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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 10:42 18 Feb 2026
Just to mention one part of this route, Sketty and Uplands accommodate a lot of international students and it would be unusual not to see a few if walking through the area. Additionally, if you walk past Bishop Gore School at times when pupils arrive or depart or the newish Sketty Mosque at certain times you will see a lot of persons with minority ethnic backgrounds.
https://www.skettymosque.org/ |
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Reply | Trump rubbishes Chagos deal
at 03:49 18 Feb 2026
Another angle that has just come up in the news concerns the original (advisory) judgment by the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea.
Critics have found that the treaty that established the tribunal contains provision for an opt out that would exclude the Chagos base from the jurisdiction of the tribunal if exercised.
Article 298 allows states to declare exceptions to compulsory dispute settlement procedures under UNCLOS, effectively excluding certain sensitive disputes from binding adjudication.
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AI Overview
Article 298 of the UNCLOS provides optional exceptions to the compulsory dispute settlement mechanisms outlined in Part XV, Section 2 of the Convention. When a state signs, ratifies, or accedes to the Convention, it may declare in writing that it does not accept compulsory procedures for certain categories of disputes, without affecting its other obligations under the Convention.
Categories of Disputes Excluded
The article allows states to exclude disputes concerning:
Military activities by government vessels or aircraft engaged in non-commercial service.
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Apparently such a declaration was made.
https://questions-statements.p
The Government probably won't take any notice as they are claiming that Mauritius could take the case to other international courts and eventually get a binding decision, but the fact that this has been kept out of public view says something about the intention to get the deal done.
In another development four Chagossians have arrived on one of the islands and are daring the UK government to remove them. The complications keep coming thick and fast. [Post edited 18 Feb 8:53]
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 22:24 17 Feb 2026
Text of Louise Bennett-Coverley's poem, "Colonization in Reverse".
Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane-load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem a pour out a Jamaica
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
What a islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An tun history upside dung!
Some people doan like travel,
But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-Englan agency.
An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.
Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see de tunabout?
Jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout’.
For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.
Jane say de dole is not too bad
Because dey payin she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
Dat suit her dignity.
Me say Jane will never fine work
At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.
Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.
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TfL recently put up posters featuring this poem. |
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Reply | Trump rubbishes Chagos deal
at 22:05 17 Feb 2026
This hints at a form of corruption that occurs when senior elements in a country's legal establishment become too closely entwined with government. In effect they come up with solutions that experts in countries that feel they have cases against the UK could not arrive at without their help, and they profit handsomely. The close relationships between advocates and former colleagues in government facilitate this process. And yet the cumulative effect is national self-harm, if not actual suicide. It is as though the elite profits but isolates itself from the ever growing collateral damage to the nation. There is a last days of Rome feel about what is happening. |
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 06:30 17 Feb 2026
But before going round and round in circles we started with Mr Ratcliffe's actual words and the suggestion that use of the word "immigrants" was in itself racist. Ratcliffe never mentioned ethnicity or race. |
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 19:11 16 Feb 2026
Another red herring and failure to grapple with the real issue. From what you say one would assume that "immigrant" is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, when the characteristics defined in law are ones that only some immigrants will have.
You can lead a horse to water but... |
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 09:10 16 Feb 2026
Surely you should realise that the definition you put forward is contested. Blair Imani in the video clip link I posted, herself as right-on an anti-racism activist as you will find, flatly contradicted what you are arguing. The controversy is feeding into the government's efforts to draft a definition of Islamophobia, with the formulation they have come up with thought not to satisfy Muslim campaigners.
In any event, your post again fails to explain the exact mechanism whereby Ratcliffe's use of the word "immigrants" can be heard as an expression of racism. It may also be worth getting to grips with the idea of "racialisation" as a concept that underlies racism, and considering the processes that racialisation involves and whether Ratcliffe used any of them (I don't think he did).
I have been explicit about how I come to my understanding of how "immigrants" would be heard by speakers in our language community. Perhaps you could dip into the sociolinguistics literature to explain to me how you or Gwyn arrive at a different hearing of the word
A final thought is that your own favoured definition involves discrimination against a particular group, whereas Gwyn's argument was that the failure to specify a particular group within the category immigrants was itself racist. I'm sorry but I think the logic is all over the place. [Post edited 16 Feb 9:28]
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 01:06 16 Feb 2026
I want to understand but am trying to see how a collective noun that encompasses multiple social types is racist, remembering the origin of the term "racism" and its claim that humankind is divided into separate physical groups differentiated by phenotype and genetics. One way to analyse how categories are used in language is the idea of membership categorisation devices, collections of categories that cluster together. Immigrant would be part of the category set that includes native (or resident or citizen) and emigrant. I do not see how describing persons arriving on the UK with the intention to settle as "immigrants" rather than listing all the included categories that one might unpack is racist. How does this speech act relate to any claim that races exist in nature and that some races are superior to others? Can you unpack the logic or chain of reasoning? [Post edited 16 Feb 1:24]
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Reply | UAE concerned about British Radicalisation!
at 20:21 15 Feb 2026
Haven't quite got my head around what is happening, but two aspects of this problem seem to be (a) the particular and almost obsessive focus on the Palestinian situation in the universities while neglecting other conflicts, and (b) the growth of an increasingly demanding Muslim vote in some larger cities, which leads to a heated political climate and the type of events we saw in Birmingham with the Villa game. Both contribute to an impression of growing radicalisation which could worry governments in certain Muslim countries. [Post edited 16 Feb 0:43]
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Reply | Any views on Burgess for the two goals
at 20:07 15 Feb 2026
We did seem more vulnerable to crosses than in recent weeks. Burgess deserves some blame but Stamenic never got off the ground for the second goal. There may be a question of whether he was the ideal marker for a 6 feet 4 striker. |
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 08:39 14 Feb 2026
My point was about irony rather than endorsement of the C word. Apparently you think Mrs Bennett-Coverley was a racist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
As to your last point, this claim is controversial because of the way usage of the R word has been stretched in recent times. Many academics, such as the historian in the video clip, would say that applying the term racism in relation to ethnicity (which centres on culture and heritage) is a category error.
You cannot get much more "right on" than the said historian Blair Imani. She is an author and activist who describes herself as Black, Muslim and Queer. So if she says "you might think you are being anti-racist by swapping (the terms) , however you are just being inaccurate" then there is probably something in that argument. [Post edited 14 Feb 9:02]
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Reply | Remarkable Police Work
at 05:25 14 Feb 2026
The scary thing is that the authorities are very stretched to keep an eye on the large number of persons who might want to cause harm to Jewish people or indeed the mainstream population, and that is not counting those who want to damage UK defence assets. |
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 04:22 14 Feb 2026
I think many would agree that the choice of the word colonialization was unfortunate, but one irony that many have pointed out on social media is that the idea of "colonialization in reverse" was already circulating in progressive circles. This is the title of a poem by the late Louise Bennett-Coverley (a woman of colour as they say) written in 1966. The poem with title has recently featured in posters on the London underground.
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.
And to Scotia I simply say that the distinction between British people and "immigrants" is about ingroup/outgroup rather than ethnicity. Both categories are composed of people of multiple ethnicities, including so called Caucasian immigrants (to use an outdated racial classification system). Note also that race and ethnicity are different concepts that some on the progressive side of politics conflate.
https://www.bing.com/videos/ri [Post edited 14 Feb 4:49]
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 12:24 13 Feb 2026
But that claim in the first sentence is what some of us are struggling to see. What ethnic group was mentioned? What were Ratcliffe's words about ethnicity? Apologies if I missed them as I probably saw an incomplete transcript of the Sky interview. What we do see (and I am not singling out anybody on this forum) is many people using the R word as a generalised insult designed to stifle debate. |
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 08:45 13 Feb 2026
I agree that Sir Jim Ratcliffe's language was poorly chosen and think that his intervention might have had more (positive) impact if the two main concerns of the high level of immigration since 2000 and the increase in the % of working age people on benefits had been communicated in more neutral language. Having accepted that the tone was wrong, however, I find myself uncertain about exactly how his comments were racist. As far as I can recall from long ago lectures, racism is a mode of thought that posits that clearly distinct races (genetic groups with distinctive phenotypes) exist in nature, ranks some races above others and discriminates on that basis. The traditional critique of this view was that research had shown the boundaries between genetic groups to be much less clearcut than has been supposed. So I wonder whether Ratcliffe's comment can be racist without identifying particular races that are seen as a problem. Statements like his seem to be more about how UK culture is being eroded or even displaced by migrants from many origin countries who have different norms and ways of life. It is hard to argue that majority of the white UK population comes from a different race than most of Western Europe, but until recently there was certainly a strong sense of British identity,. In other words, the reaction against mass immigration may be more about a preference for the home culture over other cultures, than a concern about the threat posed by a particular race as such. Even if somebody comes back to me and mentions the reaction to Islam, one might observe that followers come from several countries around the world with quite different "racial" characteristics. Could it be that those who sympathise with Ratcliffe are guilty of "culturism", rather than racism as such? [Post edited 13 Feb 9:47]
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Reply | Sir Jim Ratcliffe
at 13:42 12 Feb 2026
What worries me is that the policy climate seems to be changing in the wrong direction, at least as far as the PLP is concerned, Starmer's own "nation of strangers" speech now seems a distant memory and has largely been disavowed by the backbenchers. The latter will soon have a go at reversing the modest changes Mahmood has brought in to make the UK a less attractive destination for illegal immigrants. And while only a few short months ago Starmer and Reeves seemed to agree that the surge in IP payments and other benefits was unsustainable, any review of welfare spending has been kicked into the long grass. Regarding Wales and the more limited extent of damage so far, I can only agree with others and say I am mystified why people would vote for the Welsh Labour/ Plaid/ Green "nation of sanctuary" fantasy. |
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Reply | Vote of no confidence
at 23:03 11 Feb 2026
That was an interesting intervention that has incurred the wrath of Starmer and Ed Davey.
https://www.bbc.com/news/artic
Ratcliffe may have misspoken when he quoted population figures, which refer to the 2000 to 2025 period rather than 2020-2025, but the big picture he presents doesn't seem far off the truth to me. |
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Reply | Vote of no confidence
at 03:56 11 Feb 2026
It looks like the majority of Labour MPs want to use the Mandelson scandal as a pretext to move further to the left, probably meaning yet higher taxes, debt and spending, and greater risk of a sovereign debt crisis. In other words we would be getting something that wasn't in the manifesto or the pre-election promises. If the election offer had been a Miliband/Rayner led, fiscally lax, socially-liberal administration then I don't think Labour would have had a chance of winning, But that is what the backbenchers who blocked a cap on welfare spending increases want and what by hook or crook they aim to get. That doesn't seem to me to fit within the spirit of democracy. Surely that kind of radical policy shift demands a general election? |
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