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The full on doom and gloom topic.

Fantastic timing to welcome Herzog, too. Right after Israel violated yet another previously watertight international norm by trying (and, unusually for them, failing) to assassinate Hamas's negotiating team in Doha yesterday afternoon. There may not be a literal red carpet for him, but the Labour government has laid out something better by announcing that they have no reason to believe that the country is undertaking genocide, despite every major human rights agency internationally, the UN, and numerous high-profile genocide scholars in and out of Israel declaring otherwise.

I hope whatever consultancy job Lammy and Starmer have in mind after getting booted out of office will cover their individual legal fees at The Hague sometime in the next few decades. Although their capacity to think anything through seems completely diminished.
 
OK, meant to post this about a fortnight ago, following thoosie discussions with "Those in the Know", in the corridors of power, while wandering the Beach.

The economy, local, national, and international, is failing, and good old money may well be the cause of civilisation folding.

We are spending beyond our means, on all levels.

We haven't got enough workers paying tax to pay for it all, and it only gets worse with 1.3 kids instead of 2.4 when I was a kid.

The economy is based on borrowing, and covid doubled the outstanding debt, and we haven't started to pay back yet what was borrowed.

The markets are on the edge, especially so with AI investments, and AI making investments!

Happy Monday.

Will update the top ten this week.
 
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On Radio 5 live this morning they announced that we've apparently spent £15 billion on putting up Asylum seekers in hotels. There should have been a Cobra meeting about this years ago and cheaper camps/centres purpose built alongside using any mothballed military accommodation etc. This could be done much more cheaply. Alas, our leaders sit on their hands and Reeves' massive black hole gets larger and larger as we get further penetrated by people wanting refuge or just a better life.
 
rob666 said:
Send 'em to Pontins...
Soon want to hop back over the channel.

...and give them temporary work permits while their case is dealt with...
so they can pay for their own keep all the while.
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And solve a political issue that is quite clearly leant on to garner votes from certain demographics?

Schrodinger's Immigrant indeed.
 
BarryZola said:
On Radio 5 live this morning they announced that we've apparently spent £15 billion on putting up Asylum seekers in hotels. There should have been a Cobra meeting about this years ago and cheaper camps/centres purpose built alongside using any mothballed military accommodation etc. This could be done much more cheaply. Alas, our leaders sit on their hands and Reeves' massive black hole gets larger and larger as we get further penetrated by people wanting refuge or just a better life.
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In reeves defence, only a small defence. She is having to deal with the Tories lack of any control after 2016. We are know dealing with the actual damage of Brexit.

Farage/Johnson and the like have sold the county a lie that simply leaving Europe would sort this out. It didn't. France and Europe will happily wave at the small boats now as they drift across, knowing full it's not their problem anymore.

Still at least farage has a plan.................. Copy what trumps done and see if that worksa
 
I acknowledge that Brexit meant that some regulations were lost which included the Dublin agreement, and it will have had some impact. However, when it was in place the amount of asylum seekers coming here in total and the numbers being sent back to another EU country were negligible in the grand scheme, hundreds or low thousands up to around 2015 for example. Then, yes, numbers have risen since Brexit. But, look what happens in other EU countries with regards to their numbers of asylum seekers arriving since 2016. We're not alone. The general trend is that other EU countries have seen a massive growth in their numbers of asylum seekers admitted too. With the overwhelming numbers arriving and the time it takes to process all of these people and wait out multiple court dates (with higher wait times due to sheer numbers) whilst people appeal being deported on whatever grounds etc, would the Dublin agreement have prevented this situation at all? I'm dubious.

My point was, putting the political situation aside and whether brexit has really had a big impact on numbers of asylum seekers arriving and staying here temporarily or until their asylum is granted, we have a crisis of hundreds of thousands of people needing accommodation for months or years until their cases are heard, and it's totally unacceptable that the best idea that the government (of any colour) can come up with is paying hotel rates to house these people. Not just as a temporary stop gap for a small amount of time, but knowing that this situation will be ongoing for years until it's sorted, and they have had no other plan to accommodate all of these people in a more cost effective fashion. They've had 240 civil servants working on the Covid inquiry at a cost of over £100 million. How many have they got planning and working on getting some more suitable accommodation sorted for however many years this is going to go on for? Their priorities seem totally wrong, as usual. I've said it before, they should get some more camps/centres built and then if/when this situation is resolved these properties can be re-purposed into open prisons or any number of other things.

There just doesn't seem to be any will or joined up thinking going on.
 
Because no one has a clue. It's not as simple as Reform think it is.

You've said above about building camps. All you do there is move the issue from the hotels, to the camps. That £15billion won't get any smaller as a consequence. Only grow as we will now need to build. I doubt the "protest" will get any smaller.
 
It would cost more in the immediate future but would end up better value in the long run, and you'd be left with infrstructure to use for other things once the number of asylum seekers were down to a much smaller level. Like I said originally, they should have been monitoring this situation a couple of years ago and seeing how it was out of hand, and if they'd acted then we could have had these 'camps' in place by now. But like I said, they just sit on their hands. I also have no faith that Reform would do any good for this country. I have no faith in any of them.
 
the migrants will keep coming. As long as they're in Europe. They will keep coming. As long as the world continues down the path it is. They will keep.comin


The solution lied with us being in Europe. Now we aren't, the solution will only get harder.
 
Mad Nadine says that Reform's "solution" to all this is to leave the ECHR.

Which will come with zero consequences for the working class can assure you.
 
Random thought whilst I'm at work, but why not leave the ECHR but copy the laws/directives into a new law of our own (or create a new court with the money saved) but obviously doing away with the current legislation on claiming asylum? Is that impossible?
 
BarryZola said:
Random thought whilst I'm at work, but why not leave the ECHR but copy the laws/directives into a new law of our own (or create a new court with the money saved) but obviously doing away with the current legislation on claiming asylum? Is that impossible?
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Your proposal is impossible because The European Convention on Human Rights, and The Human Rights Act, actually have no specific provisions for claiming asylum.

Instead, ECHR's power in asylum cases comes from the protections it offers against removal. If removal were to result in a breach of any of the protected rights, removal would be incompatible with ECHR.

The only way to successfully challenge an asylum ruling, using ECHR, is to argue that deportation would result in one (or more) of your protected freedoms being broken.

Typically Articles 2 and 3 of ECHR are used by those challenging their already rejected asylum claim, in the courts. Article 2 is the right to life, Article 3 is the prohibition of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The unspecificity and broadness of the legislation is deliberate by design, to stop it from being applied to some people but not others.

Asylum claims are primarily handled by the UN's 1951 Refugee Convention. To succeed, a person must prove they have a "well-founded fear of being persecuted" for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group.
 
If we do leave ECHR, what makes you think anyone of Dorris's political views and the views of her former and now current party, would have the first clue on how to set a similar version over here. It will be used to strip away anyone's right to fight against power.
 
Anyone got any solutions then? In theory (not saying it would be) it could be 300,000 people arriving next year, 500,000 the year after, and eventually a million people coming here each year and claiming asylum. We'd end up spending a massive chunk of each years budget on housing asylum seekers (even more than the £15 billion we've spent in recent years) and then however much it costs us in legal fees etc which must be a massive chunk too. Public services would be non-existent. Is this how people want a decent portion of the tax-take being spent? We're supposed to be looking at ways to save money and improve the economy.

The rules that are in place seriously need updating in one way or another because they don't seem to be fit for the current time.

I'll point out again that I'm not a Reform voter and have no plans on voting for them, I wouldn't trust them either. It's sad that people have to point this out whenever they try to come up with ideas to deter boat crossings and want to see tax-payers money spent more effectively.
 
Closer monitoring, work permits, and the nation benefits from taxation on their earnings and purchases they make via VAT perhaps.
1.3 children instead of 2.4 for modern couples...not good for the long term at all...that good old demographic timebomb...not enough workers to pay for the dependants, simple as that.
Shrinking working population in the UK...we need to import young blood to support the system, without them we are heading for a certain economic collapse.
Organise and control it, instead of allowing a nice black market to continue in rubber boats and dangerous crossings.
 
BarryZola said:
I'll point out again that I'm not a Reform voter and have no plans on voting for them, I wouldn't trust them either. It's sad that people have to point this out whenever they try to come up with ideas to deter boat crossings and want to see tax-payers money spent more effectively.
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This comes from Mr Farage making this priority number one politically. The boats account for 4-7% of the migration into this country. BUT if you can convince the poor and middle class folk that live in mostly white areas of the country, that this is the reason why things are falling apart. It's a winner.

No one asking why him and his mates get richer.

No one asking what on earth his other policies are.

Why he wants to scrap the NHS to bring in the American system.

The mess his councils are in.

The best form of defence against the small boats is placing the st George's and union flag on lamp posts.
 
Slugjc said:
This comes from Mr Farage making this priority number one politically. The boats account for 4-7% of the migration into this country. BUT if you can convince the poor and middle class folk that live in mostly white areas of the country, that this is the reason why things are falling apart. It's a winner.
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Buxton had the smallest level of immigrants living there but voted Reform because of the bogeyman.

Get through the backlog of cases which will result in either deportation or allowance to give back into the economy is step 1. Then introduce a number of safe approved routes for asylum to minimise those taking advantage of the situation.

Stop making the lives of people a political weapon whilst we at it. But No chance of that happening.
 
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