Ben Rosher

Overhead photograph of someone sitting on a chair completing the Centre's survey on a laptop. The word SURVEY is included along with three ticks in red ink.

Our latest quarterly survey on North-South and East-West cooperation is open - and we would like to hear your thoughts on the current context for cooperation.
crossborder.ie/news/complet...
@cfni.bsky.social @communityfoundirl.bsky.social @benrosher.bsky.social @anthonysoares.bsky.social

First day of school. I have my name on a door. And my own office. And a plant!

Targeted maintenance grants for students to be reintroduced Disadvantaged students studying priority courses will benefit from extra financial support to access and excel in higher education.

UK government to reintroduce maintenance grants (rather than loans) for students from the lowest income families
www.gov.uk/government/n...

Ok. They’ve pissed me off.

I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards:

1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

For anybody who says we are not a “papers please society”. Bullshit. We have to show papers to travel, get a job, and rent a flat. ID cards would simply make this simpler.

Grey economies also exist in countries with ID cards. So for labour to pitch this as anti-migration is simply xenophobia.

*they should also not be digital-only. That is simply dumb (see EUSS)

There are issues of exclusion that need to be addressed in designing an ID card scheme. But generally, they provide a very efficient way of understanding your population and designing appropriate public services and spending.

Labour are fucking all of this away for anti-immigrant populism.

Labour pitching ID cards as an explicitly anti-immigration measure is one of the dumbest things this government has done, among a very crowded field.

As a bonus; “Brit card” isn’t gonna go down well in certain parts of NI

Politics latest: All British adults to require a digital ID 'Brit Card' Keir Starmer is set to announce plans for mandatory digitial ID. Meanwhile, Andy Burnham has claimed Labour MPs are privately urging him to challenge the prime minister in his latest controversial int...

A couple of points:

Why does it need to be digital (i)? Physical cards are easy to carry and don’t disenfranchise the elderly

(ii) The EUSS system constantly breaks

Will be we able to opt out of whatever AI training the govt will inevitably sign up to?

news.sky.com/story/politi...

Complete the survey today: calling on civic society organisations and local authorities - The Centre for Cross Border Cooperation | CBS Share this page:  The Centre for Cross Border Cooperation is calling on civic society organisations and local authorities in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to take part in its latest sur...

Have you completed the survey?

We're calling on civic society organisations & local authorities across NI & ROI to take part in participate in our survey on the Conditions for North-South & East-West Cooperation.

crossborder.ie/news/complet...

@benrosher.bsky.social @anthonysoares.bsky.social

The words Your Opinion Matters on a yellow background with an animated loud speaker on the of the illustration.

We're inviting civic society organisations and local authorities in NI and ROI to respond to our Survey on the Conditions for North-South and East-West Cooperation. Reposts appreciated.
Get involved before 6 October: crossborder.ie/news/complet...
@anthonysoares.bsky.social @benrosher.bsky.social

A list of terrorism legislation since 2000

NEW

The proscription of Palestine Action as a case study of terrorism law

Why is the general criminal law not sufficient to deal with direct action groups?

Substack: emptycity.substack.com/p/the-proscr...

Personal blog: davidallengreen.com/2025/09/the-...

If a government recognises Palestinian statehood then it recognises its right to exist. On that basis, that government cannot continue to fund and arm a state that is explicitly trying to destroy the newly recognised state.

Otherwise you’re just doing an actual virtue signal.

🔔New ARK Research Update 🔔

The latest Research Update by Professor @katyhayward.bsky.social and Dr @benrosher.bsky.social explores attitudes in Northern Ireland on the constitutional question.

Read here ➡️ www.ark.ac.uk/ARK/sites/de...

‘We can’t eat. We can’t sleep. It’s a disaster’: the small boat detainees waiting to be sent back to France This week the first migrants could be flown out of Britain under the ‘one in, one out’ deportation scheme. They talk about their fears and incomprehension

What this piece shows is that the scheme is already a mess. The Home Office is deporting people entirely at random. Those in detention don't have legal representation. Ten children have been erroneously detained and released. Legal challenges will follow.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Tell me again that Israel is not knowingly and intentionally committing a genocide

More politicians have condemned political violence in the last hour after the shooting of a guy who actively encouraged political violence than they have in the last 2 years of a genocide.

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al. Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

Chuffed to see my 'insightful' book 'Anywhere But Here' referenced in the @financialtimes.com Inside Politics newsletter.

Why, when governments say they will do “whatever it takes” to stop small boats, do they never do the one thing that will actually work and open safe routes.

People seeking asylum already carry Application Registration Cards (ARC) cards, for starters. Digital id requires you to have access to digital tech, and, despite the rantings of some right wingers, asylum seekers aren't issued with mobile phones or iPads, so many would be unable to access one. 1/

This! Over years the Home Office has successfully created the hostile environment it intended. But it’s not really sure how it’s achieved this.

This leaves a huge gap between the formulation of border policy, the responsibility for its enactment, and accountability for its effect.

Tribunal system reforms to speed up asylum decisions A new independent body will be set up to speed up decision making on asylum appeal cases.

Hard to tell from this bland announcement just what the government plans for asylum appeals, so I’m trying not to speculate. But I’ve worked in the sector in various roles since 1987 & I’ve seen a lot of policy proposals come & go so I have Thoughts on the dysfunctional way we decide such things
1/🧵

Might start investing in pallet futures, though.

Oh absolutely. Anyone who has spent any time in NI can look over the water and see that this is an anxiety response that Farage will spend the next years gleefully fanning. The result of the Epping case will make it considerably worse.

This is about the concept of "continuous immigration vetting," an idea from Trump's first term. Rather than having people be checked for compliance at specific interactions with the government such as a visa renewals, there would be an automated system running constant checks.

We’re one news cycle away from anyone buying Normal People being arrested for financing terrorism.

On the recognition of Palestine A close look at an unconvincing letter from "distinguished" UK lawyers

On the recognition of Palestine

A close look at an unconvincing letter from "distinguished" UK lawyers

By me

Substack:
emptycity.substack.com/p/on-the-rec...

Personal blog:
davidallengreen.com/2025/08/on-t...

📣 Vacancy for PhD position! 📣 I am looking for a qualitative PhD researcher (3 years, 30 hours/week) to join my ERC project #RESTATE (Refugees’ Political Participation and State-(Re)Making in Displacement), starting preferably on 1 January 2026.