the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

I'd imagine Buzzfeed would have ran this through their legal ppl before publishing?

Buzzfeed are notoriously loose when it comes to publishing stuff and Heidi Blake, who is credited, has published some absolute junk recently but this, on the face of it, looks more substantial.

Nothing in Le Figaro yet, either.

Lycamobile’s owner Subaskaran Allirajah paid to join an exclusive donor group that dines privately with Prime Minister May and her cabinet. He is also close to foreign secretary Boris Johnson after bankrolling his London mayoral campaign pic.twitter.com/Djgoc8v6lD

— BuzzFeed UK (@BuzzFeedUK) April 19, 2018

someone bollock me if this is Canary style spuriousness.

i think you mean "absolutely destroy" you

i smell a swamp that needs draining

Good 'hope this doesn't come back to bite my arse' expression from Johnson in that pic. If only he were sackable.

This still isn't anywhere outside of Buzzfeed, which is highly odd.

You ever had a political scandal on your hands and nobody else paying attention, LBI?

I have actually. And it's silly but it's the fucking best feeling seeing every minute pass by without others taking notice, knowing they will be shocked into reporting it as well.

haha no I get that totally

Buzzfeed have been pursuing the lycamobile for a while. Perhaps lycamobile have a lot of pull in the (rest of) uk media. Unless the quotes are totally fabricated, it's certainly a big story for one news cycle, even if nothing ends up being firmly pinned on tories/hmrc/lycamob/all of em

They didn't get sued for the Breaking Bad style piece they did, covertly filming Lycamobile bagmen doing huge cash drop-offs at various post office branches.

I'm under no illusion abt the state of UK media, but Lycamobile having such a pull that not a single big news org is willing to report this seems unimaginable.

xp

don't worry folks, RT are running with it now!

lol

Nick Timothy and Dan Hodges covering themselves in glory on this.

NT reckons TM was on holiday when the Go Home vans were sent out... get fucked!

The Times are running with the Lycamobile scandal now.

Unrelated, but:

would you rather save a) a tree, or b) a working class child

liberal environmentalists: that's a tough one but i think everything considered i’d have to go with option a pic.twitter.com/M7AX2xA3FY

— Clare Hymer (@ClareHymer) April 19, 2018

Nick Timothy p much "Mistress opposed the vans actually no really but then went on holiday so they just did it anyway."

we should be grateful for the moderating influence of the LibDems in the coalition years.

PS the benefit sanction turned out to be illegal and never went ahead. Ha Ha.

— Polly Mackenzie (@pollymackenzie) April 19, 2018

(the defense is that their legal advice told them that it would be illegal, but still fucking hell)

Check out the votes on the 2014 Immigration act if you really want to despair.

What did they give you for the 2014 Immigration Act? A handful of pick and mix and a lottery ticket?

— I Am Damo Godzuki ⬛🔴 (@b11ckchps) April 19, 2018

Lib Dems are pretty consistently anti sugar and anti gambling.

— Polly Mackenzie (@pollymackenzie) April 19, 2018

Policy wonks who really don't need to be on twitter.

(Lycamobile story beginning to pick up a head of steam btw)

about fucking time!

xp
complete idiots who are so extremely solipsistic, they aren't fit to be in a position to effect government policy.

And here's Mark Harper - the minister who approved the vans - in January 2014, telling MPs the vans were part of a "deliberate strategy". He does not say that the home secretary had blocked them and then they were approved without her say when she was on holiday pic.twitter.com/Nl1XUypvOy

— Henry Zeffman (@hzeffman) April 19, 2018

Would be nice if media scrutiny happened most of the time and not just when journalists scented blood, but:

Been looking into the dates of the "go home" vans that Theresa May's former advisor said happened when she was "on holiday"

1/

— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) April 19, 2018

Buzzfeed are notoriously loose when it comes to publishing stuff and Heidi Blake, who is credited, has published some absolute junk recently but this, on the face of it, looks more substantial.

Didn't someone at HMRC confirm the email?

They've confirmed what was said but they're denying it had anything to do with the decision.

The positioning seems to be that the French investigators approached HMRC with a weak case and were told that it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny - with an addendum that this was a firmly established company in good standing with the government they were talking about, not a cut-out laundering front.

According to asylum Twitter, if you’re a detainee at a refugee centre your only option for communicating with friends and family are phone cards supplied by... Lycamobile!

Yup. Topping up lycamobile was one of the most practical ways I could help when I was visiting ppl in detention.

so for an immigration detainee, unless you have outside help, you have to work in the kitchens there for less than a £1 an hour to be able to top up your phone to call your family, using a telecoms company that essentially fund your jailors.

— joe (@cillanoir) April 19, 2018

mark s linked to a very good thread on Facebook that posits the almost certa

anly true idea that the point of hostile environment is primarily economic exploitation rather than deportation

Honestly, I’m not sure that’s true. May has repeatedly shown that she’s quite happy for a variety of sectors of the economy to take a battering if it means being able to say fewer brown people came here.

I would say that one outcome bolsters the other, specifically when we're talking about people who have an absolute legal right to live here

I should caveat this by saying I haven’t read the Facebook thread but there are several Tories I’d see as sympathetic to the idea of maintaining strict immigration laws in order to drive down migrant wages / claims to rights, including Boris Johnson, but May is essentially an ethno-nationalist before an economic pragmatist at heart imo.

Probably true but she's only one cog in the bigger machine

For sure - though she has repeatedly been the squeaky wheel, if that metaphor isn’t too mixed, who has held firm to what I’d loosely call a ‘racism-first’ strategy, going up against Cameron, Johnson, etc who were far more open to the “Dubai / Singapore on steroids” idea of driving down rights and increasing economic exploitation, rather than kicking people out / stopping them from coming.

The financial motive May has is probably more about making people who have every right to access healthcare, etc, from thinking twice about going to hospital, speaking to the council, etc

History of this kind of capitalism is that fear drives down costs, whether that's wages or welfare

Analysis of TM BS from 2012 https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/theresa-may-immigration-speech

George Osborne and May were famously at odds over immigration policy; he was one of the opponents to the idea of counting foreign students in immigration stats and the LRB article on May from last year mentioned a fight beteeen the two at cabinet about a Chinese businessman Osborne knew being strip searched at Heathrow.

The two would go hand in hand; are you going to make a fuss about your treatment or join a union if your employer has Border Force waiting for you at work one morning?

And it applies in a lesser way to all immigrants - the proposed registry of foreigners at all workplaces? That doesn’t care if you’re documented or not, or if you’re highly skilled or not. That’s about targeting people for the sole fact that they are foreign. Every time I think of the Home Office since I’ve lived here I can think of another horrible little story or initiative that all feeds into this.

The thread I was talking about drew useful parallels with apartheid or Jim Crow laws

The terrible truth is that May is neither - she was given a job to reduce numbers and saw it as a duty. Various ways to do so are just tools to an end.

The thread mentioned above:

(1) Here's a thought. Racist laws aren't often designed to just "get rid" of black people or other minorities. They are designed to force minority people to be 2nd class citizens.

— Solomon Hughes (@SolHughesWriter) April 18, 2018

That was Runciman’s theory and not one I particularly subscribe to. Why was TM making up lies about not being able to deport people because they owned cats? That doesn’t speak to the plodding diligence he attributes to her, it reminded me of the anecdote about her mocking George Osborne at an awards ceremony.

Anyway, Bloomberg have just posted a story about a further email leak from the Home Office that gives more info about the van story. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-19/former-may-aide-s-attempt-to-defend-her-undermined-by-email-leak