?
Information campaigns designed to raise awareness of the potential risks of (irregular) migration have attracted much attention and investment across the world in recent years. Studies have repeatedly shown that many migrants start their journeys with limited or biased information and end up in vulnerable situations. In response, information campaigns have increased in number and the type, format, messages and strategy of such campaigns have diversified. This report presents the results from a systematic literature review of evaluations of such information campaigns in the field of migration.
The study reveals that the evidence base available for programming and policymaking in this area is strikingly limited. We find that the uptake in the use of information campaigns has far outpaced any rigorous assessment of the effects that different campaigns may have on their respective target groups. In the absence of reliable evidence, the debate on the potential of this policy tool often relies on largely anecdotal evidence. Better evidence can show how information campaigns can be designed to best achieve their intended effects given the particular circumstances.
So, there is potential here, but we need to make sure these methods are actually having the intended effect.
It's also a pretty half arsed St. George's. They ought to properly paint the roundabout white, then paint a red cross of an appropriate width and straightness across the middle. That would be doing the job properly AND making a whiter circle than at present. But that would also involve spending quite a lot of time in the middle of a roundabout which people tend to drive over rather than around.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002hb93
Of that 52%,winning coalition, they already have 30% solidly behind them. Of the 22% left, it doesn't look unreasonable for them to take a further 5 to 10%.
I'm suprised at how well Reform SEEM to be performing in Scotland and Wales, and they have the support of the NI Unionists too ofcourse.
It is looking like an election winning coalition.
All points acknowledged that a lot can happen between now and 2029 but equally it's not hard to see things getting worse for Labour on the economy, immigration and crime.
WH Smith shares plunge almost 40% after retailer’s £30m accounting error
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/21/wh-smith-cuts-profit-forecasts-after-30m-accounting-error
Edit: beaten by IanB2.
I'm not convinced by that as an argument against fun painting of mini roundabouts.
The fact that they weren’t willing to do so shows exactly how unserious the last government was - they wasted 3/4 of a £billion of our money on a project that was bound to fail because they weren’t willing to follow through with what was actually required to make it work.
We would have been better off just making the Rwandan government a gift of half a billion or so. They would probably have made better use of it.
A few years back, I was skimming on the beach in Rock. Some Chinese tourists came by and watched, astounded. They had never come across the concept. It was like witchcraft to them. I thought the urge to skim was universal, but perhaps it is not (though on the basis of that video clearly the Japanese and Hungarians do it).
(Also new to these particular tourists was the concept of the sandcastle. Well, they were sort of aware of it being done to competition standard - but not the amateur 'build a castle and a channel for seawater then watch as the moat is filled than the castle washed away' approach.)
WINTER IS COMING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbRyH6fkee0&list=RDnbRyH6fkee0&start_radio=1
Next, we'll have @bondegezou arguing for repatriation
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
Three alumni of Dulwich College, two of them truly great, Chandler, Wodehouse and Farage.
We all know that.
The proportion is probably a lot higher in places like South Yorkshire and Durham.
We are a two-thirds of the way from solstice to equinox.
The nights are getting chillier; the horse chestnuts, always the first, are on the turn.
One day soon I will crack out Pulp's "David's Last Summer". Which is the best song about the end of summer I know. Four and a half minutes of breezy carefree summer pop, then, at 5 minutes, the mood changes, then changes again with two successive shiver down the spine key changes* and suddenly summer is over and autumn is here. They lyrics are superb but the music alone tells the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZVu4c5sJhE&list=RDu_UZwDYbJ-I&index=2
*I don't, technically, know what I'm talking about so this may be wrong.
Any redraft of the convention would take many years.
Not surprising, when you consider that his insight is even smaller than his ****.
If that’s now the modal British voter, then maybe his personal solo Private Fraser tribute act actually has something to it….?
If the councils had any sense they would get ahead of this and do a flag waving roundabout and say if you do it to others we will remove it and you will be in trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrhead,_Liboside_and_Uplawmoor_(ward)
Edit: I missed this subtlety:
"Greg Turner [Tory candidate] was suspended from the Conservatives on 21 April 2022, prior to the election, after being linked to derogatory online remarks against Catholics.[4] His name remained on the ballot paper, as the deadline for nominations had passed."
I also wouldn't be surprised if there was more now than there was 20 years ago.
My experiences are getting worse.
Recently asked by a stranger if I came over on a boat.
Out of curiosity are you a person of colour?
So leave, set up a new organisation where we can frame the initial rules and invite anyone else who wants to join to do so. Greece and Italy may well prefer the UKs 2025 version to the UN one with the rules from 1951.
The likes of Leon, sitting in their underpants typing away on their bedsit PC, need to wise up as to the wider discontent that they are sowing.
It is not a great place - still lots of terraced houses in poor condition from the old mining community and also vulnerable to flooding.
The BNP when they were a thing used to get a fair proportion of the vote but never got near to winning the seat and it remained solid Labour for many years.
Reform have obviously gathered a coalition of the disenchanted (and to be fair, there is much to be disenchanted about).
Why they didn't put up a candidate at the general election [in Doncaster North, vs Ed Miliband] I have no idea.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/21/healthcare-firms-misleading-milk-teeth-treatments-autism-diabetes-stem-cells
"Tooth stem cell banking, also known as dental pulp cell banking, involves parents collecting and sending lost milk teeth to a laboratory where stem cells are harvested from the dental pulp. Firms that advertise tooth banking services claim these stem cells can be used in treatments for conditions such as diabetes as well as for autism.
The investigation, by Emma Wilkinson and published in the BMJ, found that three companies in the UK offer tooth stem cell banking – BioEden, Future Health Biobank and Stem Protect. The service costs about £1,900, with a £95 annual storage fee."
*2.5p to moderns.
The Tory government was useless in that it didn't use the power it had to push through all enabling laws, override the HRA, override the courts and override any international blocking treaties with primary legislation, dare the courts to strike it down, dare the UN to try and stop it and if necessary use our veto to shut them up and just plain ignore the ECHR or any other international courts. It didn't have the cojones to do any of those and I don't know if Reform will either, though I think they will definitely get closer to it.
You may disagree with the method of removing them but removing them is necessary, the current situation is intolerable and good on the councils for fighting back. Having read the first hand accounts of what's been happening around those hotels I'm shocked that the protests haven't been going on for much longer.
And as an innocent bystander I’m not going to call people out on it - I just avoid seeing them in future
Labour really need to lance the boil and bring back a mass deportations scheme for boat arrivals. Do whatever it takes to get planeloads of new arrivals on the way to a third country and also remove the ones who are already here. If it upsets a few liberals and they need to enable it with very tough laws that override the courts and international treaties then that's what it will take.
This has been going on too long and just as with the OSA, it's law abiding citizens who will bear that brunt of the fallout, including any citizens who look like they are from an Asian or African country. The blame lies squarely on the politicians for ignoring the public on the subject of immigration for the past 20 years.
So why not send flights before the election, see the boats stop over the summer, and hold an autumn election, which, according to some, they would then win at a canter?
I suspect the answer is that they knew it wouldn't work, had always known it wouldn't work, and the only value of the Rwanda scheme was to have Labour oppose it.
The Tories were just too weak willed, they have lost more support than Labour because of the boats and because of uncontrolled immigration. They're down to about 20 points in the polls, Reform have eaten them alive so if they were somehow holding back for electoral gain it's completely backfired on them.
https://ballotbox.scot/preview-barrhead/
The difficult bit is that the first runner last time was an Independent, so I can't guess how his voters would pan out. PLus there are no LDs this time round to vote for, *plus* an Abolish the Scottish Pmt candidate.
Yet the ward had a Brexit councillor before - albeit defected from the Tories! Though Reform [edit] *previously* abstained from standing in an agreement with the Tories.