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

what does that man say on the clip? i can only decipher "black boy"

"the news is .. it's a black boy" Is what I heard.

Lammy wrote to the Prime Minister, of course she's going to write back.

Thinking about this whole scandal, which I don't think it going to disappear any time soon, and the way it feeds back into the Tories' own disastrous election campaign, specifically their treatment of the elderly. 'Work all your life, do everything you're supposed to do, then get fucked by the government when you get old' is just terrible politics because it horrifies people right across the political spectrum.

Apparently there isn't anyone in May's immediate circle of advisors who is able to think like a human being and spot these things in advance b/c they should be really fucking obvious.

I was wondering what arrangements had been made for Windrush deportees before the press scandal began to force some actual measures to rectify this? Like, what happened to state pensions that had been payed into for decades? Were these being forwarded to be payed out in Jamaica? (most of the people I have seen profiled were retirement age or not too far off) Or were you just going to be completely up shit creek: elderly, far from home, and without the entitlements you'd earned....

Also, if UK citizen's right to remain can be so carelessly compromised, what does this say about the UK's trustworthiness regarding pledges it makes to EU nationals living in the UK? What is the effect of displaying this disregard during already crucial and fraught Brexit negotiations? This story has made me feel that living here is far more precarious than I had previously thought. I'm sure this will be good news for the Home Office.

Matt you're right but there's the old school Tory mentality that "we" won't be shocked because "they" aren't "we".

The weight of wicked, ahistorical, ignorant, spiteful bullshit that " we" carries on its back when used to talk about nationality. There's no reaching people like that, like whoever wrote that letter to Lammy. They're already dead. Fuck 'em.

And of course Amber Rudd has now offered them British citizenship *that they already had*, adding insult to injury.

also the "gift" of scrapping citizenship application fees/test for them. WTF!

and the obvious fib that she couldn't find any record of people wrongfully deported yet, did she actually say that?

I saw that and thought I must’ve misread, that there was for some reason an asterisk over their descendents’s citizenship that she was waiving, but nope.

I’m watching BBC Parliament and the reaming of Rudd even by individuals on her own benches is exquisite.

And in answer to your question about pensions, any accrued benefits were forfeited by deportees and some people were even sent bills to repay disability benefits and the like.

Worse for the Tories is that this hasn't gone down well at all with the GBP, even ones who are borderline racist. Some old granny with a Birmingham accent getting deported to Barbados is not a nagl. If it had been immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, it would have been a different matter.

not a nagl? ffs!

Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs committee, says she spoke to someone today turned away by the Home Office because they were from Kenya, not a Windrush migrant.

There is widespread concern that there is cultural disbelief in the Home Office. People there do not accept that there is a link with the net migration target. Will Rudd get rid of that target?

That’s some fine concern from someone who had this to say about the 2014 Act:

Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab): The Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have made a series of claims about immigration and the Bill, many of which do not stack up. They said that there would be action against illegal working, but there is nothing about that in the Bill. The Prime Minister promised action against those who

“deny work opportunities to UK workers.”

Again, there is nothing about that in the Bill. They promised to reduce the “pull factor” for people from the EU. Again, there is nothing in the Bill about that. They promised to

“reclaim our borders and send illegal immigrants home”,

but border control has got worse and fewer people are being returned than ever. They promised—the Prime Minister said “no ifs, no buts”—that net migration would be down to the tens of thousands by the election. It is currently at 176,000 and recent figures show that it has gone up. There has been a lot of rhetoric and a lot of confusion, and people are concerned about immigration.

We know that over many generations, people have come and contributed to this country: they have built our biggest companies, worked in our public services, and become great scientists, Nobel prize winners and even Olympic medal winners. We also know that in a global economy, in which people travel and trade more than ever, pulling up the drawbridge on all migration is not good for Britain.

Stronger controls are needed. Migration needs to be managed and, yes, we should have a proper debate about measures to control immigration, deal with its impact and tackle illegal immigration. Unfortunately, that is not what we have heard from the Home Secretary today.

Also, if UK citizen's right to remain can be so carelessly compromised, what does this say about the UK's trustworthiness regarding pledges it makes to EU nationals living in the UK? What is the effect of displaying this disregard during already crucial and fraught Brexit negotiations? This story has made me feel that living here is far more precarious than I had previously thought. I'm sure this will be good news for the Home Office.

The short message is "no documents - no rights". Realistically, EU nationals will be able to live and work here and the government will, more than likely, keep any promises they make but there'll be layers and layers of additional bureaucracy. Fail to present the right paperwork and expect to be kicked out. It'll be interesting to see if this, in combination with the new voter ID laws being proposed, will mean a return to discussion of national ID cards. It seems slightly incongruous they have been off the table for so long.

they already use lack of passport/driving license ID to disenfranchise poor people from getting benefits, when they pilot Voter ID in the local elections I'm sure they'll declare it a totally successful solution to this non-existent voting fraud problem. Without actually counting how many people have been turned away from polling stations.

You couldn’t make it up! Our esteemed Government chose the week that the ‘hostile environment’ news headlined to start a nurse recruitment drive in the Caribbean to cover the loses of EU nurses deciding to leave the NHS and UK. https://t.co/eoSa9bWMz0

— Declan Hoare (@declan_hoare) April 23, 2018

unfuckingbelievable.

re EU, my wife has a friend from Germany who was married to a British man who died a couple of years ago, she's lived here for over 20 years, is in her 60s and doesn't have any family left in Germany, she is convinced she is going to have to move back to Germany because with her husband dead she has no right to stay here - she has no visa/ILR and won't be able to get one. I'm sure there are many cases like this.

I agree with NV about old school stories, but I suspect Tom D has it right regarding the GBP - I also suspect there’s a glow over the Windrush generation, Desmond and the old characters Lenny Henry played - as well as benefiting from a segment of the GBP who feel ‘okay okay maybe we fucked up, but we did this thing so now it’s okay, right?’

"I also suspect there’s a glow over the Windrush generation"

To many of the GBP they are associated with overproof rum and jolly old good humoured scoundrels that run community barbershops. Not like them Asians who are all evil Muslim extremists of course, so should be fair game for deportation.

Bloody horrible stuff

I noticed May and Rudd seemed to put out some resources like a website etc to help people affected by the Windrush thing. I don't know how useful or helpful those resources really are, and obviously they done that because afraid of looking bad in the media, but, doesn't that really highlight though how the whole immigration business, the whole business of trying to sort out your status or get benefits could be made easy and user-friendly, if they cared.

Been watching the journalism/closed-shop thing with ghoulish interest too. That's probably a bit self-indulgent on my part though. I had a bit of a look at being a journalist once, one of my perennial slouches toward 'a career'. As with other professions whose networking events I attended whilst on JSA, I noticed that there was a real fearless projection of total bullshit going on with the personnel. Someone would be saying 'I think, I think, blah blah blah buzzword?' and the other person would go 'Yeah exactly, buzzword, blah blah blah, bibbidy bibbidy boo'. All so fast.

Omg did JSA send you to on work placement to The Canary? That is completely inhuman and I'd rather be packing Trill on a production line!

Oh no they sent me out to do Basic Employability and then Grounds Maintenance, and I've got a certificate for both, my name spelt wrong on both.

By the way I been hearing the 'tea' story a lot around the journalism question. Never quite bought this line about 'going in and making the tea' as a way in to a career. It didn't apply by the time I rocked up anyway. Did it ever? It always sounded a bit Festival of Britain to me. Is there a real tradition behind the phrase?

Julia Hartley Brewurgh kinda won the journalism/privilege thing with "I went to Oxford because I was clever*, not because I was privileged. Anyway why don't you moaning lefties support grammar schools so that at least some poor kids can get better educated?" (I'm paraphrasing, just a little)

* setting up Ash Sarkar and probably a few others for the "oh..what happened?" backslam

Doing an old-fashioned w/c apprenticeship, making tea and getting all the labouring type chasing, shovelling and sweeping type shit-work for 3 years and having someone say stuff like "get me the fucking engine driver, we don't talk to the oily rags here" is all character building stuff. Especially if you want to make more self-hating misanthropes. but most journalists are already like that to start with ffs! What a waste of resources and tea.

I do find it interesting to read about establishment journalists of yore who would do public school->Oxbridge and then work for a few years on the Rotherham Evening News before coming home to the Times.

xp Thing about Oxbridge grads like JHB is, there are many ways to get a fine education if you were interested in an education. That interest alone doesn't explain their choice of Oxford or Cambridge! They clearly wanted to be around powerful and wealthy people, and to acquire or maintain power and wealth. That's what Oxbridge is for. In the same way that there are many ways to get healthy, but that alone doesn't explain someone's choice to do lots of weight-lifting and hitting punchbags.

I got my start as basically a copyboy, which involved the making of gallons of tea, yes. Most of the people I worked with were posh-ish graduates for sure, but it was still possible to work up from bupkis.

I’m still interested to know about JHB’s boast that she bought George Osborne in a slave auction* at Oxford and what she made him do.

*eurgh, they had loljoeks about that, how edgy

Everything wrong about Oxbridge can be summed up in the following exchange:

Me, to friend at Oxford: ‘how are you liking being a student?’

FAO: ‘actually, I’m an undergraduate...’

I did not get involved in the Heated Debate on Twitter because yanqui interloper and different rules apply but any American reading JHB’s assessment of herself as ‘clever’ would be at pains to point out that ‘clever’ is the shallow person’s ‘intelligent’.

An application system for EU nationals seeking to remain in the UK after Brexit will be “as easy as setting up an online account at LK Bennett”, according to Amber Rudd.

ah the people's choice of shop there, perfect

lol!

hard to imagine Amber saying that line at the 2016 Conservative conference, where she was milking the applause with a very different message.

I made the mistake of putting on R4 this morning where Labour Antisemitism has been mentioned about 20 times for every singular Windrush mention.

Humphrys got a bit annoyed with his Jewish guest for saying people should report PLP Antisemitism to the party rather than the media and blaming the NEC for not implementing things, rather than JC - who would be accused of being dictatorial if he had overruled them. Then a segment of her interview was played out of context to Gwynne afterwards. Just a total fucking shower of shit as per...

Thing about Oxbridge grads like JHB is, there are many ways to get a fine education if you were interested in an education. That interest alone doesn't explain their choice of Oxford or Cambridge! They clearly wanted to be around powerful and wealthy people, and to acquire or maintain power and wealth. That's what Oxbridge is for.

Not to derail, but while that may well be true of some people, I don't think it's true of more than a very small percentage of Oxbridge undergraduates (is that really how most 17 year olds think?!).

speaking as a legit ignorant working class 80s kid i just thought Oxford looked like what my dream of university was and I wanted to go there mostly out of romantic fantasy. didn't really think about what it might be like as an institution for several years afterwards.

http://www.oxfordpolytechnic.com/about-oxford

You can buy your dreams online from the Oxford Polytechnic, New Dheli, India. Former alumni include Harry Potter, the character Rob Lowe plays in Oxford Blues and some cheating fucker from Nuneaton!

xp ya anch'io, I got my sixth form college to enter me for the Oxon entrance exam pretty much out of pure egotism, had really zero concept of how I'd have fitted in (badly, I think I can say with some confidence).

I mean, I thought of posh kids as being like the kids who went to the handful of non-boarding private schools in Croydon.

my school advised me against taking the exam on the grounds that private schools had whole classes devoted to prepping their kids for it, but i think that was probably a bad idea since i was great at bluffing my way thru exams and not so great at turning up for an interview without drinking a bottle of cider on the train on the way down.

i mean i regrette rien but y'know

A good thread on the technicalities of Windrush: https://www.twitter.com/alexpiletska/status/984670703357177857

oxbridge is worse than what you all think

over many years i've come to that conclusion but wondering how you could've played your hand differently is inevitable sometimes

oxbridge is worse than what you all think

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean the actual university, or the effect of the networking that goes on there on the rest of society? Maybe my perceptions of "posh kids" are way off, but I found them to be a small enough percentage of the student body that they had no effect on me then or since.

lord almighty, that lk bennett quote - these people are so fucking bad at this

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean the actual university, or the effect of the networking that goes on there on the rest of society? Maybe my perceptions of "posh kids" are way off, but I found them to be a small enough percentage of the student body that they had no effect on me then or since.

― toby, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 10:50 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

- almost everyone becomes a posh kid no matter where they're from
- that said the actual posh kids tend to dominate the social fabric and they're invariably terrible, yours truly included (although i plead aspie obliviousness to the worst of it)
- complacency, arrogance, casual bigotry as a joke, gowns. this applies both to the university and the ensuing knock-on effect in society at large
- an oxbridge degree is a passcode and the notion of academic furtherance in the main a joke. most undergrads are not contributing one iota to their subject, just to themselves, and of course, financially speaking, to oxbridge
- the fucking gowns
- bizarre secret-society hierarchies that are of course mirrored later in life amongst the august corridors of whatever power an oxbridge graduate is born to
- the graduates who believe in oxbridge are like some sort of ghastly team, agreeably spreading their privilege across britain. those of us who don't - we are isolated, ineffectual dissidents. we use our degrees for employment purposes and scowl at the memories. nobody is interested in our story.

xp Yeah, I should make clear that even if they don't technically have citizenship, Amber Rudd opening the statement with 'Well, actually' was so fucking boneheaded.

I wonder if the oxbridge culture imago describes is largely on the arts/humanties side of things, not so much science?