Tag Archives: seeker

Is this the new wheeze for friends of the Tories: subsidies for asylum-seeker hotels?

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Channel migrants: it seems the Tories have found a way to help their friends make a profit from the presence of these vulnerable people.

It’s not so long since we discovered the Tory government was giving contracts to provide Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to their friends via an illegal ‘VIP lane’ – now it turns out they are paying their buddies to run hotels housing asylum-seekers.

Apparently the BBC has been told the government is using 395 hotels to accommodate more than 51,000 people, at a cost of £6 million per day.

Hotel owners are being approached to hand over their properties to outsourced companies, which run the businesses on behalf of the Home Office.

The BBC’s report names the outsourced companies as Serco, Mears Group and Calder Conferences, all of which are enjoying increased profits as a result.

Here’s a bit of info on Serco:

But what about this snippet from the social media?

Here’s more evidence:

Sadly, that’s only a little to go on.

But it should be enough to support a demand for the facts from the Tories.

Who is running the hotels that are benefiting from this public money? Are they Conservatives or supporters of Conservatives? Who is responsible for selecting them?

Has someone set up another ‘VIP lane’ for applications?

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The Tory plan for Channel migrants is nothing but hate speech, and here’s the evidence

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Hate speech: Suella Braverman.

The Conservative government’s latest plan to deal with people crossing the Channel in small boats to claim asylum in the UK is not what it seems – according to the evidence.

Instead, it seems Suella Braverman are simply trying to stir up hate against Johnny and Jane Foreigner to distract attention from their own shortcomings – one of which is that it is a failing in the Tory Brexit deal that has made it possible for illegal immigrants to stay here as long as they have.

Look at – and listen to – this propaganda clip from Suella Braverman:

You can hear the hate speech: the people who she acknowledges are risking their lives to get here are trying to “jump the queue” and “game our system”, and this is “not fair”. These are all words that are carefully chosen – and they are all words that are likely to increase hatred against asylum-seekers.

Remember, these are people who are currently being accommodated in local hotels across the UK, much to the disgust of many local residents who are already well on the way to a life of xenophobic rage.

And she again uses the nonsense argument that people are travelling through safe countries where they should settle instead of here. They’re coming here for a reason – because of the UK’s imperial past, because they have family here, because of the language, or because of another connection; their reasons for being here are valid.

Before we go further, let’s have a bit of balance from Labour MP John McDonnell:

Now it’s time for a reality check: the planned new law is unlikely even to come into law, let alone be put into practice before the next general election. Therefore we may assume that it is motivated by something other than what we’re being told. Here’s Richard Murphy:

Finally – and above all – we should remember that this is a problem entirely of the Conservative government’s own making.

Did you catch the really damning statistics in that clip?

The Labour government – that was in power before the Conservatives slithered their way back into Downing Street in 2010 – was sending 60,000 illegal migrants back to their home countries per year. It could do this because it had a “returns” agreement with the European Union.

Now, the Tory government struggles to send 3,000 people back. This is because it doesn’t have an agreement with the EU; Boris Johnson tore it up when he foisted his daft Brexit Agreement on us and them, and countries like France and Germany won’t sign an individual deal with the UK.

Looking at it dispassionately, it is hard to believe that the Tories did not create this situation deliberately, in order to give the people of the United Kingdom somebody to hate – who isn’t a Tory.

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The Home Secretary hates protest – unless it’s against asylum-seekers

Speechless: remember when, challenged to explain how a teenage refugee from an African country might legally gain asylum in the UK, Suella Braverman had nothing to say? It’s a different story when she’s asked about protests against asylum-seekers who have already managed to get here.

Suella De Vil strikes again.

In her first interview as Home Secretary, for the far-right channel GB News, Suella Braverman has given her support to protests against asylum-seekers and refugees being housed in hotels across the UK.

Basically, she’s agreeing with racists who don’t want Johnny and Janey Foreigner to have a chance at a peaceful life, free from persecution.

What she fails to mention is that these people are only having to be kept in such accommodation because her Home Office is so inept at processing their asylum claims.

She stops short of advocating violence – thank sanity! – but I don’t think the person who tweeted the video clip is far wrong in their analysis:

Remember, this is the Home Secretary who has been pushing legislation through Parliament to prevent us from staging public protests. Apparently some protests are still valid, in her eyes – if they’re attacking foreigners and not the government.

And this person is allegedly threatening to quit the Tory Cabinet over a separate issue…

Let her go now.

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Jonathan Gullis (and everybody else) is put straight on why asylum-seekers can come to the UK

Jonathan Gullis: he’s the maskless fellow jeering behind Boris Johnson in this shot from Prime Minister’s Questions last year.

This should finally kill off all the arguments that refugees should stay in the first safe country they reach: if all countries said this, it would destroy the international asylum system.

Watch the video in which Zoe Gardner of the European Network on Statelessness destroys Gullis’s reasoning once and for all:

She continues:

Gullis is now a figure of ridicule across the UK. He recorded a video clip bemoaning the state of parts of his constituency – so members of the public merrily pointed out that the cause was 13 years of Tory government:

And I’m not sure what to make of this so-called ‘MP Mastermind’ clip, apart from that it is amusing at his expense:

Fortunately for his Red Wall constituency, people there are likely to switch back to Labour at the next general election, so his Westminster career may soon be an embarrassing blip in history.

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Medical society to boycott Suella Braverman’s plan to X-ray asylum seekers | Maximilien Robespierre

This is self-explanatory:

The president of the Society of Radiographers has told his members that they should boycott a plan by the Home Secretary Suella Braverman to X-ray asylum seekers to determine their age. He said this was unethical and piled pressure on an NHS already at breaking point.

Here’s the clip (it’s only short):

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Tory Rwanda deportation policy is lawful, says High Court. So what?

Suella Braverman: this is an archive image but you can bet she’s happy now.

The Tory government’s plan to send people who have arrived in the UK by illegal means to Rwanda is lawful, and the administration acted rationally in arranging the deal with that country – according to the High Court.

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, is treating it as a major victory, saying she will move ahead with the policy as soon as possible.

But how soon is that?

Well…

First, the courts will have to deal with any appeals against this decision. That process will begin in January.

Then, there could be a challenge to the Supreme Court, depending on whether there is concern over the interpretation of any points of law.

Furthermore, the High Court has ruled that more care needs to be taken in the judgement of each case, meaning that many candidates – if they may be described that way – for deportation to start a new life in Rwanda may be found unsuitable for it.

And finally, any who are sentenced to go may try to petition the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to have the ruling overturned.

So Braverman has been careful not to suggest that any flight will take place soon.

Meanwhile, opponents of the policy have been condemning it from all sides.

Labour’s Yvette Cooper said the policy remains “unworkable, extortionate and deeply damaging”, and “risks making trafficking worse”.

Alison Thewlis for the SNP said the police was “deeply immoral”, saying people “fleeing war, famine and oppression deserve and need our full support”.

And there were more:

Clare Moseley, founder of refugee charity Care4Calais, called the decision on Monday “disappointing”.

She said: “People who have suffered the horrors of war, torture and human rights abuses should not be faced with the immense trauma of deportation to a future where we cannot guarantee their safety.”

Josie Naughton, chief executive of migrant charity Choose Love, said the ruling “flies in the face of international commitments and accountability”, adding that campaigners will “continue to fight” for the “human right to seek asylum”.

James Wilson, deputy director of Detention Action, said: “We are disappointed that the High Court has found the removal of refugees to an autocratic state which tortures and kills people is lawful. However, we will fight on.

“The Rwanda policy is brutal and harmful and we will now consider an appeal against today’s judgment.”

It seems clear that the jubilation from the Tories is premature.

The Tories may be kicked out of government before this controversial policy reaches any kind of fruition at all.

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Suella Braverman shouldn’t play politics after telling others not to

After being asked whether the survivors of a recent Channel crossing disaster would be welcome in the UK because they came here from a “safe” country, Home Secretary Suella Braverman demanded that her colleagues should not play “politics” over such matters.

She then went on to do exactly that.

Braverman couldn’t say these people are not welcome because others have died – as a result of the fact that the UK has closed all safe routes to the UK in order to keep racists and bigots voting Tory.

Hear it for yourself:

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Braverman’s migration failures: highest-ever number enter UK despite her closure of legal routes

Speechless: challenged to explain how a teenage refugee from an African country might legally gain asylum in the UK, Suella Braverman had nothing to say.

More than half a million people entered the UK from abroad in the year to the end of June – and Home Secretary Suella Braverman had a meltdown in a Parliamentary Committee when she was forced to try to explain the legal routes for refugees to do so.

So the highest annual migration into the UK since World War II has happened at a time when it should be impossible.

Here’s a news report:

Prime minister Rishi Sunak has said that his main priority is to help Home Secretary Suella Braverman stem the flow of migrants into the UK (despite the fact that they are both, themselves, from families that migrated into the UK).

But they also want to present the UK as a welcoming place.

The latter objective was blown to dust – by one of Sunak and Braverman’s own Conservative Party, Tim Loughton, in the Commons’ Home Affairs Select Committee, when he asked her a simple question.

The best commentary on it that I have found comes from Novara Media:

This is a government that is trying to do two mutually-exclusive things – and failing at both.

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Deal with France over migrant boats is worthless

Boat people: more than 40,000 people like these have crossed the Channel in 2022. Rather than work with their countries of origin to encourage them not to come, the Tories are paying France a small fortune to police the borders we still don’t control after Brexit.

This Writer had great difficulty in getting motivated to write about Suella Braverman’s much-trumpeted deal with France to stop refugees, asylum-seekers and, yes, the occasional economic migrant coming to the UK by illegal means.

An extra £8 million to fund 350 more personnel to stop the boats coming across isn’t going to do much good, in my opinion.

The boats – and the people in them – are just a symptom, you see. The problem is conditions in their various countries of origin that encourage them to try to travel to the UK in the first place. There is nothing intended to tackle that in Braverman’s deal – and that’s why it is pointless.

Meanwhile, critics have been quick to point out its other drawback: after the Tories touted Brexit as being about “taking back control” of our borders, we are now paying a foreign country a small fortune to control our borders for us.

And our government is about to announce new heights of taxation to make us pay for it. Did you ever get the feeling you’ve been had?

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Patel insists Rwanda is safe for asylum-seekers – despite expert advice on torture

Priti Patel: she’s not one to listen to advice she doesn’t like.

The Home Secretary has confirmed that she is ignoring the advice of an adviser who said the Rwandan government tortures political opponents, in pushing her policy of deporting asylum-seekers there.

Priti Patel insisted that Rwanda was a “safe country”.

She said the comments had been made by “officials in a different government department”.

She added: “But of course it is the Home Office who has led the economic development migration partnership which is our resettlement partnership to Rwanda. Rwanda is a safe country and all our work with the government of Rwanda shows that.”

She was responding to a High Court judgment that seven statements by an adviser should be made public in advance of a Supreme Court ruling on whether the Rwanda deportation policy is legal.

A judge ruled that a further four statements should not be published as they could potentially harm international relations.

It is not unreasonable – on the face of it – for the government to seek advice and then ignore what it is told.

Governments may take opinions from multiple sources before forming their own opinions and policy.

But this has the potential to blow up in the Tory government’s collective face, if the decision to ignore warnings about this foreign government leads to asylum-seekers being harmed.