Chris Bertram

Asylum hotel provider makes £180m profit despite claims of inedible food and rationed loo paper Asylum seekers and charities tell BBC of

Asylum hotel provider makes £180m profit despite claims of inedible food and rationed loo paper - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I like to think the British public is intelligent enough to see through political parties whose plans for the future amount to

1. get rid of the immigrants
2. ?

The most radical Labour plan you haven’t heard about Collective bargaining in social care could save an ailing sector — but only if it’s done properly

Interesting piece by @sarahoconnorft.ft.com but it seems perverse to pursue a plan for sectoral bargaining in social care while kicking the can down the road on how social care will work in the future as successive government have done

Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko were all younger than Trump is now when they ruled the USSR. The Soviet Union was ridiculed in the West as a gerontocracy.

There's also the vexed question of who counts as a "foreigner". Long-term Commonwealth residents? Irish citizens? No doubt Badenoch has thought it all through ....

So latest Tory wheeze is to ban foreigners from accessing benefits. Naturally there's no detail. Refugees already recognized as such by the UK? People on spousal visas? Will foreigners who have paid NICs for decades be stripped of their pensions? I hope journalists are asking Stride and Badenoch.

EN DIRECT, démission de Sébastien Lecornu : le premier ministre démissionnaire déplore « les appétits partisans » et appelle à l’« effacement de certains egos » Le premier ministre a présenté lundi matin sa démission à Emmanuel Macron, qui l’a acceptée. L’annonce de la composition de son gouvernement, dimanche soir, était critiquée de toutes parts. Il a pris ...

Crikey is that number PM number 7 for Macron and the third in a year? As Oscar Wilde might have said, to look a couple of PMs might be a misfortune but seven looks like extreme carelessness.

Quarante-huit heures pour quitter la France : une Franco-Algérienne sous le coup d’une OQTF incompréhensible Une mère de famille de 58 ans, qui vit en France depuis 1993 et possède une double nationalité, a été retenue tout un après-midi par la police aux frontières de Roissy. Elle conteste l’obligation de q...

J'aimerais bien savoir comment ce cas a été résolu: si elle était expulsé, si elle a réussi à garder la nationalité française.... (C'est pour un article que j'écris.)

It also led the the Windrush scandal, and I don’t think that can have helped them

And how did this work out for the Tories?

Tories to pledge to create immigration taskforce modelled on Trump’s Ice Proposed ‘removals force’ will be tasked with deporting 150,000 people a year in bid to tackle illegal immigration

The fact that 3 parties are now competing for the votes of the most bigoted and uninformed voters really ought to give some opportunities to the Greens and LibDems

Conservatives pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan The party unveils new policies on illegal migration as its annual conference begins in Manchester.

In a desperate attempt to boost their poll standing, Tories propose to abandon the rule of law
www.bbc.com/news/article...

‘They are treated with the most appalling hostility’: the... The number of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Britain has soared, and many are being put at risk having got here

The British state failing in its obligations again.

I got a google notification and clicked! Read until I ran into the "these pages excluded from this sample" part.

Well IMO they have some excellent journalists. Not all, but some.

Congrats, though it seems a pretty ghastly rag

The greatest crime of this Labour government (and you can say the same of most of European social democracy) is that it removes any rational hope of achieving a just society by democratic means. That conclusion leads either to cynicism and apathy or to ultimately self-defeating violence.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, p. 436

I think that's right, but I think you also have (or had) the option of selecting "Oxford" spellings and loading that dictionary. But, as ever, the default setting wins out.

@crookedfootball.bsky.social I thought this was excellent

crookedtimber.org/2025/01/29/t...

Thank you!

Why I welcome Americanisation. Sorry, Americanization News of the British Museum’s fundraising gala smacks of the sort of imitation and assimilation we’re good at

Oh God, not this again. The use of -ize rather than -ise does not mark a US/British English divide. Standard Oxford is -ize for example. There's a whole Inspector Morse episode about this. Expected better from the FT

The case of the pig is already supberbly covered by Roald Dahl

This from Bernard Williams, cited by @artsofdenial.bsky.social (books.google.fr/books?id=NW6...) doesn't reflect very well on Habermas (that is, the urge to put people in boxes).

Windrush commissioner pledges to fight for justice for marginalised groups Clive Foster aims to ‘confront uncomfortable realities’ and expand his remit to help those faced with discrimination

Does anyone know if the Windrush Commissioner has yet expressed himself on the possible impacts of Starmer and Mahmood's hardening of immigration policy? Was he consulted?

Reading Zweig's World of Yesterday (1940). Says that "back then" (WW1) was "unlike today" a world where writers had a reasonable hope of changing things for the better. 85 y later you could write most persuasive argument ever, reason and evidence aplenty, and wouldn't mitigate the cruelty one bit.

I'd seen that, but wasn't yesterday, it was on the 22nd. I thought there must have been another one.

Just caught this news. Absolutely sickening. Can't see the Bristol news at Bristol Live site: what happened?

The other thing to note is that instead of taking pride in having higher standards for refugee welcome than other countries, this Labour government thinks it important to have lower standards, all justified by unevidenced assertions about "pull factors". For shame.

Israeli naval ships intercept Gaza-bound flotilla Climate activist Greta Thunberg is among activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla being taken to an Israeli port.

Ireland, Turkey and Colombia standing up for international law against an act of piracy by Israel. The UK, France, Italy, not.