Category Archives: United Nations

Priti Patel told to stop lying about refugees by UN agency

Hate face: would you trust Priti Patel with a duty of care over any human beings at all?

Priti Patel should stop lying that refugees from foreign countries arriving in the UK are merely “economic migrants” looking for  a bit of easy money.

That’s the gist of a report by the United Nations’ refugee agency:

The United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) told the Guardian that those travelling by small boat to the UK should be considered to be asylum seekers or refugees, and not migrants.

“Based on currently available Home Office data, UNHCR considers that a clear majority of those recently arriving to the United Kingdom by boat are likely to be refugees. Refugees and asylum seekers are not, and should not be described as, ‘migrants’,” the spokesperson told the Guardian.

“Access to asylum should never be contingent on mode of arrival or nationality. Equally, the only way to establish whether people are refugees is through a fair and efficient determination of their claims, for which the UK has a clear responsibility.”

The intervention comes as the Home Office prepares to deport the first set of people to Rwanda, after Patel announced her intention to emulate a failed Israeli plan to do the same that was wound up a few years ago.

The policy is explicitly focused on people who arrive via so-called “irregular” routes, such as in small boats across the Channel or hidden in lorries.

Here’s the part of the Home Office statement referring to this (that isn’t waffle):

“Only those with inadmissible asylum claims who have made dangerous, unnecessary and illegal journeys will be relocated and to suggest otherwise is wrong.”

Inadmissible in what way?

Because they arrived by an “irregular” route? Who defines what is an “unnecessary” journey and what are their criteria?

Are they as described by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees? If so, is the UK breaking UN rules again, as it did with sick and disabled benefit claimants?

And will the Tory government get away with it yet again, after the UN proved utterly toothless in effecting change?

Source: Clear majority of people crossing Channel are refugees, says UNHCR

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UN report shows irreversible damage to the planet. Why aren’t polluters being jailed?

Pollution: did your home suffer flooding last year? Here’s the reason. And I bet you haven’t done anything about it, have you?

A landmark United Nations report has demonstrated that the planet where we live – Earth – has suffered irreversible damage to its ecosystem because of pollution by big business moguls.

But it does not propose any punishments for those people that would deter them, so they will keep right on with it.

Here in the UK, a group of right-wing politicians has rebranded itself specifically to fight against efforts to clean up industry, we’re told.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that

the warming we’ve experienced to date has made changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.

The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or centuries.

It predicts a rise in sea levels that will threaten millions of people living in coastal areas with flooding by the year 2100.

But the behaviour of some UK members of Parliament shows that the people who can stop this vandalism of paradise simply don’t care.

They never wanted poor people to have fresh air and clean water anyway.

It seems the former European Research Group (ERG) of far-right Tory MPs (including Jacob Rees-Mogg, if memory serves) has undergone a metamorphosis.

After briefly becoming the Covid Recovery Group, an Orwellian perversion of the words by an organisation that wanted to do as little to fight the virus as possible, it now appears to have become the Climate Action Group – determined to prevent government from halting climate change.

As Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK states,

The plan is to argue that climate science is wrong, and we can’t afford it anyway.

Destroying the economy and national health is not enough, the aim is to trash the planet as well.

He continues:

We have due warning that the right wing are lining up to demand the right to take us to oblivion.

This one is the fight for survival, and we have to win it.

It will be a particularly hard fight, when one notes that the IPCC report does not even suggest penalties for polluters.

Given that the damage they have done is said to be irreversible – that is, there is no going back – it seems to me that those responsible should receive irreversible punishments.

I would suggest that they be removed from their jobs and banned from any executive positions in any firm globally, that their life savings should be confiscated and used to fund initiatives to de-pollute the planet, and that they should face imprisonment for varying terms, depending on the harm that has been done on their watch.

I would also suggest that their firms should be ordered to pay fines for the damage they cause – on an ongoing basis, so each year they would have to fund measures to roll back this damage, according to the amount of damage done. If the firms were to be dissolved, then all of their assets should be taken for this purpose.

Nothing like that has been suggested but it is what is needed. And it won’t happen unless you demand it.

Ah, but you’re afraid of taking part in this, aren’t you?

I only have to look at the response to This Site’s article yesterday to see the evidence of that.

I warned that people are “switching off – not just their TVs and radios, but their minds. They can’t face it. They want somebody else to come along and make it better.

“But nobody will. What these people are really doing is handing the planet over to people like Alok Sharma” who will allow the polluters to carry on polluting if they think they can make a farthing out of it.

I stated: “If you run away and hide from it because you’re afraid that bad things will happen to you in the short term, then just you remember – always – that you are making sure that bad things will happen to you in the long term.

“And that future is accelerating towards you at a terrifying pace.”

And I asked: “Are you really such a craven coward? If you do nothing, then you are contributing to it. You are supporting it. You are saying you want it.”

At the time of writing, that article has been read just 246 times. It is the least-read piece I have written this month.

And that’s because people like you simply don’t want to have to get their hands dirty, fighting to live in a clean world.

Well, as I implied yesterday: if you don’t do anything for it, you won’t get it – and that will be because you don’t want it.

If you do want to live in a clean world, you could start by writing to your MP, to Alok Sharma (as he is hosting the climate summit COP-26 in November) and possibly even to our daft prime minister Boris Johnson.

You could say that you have read the findings of the IPCC report and are horrified, that you don’t believe any businessperson will stop the pollution that is poisoning the planet – and therefore all of us – without sanctions.

And you could put forward the penalties I have proposed, above, as starting-points.

That is something you could do.

If you had any guts at all.

Source: The next fight with the right wing is for planetary survival

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United Nations warns UK could be breaking international law over cladding

The cladding at Grenfell Tower explained: The materials used were flammable – not flame-resistant.

What do you think the Conservative government will do about this, considering it is now three years since the Grenfell disaster and the Tories haven’t lifted a finger to replace flammable cladding on thousands of other tower blocks?

This Writer is willing to bet we’ll hear a load of flannel about the UN not doing its job properly – or misinterpreting its role in some way, and some minister – probably Robert Jenrick – will make some sabre-rattling suggestion that it should keep its foreign nose out.

You know how it would be – like the Tories did when the UN accused this country of institutional abuse of people with disabilities.

The last thing the Tories want to do is spend money on poor people who are living in firetraps.

The UN has warned Britain that its failure to strip combustible cladding from high-rise buildings containing tens of thousands homes may be a breach of international law.

The global body is demanding answers about the UK government’s delayed programme to fix hundreds of blocks wrapped in flammable panels and with other fire safety problems.

Leilani Farha, the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing, wrote to the government to express “serious concern about allegations of multiple violations of the human right to adequate housing, of which safety is a key component – contrary to international human rights law”.

Source: UK could be breaking international law over cladding, says UN | Society | The Guardian

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UN poverty expert condemns UK coronavirus response as ‘utterly hypocritical’

Philip Alston: he warned us all about the Tories before but they were voted back in because people didn’t listen.

How else would you describe the way the UK’s Tory government threw away austerity the instant the well-being of the rich was threatened?

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, made a good point when he pointed out that the harm caused by austerity policies of the last 10 years cannot be undone – but the policy itself was reversed the instant it seemed likely to harm the rich.

He told The Guardian:

“My thoughts of course hark back to the sense of how utterly hypocritical it is now to abandon ‘austerity’ with such alacrity, after all the harm and misery caused to individuals and the fatal weakening of the community’s capacity to cope and respond over the past 10 years.

“And of course, many of the worst and most damaging aspects of ‘austerity’ cannot and will not be undone. The damage caused to community cohesion and to the social infrastructure are likely to prove permanent.

He said that globally “the most vulnerable have been short-changed or excluded” by official responses to the disease:

“The policies of many states reflect a social Darwinism philosophy that prioritises the economic interests of the wealthiest while doing little for those who are hard at work providing essential services or unable to support themselves.

“Governments have shut down entire countries without making even minimal efforts to ensure people can get by.”

The Tories would undoubtedly argue that they have indeed made efforts to ensure people can get by… but some would argue that those efforts have indeed been minimal.

Across the UK, people who claimed Universal Credit because their income dried up in the lockdown have found their five-week wait for benefit cash has culminated in a cheque for no money at all.

Others have been unable to claim the benefit because they don’t meet the government’s criteria.

And of course Boris Johnson won’t agree to a Universal Basic Income that will help everybody – and will be cheaper to administer than UC. Why? Because he likes to keep people poor and – if possible – push them into debt.

Look at the other coronavirus-related policies and you’ll find that most of them aren’t working – at least, not the way we were led to expect.

And now there’s huge pressure to sway public opinion in favour of lifting the lockdown so we can all go back to work, making profits for the rich again – before their income is harmed as that of the poor has been.

Put it altogether and it seems Mr Alston has a very good point.

Source: UK coronavirus response utterly hypocritical, says UN poverty expert | Politics | The Guardian

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UN poverty rapporteur’s condemnation of the Conservatives must be read

Philip Alston: He came to his conclusions by listening to people affected by Conservative policies on the poor, sick and disabled. Tories implemented those policies by ignoring the very same people – and now they are complaining because Mr Alston hasn’t done the same.

Sometimes important information drops off the news agenda because crafty operators do what they can to obscure it.

Sometimes there’s just so much going on that it is ignored.

In this case, with international controversy over an Iranian oil tanker and a British ambassador to the US, and domestic fuss over the pumped-up Labour anti-Semitism claims and the Tory leadership election, the latter seems possible (for a change).

But Philip Alston’s anger about the way the Tories have sidelined his report on the way their austerity policies (carried through at first with the complicity of the Liberal Democrats, let’s not forget), is well worth bringing back to public attention.

In his Independent article (link below) he writes [boldings mine]:

“In one of the world’s richest countries, I found 14 million people living in poverty, rising infant mortality rates, falling life expectancy for some groups, foodbanks springing up everywhere, rising homelessness, and overloaded and struggling schools and police services.

“Most of these problems are the direct result of government policies.

“The government’s response so far has consisted of three strategies. The first is denial. The report is “barely believable”, they say. In other words, it’s a load of rubbish. A pity then that a senior official of the Department of Work and Pensions subsequently told a House of Commons committee that the report was “factually correct”.

“The second strategy is distraction. Rather than acknowledge the extent of poverty, inequality, unaffordable housing, or hunger, the government pointed to a “UN report” that supposedly shows “the UK is one of the happiest places in the world to live”… Acknowledging that many people in the UK are happy and that employment levels are at a record high does not refute the fact that too many are facing severe hardship.

“Third, attack the messenger. The government claimed the report was insufficiently researched, “based on a tiny period of time spent here”. But it knows that my team and I spent months preparing for this visit, reviewing countless existing reports, making more than 100 advance consultations, and reviewing more than 300 submissions.

“If there is any good news, it is that these policies could still be reversed with huge savings in terms of economic and social trauma and much greater productivity in the future.

“All that is needed is a vision to make all Britons, not just the wealthy, better off, and to commit to minimum levels of social justice for all.”

That won’t happen under the Conservatives, but Labour’s policies are specifically geared to do exactly what Mr Alston suggests.

Perhaps that is the reason the trumped-up controversy over anti-Semitism has been hyped beyond credibility – to make Labour seem an inappropriate choice.

There is nothing new in this. It shows that, as usual, the political debate is between the easily-led and those who think for themselves.

I know where Vox Political readers stand in that debate, but it is certainly time we all turned to our friends and colleagues and said:

“I think for myself on this. What about you?”

Source: I proved that austerity destroys lives and all the government has done is try to discredit me | The Independent

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The UN says austerity has fuelled UK racial inequality. Will the Tories call THIS a lie, too?

Prepare for a new outbreak of outrage against a United Nations rapporteur.

The Tory government likes to pour scorn on UN reports, and I reckon this will be no different.

Note that Tendayi Achiume managed all her research in 11 days. The Tories pilloried Phillip Alston, the poverty rapporteur, for carrying out his own research in less than two weeks, and there’s no reason this would be different.

Of course, it turned out that the facts on which Mr Alston based his findings were accurate and the Tories rubbished his report for political reasons.

Now Ms Achiume is quoting research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission estimating that by 2022 black households will have seen a 5five per cent loss in income because of austerity – double the loss for white households.

Tory spokespeople should have a field day with this.

But the evidence is damning:

The government’s austerity programme has entrenched racial inequality in the UK, a UN expert on racism has concluded in a report that also describes the Windrush scandal as a “glaring example” of discrimination in the UK’s immigration policy.

National debates in the aftermath of the EU referendum “amplified racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in the UK” said Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s special rapporteur on racism.

“Public and private actors have played dangerous roles in fuelling intolerance. Among them, politicians and media outlets deserve special attention given the significant influence they command in society,” she said, without naming the politicians or media outlets she had in mind.

Despite the existence of a legal framework devoted to combating racial discrimination, Achiume said race and ethnicity “continue to determine the life chances and wellbeing of people in Britain in ways that are unacceptable and, in many cases, unlawful.”

Achiume, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said a hostile environment “ostensibly created for, and formally restricted to, irregular immigrants is in effect a hostile environment for all racial and ethnic communities and individuals in the United Kingdom.”

Source: Austerity has fuelled racial inequality in the UK, says UN expert | Politics | The Guardian

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Are they joking? UN poverty expert thought Tory response to his report was a ‘spoof’

Philip Alston: He came to his conclusions by listening to people affected by Conservative policies on the poor, sick and disabled. Tories implemented those policies by ignoring the very same people – and now they are complaining because Mr Alston hasn’t done the same.

At a time when we are all taking a long, hard look at the Conservative government of the last few years, this is damning.

Philip Alston, the New York-based human rights lawyer and United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has responded with disbelief after the Tories responded to his report on poverty in the UK.

“I thought it might actually be a spoof,” he said after ministers claimed that his report was “a completely inaccurate picture of our approach to tackling poverty” and that the UK was among the happiest countries in the world.

“The statement is as troubling as the situation,” he said. “There is nothing that indicates any willingness to debate over issues which have generated endless very detailed, totally reputable reports across the political spectrum in the UK. All of these are dismissed.”

Alston’s report compared Conservative policies to the creation of Victorian workhouses. Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, said she felt it was politically biased and alleged that Alston did not do enough research, only visiting the UK for 11 days.

Alston retorted that the government response amounted to “a total denial of a set of uncontested facts”.

Particularly contentious was Mr Alston’s claim that the Department for Work and Pensions had created “a digital and sanitised version of the 19th-century workhouse”.

Tory apologists rushed to rubbish the claim, like historian Dominic Sandbrook, who wrote in the Daily Mail that it was “simply ridiculous” and “an insult to our national intelligence”.

“I think breaking rocks has some similarity to the 35 hours of job search [required per week to receive universal credit] for people who have been out of work for months or years,” Mr Alston responded. “They have to go through the motions but it is completely useless. That seems to me to be very similar to the approach in the old-style workhouse. The underlying mentality is that we are going to make the place sufficiently unpleasant that you really won’t want to be here.

“Is it the case that 14 million people do not live in poverty? Do they contest the child poverty predictions? That is what it seems to be.”

It seems clear that this man will not be backing down.

As long-term readers of This Site will appreciate, that is a stance with which I can sympathise.

And it really is the only position to take with a government of bullies like the Tories, who deliberately (it seems) ignore the facts in order to continue pursuing malevolent policies of hate towards the poor and vulnerable.

Sadly, as I mentioned previously, the UK government may merrily ignore the findings of the United Nations report, without suffering any adverse backlash.

We know the Tories are wrong because we can see the evidence all around us. We know they are driving the entire country to ruin.

But they refuse to see it. Their attitude is symbolic of the pig-ignorance that came into office with David Cameron, back in 2010.

Source: UN poverty expert hits back over UK ministers’ ‘denial of facts’ | Society | The Guardian

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UN reports on poverty in the UK – and the Tory response is WORSE than expected

Remember when I responded to news of a UN investigation into cruel and inhumane treatment of disabled people by stating, “The UN will release a damning report stating that the UK’s Conservative government tortures disabled people, and the UK’s Conservative government will ignore it.”

The government’s response to UN expert Philip Alston’s report on poverty is, if anything, worse.

Mr Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies, including the rollout of universal credit, since 2010. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population” and warned that worse could be yet to come for the most vulnerable, who face “a major adverse impact” if Brexit proceeds. He said leaving the EU was “a tragic distraction from the social and economic policies shaping a Britain that it’s hard to believe any political parties really want”.

And what was the Conservative government’s response?

Amber Rudd plans to lodge a formal complaint with the UN.

According to The Guardian, “Rudd will argue that Alston is politically biased and did not do enough research. The minister is seeking guidance from the Foreign Office on the best way to respond after Alston compared her department’s welfare policies to the creation of Victorian workhouses.

“In a statement, the government said his report was ‘a barely believable documentation of Britain based on a tiny period of time spent here” and “a completely inaccurate picture of our approach to tackling poverty’.”

Typical blinkered Toryism.

If they didn’t have their tame journalists in the partisan “mainstream media” to defend them, they would have been ousted as the charlatans they are, long ago. Look at the way Jo Coburn on the BBC’s Politics Live tried to deflect blame onto the Labour Party – the party of opposition that has absolutely no power to change anything – for the details of the damning Alston report:

In fact we know that Conservatives have spent the last 40 years systematically destroying every element of society that could give poor and working people a chance at a better life. Why do you think Margaret Thatcher destroyed our industrial base, back in the 1980s?

Their denials don’t ring true.

And if she goes through with it, I hope anyone seeing Amber Rudd in the streets will have the courage to call her out on it: “Amber Rudd – shame on you.”

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The United Nations is investigating the UK’s treatment of the disabled again. Don’t expect anything useful

We’ve been here before.

The UN will release a damning report stating that the UK’s Conservative government tortures disabled people, and the UK’s Conservative government will ignore it.

In his opening statement to the UN’s Committee Against Torture, the head of the UK government delegation, Paul Candler, said the UK government “consistently and unreservedly condemns torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and raises concerns about it “wherever and whenever it occurs”.

He said: “The UK has a longstanding tradition of ensuring rights and liberties are protected domestically, and of fulfilling our international human rights obligations, including through dialogues such as this one.”

There’s just one problem: The UK’s Tory government does not consider that disabled people have any human rights.

Tories don’t think disabled people are human.

If you are disabled, they consider you to be stock.

A UN body has been questioning the UK government this week on the “grim and unacceptable truth” that disabled people and other groups are still being subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment – and even torture – in taxpayer-funded services.

The UK and devolved governments have been scrutinised for two days by the UN’s committee against torture (UNCAT) over their record on torture and ill-treatment in the UK and abroad.

In a short oral submission – she and others were given just one minute 10 seconds each to deliver their presentations – NSUN’s Dorothy Gould told the committee in Geneva on Monday: “Following visits from the UNCRPD in 2015 and 2017 and last year’s visit from the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, there cannot be any doubt that levels of destitution in the UK amount to inhumane treatment and that people with mental health diagnoses have been disproportionately affected.”

She added: “Discrimination and hate crime against us are also prevalent, intersectional crime still more so.

“It is hard, too, to see current mental health legislation in the UK as anything other than inhumane.

“Under this legislation, the use of detention in psychiatric institutions and forced treatment is misinterpreted as care.

“These measures are employed at the very times when we are most vulnerable and despite serious challenges to the scientific basis for psychiatric diagnoses and medication.

“We are also detained on the basis of potential risks to others, although no-one else is detained on this basis.”

Source: UN’s torture committee probes UK on ‘grim and unacceptable truths’

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In total, Universal Credit two-child limit will put nearly HALF A MILLION children into poverty

Around 450,000 children will be pushed into poverty because of the two-child limit on child allowances in Universal Credit and tax credits.

That’s the prediction from the Child Poverty Action Group about the cruel policy that has pushed 150,000 children into poverty so far – and will impoverish twice as many more by the time the rollout of UC is complete.

Already, 43 per cent of children in families with three or more live below the poverty line, in a country where the overall child poverty rate is 30 per cent. That in itself is a scandal in the fifth-richest nation in the world.

Two-thirds of families hit by the policy will be working, and CPAG says a single parent with three children working 16 hours per week on the fake ‘National Living Wage’ of £8.21 per hour would have to more than double their hours to 37 per week to compensate for the effect of the two-child limit.

Of course, that’s a full-time working week, which means childcare may be necessary – meaning our hypothetical single parent would probably have to hold down two jobs, just to make ends meet; there’s no guarantee they would be able to get free care.

They would be worked into the ground, and probably would hardly even see their own children.

CPAG also says the policy breaches the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and unlawfully discriminates against children, because it treats them as unworthy of individual consideration for entitlement to subsistence benefits – in fact it automatically disqualifies them.

That is the intention behind the two-child limit on Universal Credit, of course: Harm.

The intention is quite clearly to penalise people for having more than two children – never mind the circumstances. In short, it is a eugenics experiment; a “nudge” project – an attempt to restrict the population at large by making it too expensive for people on a low income to have children.

The rich will be able to continue having as many youngsters as they want, of course.

So the comment by a DWP spokesperson – that “the two child policy ensures fairness between claimants and taxpayers who support themselves solely through work” – is a lie.

Doubly so, in fact, because it does not acknowledge the fact that the number of people supporting themselves solely through work is diminishing – because of the fakeness of that misnamed “National Living Wage” mentioned above. It isn’t a living wage; anybody receiving it must top up their income with benefits or go into debt.

This means the claim that the government is tackling child poverty and helping families with the cost of living is also a lie.

As the number of people – especially young people – in poverty increases, one has to question how many people will continue believing this nonsense.

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