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Probably, the publication source and authorship team won't appeal to many, but this report repeats what some of us have been saying for a while on these threads about per capita GDP, net fiscal impact, and pressures on infrastructure. It is hard to deny the core argument.
2023: growing alliance between Russia, Iran, and Iran's affiliates in Middle East, such as Hamas and the Houthis. Autumn 2023: Saudi Arabia is about to sign the Abraham Accord Peace Agreement which would have brought closer ties between Israel and Arab world. The October 7th raid murders over 1200 Israelis and triggers a response that ends the chance of extending the Accord. Oct 26th: high-level Hamas delegation visits Moscow. Diversion of US attention and supplies to Israel results in dramatic decrease in military aid to Ukraine. November 2023: the Houthis launch attacks on Western shipping causing cargo to be diverted away from the Suez Canal with a considerable cost to Western European consumers. Houthis agree not to target Russian and Chinese ships (although their aim is not always great). Israel is seen by many countries as the villain, and there are calls for a permanent ceasefire with Hamas left to rule Gaza. Russia is pushing forward in Ukraine. Join the dots.....
Hard to know quite what the upper limit would be for the right central striker. I was idly thinking it might be worth taking another look at Lawrence Shanklin at Hearts, who has rediscovered his form this season. Only thing with him is that in the past he has not travelled well outside Scotland. DK how high his fee would be. Probably Keith would have mixed feelings about such a move.
This is the song he wrote that was ripped off by a US producer who gave it to the Andrews sisters, leading Invader to spend years in the US suing to get some money back.
Wearing high heels and a dress does seem to be on the rise. I came across an old calypso song the other day that seemed quite topical - wouldn't be allowed to be played now I suppose. Who remembers Lord Invader?
Viljami Sinisalo on loan from Villa at Exeter is worth a look.
Or an outside possibility might be a senior pro in an EPL reserve side, providing that such a person would trade a high wage for lifestyle and a couple of years of first team football.
Just before he died, Henry Kissinger commented on the political impact of large-scale migration into Europe; he talked about the creation of new interest groups that would influence political parties and their policies. The results of the recent council elections, and how Gaza has featured so centrally in the campaigns in some areas, seem to bear that out.
Other recent news headlines say that the Labour Party is working to win back votes in Muslim communities. Some senior party sources say policy will need to change, even after the shift that already happened.. Personally I find that quite worrying. I seem to recall a discourse from years ago whereby people on the Left argued that changing demography would not greatly change existing culture and values, because integration would mean that migrants adopted the values had attracted them to the UK in the first place. Will foreign policy now be shaped increasingly by the reaction of certain "interest groups" to what is happening in far away places? Some will say that demography is destiny.
I agree that the big PPE contracts were let in a highly dubious way, but I am not sure that anybody could really have got a grip on furlough. I was listening to the "14 years of chaos" jibes yesterday, and thinking that, just as Labour got unfairly blamed for the 2008 crash and bankers' bailout, the Tories were in a no-win situation with COVID-19 (obviously fewer parties would have helped). True, our national debt shot up alarmingly, just as it did after 2008, but do you remember the anguished calls from the opposition parties for more generous. longer-lasting support, and the accusation that small businesses and the self-employed were being left behind? No doubt some conmen enriched themselves, but amidst the general turmoil that surrounded the pandemic could the government have weathered the storm if it had slowed down the hand-outs to have strict checks? I say this as somebody who received no public help and paid a lot of tax at that time. It was a very difficult situation. Of course, I fully support efforts to get money back where wrong-doing can be proved.
Wouldn't you then feel uncomfortable in an EU country where this is the norm? Of course, the long-term trend within the Union is towards convergence on matters like this , so that this would almost certainly have eventually affected the UK had we remained a member country.
Indeed. And I imagine that if the UK announced the introduction of such an mandatory ID card, critics would probably argue that that too disenfranchised voters who for one reason or another were not able or willing to produce it. We are presently a bit of an OECD outlier with that recent reform closing the gap a little. Has it really been the case that thousands were disenfranchised in N. Ireland because they had to produce ID to vote?
Given the turn the thread has taken, I cannot resist pointing out that most European countries require photo ID in elections. Johnson is a buffoon, but this policy just copied what happens in the EU.
I agree that it is wrong to pin the whole blame only on the present government, even though their record is abysmal. As MajorR acknowledged above, the influx from the central and eastern European A8 countries in 2004 was significant, and many would say that was a sea change moment.
Today's announcement from Labour about allowing asylum claims for all already in the UK brought to mind that 2019 party conference resolution on extending free movement. If Labour get in for one or even two terms, I fear immigration will rocket even higher and we will really notice the difference.
Looks as though I missed a key element in my earlier post. Labour will add the nearly 100,000 undocumented migrants who are ineligible for asylum under current legislation to the asylum backlog. This represents a 7-fold increase in the number queueing and appears far beyond present processing capacity. To deal with that, Labour plans to recruit 1000 new officers, plus arrange new returns agreements. At the moment very few returns are possible, so it looks like rejected cases will be allowed to stay on a more temporary basis. I think it is fair to say that in reality they are talking about an amnesty.
If there have been signs of a deterrent effect with the recent influx of around 7000 migrants into Ireland, that seems to have just gone out the window with a Labour election victory likely. Was that the plan in making the announcement now? Were the Labour front bench afraid that the Rwanda policy seemed to be starting to work?
The added problem is that it has to be productive people with incomes high enough that their taxes exceed the cost of in-work benefits and services received. That means a household income above £40K if they are to make a net fiscal contribution.
The Labour solution seems to be: crack down on the people smugglers, returns deal with the EU, and extra safe routes.
My problem with this is that the Tories are already trying the first without a great deal of success. Just in relation to paying France to police its border, the HoC Library states that the UK paid £232 million directly between 2014 and April 2023, plus another £86.9 million on related expenditure such as Channel tunnel security and border strengthening. Moreover, the UK has committed to spend around £476 million to fund French assistance between 2023/24 and 2025/26. (Just as a reference point the amount so far spent on Rwanda is £240 million up to December 2023.)
There have been attempts to engage with Belgium, Germany and Turkey to slow the supply of rubber boats to the French coast, which will also have cost something. It is unclear what more Labour could do and what the cost would be.
A returns deal seems very difficult, as even with all the money paid so far France is unwilling to move to this next step and says that such a policy has to be agreed with Brussels. From what has been leaked about likely negotiating positions, there could be no returns policy without burden sharing, meaning accepting a quota of arrivals into the EU from migrant source countries. Very few returns occurred when the Dublin Regulation was in operation before Brexit, so one may conclude that the UK would be lucky if returns were as high as the burden-sharing quota allocated. Being able to use the Dublin Regulation does not seem to be helping Ireland, even though the details of many migrants transiting through the UK will already be in the Eurodac database.
The safe routes proposal has never made sense to me as the numbers of people wishing to move from conflict-affected countries, or those where some people may be at risk of persecution, is very high indeed. There will always be a fair number of asylum seekers who do not meet the criteria for refugee status. We have seen what is happening on the US Southern border with safe routes already provided. The people smugglers would still have many takers.
So I don’t see how any of these ideas will work. I see that Andrew Marr is saying Labour may keep the Rwanda policy for a while if it is working.
Putting this another way, Ireland intends to nullify a judgement by its highest court that returning migrants to the UK would break international law by passing domestic legislation to allow returns. Yet when the UK passed recent legislation to declare that Rwanda is a safe country, thus circumventing the Supreme Court judgement that said transfers to Rwanda broke international law, that was condemned by Irish and other EU politicians. Does that seem logical and consistent?
The article seems to suggest that rather than returning the migrants to France, RoI law will be changed to allow returns to the UK. What I wonder though, given that most have just passed through the UK on their journey to Ireland from France and other EU countries, is whether it would be possible for Ireland to use the Dublin Regulation to return them to another EU country. The Eurodac Regulation allows this for persons recorded in the shared Eurodac database. This contains information collected when undocumented migrants are fingerprinted and biometric data collected in the first point of contact EU country or where an asylum claim is made. Does the fact that a migrant has left the EU and then returned render this inoperable? I don't know.
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