Re: UK News and Discussions
Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2022 3:50 pm
UK is screwed economically. Recession until 2024.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -3-percent
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -3-percent
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ion-centreMon 7 Nov 2022 06.00 GMT
Britain exists in an imaginary state of crisis about immigration. Nothing soothes this anxiety – not facts, not real numbers of arrivals, not the distinction between migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular. In the past week alone, reports have emerged of illegally detained migrants at overcrowded centres falling ill, of underage sexual assault, and of others being dropped off in the middle of cities and promptly forgotten about. These appalling failures have occurred not because there are too many migrants, but because the government has broken its own asylum system.
This is a crisis by design, not of arrivals. The government is keen to stress the recent increase in Channel crossings, yet asylum applications are half what they were 20 years ago. The real and only cause of the debacle at Manston and other failing centres is this: the number of asylum applications processed within six months has fallen from almost 90% to about 4%. It’s not that more people are arriving than ever before, it’s that more of them aren’t being processed, and so are stuck in the asylum system for years. Efficiency has been dropping sharply since 2014, one year after Theresa May established the “hostile environment” and in the middle of George Osborne’s austerity programme. The intersection of those two forces created an underfunded, cruel Home Office, and with it Britain’s immigration “crisis”.
And it is a crisis that the government has every interest in maintaining, or at least no pressing interest in resolving. The Tories have finessed a narrative in which the country is under a migrant siege that the government is trying valiantly to rebuff, but is frustrated in its efforts by a string of culprits – “activist” lawyers, human rights law, tofu eaters, the Labour opposition. It is that tired fallback of failing rightwing government: plead helplessness in the face of a ubiquitous fifth column, an abstract leftwing blob that only last week the Sunday Telegraph editor, Allister Heath, promoted to the status of wielding “near total intellectual hegemony”.
https://news.sky.com/story/labour-call- ... s-12741476Tuesday 8 November 2022 15:47, UK
Labour has called on Rishi Sunak to block Boris Johnson's "conveyer belt of cronies" resignation peerages.
Scotland Secretary Alister Jack, former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, former minister Nigel Adams and the outgoing COP26 President Alok Sharma are among those expected to be nominated by the former prime minister to be elevated to the House of Lords.
The Times newspaper also reports that Mr Johnson has nominated two of his loyal advisers - Ross Kempsell, the Conservative Party's former political director and Charlotte Owen, a former assistant to the former PM - to become the youngest life peers in history.
A source close to Mr Johnson said: "We never comment on speculation about honours."
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/police-shutt ... -arrested/9 November 2022, 12:23
A minister has hit out at police for arresting LBC reporter Charlotte Lynch as she covered Just Stop Oil protests yesterday.
Charlotte was arrested on the side of the M25 on Tuesday and held for five hours, despite the fact she had her press identification with her.
Hertfordshire Police defended their actions, saying officers faced "very challenging circumstances" and they had "reasonable grounds at the time to make an arrest in order to ascertain the circumstances surrounding [the journalist's] presence at the location".
However they later said ordered an independent investigation of their approach, saying they recognised "the concerns over the recent arrests of journalists" and added that "additional measures are now in place to ensure that legitimate media are able to do their job".
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan told LBC's Nick Ferrari at Breakfast: "Journalists shouldn't get arrested for doing their job."