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

Even allowing for the stupidity of depriving the country of cash cow overseas students AND encouraging the subsequent post-graduation brain drain, I would guess a small-but-important slice of the FT readership would be foreign students with aspirations of joining the global business elite and staying in London - ie FUTURE TORY VOTERS that they are happy to just piss away.

(xpost - when you're already spending billions on Brexit I think an extra £70m on deportations would barely touch the sides).

If they lose some high profile council on Thursday, she’s done imo.

If only....

They spent over £70m deporting people

jesus fuck the magical money tree just keeps on giving huh

The compensation for Windrush cases will run hundreds of thousands per person.

come on K&C

get some popcorn + beer in on Thurs, should be a good night in!

There are a lot of #FBPE-type parties with Apprentice team-style names (Renew, LOL) in RBKC trying to get traction there, but the Labour canvassing has been unreal.

A poll by @SkyData suggests 31% of people think Theresa May is most to blame for the Windrush scandal with 24% blaming civil servants, 18% blaming the last Labour Government and 4% blaming Amber Rudd

— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) April 30, 2018

Handy to know an approximate percentage for current U.K. gammon levels.

As somebody who has dealt with the sharp end of the home office immigration department (or actually the private companies it's farmed out to) and has spent years retweeting the constant horror stories which have been largely ignored by moreorless the whole country, I have little or no confidence that the British public have any more appetite for sympathising with the suffering of any non-white or foreign-sounding people at the hands of our country. Frankly I'm shocked that the scandal has even got this big.

tbf it's only been *checks calendar* almost exactly eight years since the last labour government, so you can see why nearly one in five britons would consider this catastrophic fuckup to be their fault

Be fair though, it's obviously Clement Attlee's fault for encouraging those people to come here in the first place.

I don't think it's controversial to suggest that New Labour laid the foundations for the whole hostile environment policy - the first immigration detention centres opened in what 2001? I'd stop short of directly blaming them for Windrush though.

blunkett was an awful home sec it's true

It was Blunkett who first floated the idea of language tests for citizenship and marriage iirc.

Get you a government that "lets too many of them in" AND increases the hostility of their environment eh.

Ex-Tory MP And His Floating Dog Inexplicably 'Photoshopped In To Road Junction Protest'

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/david-burrowes-local-campaign_uk_5ae87716e4b055fd7fcfca8b?fc5

xp,

There was a shift towards keeping people out during the Blair years but the drive from Blunkett, Straw, etc was more about language acquisition as proof of integration. If you had not learned English, you were perceived as at risk of not being part of society - with associated risk of extremism, etc. The fact that language funding was being cut back severely and the only people who don't have basic English tend to be a handful of Gujurati grannies highly unlikely to blow things up was besides the point. This was the era of taking policy leads from the Quilliam Foundation, etc.

Under May, it became much more of a tool to stop people from emigrating. Again, language levels are not the issue - it's the layer of bureaucracy that can be factored in that is important. There's a paranoia that people will go through the ludicrously circuitous route of enrolling at a university in order to work as an illegal immigrant on the Tesco night shift and by having a language certificate will somehow weed out the bad apples but the key point was telegraphing (successfully) that your sort are not wanted here.

Even when they’re paying £30k a year at UCL or similar!

Theoretically, yes, they're still open to "the best and brightest" but, in practice, you will be assumed to be suspicious until proven otherwise.

Student immigration patterns are cyclical and deeply influenced by perception. If there is a chance that your application to a top university will be arbitrarily rejected - or you think it will, just apply to Canada and Australia and save yourself the bother. UK universities are falling over themselves to send out the message that they're still open for business but, fundamentally, students don't go where they don't feel they're welcome and the UK has assiduously cultivated an image as a racist backwater for eight years.

Waiting on the outraged thinkpieces and wall-to-wall coverage on BBC and Sky of Theresa May's failure to tackle racism in the Tory Party:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-43959705

Sajid's promotion is enough to shut down any suggestions they are an intrinsically Islamophobic party, google Indefinite Detention UK and nothing on the first page is BBC news either, shockingly.

They’ve suspended like 20 in the past week? Haven’t seen a handy thread linking them but most are being suspended for racism. They were called out by a Tory yesterday for the hepatitis leaflet!

Also, saw Baroness Warsi had mentioned the Islamophobia of the Conservatives on tv recently but hadn’t seen this:

Sadly the rot of Islamophobia has taken hold of sections of right wing politics and Zac you continue to feed it.
Of all my colleagues you should know better- have no idea where the Zac of years gone by has disappeared to 😢 https://t.co/ESAh8KDRVY

— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) April 28, 2018

old racist Zac has been replaced by new, slightly more racist Zac

Warsi attacked Zac's ugly mayoral campaign multiple times and the criticised the direction they were going in, which made her the "wrong" type of Tory Asian.

Meanwhile the silence from the UK media was and is deafening.

mmm yes, noted tax-dodger, expenses-fiddler and extra-marital fucking enthusiast zac goldsmith has somehow gone wrong of late now that he's a massive racist, it's very sad

Also, this vote is coming up later and is one to watch because fallout is potentially very messy.

Tory MPs three-line whipped to vote against Labour's opposition day motion on #Windrush (demands all correspondence between officials and ministers from 2010 be provided to the Home Affairs Select Committee - effectively making it public). A vote against transparency? pic.twitter.com/oIVRtDdb6S

— Ross Kempsell (@rosskempsell) May 2, 2018

question mark v much redundant at the end of that tweet, wtf else is it other than a craven attempt to minimise the story

But if the government wins the vote then they’ll get the opposition hammering them with accusations of covering up. The Labour whips twitter account says LBC can’t find a single Tory MP willing to defend this on the radio.

red-letter day for our strong and stable government, trebles all round

Almost half a million women were not invited for breast screening over a decade because of IT failures, Jeremy Hunt expected to say later today. Huge failure for NHS and big questions about why it wasn't picked up

— Chris Smyth (@Smyth_Chris) May 2, 2018

https://twitter.com/PeterPannier/status/991636631026388993

that should be

https://twitter.com/PeterPannier/status/991625399678455808

This account's Tweets are protected.

Only confirmed followers have access to @PeterPannier's Tweets and complete profile. Click the "Follow" button to send a follow request.

lol, Corbyn opened pmqs by asking May if she felt guilty that Rudd had to resign.

like may has any ability to feel guilt or shame, c'mon

Fun to get your Voight Kampff questions in tho

may is definitely an earlier nexus model, her affect is just all wrong

yougov suggesting that the windrush scandal seems unlikely to significantly change the public's views on immigration

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/04/27/where-public-stands-immigration/

when ppl hostile to immigration discuss windrush, as well as the insistence on a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' migrants, there's a tendency to interpret the whole thing as proof of how the system is chaotic and broken and therefore needs to be made *stricter* - like when people complain about the police going after drivers who break the speed limit instead of the "real criminals", they fact that the authorities have expelled british citizens who have been living here for decades is taken as evidence that they're soft on illegal immigrants, and confirms their existing opinion we need to get 'tougher'? Part of the challenge is a way to frame windrush that doesn't feed into the narrative of 'chaos' which is a driver of support for more draconian immigration policies?

or just exterminate racists, either way's good

sorry, that's unhelpful, we need to find a way of understanding and reaching out to thick, ignorant, hateful cunts

soref's link is what I was trying to post from Peter Pannier's protected Twitter, thx

americans on twitter are discussing Sajid Javid because of this racist Alex Jones tweet and one of them has has just pointed out that Javid looks like a bald Tony Danza and now I can't unsee it

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DcMceh1XkAMsmV1.jpg

i don't think i can live in a world where alex jones gets mad, red and nude and weighs in on uk politics tbh

Bad enough having Fred do it.

in other news, check out this obsequious lickspittle

Wellingborough MP Peter Bone announced during Prime Minister’s Questions that “In 331 days, 11 hours and 14 minutes and 22 seconds the Prime Minister will be leading us out of the European Union.

He continued: “My question to the Prime Minister is, in 332 days time, will she came to Wellingborough where she will be carried should height through the streets to the echoing of cheering crows and I will be able to show her the site where a statue to the Brexit queen will be erected?”

'cheering crows' is presumably a typo but i kinda like the idea of theresa may being carried on mp's shoulders through the empty streets of wellingborough which echo with the sound of thousands of cawing crows and nothing else

xxxp
I don't think that loud American feller seems to now that Javid has publicly declared his desire to live in Israel one day, and doesn't face Mecca very often, either!

know