Tag Archives: flight

Who thought the first deportation flight to Rwanda would be stopped? You were right!

Priti Patel: she announced the deportation flights in April – and has been humiliated by the cancellation of the first.

Yes – some of us saw this one coming from a long way away!

The first flight to deport people seeking asylum in the UK to live in Rwanda instead has been halted after a series of last-minute legal appeals.

Oh what a shame. Another Priti Patel plan bites the dirt – and not a moment too soon.

The flight was called off after the European Court of Human Rights intervened.

In a statement hours before the flight’s planned departure, the ECHR said it had granted an “urgent interim measure” in the case of an Iraqi man, known only as “KN”, and one of seven remaining passengers.

An out-of-hours judge was then tasked with examining the remaining half dozen cases.

The flight was originally intended to take 30 people to the African country that is accused of human rights abuses – but has been cancelled after the number was whittled down to nothing.

The architects of the scheme – Boris Johnson and Priti Patel – have said this is a setback but they are determined to make it work.

Johnson suggested lawyers representing migrants were “abetting the work of criminal gangs”.

But this is reducing the situation to a ridiculous degree.

The plan will break the 1951 Refugee Convention that has set the standard for the way that governments should deal with people fleeing persecution in other countries for more than 70 years.

Johnson and Patel have sidestepped the convention by ignoring the complex set of problems surrounding each asylum-seeker and refusing to accept that their arrival is to do with anything more than the criminal acts of people smugglers.

The government has also been accused of acting irrationally in treating Rwanda as a “safe third country”. Critics have correctly pointed out that Rwanda’s record on human rights is flawed.

Still, Patel has vowed that the government will “not be deterred” from its plan and “many of those removed from today’s flight will be placed on the next”.

It’s threatening language from an extremely unpleasant individual.

One can only be left with a sense that the UK’s government is acting against the best interests of the asylum-seekers in its care – unloading them onto a foreign country without the slightest interest in their well-being.

That, of course, is exactly the reason these people don’t want to go.

Johnson and Patel have said they may consider changing the law to make it possible to push the deportations through.

That is exactly the behaviour of a rogue state.

Source: First deportation flight to Rwanda halted after last-minute legal appeals

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Shadow Cabinet member tries to excuse herself over failure to protest ‘Windrush’ deportation flight

Rosena Allin-Khan: no responsibility?

How do we feel about this?

Dr Allin-Khan is referring to a letter by Holly Lynch, signed by more than 60 Labour MPs, deploring Priti Patel’s decision to deport more people including, it was said, at least one person who was of the Windrush generation or descended from it.

On her website, Dr Allin-Khan adds:

“As a member of the Labour Shadow Cabinet, my role is to intervene in matters related to mental health (because I am the Shadow Minister for Mental Health). Members of the Shadow Cabinet do not speak in debates, sign letters, sign EDMs or intervene in matters which are not related to their role. This rule has been in place for as long as I know, it was the same when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

“I have noticed that my name was put on a list along with 12 colleagues, suggesting we were the only people not to sign this letter. No member of the Labour Shadow Cabinet signed the letter, indeed, almost three quarters of Labour MPs didn’t sign the letter. Does that mean that they don’t care? No, of course not. Sometimes they miss the deadline to sign, sometimes they can’t sign, sometimes they make representations in different ways. It’s very disappointing that some would single out me and 12 other colleagues, suggesting we were the only ones not to sign – simply to fit their political agenda.

“My background has seen me work in war torn countries, disaster zones and refugee camps helping the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable people. I always care deeply about these issues and to suggest otherwise is incorrect. I’ll continue to liaise with my colleagues in the Home Affairs team with regards to this, and other important issues.”

My recollection is that Dr Allin-Khan is distorting the issue. Shadow Cabinet members weren’t criticised for being the only Labour MPs not to sign and it seems to me that she was deliberately creating a “straw man” argument with a ready-made response (that other Labour MPs also failed to sign).

As for her claim about Shadow Cabinet members:

Maybe that is true.

Perhaps it should change.

It seems Shadow Cabinet members are using their position to avoid expressing opinions on the most important matters of the day – the actions of the Tory government – abrogating their responsibilities as members of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

Meanwhile they line up to vilify members of their own party when they are accused – falsely, as we learned in the case of Jeremy Corbyn – of breaking party rules that are so badly-written that they can be made to mean whatever the current leader desires.

Isn’t that, you know… wrong?

Some people seem to think so:

Oh, and it seems Shad Cab members like Dr Allin-Khan can’t even face the responses their protests attract:

Meanwhile, Home Secretary Priti Patel has taken the opportunity provided by this failure of opposition to attack critics of the flight, saying it involved the deportation of “vile criminals” and was nothing to do with the Windrush scandal.

In that case, why did the flight contain only 13 people after last-minute legal challenges succeeded in gaining a reprieve for 23 others?

Oh, that’s right. As Ms Patel said, it was all the fault of “do-gooders” and “lefty lawyers”.

She comes across as a bad Scooby-Doo villain, after the mask has come off: “I would have got away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you pesky lefty lawyers!”

Sadly, in her case, the significance of the mask is reversed. In Scooby-Doo it was always a fright mask being replaced by the villain’s rather ordinary face. With Ms Patel, it is the genuine, hate-filled, face that is the horror.

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Less than a week after the EHRC damned the Tories over the Windrush scandal, deportations continue

The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. If it had still been in service a couple of years ago, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.

It is ironic that the Conservative government’s own review of its behaviour in the Windrush Scandal was called Lessons Learned, considering its plan for a mass deportation to Jamaica tomorrow (December 2) shows that the Tories have learned nothing.

The Home Office failed to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) under the Equality Act 2010 when implementing Theresa May’s “hostile environment” strategy, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

May’s plan, which commenced in 2012, was originally intended to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for illegal immigrants – people who do not have leave to remain, in the hope that they would leave of their own accord.

But the policy’s severe harm to members of the so-called Windrush generation – whose documents showing that they were allowed to stay in the UK were destroyed by May’s Home Office shortly after she took over responsibility for it in 2010 – was ignored, dismissed and disregarded, despite the fact that the Home Office was warned about it repeatedly.

Perhaps part of the responsibility for this lies in the fact that the Tory government, obsessed with outsourcing work to private, profit-making firms, told landlords, banks, doctors and employers to carry out ID checks and report people who lacked adequate documentation.

As a result, thousands of people – yes, thousands – were denied access to health care, benefits and housing, before being deported illegally.

Engagement with representatives of the Windrush generation – people who came to the UK, mostly from Jamaica, to help rebuild the country after World War Two, after the government of the day promised to allow them to settle here (see the 1948 Nationality Act) – was limited.

Most of the government’s Windrush victims are still awaiting compensation.

Some have died before receiving it.

The EHRC report said the consequences – which have included several deaths – were “foreseeable and avoidable” and the organisation’s interim chair, Caroline Waters, said the treatment of the Windrush Generation was “a shameful stain on British history”.

This Counterfire article is damning in its condemnation of the policy:

Dehumanisation and discrimination are built into the very concept of the ‘hostile environment’. For the Tories, the purpose of the policy was twofold: to divert growing anger at their austerity policies and to undercut the rise of far-right rivals like Ukip by appropriating their unabashedly dehumanising and racist ideology.

That’s right – the Tories under Theresa May adopted a deliberately racist ideology. And the policy of dehumanising victims was taken directly from the Nazi playbook, as Jews know very well from bitter experience.

Counterfire continues:

The lives of migrants and ethnic minorities are routinely exploited and endangered for the political gain of those in power in this way. This is not recognised in the EHRC report, which is only able to recommend a set of vague rectifications that rely heavily on the government’s good will, such as the recommendation for the Home Office to ‘prioritise and act early’ on its Equality Act duties.

The Home Office under current Home Secretary Priti Patel has made a public commitment to avoid any similar events occurring.

So it is strange that Ms Patel is determined to force as many as 50 more people out of the UK – including another member of the Windrush generation – in a specially-chartered flight tomorrow:

Immediately after it was revealed that the flight was taking place, no fewer than 82 BAME celebrities wrote to six airlines known to have carried out such flights, begging them to reject contracts to carry out any more. It is not known which airline has been engaged to carry out tomorrow’s flight.

Signatories included the author Bernardine Evaristo, model Naomi Campbell, historian David Olusoga and actors Naomie Harris and Thandie Newton, as well as lawyers, broadcasters and NGO chiefs. Leading Windrush campaigners including Michael Braithwaite and Elwaldo Romeo also signed.

And now – better late than never – 70 MPs and peers have also written to Patel, demanding that the flight must be cancelled:

The letter, co-ordinated by Labour’s Clive Lewis, states:

You have previously committed to ‘righting the wrongs’ concerning the Windrush scandal. But eight months after the Windrush Lessons Learned Review was published, the recommendations have still not been fully implemented, it adds.

“Planning a pre-Christmas deportation flight demonstrates that the Home Office has so far failed to learn any lessons.”

The letter also highlights the threat posed by Covid-19 to anybody being forcibly deported:

“The conditions of deportation, such as shackling detainees to ushers for long journeys in potentially cramped conditions, risk exposing people to the virus,” the letter reads, adding that Black people are already at an increased risk of contracting coronavirus.

And there is the more tangible threat of deportees suffering harm or death at the hands of the authorities when they arrive at their destination:

“We know that five UK deportees were killed between 2018 and 2019. Some people in detention have scars from past abuse in Jamaica, or siblings who have been murdered.”

Strangely, Labour leader Keir Starmer has not signed the letter – nor have 12 of his front benchers. They are: Angela Rayner, Anneliese Dodds, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Lisa Nandy, Ed Miliband, Jon Ashworth, Rosena Allin-Khan, David Lammy, Jess Phillips, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper. Are we to conclude that these MPs approve of the Tories’ racism?

On the other hand, one of the signatories is former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn:

There is absolutely no doubt that the Conservative government’s racist deportations of people who have every right to remain in the UK should stop. This Writer also has absolutely no doubt that they won’t.

Priti Patel’s record marks her out as a vicious racist who delights in dehumanising and tormenting others.

It is sad to see that she faces no opposition from the so-called Opposition front bench.

But we should remember that the people who have opposed this obscenity are those who have been vilified by the Tory Establishment and their lackeys in the mainstream media. They have lied to us; they are not to be trusted.

And we need to find better ways to oppose them.

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Home Office deletes “fascist Dad’s Army” ‘migrants’ clip released after it was forced to abandon deportation flight

It seems there was more to the Home Office’s video clip about “activist lawyers” than met the eye – and that was already pretty bad.

Apparently the government had been forced to abandon a deportation flight to Spain after last-minute legal challenges meant all 23 passengers had to be allowed off the plane.

It seems that HO had tried to rush through the deportations fast, in order to deny these asylum-seekers the right to appeal; that would be breaking the law. All the lawyers did was insist that these people be allowed their legal rights.

In response, the government department released the tweet attacking “activist lawyers” who “delay and disrupt returns”.

So it seems the line saying, “Soon we will no longer be bound by EU laws and can negotiate our own return arrangements,” was an attempt to taunt those lawyers.

That was a mistake. It provoked complaints – some of them from the lawyers who carry out these actions.

So now the tweet has come down and HO permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft has issued instructions that the term “activist lawyers” should not be used again.

The most effective complaint seems to have come from the economist Jonathan Portes. This Site has huge respect for this gentleman, going back to discussions of the UK economy here many years ago.

He posted a thread showing part of the response he received:

Later, he added this:

By this time, some of the lawyers concerned had already taken to Twitter to put their side of the story across – and it makes interesting reading:

It’s another own-goal for Boris Johnson’s Tory government – and the Home Office that Johnson insists must be run by Priti Patel.

Source: Home Office wrong to refer to ‘activist lawyers’, top official admits | Home Office | The Guardian

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Jamaica deportation: 25 saved from flight – but 17 are aboard, despite court ruling

Boris Johnson: He’s a foreign-born UK resident who plotted a crime in the UK – why hasn’t he been deported?

This is a win – if only a partial one.

A ruling by the Court of Appeal that people who have not had access to legal advice should not be on the Home Office’s deportation plane to Jamaica has led to a reprieve for 25 of them.

But they do not know what the Conservatives will do to them next, and 17 people were forced to take the plane.

Campaigners have said that the decision to deport people who have been in the UK since they were as young as two years old, meaning they are being removed from their families and the country they consider their home, is racist.

The Tories are saying that it is right to deport people who were born in foreign countries and committed crimes in the UK.

So far they have refused to address the fault in their argument – that their own prime minister, Boris Johnson, plotted an assault and battery offence against a UK journalist.

Why is he not on a plane to the United States, which is where he was born, with no hope of return?

Source: Jamaica deportation: Home Office flight leaves UK despite court ruling – BBC News

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Flake on a plane: Theresa May’s mile-high hissy fit

Venom: This is NOT how the scene played out but from the look on Mrs May’s face, you can imagine her leaping across, burying her fangs deep in the interviewer’s fleshy parts and emptying her poison sacs.

Poisonous prime minister Theresa May launched herself into a tantrum at 40,000 feet during a plane flight to the G20 summit, when some poor soul asked whether she would resign if her fudged withdrawal deal fails to win the support of MPs.

Clearly the matter has been preying on the PMs mind because she couldn’t keep her cool.

According to the Mirror, Mrs May had a “mid-air meltdown”, the most lucid part of which went as follows: “Look, I have been asked these sorts of questions before.”

In that case, she should be used to them and they shouldn’t upset her, right?

“I am tempted to think that actually the price of coming on one of these trips is asking questions about my future, because they come up every time – and my answers aren’t going to change.”

The problem is, her answers don’t make any sense. The report states that she was “refusing to rule out resigning”, which means the didn’t say she’d stay and didn’t say she’d go.

In other words, it was another fudge:

Perhaps Mrs May had seen Tracey Ullman’s parody before taking her flight.

But will her Brexit fudge be enough to keep Mrs May in her job?

The smart money says, “No.”

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As Rosa Parks is celebrated in TV drama, real life shows we have slid backwards

Iconic figures: Rosa Parks (Vinette Robinson) meets the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) – at just the right time to shine a light on rising real-world racism.

As an iconic TV drama celebrated a black woman who changed the world by sitting down on a bus, RyanAir dragged our entire culture backwards by throwing a black person out of their plane seat, on the insistence of a racist.

The BBC broadcast one of its most powerful and moving episodes of Doctor Who in years on the evening of Sunday, October 21. Entitled Rosa, it was about the moment when a black woman took a seat in a whites-only section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested for it. This led to the Montgomery bus boycott, in which black people refused to use the service – and to the capitulation of the bus company to their demand (to be able to sit wherever they wanted) around one year later. From there, the American civil rights movement grew and attitudes changed radically.

The TV drama made perfectly clear the reasons for change. As iNews put it in its review, “Last week… the Doctor and her team had to survive on a ‘cruel’ planet full of monsters. And yet that alien setting could never match the reality of deep south America; of the shock of Ryan [Tosin Cole] being slapped by a white man in the street and threatened with lynching; of the tension of seeing Ryan and Yaz [Mandip Gill] do something as banal as sit in a restaurant; of the danger suggested by the camera lingering on the holster of a cop’s gun; of the thematically bold spectacle of the Doctor sitting in the white section of a segregated bus, while Ryan has to sit at the back.”

For This Writer, a crucial scene took place beyind a trash bin, where Ryan and Yaz discuss the need to do nothing to provoke the racists – because you never know who will react with violence.

That sentiment was proved by the racism of a passenger on RyanAir flight FR015 from Barcelona to London Stansted on Friday (October 19).

The bigoted white man unleashed a furious, foul-mouthed racist rant at a disabled black woman that shocked other passengers.

But rather than put the racist in his place, RyanAir staff removed the victim of his vicious attack from hers.

It seems the tirade began when the lady was unable to move out of the racist’s way fast enough, to let him sit down in his window seat.

I was going to quote some of the confrontation – but why encourage others reading this to do the same? The racists came out in force to support Sajid Javid after the Vox Political article about his racist tweet a couple of days ago, after all.

RyanAir has said the perpetrator has been reported to the police. He should have been removed from the plane before it took off.

Making matters worse, it seems the 77-year-old victim was a member of the Windrush generation who had been returning from a holiday abroad that marked the first anniversary of her husband’s death.

The Windrush generation are – as has been well-documented, here and elsewhere – victims of institutional racism by the UK’s Conservative government, which destroyed papers conferring on them their British citizenship and right to all the benefits it provides – and then tried to deport thousands of people on the grounds that they could not prove their right to stay in the UK.

Was this incident yet another indication that culture is backsliding into racism, bigotry and prejudice?

If so, then the Doctor Who episode could not have been broadcast at a better time.

It shone a spotlight on the primitive attitudes of the racists and made it clear that the only place for attitudes like theirs is the history books.

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He’s been Home Secretary less than a day and already Sajid Javid is messing it up

According to Larry the Cat’s Twitter account, “The cabinet stand like this because a body language expert thought it would be a laugh to see if they would.” And on his first day as Home Secretary, Sajid Javid was stupid enough to do it.

Result:

The Tory Powerstance Workout Video – Featuring Sajid Javid [Image: The Agitator].

And:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” wrote Gary Barker, “I give you your new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid and your surviving (just) Prime Minister Theresa May.”

Worse than that, he used his first appearance in the Commons, in his new role, to promise to “do right by the Windrush Generation” – and then lied to everyone.

Responding to a question from Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, on whether he would restore the protections that were taken from the Windrush migrants in the 2014 Immigration Act, he said: “No such protections have been removed. People who arrived pre-1973 – they have the absolute right to be here and that has not changed.”

Ms Abbott begs to differ. Refused the opportunity to respond in the House, she took to Twitter with this:

The Guardian report shows that a clause giving longstanding Commonwealth residents protection from enforced removal was taken off the statute book by the 2014 Act. The Home Office claims it was redundant – but who’d believe it?

Mr Javid also said that he disliked the term “hostile environment” as a description of Home Office policy relating to immigrants and would not be using the term – which shouldn’t be too hard, as the Home Office ditched it a while ago.

Instead, he said he preferred to talk about having a “compliant environment”.

Interesting word choice.

“Compliant” means “disposed to agree with others or obey rules, especially to an excessive degree; acquiescent; meeting or in accordance with rules or standards” [Boldings mine].

So Mr Javid wants to create an environment in which everybody slavishly obeys the rules he makes up – no matter what they may be.

Vile.

And what of the rules that are already in place – the really ugly, racist rules that mean thousands of people, including British citizens who have been unjustly accused of being illegal immigrants?

They remain in place. After a crippling scandal for the Tories, more innocents are being deported this week.

So the “hostile environment” is still in place, no matter what Mr Javid says.

That’s a series of lies racked up in his first Commons appearance.

Home Office employees are probably saying to each other: “Meet the new boss… Same as the old boss.”

Maybe, but as the title of the old Who song, from which that lyric is taken, states:

We won’t get fooled again.

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