This is a headline in the Financial Times this morning:
The substance of the story does not matter in any large part.
The fact is that what we are seeing is a Conservative Party leader who is almost devoid of ideas, seeking to exploit a situation that has arisen as a direct consequence of her own actions as part of a government in which she was a Cabinet minister.
More than anyone else, the problem of the asylum seekers living in hotels is the creation of the Tories. Like Labour (and I am referring to the Blair and Brown administrations here), the Tories refused to let asylum seekers work whilst waiting for decisions on their status to be resolved, so that they might finance themselves during the interim, as many countries permit. Instead, the Tories persistently chose to make them a cost to the state.
Worse than that, the Tories insisted that asylum applications should not be processed over an extended period before leaving office, increasing the number of people living in hotels as a deliberate way to heighten the stress now being seen.
Kemi Badenoch's comments reveal three things.
First, there is straightforward hypocrisy: she helped create this problem.
Second, there is bandwagoning. What has happened in one particular case is highly unlikely to be replicable in many others. Using a quirk of planning law is not the basis for migration policy. What is more, Badenoch has nothing to say about what should be done to assist the people living in hotels because the UK government has not formed a coherent policy on managing legitimate asylum claims by those arriving in the UK. Badenoch's suggestion that we use tents is deliberately cruel, while also being intended to indicate refugee status — in the process, in fact, confirming that many of those claims are justified.
Thirdly, if this is the best the Tories can manage, the fact that they are languishing in the polls is unsurprising. Whatever they do now, they are without a future unless (and I think this is likely) they are subject to a reverse takeover by Reform. The one thing that they will never be again is the obvious party of government.
What I know is that we will be better off without them.
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What about homeless people housed in hotels.
The fact is that hotels are entirely unsuitable for long term accommodation either of the homeless or asylum seekers but that issue is never addressed
Agreed. They are not suitable for anyone for the purposes of long-term accommodation, but for far too long homeless people have been housed in hotels and bread and breakfast accommodation.
They are using implicit -and sometimes less subtle- racism to gather support.
If they get into power and have to deliver on the rhetoric, they will find it more difficult than they say. And their supporters will demand more. Once ignited the fires are not easily extinguished. Or to use the Chinese phrase we hear in the 1960s ‘he who rides the tiger cannot easily dismount.’
Agreed
Agreed – Badenoch though is to me a rather comical figure – dangerous of course – but with little or no credibility.
The person to watch though is Robert Jenrick.
He is evil incarnate, I’m sure of it.
As a quaker, I try to see “that of God in everyone“. I have admit, God looks well hidden in the case of Robert Jenrick.
Absolute bollocks – your blog is firmly built on criticising and casting aspersions on anyone and everyone who doesn’t agree with you.
Far from ‘seeing the best’ in everyone you do the precise opposite, accusing people of having nasty or negative motives even when their actions are positive.
In just about every blog post you’ve written you criticise and castigate those whose thinking does not align with yours. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
All that it takes for evil to happen is for good men to do nothing. I would remind you of that.
Richard, I have always maintained that you are a much better human being than I.
Bullsh*t.
I recognise no such distinction or claim.
As his Satanic majesty’s representative to the EU & UK (I have the brand to prove it) likewise I ( & HE) see the good in most people.
Jasmine, as you know my Master favours kindness and consideration to all – of honest character. & thus we come to the crux of it. Mr Murphy criticises those who ain’t (of honest character – or who have strayed from the path of honesty). You will be rewarded to know, that my Master has reserved some interesting “entertainments” for those that have “strayed”. I am certain, Jasmine, that you are as honest as the day is long & indeed try to see the best in everybody – but keep in mind there are those that can deceive & my Master can see through them – like a pane of glass. Reflect on this as you survey your erm… elected representatives, all this is little to do with thinking and much to do with their actions & who pays for that action, it you see what I mean.
Yours. Morningstar
I’d just like to state for the record, that I am not (dis)Honest Bob. 😉
Richard Desmond may have 45m reasons to like him, I have none.
I am in complete agreement with you and your sentiment. As one who has a lifetime’s experience of planning law, the judgment did not surprise me. The judge acknowledged that this case involved a narrow point of planning law and that cases of this nature are always highly fact sensitive. Therefore a seemingly similar case may still produce an entirely different outcome. To adapt the saying from another post today, our politicians, despite the colour of their respective rosettes, have been riding the tiger of immigration for too long now that they may find it difficult to dismount before the jungle around them is engulfed in flames lit and stoked by the far right. Already there appears to be a litigation bandwagon beginning to roll. All of this is as a result of all the main parties “othering” migrants. Only crocodile tears are shed when a tragedy occurs in the Channel. No one in the MSM ever challenges the slogans and propaganda surrounding this whole debate. No one wants to treat these people for what they are and what they might become – fellow human beings who may be fleeing genuine persecution and who may well want to settle hear, work, raise families, pay taxes and make a contribution to society. Instead they are demonised as a whole on the basis of a complete absence of knowledge about their individual circumstances. It is akin to shooting first and asking questions later.
The facts of this case show that none of these migrants are living the high life at the expense of the taxpayer. Instead they are put up in fairly squalid accommodation. Time for the “political class” to hold a more honest debate on the subject and resort to less dog whistling.
So Bayleaf’s thoughts for today are “Sow more seeds, not division” and “Divide plants, not people”!
Richard, I wish I could agree that the Tories will never again be the obvious party of government. I thought that when Blair bulldozed them out of office when I was a young man, and how wrong I was. The party’s survival instinct and capacity to shape shift can’t be discounted – it’s served them well for decades.
I explained it’s only route to survival. It might, indeed, shape shift so that we have the Reformed Tories in the future..
“Tents” – despicable language aimed deliberately at dehumanising refugees and asylum seekers, so we can deny them their inalienable human rights, only providing basic “zoo” conditions before “sending them back where they came from”.
I suppose that’s what Badenoch means by “cultural Christianity”.
And then we have Yvette Cooper, and Fa***e.
LORD have mercy on us…
Chris Philp was on the radio this morning, trying to blame Labour for a problem which is largely arose from 14 years of Conservative led government – more refugees paying gangs to cross the Channel on small inflatable boats, people shunted into hotel accommodation for lack of anything better while they wait for claims to be proceeeds, long backlogs at the Home Office due to inadequate resourcing, inability to return refugees to the EU due to Brexit.
Apparently a main plank of his “plan” is to disapply the ECHR. Apparently this is the Conservative position: that refugees will no longer be treated as human beings. Jesus wept.
We could talk about the need for safe routes, and remote processing of claims. But why is it so difficult to control the supply of large inflatable boats? Who makes them, and who sells them? What legitimate uses do they have?
There is obviously a deeply organised supply chain to ensure that boats arrive where required on the French coast. Most of these appear to be a far east manufacture, shipped through Germany and then arriving in France. As you say, why is it so hard to disrupt that process. It should be incredibly straightforward.
That said, the pure hypocrisy of the Tories is stunning.
Frankly, we are normalising cruelty.
Its mindboggling.
Buried somewhere in my Twitter timeline from years ago is my prediction that Badenoch would be a serious danger. That’s certainly come true! But, as usual with such people, hubris will lead to her eventual downfall. These people can never understand just how out of tune they are with everyone but their small band of faithful.
All we have to ensure is that she never gets near enough to the levers of power that she is able to squash those who oppose her, as seems to be in danger of happening in Trump’s America..
Much to agree with.
I would love to see the small boats misery hung around Nigel Farage’s neck. As the principal architect of Brexit he is the person most responsible for the misery in the channel and the Asylum hotels. Before Brexit we had a returns agreement which would allow us to return illegal entrants to the country in which they first entered the EU. That effectively prevented people from taking the risk of dangerous channel crossing. Once Brexit had happened we had no returns agreement and therefore every incentive for people to chance their luck as there was no legal means to return them. Hence the increase in small boat crossings post Brexit and the crisis Farage now seeks to exploit for his own unscrupulous ends. I would love to remove his statehood and cast him adrift in the North Sea without any guarantee that any state anywhere would take him- but only after having charged him royally for the privilege of sitting in a leaky boat.
I listened to shadow immigration minister Chris Philp on LBC this morning and frankly you couldn’t separate anything he said from the inflammatory language written on BNP leaflets 30 years ago.
The libel that asylum seekers are all sexual predators and lawless illegals is now embedded, Philp parroted all the tropes that would have been off limits not 5 years ago. He and the Tories cling to the carcass of the foul and hyper-illegal Rwanda scheme as if that – had it had any scintilla of legality at all – would solve the issue of channel boats.
The Tory indulgence of these legal claims is of course the towering Himalayan height of their usual, characteristic hypocrisy. The Tories are a Party forever creating problems with their partisan ideology and unworkable policymaking, then after being belatedly booted out, screeching with their establishment media chums at all those charged with solving them.
The evidence is that the propensity of these asylum seekers to commit crime is MUCH higher than for the general population.
That’s an inconvenient truth for those of the Left who want to hide this under the carpet and claim racism against anyone pointing it out.
Those who have studied this issue, like the Migration Information Centre at Oxford University, say that there is no sustainable evidence to support the claim that you are making. In that case, why do you spread such evil venom?
MUFC
Please can you reference that evidence, so we can see what it says? Many thanks.
Listen MUFC, the real crime being committed against you is government austerity – keeping you/us in poverty of some kind, pissing everybody off so that we end up fighting amongst ourselves for a few titbits.
Get it into your head will you that it is our crappy politicians who are funded by the rich who are stealing from you – not a bunch of desperate people trying to come here for safety.
Have you ever been across English Channel? Not exactly a canal is it? You’d have to be pretty desperate to get in a rubber dinghy to cross that ditch to get here where you are not wanted.
Alas, might we br in an era of arrogant ineptitude of service to the citizenry, and their children, masked by showbiz callousness and cruelty?
If so, might the main stream media also have significant responsibility for such paraded, self-indulgent mismanagement?
There is currently no political party worth supporting or main stream media worth reading or watching in the UK. There’s zero understanding of money mechanics yet we need as a society to deploy a lot of money to make things better.
Most sexual and physical crime is committed by white men. As proportionate to the population, non whites are slightly, but not significantly, less likely. White men kill women every day, most sexual and violent crimes are committed by members of the extended family, or in the case of the 16-30 age group, you can add peers. There’s no evidence migrants committed any more crime proportionately. I would be pleased to see MUFCs peer reviewed statistics, as I’m sure the ONS would want to consult him/her.
I’m a great believer in trying to reason with people as far as possible. Some of the behaviour of politicians with regard to these hotels has been appalling, often leading to incitement to criminal damage by hooligans who cannot respond to reason. They are always looking for an excuse to riot, not a reason.
Jonathan Swift said: you cannot reason a person out of behaviour that they didn’t reason themselves into. Wise words.
“Reader, I married him.” – a refugee that is. I am now sitting in a country, Iran, whose people are drowning in immiserated desperation.
As the government valiantly – IMHO – defends Iran’s independence, the people’s basic needs have been neglected. The economy, crushed by 40 years of extreme Western sanctions, is failing everyone.
Even as US bombing and regime change plots recede, young people are desperate to leave. Women have won their freedom from compulsory hijab. But no amount of money protects your family from water shortages, electricity cut outs and lack of decent jobs.
Interestingly, the talk in taxis now is whether Georgia or Russia is possible – Russia doesn’t recognise refugee status.
Every person on a small boat in the Channel has genuine grievance, almost all due to Western Imperialism and Colonialism.