#stop demonising migrants

[onbreakreadlastpost]

Three migrants die attempting to cross Channel

How many more will die before new safe routes are made available.

We must stop punishing and demonising migrants

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[sourcreammachine]

it’s allow the migrants who want to come here to come here, or it’s work til yer 75

with migration being such an absolute necessity i’m starting to think the hostile environments, indignities, barriers, political demonisation and attempted pogroms might be about maintaining an underclass rather than actually ‘stopping migration’

if we can’t have our migrant saviours without keeping them as an underclass then we deserve to rot and die

[ladymazzy]

I am not shocked or surprised by any new announcement/action by the tories - and yet...

It's just one thing after another

Painting over cartoon murals intended to put newly arrived asylum seeking children at ease (because something something 'child safety stop the boats!)

Proudly declaring that they're going to 'clamp down' on degrees that don't immediately lead to high income employment (because the so-called 'poor value' of degrees has got nothing to do with the imposition of tuition fees, anti-intellectualism, and an exploitative labour market. Nope. In fact, culture and learning is bad and erudition should be the sole preserve of posh bastards who vote tory)

Continued determination to make it mandatory that teachers inform parents if a child is questioning their gender, requiring parental consent before validating trans kids' names and identities (because parents are absolutely never abusive, and what's safeguarding anyway?)

Getting some culture war dickhead to be the new Ofsted leader (because zero-tolerance has proved itself to be the most successful way to ensure no children are ever left behind in education)

Squeezing as many vulnerable asylum seekers as (im)possible on to a barge carefully positioned on the outskirts of an underesourced, tory represented community with relatively high levels of deprivation (because it's super generous, won't rile the locals leading to further demonisation of an already vulnerable group of people)

Offering up a stingy pay rise for public sector workers which will be covered by increasing visa and nhs fees for migrants (gosh we are so lucky there are no immigrants working in the public sector - especially in the nhs!)

Not to mention every few days a tory gets published in a right wing rag spouting some cruel, dogwhistle laden nonsense demonising marginalised communities, and acting like they haven't inacted policies which have - quite literally - killed people, and left many more impoverished

And in the midst of all this, there are still centrists bleating on about 'reaching across the aisle' and befriending tories. How, pray, can you maintain a healthy friendship with someone who would - at best - second guess you if you told them you'd been subjected to racist police harassment, or been rendered stateless because the racist hostile environment policy rejected your claim of citizenship, or that your trans kid was spiralling because they weren't getting adequate support, or your aunt was stuck in Khartoum because she's the wrong kind of refugee

It's not that being 'progressive' immediately makes you a great person; we're human and just as prone to being insufferable dickheads as anyone else (not to mention, despite alleged political views, prone to all the bigotries...), but happily aligning yourself with such consistent cruelty and dimness kind of makes you a dubious character does it not

[feckcops]

Here’s the flaw in Sunak’s poisonous strategy: voters don’t believe migrants cause all their problems any more

“You can’t separate Britain’s parlous state and Rishi Sunak’s latest bungled attempt to escalate the “stop the boats” campaign. No British government in democratic history has presided over such an acute period of national decline. The average Briton is set to be no better off in 2026 than they were in 2008, and the poorest fifth are more than 20% poorer than their French and German counterparts ...

“In these circumstances, it is perhaps understandable that a Conservative prime minister will desperately reach for a big red button labelled ‘immigration’. Having manufactured the phenomenon of refugees arriving in small boats by closing down safe and legal routes, the Tories believe the sight of desperate, dishevelled foreigners clambering on to British shores will deflect public anger away from the country’s multiplying crises ...

“There are reasons to doubt that Sunak’s morally debased campaign will succeed: attitudes towards immigration have improved, with only 9% of voters regarding reducing it as a top priority, and the country’s crises are too calamitous to shift the blame from the ruling party. But as we witness Britain’s decline to the status of a poor country with a few rich people in it, we must surely conclude that the Tory scapegoating of migrants played a pivotal role in our nation’s social and economic descent.

“For many years, a significant chunk of the electorate were convinced by claims that migrants really were responsible for soaring NHS waiting lists, strained local schools, the absence of affordable housing, and all manner of other social disorders. That deflected scrutiny away from the real causes, leaving the sickness untreated. Will we finally learn, I wonder, that it’s those who demonise fellow humans from foreign lands who pose the greatest danger, not those who flock to our shores and enrich our communities.”

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: March 2023

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of March 2023 to make sure that they are never forgotten. 

It was once again time for Suella Braverman to become the Main Character of the Tory party, with her once again returning to the well of demonising migrants while making no mention of how the Tories have closed safe routed to create the migrant “crisis” they are proposing a final solution to

...while the ultra-relatable nice guy Rishi Sunak supported her rhetoric to the point he stood behind a lectern featuring the slogan “Stop The Boats” emblazoned on it shortly afterwards, demonstrating what a strong leader he is by blindly nodding along to far-right rhetoric from somebody he was too scared to leave outside the cabinet

...while an email signed by Suella Braverman was sent out criticising civil servants of being an “activist blob” whose lefty ways backed by Labour was stopping them getting their job done, yet strangely when that email received a ton of backlash the immediate Tory response was to claim that Braverman had never written or read that email with her signature on it, as if there isn't a track record of Braverman and emails - which, you know, is the reason why Liz Truss had a momentary blip of sense and sacked her

...so what did Stephen Kinnock offer in response in his role as Shadow Migration Minister?  The exact same rhetoric about how the Tories have failed by letting so many migrants into this country, plus the cost it is adding to our economy...which sounds exactly like the shite Braverman was saying

...and then Suella Braverman jetted off to Rwanda for a PR trip where only the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph, The Times and GB News to join her for the ride  due to them being “friendly” to the government, so friendly in fact that they neglected to mention the minor fact that the building site she posed in front of while cackling maniacally and joked about hiring their interior decorator wasn't even a site used for migrants, it was a random housing estate she posed near because she needed photos of her near a building site to “justify” the trip

...and then along came Rael Braverman to howl to the Daily Mail about how that big, bad Gary Lineker called his wife a Nazi.  Except for the fact that Lineker did not at any point call Suella Braverman a Nazi.  Or the fact that it took Rael Braverman three weeks after the whole nontroversy had dissipated into vapour before going crying to the Mail to try and reheat the whole thing.  Must be a happy couple there...

Nobody ever accuse Matt Hancock of having the full compliment of sandwiches for a picnic at the best of times, but his genius idea of handing Isabel Oakeshott his full WhatsApp history in order to write his diaries (to make up for the fact he never kept a diary) rapidly came back to bite him in the backside when Oakeshott handed over the complete logs to the Daily Telegraph almost as soon as the book was on shelves and the Telegraph has been dripfeeding the most salacious bits to expose Hancock’s rank incompetence when dealing with Covid to the wider world, which is hardly the first time Oakeshott has shanked a source in the back to shit-stir - but this has also emboldened Covid truthers such as the Telegraph or her boytoy Richard Tice

...although it seems that, while Isabel Oakeshott did so to make the story about herself, she really didn't like the story being all about her once people were asking relevant questions such as why a Murdoch-contracted so-called journalist would happily hand over a scoop to a rival paper

Of course the BBC decided to make a big show of how they would inform, educate and entertain Gary Lineker about their impartiality rules after he posted a tweet likening Suella Braverman’s rhetoric towards migrants as those of 1930s Germany - which of course is shared equally, as we’ve seen all the times they have publicly condemned Fiona Bruce or Laura Kuenssberg for flagrantly breaking impartiality rules and even Electoral Law on the air, let alone the various times Alan Sugar has tweeted against striking workers, going into lockdown, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, or getting triggered by pedestrian crossings

...and then the BBC decided to inform, educate and entertain the public about how untrustworthy they are when saying that Lineker was stepping back from hosting that weekend’s Match of the Day, only for it to turn out they suspended him and lied about it - which saw pundits Ian Wright, Alan Shearer, Alex Scott, Micah Richards and Jermaine Jenas all walk out in solidarity, and Match of the Day to be a surreal twenty minute long sequence of clips

...so of course Laura Kuenssberg weighed in with her opinion on the entire situation, which consisted of her reading out anti-Lineker messages on her show, which was as revealing as the time Tim Davie was asked if he would have acted if Lineker tweeted in support of the Tories and backpedalled so fast he created a vacuum

...although don't count out GB News for when they try to make themselves look like the biggest bunch of bellends over the whole situation, as their Alternative Match of the Day not only had a title begging for the BBC to bitchslap them for copyright, but was such a shoddy exercise that they had to make homophobic comments about Brighton fans so all six viewers would stop people cringing themselves to death

TERF dictator Posie Parker probably shouldn't chuckle while making the obligatory right-wing shithead Matrix reference at one of her heavies dragging a woman off stage at her TERF rally in Melbourne, because that's the sort of thing that makes her “Let women speak” mantra as much of a punchline as the neo Nazis who showed up to give Parker their support

...although a few days later Posie Parker tried staging another rally in Hobart which the grand total of ten supporters showed up for compared to a significantly larger number of people who showed up telling her to do one, causing her to have the sort of public meltdown usually reserved for Antonio Conte post-match press conferences after letting a 3-1 lead to Southampton slip where she inadvertently torpedoed the standard defence of her TERFiness by saying she wasn't a feminist 

...and because Posie Parker hadn't quite finished her Australian shitshow tour, at the rally in Canberra her heavies shoved Senator Lidia Thorpe to the ground in full view of cameras, so apparently “Let Women Speak” only applies to women who agree with Parker and those who don’t are on Parker’s list of people to be annihilated

...but because Posie Parker thought her antipodean tour wasn't enough of a shitshow, so she decided to visit Auckland next...and not only did her attempt at staging a rally fail miserably and see her getting out of Dodge within fifteen minutes when she was told to do one while coated in a thin layer of tomato soup, she not only fled Auckland but fled the whole of New Zealand on the first available flight

Billionaire manchild Elon Musk continues his quest for Employer of the Year by responding to Haraldur Þorleifsson’s tweet asking if he had been fired by Twitter or not, as he had no other means to contact Musk, by mocking him for the LULZ and then trying to claim he wasn't as disabled as he claimed in order to work from home because he was posting tweets when he should be working (an irony not lost on non-Musk simps) - which isn't a good look due to  Þorleifsson living with muscular dystrophy and having to use a wheelchair for twenty years, and that's before Twitter’s lawyers clearly informed Musk that  Þorleifsson had a $100m termination clause in his contract, at which point Musk very quickly backed down and rehired him

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk had the genius idea of announcing that, from April 1st, all legacy verified accounts would lose their verified status so if you wanted that blue tick you had to pay for it, while also announcing that the For You tab (aka the tab with all the shite Musk’s algorithm is shoving into your feed, starting with Musk’s tweets) would only be available for the $8 gang

It didn't take long for Michael Knowles to go from saying that he wasn't calling for genocide of the trans community to saying fuck it, he wants the trans community eradicated and salt spread on the earth to prevent any trans community growing in its place, did it?

Because it's been a while since proven liar Boris Johnson did something self-centred and self-serving, proven liar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson suggested putting his father’s name forward for a knighthood, which technically means Caligula is owed an apology as making his horse Consul is a marginally less insane move

...and then Fiona Bruce had the most logical response to a Question Time panellist bringing up Stanley Johnson breaking his wife’s nose once by cutting the panellist off and saying he only did it once - which not only fucked up the BBC’s claims of impartiality but also trustworthiness, given he’s been accused of beating women multiple times.  By the way, this was on the episode which aired on International Women’s Day.  Funnily enough, she soon had to give up her ambassador role with domestic abuse charity Refuge

...but apparently Fiona Bruce is the victim in all of this, definitely not the woman whose nose was broken in a domestic abuse incident which she handwaved away while pretending the various other incidents didn't happen, it was social media's fault she had to give up her role with refuge and definitely not her giving a one-sided version of events that was also factually incorrect

Unifying force Keir Starmer once again proved his dedication to HIS party by allowing Mike Gapes back into the Labour party.  Yes, that is the same Mike Gapes whose name is all over the Labour Leaks we’re supposed to pretend doesn't exist, who stood against Labour as an Independent Change For Change Group candidate in 2019 so should be disqualified as a potential MP by the party’s own rules, and voted against the customs union proposals in Commons before trying to say Brexit was Labour's fault 

...and that's before the minor issue of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party not only giving ‘Nam flashbacks to Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats, but also being revealed to have ignored the findings of the Forde Report, a report which he commissioned, because the findings didn't say “Corbyn Bad Man” as he hoped - which the BBC also weren't happy with, hence they asked Martin Forde to remove criticism of the corporation from the report - which led to Martin Forde having to publicly state that Labour had refused to act upon the recommendations of his report

...and then the excuse Keir Starmer’s Labour Party barring Jeremy Corbyn from standing as an Labour MP at the next election truly beggared belief, as their entire argument is he lost the 2019 election as Labour leader - which begs the question why they aren't trying to shove Ed Miliband out the door given he lost the 2015 election as leader and saw the Scottish vote practically wiped out

Chocolate teapot Ofcom stated that there is a perfectly valid reason why they will not act when Tory MPs use their bully pulpit on GB News to spread outright lies which just so happens to benefit the Tory party, and that perfectly valid reason is that GB News is not a news channel.  In spite having the word “News” in their name.  And their channel slogan is “Britain’s News Channel”.  And their YouTube channel and Instagram profile saying they provide “news, opinion & debate for all the UK”.  Don't suppose the Advertising Standards Authority fancy stepping in?

Walking chaff Lee Anderson continues to spew out increasingly batshit attempts at distraction that sound uncannily like they were generated by a Daily Mail AI bot, be it claiming that a definitely very real family who use the food bank in his constituency are regularly seen at McDonalds, or saying how he agrees with people who throw bottles at hotels housing migrants, or the age-old “My dad fought the Nazis and I support sinking migrant boats” chestnut.  So, of course, it was inevitable he would wind up as a GB News host by month's end

There’s something quite pathetic about proven liar Boris Johnson trying to suggest that the reason he misled parliament was because his advisors neglected to tell him not to mislead parliament, which has a remarkable amount of “One of the bigger boys told me to do it, sir” energy to it

Minister for Women Kemi Badenoch showed her level of aptitude to be Minister of Women by dismissing a pilot scheme on menopausal leave as “left-wing”, because apparently the menopause is a symptom of that woke mind virus we’ve been hearing so much about

Noted murderer Amanda Knox is once again doing the thing where, if something is trending on Twitter about studying abroad, she pops up with the exact same “Well I had a bad time studying abroad, tee hee” joke.  Yes, Amanda, as we all know the true victim of you murdering Meredith Kircher while studying abroad was Amanda Knox

This month it was Peter Hitchen who decided to try the “hiTtLUh wuZ a sOshULiSt” line of argument in a particularly demented Mail article.  As in, demented even for the Daily Mail’s output

...so demented that Petronella Wyatt came rushing to Hitchen’s defence agreeing with every spittle-encrusted word of it, as Wyatt continued to make aggressive moves into the void left by Isabel Oakeshott’s sudden decrease is dreadful takes by reactionary right-wing hacks, as if Alison Pearson, Dan Hodges and Julia Hartley-Brewer weren't already long established in that space

So has Bethany Mandel worked out what the word “woke” means yet, or is she going to need yet more press and TV interviews where she whines about her career being sabotaged by anything other her public demonstration that she has no clue what the words she throws around like confetti at a particularly dreary wedding and turned into a corn cob in front of everybody's eyes?

Of course Kari Lake is still banging on about how the Arizona gubernatorial election which she lost was rigged.  What else is she going to do?  Get a real job?

The boneheads at Turning Point UK really excelled themselves this time, organising a protest against a drag show outside of a pub which wasn't staging one, as it had been cancelled months before Turning Point even got wind of it

...and yes, before you ask, it wasn't long before Lawrence Fox was also jumping on that grift in the vain hope that somebody might remember he’s alive

Cretin’s idea of an intellectual Jordan Peterson posted a photo of milking fetish porn and tried to pass it off as evidence of China's sinister means of repopulation.  There is literally nothing I can add to that sentence, is there? 

Self-appointed racism czar David Baddiel showed what an authority he is on the subject by saying that fascism and socialism are the same thing because Nazi posters from the 1930s look similar to communist posters from the 1930s.  The fact that posters by the British and American governments of the 1930s also look similar to them, as do advertisements for soup or baked beans, appear to have gone over his head

Somebody should tell Ben Shapiro that, yes, a school lunch is a solution to child hunger.  Eating at least one meal a day tends to do that

Past it shouter at clouds Jim Cornette really pushed the boat out to appeal to his incel fanbase, responding to Riho deactivating her Twitter because Cornette-inspired incels kept making creepy comments about her by going on some completely demented rant where he effectively called Hana Kimura “weak” - yes, that would be the Hana Kimura who committed suicide after a cyberbullying campaign against her - as an excuse to rant and rave about Riho to the sealioning of his incel fanbase

I would ask Danny Lemoi how that course of invermectin is working out for him, but I would need to hold a séance to do so due to Lemoi dying as a direct result of taking daily doses of invermectin, which I suppose got him before the course of homegrown cyanide he was suggesting to his followers

With WrestleMania Weekend in full effect it was Rick Steiner who got the worst headlines of the weekend after yelling a bunch of transphobic insults at Gisele Shaw, because apparently being seen as the (marginally) less abrasive Steiner Brother for decades stuck in his craw

Nepo baby you will never hear about again Alfie Brown probably needs more material than “All Corbynites are antisemites, LOL”...oh wait, he does have a lot more material, mainly where he's throwing out racial slurs or doing routines about how he’d have sex with a 14 year old girl if it wasn't illegal, which reflected really well on both David Baddiel and Rachel Riley when when they were only too happy to gleefully retweet Brown's comments in “solidarity”.  LOL...

Particularly bad look from James Stephanie Sterling where they sacked their longtime editor Justin McDaniel and tried to frame them as emotionally and financially abusive - only for McDaniel to issue a statement saying that was complete bollocks, and that Sterling was blurring the line between being a friend and an employer to ask McDaniel to move across state lines at one point, before trashing McDaniels’ reputation when a line was drawn - and further didn't help things by acting as if the situation wasn't happening, behaviour Sterling has (rightly) criticised numerous game devs of for years, and then thought making an oblique reference to not apologising as a joke for not liking Kid Icarus Uprising was a good idea

It says a lot that the porn bots did a better job of fixing the problem with porn bots than Tumblr ever managed - even if that job is mainly getting dozens of follows from blank accounts instead of more obviously porn botty ones

Congratulations to Gwyneth Paltrow for her utterly asinine assertion that you can't get skin cancer from sunbathing as the sun is natural and, therefore, not harmful.  Thanks to you sterling efforts, anybody whose uses arsenic as a poison now has the perfect defence of “Arsenic can't be harmful, it's natural”

Remember how, just a month ago, GB News attempted to insert a clause in Mark Steyn’s contract making him personally liable for any Ofcom fines incurred by him blurting out yet more Covid truther gibberish on the air?  Well, it appears that GB News forgot that little detail when they were hit with an Ofcom fine for Mark Steyn blurting out Covid truther gibberish on air and the channel's response was to issue a statement claiming they were disappointed with the decision

And finally, when not busy laundering $8m worth of Russian cash through Truth Social, is Donald Trump spectacularly losing his shit with an ALL CAPS RANT where, when not dogwhistling about George Soros, once again said the 2020 election was “STOLLEN” like the fruitcake he is.  Has anyone actually taken the time to show him that Downfall clip?  He might need to watch it soon, to take his mind off that whole getting "INDICATED” thing...

[mithliya]

thepublica is an unreliable far-right source started by a far-right white man and a right-wing white woman.

even according to the sources they've provided in their article, these 16 year olds HAVE been sentenced. they've just been sentenced the way rapists of their age tend to get sentenced in sweden. meaning: no prison. because people between the ages of 15 and 18 can only be sentenced to youth care & institutional youth care.

3. this means that despite racist & xenophobic fearmongering from far-right sources, this is not relevant to them being "migrants".

4. this also means there isn't some secret hidden "migrant men" supremacy. white boys at the age of 16 would get sentenced similarly, maybe even more leniently, except the far-right media of course would not report it because they only care about rape when its committed by men of colour.

5. therefore the issue is the system. not some hidden brown immigrant privilege in europe.

6. the maximum rape sentence for ADULT rapists is around 6 years. the minimum is 2 years. minors are sentenced more leniently.

i think its very possible to discuss the threat boys of every race are without making it about their race and its pretty sad to see how normalised far-right xenophobic and racist fear-mongering is on radblr that none of you are looking at these sources with a critical lens. this rhetoric of the danger of migrants doesn't just stop at men btw, it's used to demonise & harm woc too. the far-right doesn't care about women, they just hate poc & immigrants

My heart breaks for young girl, there is no safety for women even in their countries because of men like them. Their sentence is a joke. Physically and mentally hurting a women is just couple months of jail which they will just be using tax payers money. They should be deported.

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Peak uncertainty: This is what covid might do to our politics

By Chaminda Jayanetti

Just because something should happen, doesn't mean it will.

Many articles speculating on how Britain will look different after coronavirus mistake what the writer thinks should happen with what probably will, trusting in the logic of the moment when politics often obeys anything but.

Others focus on the party political fallout, which is the most unpredictable aspect of all. Coronavirus may determine the next election - or it may play no role in it at all.

But to really get an idea of how Britain could look on the other side, we need to get away from the big picture discussion and dig deep into policy areas.

Who cares?

The centrality of the NHS is now guaranteed no matter who is in charge. The Tories had already pledged increased funding, and the need for spare capacity in the event of pandemics may force a rethink of service redesigns and efficiency measures that aimed to minimise 'waste'.

Bigger questions surround the adult care system. No-one can now ignore the funding cuts and staff shortages that have left the care sector so depleted. If elderly and disabled people find themselves dying untreated in care homes in large numbers, this might - and should - become a point of national shame over the coming weeks.

The Tories' direction of travel is towards a social insurance system, whereby people pay in to a fund during their working lives that gives them access to care provision when they need it. But those who are retired or have lifelong care needs won't be able to pay into an insurance scheme before receiving care. These immediate care needs will need direct public funding, not long-term insurance.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn took a different tack: universal free personal care for the over-65s, with an ambition to extend this to all working age adults. This is simpler and more inclusive than our current means tested mess, but it doesn't come cheap: Labour's manifesto estimated the cost as £11bn a year by 2023/24.

Keir Starmer will be under pressure from some to stick with their existing policy, and from others to engage with social insurance proposals. Keeping Labour MPs united behind whatever strategy he adopts won't be easy.

But it's plausible the Tories will also be pulled in another direction - towards voluntarism. The party's social and fiscal conservatives - uneasy bedfellows in recent years - could use the increased community cooperation seen amid the pandemic as evidence that volunteers and family members can take on more of the care burden, while still improving pay and conditions for care staff.

Expect to see rhetoric that the pandemic has 'unleashed' Britain's 'community spirit', which should be 'channelled' after the crisis by relying on family and neighbours to 'look in' on people in need - the soft-soap version of women doing unpaid care work in lieu of public services. The current trend in care provision is towards making use of what 'assets' people already have, including friends and family - an approach that can be used for good or ill. The temptation for the government to lean on unpaid volunteers instead of the taxpayer is not hard to imagine.

The care system was the biggest public service challenge facing the government before coronavirus. Now that's been magnified tenfold. It could become one of the big battlegrounds of post-pandemic politics, between competing visions of society based on universalism, managed markets, and voluntarism.

Bob Crow was right

Before his death in 2014, Bob Crow was one of the most demonised figures in Britain. His readiness to threaten to shut down rail networks as head of the RMT union made him a bête noire for commuters, causing considerable disruption.

Crow was a rarity in post-Thatcher Britain - a union leader who was ready to use strike action as a sword, not just a shield. Whereas most unions only went on strike in defence of existing jobs, pay and conditions, Crow levered the criticality of the role of his members to transform their economic position.

He was accused of holding passengers and politicians to ransom, but his argument was a simple one: the disruption caused by his members going on strike showed how important their role was, and they should be paid more - much more - to reflect this.

It has taken the worst pandemic in more than a century for many people to realise this point. Pay does not necessarily reflect the importance of a worker's role - in fact, very often it does nothing of the sort. Pay reflects many factors: supply and demand of labour, required skills and levels of education, the strength or weakness of collective bargaining, the resources of the employer, and the profit-making productivity of the role. The social necessity of the role comes below pretty much all of them.

There may well be a post-pandemic cross-party consensus for a higher minimum wage and more protection from exploitation - action on zero hours contracts, for example - to protect low-paid workers from poverty.

But Crow didn't want his members to be low paid at all. He wanted to transform their economic station. We keep hearing about essential workers in cleaning, portering, social care and customer service. Will this be rewarded with more middle class pay and conditions?

There are reasons to be doubtful. There will likely be broad acceptance of the importance of care workers, who are a very visible part of the fight against coronavirus. But that does not mean politicians will be ready to fork out for transformative pay rises. Will Starmer accept billions of pounds of extra spending on top of the £11bn Labour has already earmarked for social care, let alone the Tories?

And where is the industrial, political or public pressure going to come from to secure such pay rises for the often migrant workers in portering and cleaning? We don't want to accept it, but many workers on middle incomes would sneer at the idea of porters and cleaners being paid the same as them.

The safety net

The benefit system has taken a battering over the last decade. Now the economic shutdown is driving more than a million people to seek refuge in the rubble left behind.

The government has responded by performing emergency repairs -  raising benefit payments and scrapping job search requirements in a desperate attempt to stop the newly unemployed middle classes struggling in the way the unemployed poor were expected to.

Things could play out from here in a number of ways. If Universal Credit functions to a level the government can live with, they will declare the system a success, leaving Starmer in a politically difficult position. Will he keep Labour's pledge to axe what will have become an established system, or switch to reforming it, thus angering his left flank. Labour may try and build a minimum income guarantee using the framework of this system. Or they may 'abolish' Universal Credit by tweaking it and changing its name.

If Universal Credit simply topples over - unable to process claims properly, or pay out the right sums of money - the government might be forced to give up its costly and chaotic flagship scheme.

What then? Labour would push for a more generous system with far fewer conditions and sanctions. The Tories would be truly hamstrung, having in this scenario wasted a decade on a failed system.

Public opinion would not necessarily favour a more generous, less judgemental approach. The declared end of the pandemic, and the gradual return to some kind of economic normality, would likely bring back demands that the unemployed get back to work, and that they be cattle-prodded into doing so. Laid off workers do not carry the same image as health and care workers in this pandemic - and doubtless right wing ideologues will start shouting about the deficit the first chance they get.

But if the economic recovery is insipid, with little job creation, enduring high unemployment, and a stop-start lockdown as the virus returns, both parties could be drawn to more universal systems - a minimum income guarantee set at a liveable level, or even a Universal Basic Income.

The government toyed with introducing UBI last month, but it would face wide opposition from Tory MPs unhappy at its cost. Claire Ainsley, who is expected to be unveiled as Starmer's policy chief, is also a sceptic. It is expensive, blunt and largely untested. But if jobs don't reappear as the pandemic passes, the 'on yer bike' mentality that has underpinned the benefit system for decades will itself be left redundant.

A costly affair

Britain is running up huge deficits as sectors of the economy grind to a halt. How will all this be paid for? Starmer is calling for higher taxes on the rich, but that alone is unlikely to be sufficient, especially if corporate profits remain depressed for years. Everyone is going to have to pay more.

Could the Tories go in for funding cuts? Perhaps - but likely not at the scale we've seen. The big targets after 2010 were local government and welfare. The former can't be cut further without it collapsing. The Tories may winnow away at the latter. Foreign aid could take a hit. But the party would have to tear up its electoral strategy of higher spending on schools, hospitals and police to recreate full-blown Osbornomics.

Labour, and possibly even the Tories, may look to wealth taxes to help bring down the deficit. Taxing people's wealth would be a major shift in Britain's approach, and could finally tackle one of the key sources of economic inequality.

But there's a problem. The richest hold most of their wealth as financial assets, meaning they can easily move it to offshore tax havens. Fixed assets, like houses, tend to benefit the middle classes. Taxing property wealth could hit Tory homeowners while barely affecting hedge fund billionaires. Targeting the latter would require a Tory government to clamp down hard on tax havens.

Conservative MPs are likely to be split on middle class tax rises and spending cuts. If the Tories go after tax havens and impose a progressive wealth tax, it would be one of the most dramatic changes the pandemic brings about. The curtailment of the free movement of capital would be a paradigm-shifting development, and an extraordinary one for a Conservative government.

What does need to happen is for governments to spend on preventative services - such as social care - in the knowledge that this will cut required spending down the line. Only when that happens will Britain's fiscal politics finally grow up.

But on a variety of fronts, the British are going to have to decide what it is we are willing to pay for. If we want functioning public services and low deficits, we'll have to pay more tax. If we want properly paid frontline public servants, we'll have to pay more tax still. If we want to end poverty pay, we may have to pay more for goods. If we want to protect the high street, or British producers, we may have to pay more in digital sales taxes or import tariffs.

Cakeism has run out of road.

The known unknowns

If Britain does head down the path of higher taxes, more generous benefits and greater public provision, our politics and economy will start to look more European - either universalist northern European, or rather more patriarchal southern European.

But the irony is, we'll be firmly outside Europe. Nothing that is happening right now will be fostering a European identity among voters. And if the government decides to take radical action on the economy, that could mean Britain fundamentally diverges from EU rules, keeping us on a separate path into the future.

All this is predicated on coronavirus being conclusively 'defeated', and a one-off in its mortality, geographical spread and disruption. Those are the prerequisites for things eventually returning to some recognisable norm.

If, however, pandemics of this scale become even semi-regular, shutting down national economies for months at a time, everything changes. Rents become unpayable, debts unaffordable, jobs untenable, the economy itself unsustainable. When Rupert Harrison, George Osborne's former adviser, is openly suggesting debt forgiveness, we are in very new territory.

Most people will want life to get back to normal as soon as possible. But if normal never comes, anything goes. And even the most radical ideas we've discussed would be on the moderate end of what could happen then.

[crhlabour]

Tweeted

RT @SteveBrooks13: #c4news "What would Labour do?" Stop demonising migrants, perhaps.

— Labour CRH (@CRHLabour) Apr 14, 2022

[xtruss]

For Trump and Modi, Ethnic Purity Is The Purpose of Power

— Jason Stanley | Guardian USA | Monday 24 February, 2020

The two strongmen favour immigration and citizenship policies designed to demonise minority groups

‘Trump leads an administration that seeks to return the US to the national state of Hitler’s adulation. In many respects, Modi’s India is further along this path.’

The US president, Donald Trump, has delighted a stadium of 125,000 cheering Indians in Gujarat by declaring: “America loves India. America respects India. And America will always be a faithful and loyal friend to the Indian people.” It might seem a discordant note from a president whose rule has been marked by a single-minded obsession with halting foreign immigration. But it’s an obsession he shares with his Indian counterpart, prime minister Narendra Modi, who stood on the stage alongside him.

The president has previously complained about immigration from “shithole countries” and suggested a policy that prefers migrants from “countries such as Norway”. And his administration has assiduously prioritised changes in immigration laws. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, called for a return to something like the 1924 Immigration Act, which banned immigration from Asia and severely restricted the entry of other people considered racially undesirable.

Stephen Miller, Sessions’ protege and Trump’s longest-serving senior adviser, was recently quoted as describing stopping migrants as “all I care about – this is my life”. Miller drafted one of the first executive orders signed by Trump, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry”, which banned immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries; a subsequent version, altered to tone down its too-obvious religious discrimination, has been approved by a 5-4 majority in a supreme court that features two new ultra-conservative Trump appointees. In January six countries, including four from Africa, were added to the list.

“Hitler was influenced by American ideology. His Nuremberg Laws made my father, born in Berlin, a second-class citizen”

In the early 20th century, the US deployed citizenship strategically to exclude non-whites and non-Christians, which impressed Hitler. In Part II of Mein Kampf, he decries the idea of a state in which “race and nationality” play no role in citizenship, proposing a “national state”: “Anything crazier and less thought-out than our present laws of state citizenship is hardly possible to conceive. But there is at least one state in which feeble attempts to achieve a better arrangement are apparent: the United States of America, where they absolutely forbid [the] naturalisation of certain defined races, and thus are making a modest start in the direction of something not unlike the conception of the national state.”

My wife’s great-grandfather Takayuki Yaokawa Sato was a fisherman by trade. At our family gatherings, we show an old American photo of him, with a fishing pole, proudly holding a large fish. Sato, a Japanese immigrant, married Grace Virginia Woods, a US citizen, in the early 20th century, when the country was gripped by fears of a “yellow peril” and the supreme court declared Asians ineligible for naturalisation. In concert with the 1907 Expatriation Act, which revoked citizenship to American women who married non-citizens, this deprived Woods of her citizenship. She only regained it upon her husband’s death.

US immigration policy was a source for Hitler’s “national state” vision. In September 1935, the German government realised this vision with the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited non-Aryans from marrying those of “German blood” and created a category of second-class citizenship for Jews. Here too, Hitler was influenced by American ideology, in particular the Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws. At the time, my Jewish father was a German citizen in Berlin, where he had been born in November 1932. On 15 September 1935, he became a second-class citizen.

Stripping minority groups of the state protection associated with full citizenship leaves them vulnerable to brutal treatment. In Hannah Arendt’s phrase from The Origins of Totalitarianism, citizenship is “the right to have rights”. The Nuremberg Laws coincided with the building of large detention centres – concentration camps – for those affected by them. The US Holocaust Museum describes a concentration camp as a zone where the legal norms of arrest and imprisonment do not apply.

The European-American concept of a national state had influence outside Europe. VD Savarkar, the Indian political theorist who ushered in Hindu nationalist ideology, was influenced by European ethno-nationalism. He took the Nazi treatment of German Jews to be a model for eventual Hindutva policy towards India’s Muslim residents. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a Hindu nationalist movement dating back to the mid-1920s, many of whose members venerated Savarkar. Senior leaders, such as MS Golwalkar, were influenced by Mussolini and Hitler. The Bharatiya Janata party, the political wing of RSS and now India’s ruling party, has begun to implement changes in citizenship laws that echo the Nuremberg Laws.

India’s new Citizenship Amendment Act allows for a fast-track to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants, thereby discriminating against Muslims. The proposed national register requires residents to prove their citizenship with documentation – which many in India lack. Together, these laws place Muslims without documentation in a quandary. Large detention centres are being built to house India’s Muslim residents who are declared ineligible for citizenship. Like the US immigration policy so admired by Hitler, these laws are a mask: they are designed to privilege Hindus in the citizenship laws of the world’s largest democracy.

Trump leads an administration that seeks to return the US to the national state of Hitler’s adulation. In many respects, Modi’s India is considerably further along this path. The student has become the teacher.

There is more to fascism than changing citizenship laws. Fascist movements seek one-party rule: over the courts, the police, the military and the press. They involve a cult of loyalty to a single leader and nostalgia for a mythic past when the nation was dominated by the privileged group. But the core of fascist ideology is realised in changing citizenship laws to privilege a single ethnic group. This is why we regard the Nuremberg Laws as a defining moment in German history, and the concentration camp as the defining Nazi institution.

History has been rightly horrified by the Nuremberg Laws and their consequences. Why, then, are so many countries going down this path?

Fascism thrives during moments of perceived crisis, which can be represented as a zero-sum battle for group survival. The climate crisis, already taking the form of water wars between Indian states, is an example.

The solution is international agreements, which recognise that we humans share similar fates – that our similarities far outweigh our differences. This liberalism is denounced as “globalism” by figures such as Trump, while liberals and leftists who defend India’s secular constitution are denounced as “anti-national” by the BJP and its acolytes. Trump’s triumphant visit to India demonstrates just how global ethno-nationalism, and its more violent sibling, fascism, has become.

• Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale and the author of How Fascism Works

[katiemcgrath]

Don't lose hope - the bad guys win when we lose hope. You are strong and good people are stronger than the evil that keeps doing this. We are united against hate and violence and there will be a way to get through this.

I’m done with hope. Time for action. Time to demand the government get shit done and get to the root of the problem. Time to tell the government that their plan to build “an extremist” prison wing where she’s going to put all the extremists together in one place is fucking stupid. Time to have better muslim representation on TV and better muslim role models so young people don’t grow up only seeing terrorists on TV. Time for newspaper to fucking stop. Time for them to stop calling refugees “migrants” and demonising asylum seekers. Stop creating fear and hate. It’s all propaganda for extremist groups - “oh look, see how much they care for you? they don’t.”. Time for there to be better education in mosques from influential Islamic scholars all over the country and the world. Not just condemnation but education. Time to stop radicalisation in our young before it begins. Time do fucking do something with humanity and not just idle threats and shit thrown at people but at the same time not just ignorance and platitude. Also time for the west to get their heads out of their arse, admit some fault and look at their foreign policy. 

It’s time for action. 

[wikiweb-blog]

If the EU wants to be the bastion of liberal democracy, it too must stop demonising refugees and migrants

European Union officials have not been shy to express condemnation of US President Donald Trump’s permanent ban on Syrian refugees, and temporary ban on all other refugees….

FULL ARTICLE

[hark1karan]

London: The chicken shop. A London institute. That's a fact. Love them or hate them. I used to eat from chicken shops all the time. Hands down the best one is Brixton Morleys. Now there are many reasons why there are so many chicken shops. The food is cheap, processed, easy to make and full of hormones (one of the reasons why I stopped eating meat). When you're hungry and on a budget they're very tempting. We've all been there (well some of us have). Now, I know it's healthier and cheaper to cook for the same price. Not everyone has access to this knowledge and are not aware of the health implications of eating at chicken shops. Hence why the Pengest Munch is not cool and never was (but rate him for his entrepreneurial skills). Chicken shops are also a symbol of the class divide. Well here in London anyway (this where I know I'll get attacked). Often run by "migrants" and frequented by ethnic minorities and the working classes. With the fetishisation of modern working class culture of London, via certain media outlets, it's now seen as cool to eat at chicken shops. But when has it been cool to be poor and eat fried chicken? In Tooting they've opened 'The Chicken Shop' a segregated space for the middles and young working professionals to eat organic fried chicken, away from the riffraff of the city. Where as in my area I have well off mortgage holders complaining about halal butchers and chicken shops. Yet they campaign for a Pizza Express and Nandos. And complain when a new KFC is going to open. After all this waffling, I'm saying that such spaces are being gentrified and demonised at the same time. To be later replaced by a superior alternative which excludes the poor. Hopefully this didn't come across bitter. It's an observation I've witnessed over the last 5 years or so. PHOTO: @hark1karan . . . . . #huaweip9 #huawei #fujifilm_id #igerslondon #cycling #exploreeverything #35mm #filmisnotdead #igworldclub #igmasters #streetdreamsmag #street_photo_club #illgrammers #shoot2kill #London #street_photo_club #streetphotography #streetleaks #streetphoto #kodak_photo #advertising #olympus #southLondon #urbanexploration #thisislondon #reflectiongram #croydon

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Putin’s moustache-twirling attack on liberalism

By Ian Dunt

It's like the bit at the end of the superhero movie where the villain explains the plot. The protagonist is chained up. The bad guy twirls his moustache and outlines how his genius plan led to this point. That's basically what Vladimir Putin did last night.

"The liberal idea", the Russian leader said, had "outlived its purpose". He attacked Angela Merkel for her decision to allow one million refugees into Germany and praised Donald Trump for his hardline policies on the American border, which are behind several recent deaths, including those of children.

"This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected. Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population."

Putin has always been at the heart of this historical moment. He's not the best villain, to be frank. We deserve better. Instead we got this middle-management type with the eyes of a wolf. But whichever way you look at global or domestic politics, it always has him at the centre. All roads lead to Putin. From anti-semite Viktor Orban's government in Hungary, to proto-fascist Matteo Salvini's government in Italy, to Neanderthal Donald Trump's government in the US, to Brexit, the tragic-comic little cousin.

It is useful that Putin puts a name to it, because we so rarely do. This is a war against liberalism. And that means it is a war against what liberalism stands for: Reason, individual freedom and the protection of minorities.

That attack is perpetual and system-wide. Look how reason is attacked: Fake news, the inability to assess the reliability of the information you see, the emergence of a political class with no concern about truth, which will say anything to get what it wants and is seemingly completely unfussed by whether someone points out it's wrong, the death of any sense of honour in the manner in which one discusses things in politics. The aim is to make it almost impossible to assess arguments. And once that is chiselled away, your ability to form independent judgements is fundamentally compromised. This has always been core to authoritarian agendas. It's why making Winston Smith say 2+2=5 is so important in 1984. Once you cannot reason independently, you must defer to a higher power.

But the great danger to liberalism comes, and has always come, by the attack on minorities. Those minorities change. Through modern history it has been Catholics, or gay men, or Jews, or Kossacks, or countless others. Now it is immigrants. Wherever you look - refugees in Italy, Latin Americans in the US, Polish plumbers in the UK - it is the same minority, with a local discriminatory flavour. The authoritarians know: the most effective way to defeat liberalism is to make it a culture war against the Other.

That process of demonising the outsider always has a two-way narrative. The narrative is internally inconsistent, but that does not stop it working. It says, first of all, that the outsider is supremely powerful and destroying the nation. And second, that they are disgusting subhuman animals unable to control their own urges, usually with a heavy emphasis on rape or sexual violence.

It's amazing that the human brain is weak enough to accept this narrative. It simply makes no sense. But it always does.

And so it is now. The idea of the immigrant and the elite is bound up together. Look at Putin's comment. Immigrants "kill, plunder and rape with impunity". They are animals. But to stand up for immigrants, or to identify with more than one country, or to travel freely, or to be an immigrant oneself, is to be an elitist, going against the wishes of the average joe, the working man.

Of course, the average joe, the working man, is just as much of a myth as the rest. People who don't fit the mould - ethnic minorities, students, nurses, progressives - are jettisoned from that classification because they're not useful to the argument, no matter what their income.

These are such old stories. They are the stories they always use to attack liberals and have used for hundreds of years. And that is what is happening here. A full-scale attack on the greatest system of thought the world has ever known, the one which, for all its faults, guarantees freedom for the individual, no matter what their identity, and fights the tyranny of the group.

It's useful that the villain of the piece has come out and done his little moustache-twirling monologue. It lays it right on the line. This is a conscious political war we are engaged in, fought by people who are quite aware of what they are doing.

[rightsinexile]

News on Countries of Asylum

Global

1.4 million refugees set to need urgent resettlement in 2020, says UNHCR

Africa

CAMEROON: Refugees from Central African Republic reluctant to return home

ERITREA: UNHCR appeals to Eritrea over refugee camp closure

KENYA: Unaccompanied and abandoned child refugees fostered by women at Dadaab

MOROCCO: Morocco rescues 242 migrants in Mediterranean

Americas

US and El Salvador sign asylum deal, but details vague

MEXICO: Trump’s ‘remain in Mexico’ policy exposes migrants to rape, kidnapping, and murder in dangerous border cities

UNITED STATES: 

Trump Administration prepares to replace in-person interpreters at first immigrant hearings

Refugees from Latin America and Africa languish in Mexico with persistent immigration restrictions under Trump Administration

Jurors refuse to convict activist Scott Daniel Warren facing 20 years for helping migrants

Trump is poised to sign radical agreement to send future asylum seekers to Guatemala

A new rule issued by the White House effectively prevents Latin Americans from claiming asylum at the southern border

Rights groups file lawsuits to stop Trump’s new asylum rule

Asylum seeker fights ICE in Tacoma immigration court

US and Guatemala sign deal on Central American asylum-seekers

US announces stricter asylum regulations

Federal court rejects the government’s second attempt to dismiss a lawsuit challenging its unlawful turnbacks of asylum seekers

Trump’s asylum policies — and the troops who enforce them — are breaking the law

ICE is detaining thousands of immigrants who have passed a test showing fear of persecution or torture

Asylum-seekers continue to be turned away from the US and sent to southern Mexico

Attorney General William Barr promotes immigration judges with high asylum denial rates

Asia

BANGLADESH: 

Thousands displaced as heavy rains batter fragile Rohingya camps

Former UN chief says Bangladesh cannot continue hosting Rohingya

Rohingya face floods and landslides

INDIA: Supreme Court will examine whether illegal immigrants can be considered for refugee status

INDONESIA: Refugee relocation rejected by residents of West Jakarta

SRI LANKA: 

Caught in Sri Lanka’s anti-Muslim backlash, evicted refugees search for safe homes

Sri Lanka's Muslims 'demonised' after Easter bombings

TAIWAN: Taiwan open to granting Hong Kong protesters asylum

TAJIKISTAN: Tajikistan regime targeting families of political activists

Europe

Fourteen EU states agree to Franco-German 'solidarity mechanism' for migrants

Mediterranean gets new NGO migrant rescue ship

EU interior ministers fail to find compromise on Mediterranean refugee rescue

EU to move evacuated migrants from Italy; 350 still at sea

GERMANY: Honduran asylum seekers making claims in Germany

GREECE: Cruise ship rescues 111 migrants off Greek coast

HUNGARY: EU takes Hungary to court over asylum helper law

ITALY: Italy blocks own coast guard vessel with migrants on board

NORWAY: Ex-Minister guilty of sexually abusing asylum seekers

UNITED KINGDOM: 

Hundreds of children wait years for asylum decisions

Serco begins asylum seeker lock-change evictions in Glasgow

Locked-out asylum seeker allowed to return to Home Office lodgings

Middle East

TURKEY: Turkish requiring Syrians living illegally in Istanbul to leave the city by 20 August or face expulsion

[hviral]

Spain to take some migrants on Open Arms ship, says Italy

Spain has offered to take some of around 150 migrants on a rescue ship that has been blocked from docking in Italy, Rome authorities said on Thursday, signaling a possible end to a standoff that has fueled infighting in the coalition government.

The vessel was in Italian territorial waters on Thursday, said a spokeswoman for its operator, Spanish charity Proactiva Open Arms. Its passengers have been in limbo since they were picked up in the Mediterranean in early August.

Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini had refused to allow them to disembark, triggering the latest of a number of flashpoints over immigration between European governments since he launched a clampdown on refugee arrivals by sea after taking office in June 2018 .

But a Rome administrative court ruled on Wednesday that the vessel, also called Open Arms, should be allowed to enter Italian territorial waters.

The office of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Thursday that Spain had expressed willingness to take some of the migrants once they had disembarked.

Salvini’s League and its coalition partner, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, were already in open warfare after Salvini said last week the alliance had become unworkable and called for elections.

Saying he would “never be an accomplice to human traffickers,” Salvini issued an emergency order to prevent Open Arms arriving at the Italian island of Lampedusa, but the defense minister, who is from 5-Star, has refused to counter-sign it.

Openly challenging the League leader, who has so far dictated Italy’s immigration policy, Elisabetta Trenta said defying the court was illegal and added that “politics must not lose its humanity.”

Hollywood star Richard Gere visited the Open Arms last week and urged the Italian government to stop “demonising people” and allow the boat to disembark.

The Spanish government declined to comment, but daily El Pais said three unnamed government sources had confirmed Madrid’s willingness to take in some of the migrants.

The newspaper said the exact number that Spain would take had yet to be determined, under a broader deal in which France, Germany and others would also take part.

The charity’s spokeswoman said the ship was anchored five miles (eight km) off Lampedusa.

Open Arms’ founder Oscar Camps told reporters on Wednesday that the NGO would request medical evacuation for all those on board once the vessel was in Italian waters.

The post Spain to take some migrants on Open Arms ship, says Italy appeared first on HviRAL.

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[atomicnumber76]

Richard Gere and Matteo Salvini clash over migrant crisis

Richard Gere and Matteo Salvini clash over migrant crisis

Row follows US actor urging Italian government to ‘stop demonising asylum seekers’

Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, has clashed with Richard Gere over the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, suggesting the Hollywood star should house himself those stranded on rescue ships after the US actor urged the Italian government to “stop demonising asylum seekers”.

Gere who is…