Tag Archives: immigration

With these takes on HS2, immigration and more, should we rename the UK PM Rishi SKEWnak?

Let’s look at more of Rishi Sunak’s speech to the Conservative conference.

This is a follow-up to This Site’s previous article, Lies, DAMNED lies and truth bombs: little Rishi’s BIG conference speech.

There’s no intro from me this time so let’s dive straight in to his views on HS2, smoking, benefit reform and immigration:


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Here’s the only response to Suella Braverman’s US immigration speech you need

Suella Braverman: racist, sexist, homophobic. Right?

If you’re hoping for an in-depth analysis of all the Tory crowing in support of Suella Braverman’s racist, sexist and homophobic speech against immigration at a US think tank last week, I’m happy to disappoint you.

There’s really very little to say about a lot of Tories supporting an unacceptable view.

I’ve already provided my comments on the speech itself, here.

But I did want to highlight what I think is the best comment on it, which came in musical form. Here it is:

Any questions?


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Suella Braverman’s speech: a self-hating bid for Tory leadership?

Suella Braverman: this product of UK multiculturalism reckons multiculturalism has failed.

The UK’s Tory Home Secretary has continued her hate campaign against immigrants in a speech to an American think tank – earning widespread condemnation from all but her own Tory cronies.

She was discussing policy, which means she would have needed to get permission to say her words from the Cabinet Office.

Commentators may be right to suggest that it is a first move in a bid to become leader of the Conservative Party, challenging Rishi Sunak’s ever-weakening position.

(Sunak appears to have given up any pretense of trying to run the country and seems to be devoting himself to projects that will make money for himself and his family.)

Of course, as she did have permission (the speech was signed off by Downing Street), then the Tories should lose votes from gay people and women – because she promoted discrimination against both those segments of the population in her speech; this is now Tory government policy.

The fact that she was speaking to a US think tank suggests that she was making a pitch to the kind of international oligarchs who provide much of the Tory Party’s funding (do I have to attach the word ‘allegedly’ to that?) in order to gain support for such a bid.

But the speech also opens up the main fault with Braverman’s candidacy – for anything: her opposition to immigration indicates hatred of the very mechanism that has put her in a position even to make her speech, let alone seek power as a world leader.

Her own prime minister is of Indian descent, yet has risen to become the political leader of a country that is not, ancestrally, his. Doesn’t that, alone, destroy her arguments?

She is, herself, a daughter of immigrants, but the way she speaks about them reveals not the calculated reasoning of a seasoned politician but the irrational hatred of an unbalanced child.

Remember when Jewish people were labelled “self-hating” if they campaigned against the policy of Israel to persecute Palestinians on the lands that country has illegally occupied? It was a misnomer, because they did not hate their religion, culture or ethnicity – just a policy of a country that claimed to represent that religion, culture and ethnicity.

But that issue brought the phrase “self-hating” into modern parlance and we may now attach it to Braverman with far more accuracy than was ever applied to it in relation to Jews.

She is the daughter of immigrants; she does clearly hate them (and, by extension, their offspring), so she’s very definitely self-hating.

And she knows it’s her weak point, too. That’s why she went on the attack when she was challenged about it after her speech:

In this part of her speech, Braverman claimed that multiculturalism – allowing people of other cultures to settle in the UK – has failed because they don’t integrate into society:

Her arguments about the results of immigration are not new; they are the same arguments that were put forward by Enoch Powell in 1968. Fortunately, we had people like Jonathan Miller to present the other side, back in those more enlightened days:

The claim that people come here to create communities of their original countries, rather than integrate into our culture, falls because only a minority do this:

Braverman is the daughter of Mauritian and Kenyan immigrants who integrated into UK society. Her prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian extraction but has also integrated into UK society. They are both living proof that her claim is false.

In fact, the debate over immigration goes back centuries; Shakespeare discussed it – and it is appropriate to end this article with a speech from the man who is considered to be England’s greatest writer.

If you claim to love England, Britain, the UK, and the culture that we have built, then you should love and live by these words:


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Tories ‘normalising fascism’ by threatening life imprisonment for ‘coaching’ migrants

Robert Jenrick: he has strange priorities with regard to punishing wrongdoing. Is that because he has done so much wrong himself?

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick has been roundly condemned over a plan to send lawyers to prison for life if they are deemed to have been “coaching” migrants on how to “abuse the immigration system”.

In a statement to the House of Commons, he said lawyers charged with “assisting unlawful immigration to the UK” could face sentences on a par with or even longer than those convicted for fraud, causing death by dangerous driving or sexually assaulting a child under 13.

The announcement follows a Daily Mail investigation in August that claimed solicitors had agreed to help an undercover journalist posing as an economic migrant submit a false application in exchange for thousands of pounds.

In August, the Ministry of Justice and Home Office jointly introduced the Professional Enablers Taskforce to crackdown on “crooked” immigration lawyers who “coach illegal migrants to lie”.

His statement has led to harsh criticism for Jenrick. Here’s a video clip of him making it, and a comment by Unite’s Howard Beckett that he is “normalising fascism”:

“Not content enough with banning Mickey Mouse paintings from children’s asylum centres, Jenrick now proposes life in prison for lawyers defending human rights,” posted Rosena Allin-Khan – who now has plenty of time for this sort of thing, after Keir Starmer did away with her shadow mental health portfolio.

“This should terrify all of us,” added Peter Stefanovic of the CWU. “When this rotten to the core bunch of truth twisters are not robbing millions of workers of their democratic right to strike & stripping back our right to protest they are preparing to imprison human rights lawyers for life.”

Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project injected the prospect of sanity: “More likely that no lawyer will ever be convicted than that a lawyer will be imprisoned for life. Even so. This splenetic fury, these wild threats, speak of what the Tories have become.”

It’s just another day in the office for Jenrick, of course.

His last appearance of any note in the news was in April, when he was banned from driving for six months and fined more than £1,600 after he was caught breaking the speed limit on the M1, following an appearance on the BBC’s Any Questions.

The Tory MP for Newark was recorded driving his Land Rover at 68mph in a temporary 40mph zone on the M1 southbound in Northamptonshire on August 5 last year, after appearing on the radio show at Wakefield Cathedral in West Yorkshire.

He was fined £1,107 and ordered to pay a £442 victim surcharge and £90 in costs, the Courts and Tribunals Service centre said. You can form your own value judgement about the difference between this and the fine penalty he’s slapping on lawyers.

And he’s habitual: In March last year Jenrick was fined £307 and handed three penalty points for breaking a 40mph speed limit on the A40 in west London in August 2021.

Jenrick is best-known for fiddling an inner-London development in order to deprive the local council of a huge fee.

Not only did he override both the local planning authority and the Independent Planning Inspectorate to grant planning permission for Richard Desmond’s controversial Westferry development, despite it having been found not to meet acceptable planning standards…

… but he did it to allow the developer to avoid paying a £45 million levy to Tower Hamlets Council that he had decided should not apply – and then used that as his reason for granting the application.

Text messages between Desmond and Jenrick show the former Express newspaper owner and pornographer pressured the minister to grant planning permission, saying: “We don’t want to give Marxists loads of doe [sic] for nothing!”

Jenrick also broke Covid-19 lockdown rules to travel between his three homes – and then insisted that young people should adhere to restrictions, even though there was no evidence to suggest they did not.

And he corruptly induced a fellow MP to approve a grant for his constituency totalling £237 per person recently – but negotiated Covid-19 support for the people of Manchester down to £7.95 per person.

So it seems, in a comparison between Jenrick and any lawyer he wants to convict, it is the government minister who would appear to be the most crooked.


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Starmer party is too ‘timid’ to challenge far-right claims or offer alternatives. Why?

Starmer and Sunak: perhaps the reason there’s little difference between them and their parties is that they are chasing sponsorship from big business for their own personal gain, rather than doing what the public pays them to do – which is find solutions to the problems being created by the firms they are courting.

Economist Richard Murphy has published a column highlighting concerns that Keir Starmer’s STP (Substitute Tory Party – formerly Labour) is too “timid” to challenge right-wing claims about immigration, climate change or anything else, or to articulate an alternative vision.

He suggests three reasons for this:

Is it that they spent too much time watching Top Gear over the years and now live in fear of that culture?

Could it be that they have a deep-seated insecurity when it comes to standing up to the interests of big business when the latter so clearly want what the country does not?

Or is that they simply do not do ideology-based politics and so go where the money is, with money filling the vacuum where their convictions should be?

It comes down to the same thing. Starmer has decided to do what the Tories always do: chase the cash that comes from big corporate sponsorship for his own personal gain.

The national interest can go hang, as far as he is concerned.

I’m willing to bet we’ll find evidence of this if we have a look around. Or have you found some already?


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Braverman ‘going to ground’ as record migration figures revealed

Suella Braverman: don’t you think she looks worried?

Migration from foreign countries to the UK has soared, with new figures showing 1.2 million people coming to live in the country during the last year.

Net migration – the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants (either UK citizens or non-citizens) stands at 606,000, according to the statistics released today (May 25, 2023).

It’s a 24 per cent increase on the previous high of 488,000. Embarrassingly for Brexiters Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, the rise was fuelled by people from outside the EU entering the UK to study, work or escape conflict or oppression.

At the time of writing, Braverman has not commented on the figures – instead, she ran like a rabbit from an urgent question in the House of Commons, leading Shadow Home Secretary to accuse her of going to ground. “What is the point of her?” she asked

Some might say that this was better than the comedy response from Rishi Sunak who, while agreeing the numbers were too high, actually said, “I’m bringing them down.”

Clearly he isn’t!

His government has announced a few new measures, like making it harder for international students to come to the UK by banning them from bringing “dependents”.

This seems to have confused some MPs, who mentioned students’ parents and grandparents in Commons debate. In fact, it means students will be banned from bringing their partners (spouse, husband, wife, civil partner, relationship partner) and children.

Amazingly, this has been welcomed by the Labour Party:

The result will be that foreign students will be discouraged from coming to the UK.

Readers of This Site will be aware that Yr Obdt Servt (that’s me) has been re-watching the old BBC sitcom Yes, Minister lately, and one episode refers to attempts to stop foreign students attending UK universities.

In it, the university authorities squealed like pigs in the mating season, because foreign students paid eight times as much as UK citizens and a ban would create financial difficulties for them.

Is the situation the same today?

If so, what advantage do Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman hope to create for the UK by closing our universities?

Source: ‘What’s the point of her?’: Braverman accused of ‘going to ground’ as record migration figures revealed


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Immigration/Nazis: read history more carefully, says Cleverly – and so he should

James Cleverly: has he ever read a history book – or, indeed, any book at all?

Look at the state of this:

He’s right and wrong at the same time.

People should indeed read their history books more carefully – he’s right on that! – but if they do, they’ll find that the UK is not – historically – a welcoming country.

See for yourself:

So half a million Jewish people were denied entry into the United Kingdom in the 1930s, despite the obvious cruelty of the Nazi regime in Germany – including Oskar Goldberg’s family who died at Auschwitz as part of the Nazi Holocaust.

And – how convenient! – nobody knows how many of the others, who were turned down or turned away, also died in the Nazi Holocaust.

And now Suella Braverman – with the support of the rest of the Tory government including Cleverly – wants to turn away similar numbers of refugees, behind a smokescreen that she is foiling “criminal gangs”.

How many of them will suffer and die on foreign soil, after being denied safety here? How can anyone with a conscience look at the UK’s own history and support this inhumane and internationally illegal policy?


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Never mind the Nazis – do you know what the BRITISH were saying about immigrants in the 1930s?

Gary Lineker: he opened a debate on Channel migrants by highlighting similarities with Nazi Germany – but our politicians’ speeches have far more in common with BRITISH MPs of the 1930s.

Tory chameleon Grant Shapps (as he styles himself today) has been quick to jump into the controversy around Gary Lineker.

Mr Lineker compared Tory rhetoric about asylum-seekers – who come across the Channel in small boats because the UK’s current government has closed off all their legal routes to seek sanctuary here – with that of the Nazis in 1930s Germany.

Here’s what Shapps had to say about that:

Of course the obvious answer to this is to point out that his colleague, Home Secretary Suella ‘De Vil’ Braverman, isn’t targeting the “criminal gangs” at all; she’s persecuting the “vulnerable people” instead. And Shapps is fine with that.

The less obvious answer is to point out that, as a Jewish Cabinet minister, Shapps should be more concerned about the similarity of Braverman’s language to that of UK politicians in the 1930s.

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And feel free to comment!

Here’s Professor Tim Wilson to explain:

When Nazi Germany was persecuting Jews, the UK government “ramped up” laws to prevent adult Jewish people from coming here.

The Kindertransport initiative was laudable, but we should not let it mask the fact that the UK turned its back on those children’s parents and left them to be transported to extermination camps.

The EU and UN conventions on human rights, both of which were created in the 1950s, were set up in acknowledgement of our – and other countries’ – failure to do the right thing.

And now Braverman is turning her back on those conventions because she wants vulnerable people who are fleeing persecution to suffer. It’s the 1930s all over again.

Here’s an example of 1930s rhetoric, pulled at random from Twitter:

“The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest.” Was it an “invasion”, of the kind recently described by Braverman?

Sadly the UK’s main opposition party – Labour – is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Tories on this issue. In an LBC radio interview, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Gary Lineker was wrong to make his comparison with the 1930s:

Perhaps she was covering for her boss, Keir Starmer, whose words in Prime Minister’s Questions harked back to the UK’s political rhetoric of the 1930s:

During the same exchange, Starmer equated Channel migrants with rapists:

We should be thanking Mr Lineker for raising the issue of inhumane policies directed at people who are too vulnerable to resist.

But it is clear that we didn’t have to look as far as Nazi Germany to find parallels with the 1930s. Both the government and its opposition are parroting British racists of that time.

They shame us all.


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Gary Lineker has no reason to apologise. The Tory Immigration Bill is Nazi-style immoral

Gary Lineker: once again, his compassion for others has set him against Establishment rhetoric.

The demonisation of Gary Lineker – for pointing out something that should be obvious and uncontroversial – is disgraceful and the Tories doing it should be shunned.

The European Convention on Human Rights was set up in the early 1950s, and Suella Braverman’s filthy little Illegal Immigration Bill spits on it.

She admits it:

The United Nations has also stated that the Bill undermines the “very purpose” of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which “explicitly recognises that refugees may be compelled to enter a country of asylum irregularly.” The statement added: “International law does not require that refugees claim asylum in the first country they reach.”

That convention was introduced in recognition of the failure of neighbouring countries to help refugees from Nazi Germany when they needed it.

In Parliament, Braverman referred to her Bill removing “foreign national rapists, drug dealers and murderers” – and was reprimanded by Labour’s John McDonnell for “inflammatory language” that was putting asylum-seekers and those who represent them “at risk”.

In response to earlier such shenanigans, former footballer and TV presenter Gary Lineker tweeted that the language in which Braverman’s plan was set out was “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. He has a point, it seems.

But of course he faced a backlash. Braverman herself called his words “unhelpful”:

But of course Mr Lineker wasn’t trying to help her; he thinks her law is rotten. Notice that she appealed to “the British people”, claiming that her law was in line what the people want. Isn’t that exactly the kind of rhetoric that the Nazis used?

Also:

Dehumanising people was exactly what the Nazis did, of course.

And – of course – Braverman cynically inflated the figures on the number of people allegedly trying to come to the UK:

The media debate is big on emotion and small on detail, with other claims added in to boost the failing Tory rhetoric.

For example, on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Susannah Reid had to torpedo a claim that all asylum claims should be refused (75 per cent are valid) and that civil servants were inclined to grant all asylum claims for an easy life (there’s no evidence to support that at all):

The United Nations has provided valuable insight on the facts here. Its refugee agency, the UNHCR, has stated that Home Office data indicates that the “vast majority” of small-boat migrants would be granted refugee protection if the UK considered their claims.

“Branding refugees as undeserving based on mode of arrival distorts these fundamental facts,” the agency added, calling on the government to consider its own “concrete and actionable proposals” as a way to reduce the demand for small-boat crossings.

Underlying all this is the fact that the so-called “war on immigrants” has been manufactured by the Tories in order to give people a bogeyman to fear and revile.

The reason people are coming across to the UK in small boats is simply that Boris Johnson turned his back on the UK’s former “returns” agreement with the European Union, that allowed a Labour government to return 60,000 people in its last year in office. That’s more than the most recently-recorded number of people coming in. Watch:

Labour has, at least, recognised that there is an easy way to solve the issue of people crossing the Channel in small boats:

Mr Lineker faces a “frank conversation” with his BBC bosses about his criticism of the government, which the Corporation – under its Tory-supporting, Tory-appointed chairman – is claiming contradicts its impartiality rules.

But of course, he was tweeting in a personal capacity.

I am reminded of Rachel Riley’s vigorous campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the run-up to the 2019 general election.

Her right to do this was not publicly disputed by her employer, the broadcaster Channel 4.

Isn’t it incongruous that she was allowed to undermine a left-winger’s election campaign but Mr Lineker is being reprimanded for passing a reasonable comment on a right-winger’s attack on refugees?


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Won’t this Brexit ‘benefit'(?) seriously hinder crime detection in the UK?

Information deficit: if the police officers standing behind Brexiteer Boris Johnson at this speech knew how badly he’d harmed their ability to detect crime, would they have arrested him for perverting the course of justice?

Is this yet another ‘unintended’ consequence of Brexit that’s going to seriously harm the people of the UK?

Read:

Frontline police and border force officers will remain locked out of information on a key EU database of terror suspects, criminals and immigration offenders for at least another four years, the Home Office has quietly admitted.

UK police and security services conducted more than 600m real time checks on the Schengen Information System II [SIS II] in 2019, but the following year lost access to its instant information on policing, national security, or immigration alerts because of Brexit. A civil servant said they hoped to get access to a planned new EU international law enforcement alert platform “within two or three years, according to a 2021 House of Lords report”.

But it has now emerged that Matthew Rycroft, the department’s permanent secretary, has said that gaining access to EU datasets is at “a very early stage” and is not expected to be completed before 2027/2028.

Source: UK police and Border Force to remain locked out of EU database of criminals | Home Office | The Guardian


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