19-Nov-2021 : CON 36 / LAB 34 / GREEN 10 / LIBDEM 7

[mercian]

ON
ok, I don't know or care about the details of Schengen rules, but it would surely be easier to get into Ireland by legal means than to the UK? After all the UK wasn't in Schengen but it didn't seem to stop many EU folks coming here.

[jib]

Nov 25, 2021 22:59:30 GMT oldnat said:

Mercian

Again, you would have to check the rules, but Ireland isn't in the Schengen Zone. It's in the CTA with UK, CI and IoM. While each has it's own immigration policy, they are broadly in line. The confusion in Brexiteer minds as to EU and Schengen is not untypical.

To quote the official version:
"The Common Travel Area (CTA) is a long-standing arrangement between the UK, the Crown Dependencies (Bailiwick of Jersey, Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Isle of Man) and Ireland that pre-dates both British and Irish membership of the EU and is not dependent on it."

But you are right that there is widespread misunderstanding of the CTA.

[alec]

More on that B.1.1.529 variant, and it doesn't look good. This gives some technical information on the mutations found -

It seems clear that there are numerous mutations, a number of them have been seen separately in previous variants of concern, but we've never had s many all together in a single variant. A paper in Nature last year identified a number of the mutations seen in this variant as being likely to improve the virus' ability to bind to receptors, but in this case we are seeing those mutations on the same strain.

This was from the Observer on Sunday, covering the issue of super variants emerging - www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/21/is-delta-the-last-covid-super-variant

The point is made strongly by Ravi Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, that we cannot rely on vaccines alone, as the situation where there are high case numbers within a population, including a vaccinated population if vaccines cannot prevent transmission, create ideal conditions for the development of new variants.

This is probably my fault, because a few days ago I posted about how things were looking optimistic for covid. There is still the hope of the second generation vaccines, with the Novovax shot theoretically more like to be able to combat B.1.1.529 because it is less focused on the key spike protein, but we've got to hope that these assumptions are true, if this variant is a bad as the experts seem to think it might be.

Whatever happens, in all likelihood we are going to have to revisit mechanisms to limit exposure and infection, beause there is a chance that the vast majority of the UK population have little effective resistance to the new strain.

[neila]

Student visa abuse is fairly common, but tends to be for East Asian migrants (China and, particularly, Vietnam). I am not aware of it being an organized thing with African students, but it may just not have crossed my desk. I have known African students "abuse" the system but it is more ad hoc (come to the UK, get a girl pregnant and claim the right to stay under family ties etc) rather than claiming asylum or just "disappearing". With East Asian groups there are large, very organized crime groups involved - including the use of threats and violence against families to ensure that bills are paid (either in currency or indentured labour - c.f "nail bars" and cannabis farms).

My personal preference would be for the UK and France to set up joint asylum policies, with processing centres based in France that are financed and part-staffed by UK border officers. Those who believe they have a genuine claim for asylum, and genuine reasons to seek it in the UK rather than France (or elsewhere) would be expected to come forward, register their claim, have biometric data taken and be provided with accommodation and living expenses (in France) whilst their claim is processed (in France). Those that are found to qualify (and I would be fairly generous in setting the bar - the numbers are relatively small) would be transported to the UK safely at UK government expense. Those who are found to need asylum but who do not qualify to enter the UK would be resettled in France. Those whose asylum claims are found to be lacking would be for France to deport.

Whilst I don't think this would necessarily stop the boat crossings, they would provide a counter narrative against the disinformation given out by people smuggling groups. It would also be easier to find land for accommodation centres in France (being far less population dense than the UK).

[chrisaberavon]

Tory advance in Lee Chapel Basildon and Labour retreat in a formerly safe seat for them. Seen on 'Britain Elects' tweet

[eor]

oldnat, mercian

Just to add another strand to your discussion on people without documentation.

Claims I've read on people destroying their documentation have varied hugely in the situations they purport to.

I can recall the claim that some destroy documentation prior to arrival in their final intended destination so as to make a claim of eg religious persecution harder to contest. I have no idea whether this actually occurs, and if so on any meaningful scale.

On the other hand if someone is seeking to illicitly escape from their country of origin, carrying papers that verify them to be a person that the authorities of that place would actively like to detain would seem to be an almost contradictory risk to take. I have no data as to the scale of this either.

[eor]

I'd kinda guessed the thing about posters' statuses updating automatically on here, but as someone whose lurking phase dated back to probably 2008ish, there's something fun about seeing posts from "alec - New Member" keep popping up 

[oldnat]

I have no experience of having to suddenly flee with my family as rebel or government troops attack my area, or being forced at gunpoint to leave my home. As a result, I have never ended up in a refugee camp.

Consequently, I don't feel confident about asserting the ease with which people in these circumstances might have all the appropriate documentation to buy an airline ticket to the UK (or Ireland) and to be allowed entry by immigration officials.

Others clearly see no difficulty for them. Ignorance is seldom bliss, but can allow folk to exist in such a state devoid of reality. I'm told some drugs can have the same effect.

[eor]

Agree oldnat, for eg those seeking to avoid Taliban retribution for their occupation under the previous regime it seems crazy to imagine they'd risk trying to flee Afghanistan carrying paperwork clearly proving their actual identity.

[oldnat]

More detail dripping out from the YG Full Scottiah poll

Westminster VI (change from GE2019)
SNP 48% (+3)
CON 20% (-5)
LAB 18% (-1)
LD 6% (-3)

Comparison with last 7 YG Scots crossbreaks (N=1023 : 6 Oct-18 Nov)

SNP 46%
CON 21%
LAB 17%
LD 7%

So, their crossbreak average not much out of line with a proper Scottish poll.

[eor]

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/23/britain-should-stay-neutral-in-a-poll-on-irish-unification-says-shadow-minister

Apologies if this has been posted already, but I missed it if it has.

The stance is understandable in itself, but to me it begs a couple of questions. Are Labour now taking the same approach to a hypothetical future Scottish Independence referendum if they were to be in Westminster government at the time? And how many more principled abstentions can they flag before it starts to become an issue for them in itself?

Triangulation can be wise on a given issue but at the same time if people have little idea what it is you're actually for, it makes it a lot harder to win unless you're running against complete catastrophe.

[eor]

oldnat

Thanks for the Scottish poll detail - do you have a sense of what that kind of narrowing of the gap between SCON and SLAB would mean in terms of the seats? I appreciate the margin of SNP vs the primary unionist party in a given seat will be key, but there seemed to be seats briefly regained by Labour in 2017 that perhaps resulted from SCON gains vs SNP, which were then lost again in 2019 as the SLAB vote fell and SNP vote recovered. Hard for an outsider to scree which of those swings was more important tho?

[oldnat]

EOR

Hasn't polling in England suggested that voters there are disinterested in Ireland (either part)? UKanian Nationalists[1] will, no doubt, want to retain what remains of the 1801 Union, having "lost" most of Ireland. They won't wish to "lose" any more.

British Nationalists (excluding those of migrant to Ireland) heritage will wish to maintain the 1707 Union.

English and Scottish Nationalists would prefer to dissolve the 1707 Treaty.

Others [in England] may only care about finding ways to enhance their chances of governing England, and see the retention of parts outwith that polity that do (or might) vote for MPs of their party.

Looking for principles (other than self advancement) may be a fool's errand.


[1] I'm using that term solely in terms of the territory that they wish to be a sovereign state.

[mercian]

On the immigration thing - as a history enthusiast it reminds me of the dog days of the Roman Empire. Then there were waves of migrants - Goths, Huns etc, and knock-on effects such as Angles Saxons and Jutes being forced westward into what is now UK. It took a while - a hundred years or so? - but ultimately the Western Roman Empire collapsed under the strain.
If we think of 'the West' as equivalent to the Roman Empire we are now also beset by mass migration of folks from outside. The US has mass migration from South and Central America, Europe (i.e. EU+UK+other bits) gets mass migration from Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, East Asia etc. Australia has had a lot of immigration from Asia in the recent past but seems to have tightened up for now.
China is already a mighty force, and will soon dominate the world (IMO).
Whatever sympathy we might have for migrants we should bear in mind what the world might be like for our children and grandchildren. If 'Western' (i.e. including Australia and NZ amongst others) civilization loses out then what will be left? I certainly wouldn't want to live under a Chinese-style regime, but my grandchildren may have to.

[oldnat]

EOR

I'm not convinced that Electoral Calculus' Scottish seat predictor actually captures the extent of Unionist tactical voting. Even if LDs drop 3% in VI overall, if that is mainly in the seats where they are a total irrelevance (most of them) that doesn't mean that more folk who might Tory or Labour elsewhere won't vote LD when that is the ABS party. A similar approach applies in currently Tory seats or the 1 (supposedly) Labour seat.

But FWIW, Electoral Calculus suggests that the outcome of an election held on those YG figures would have SNP gaining 8 Westminster seats - 4 each from Tories and LDs.

[oldnat]

Mercian

I feel your grief that Empires that conquered other people's lands by force of arms, were forced to yield those territories to others doing the self same thing.

Clearly, the only acceptable status for Brittania was to have governors appointed by the Emperor in Rome, and for them to erect a wall across the north of what is now England to control trade with, and movement of, the barbarous people north of it.

The entire problem was caused by those damned Mercians!

[mercian]

🙂 I take your point in a way, but if you're referring to the British Empire, much of it was founded on trade rather than force of arms. And of course if we are referring the the Matter of Britain then the Saxons were originally invited in by Vortigern (Attlee in modern equivalence). It will take time, but I think if we were to come back in 50 years' time the world as we know it will have gone.
I'm sure there were folks in what is now Italy who carried on for generations or even centuries without too much problem after the Fall of Rome, but the geopolitics was way different. Now that we are in such an interconnected world it might be more difficult.
And by the way the Romans traded with but never conquered Cornwall either.

[eor]

oldnat - out of interest have you ever stood on what remains of that wall and looked north?

We had a chance a few years ago and it was remarkable to try to imagine what the Spaniards and Belgians and Cypriots that were compelled to staff it for Rome might have felt looking out over what they'd been taught was the edge of the world.

[moby]

Nov 25, 2021 8:59:34 GMT Danny said:

Nov 25, 2021 7:45:11 GMT @jib said:

I'm afraid that we are going to see refugees coming through for a long time now after the collapse of the Blair - Bush puppet Government in Afghanistan.

We are going to see a fair few coming now because having left the Eu we are no longer able to just send them back to France. They know we have left the Eu and therefore they cannot be returned, so its worth the risk of getting to the UK.  More and more will come.

In this respect as many others, being a member of the EU gave the UK real power over its neighbours. Leavers threw away real sovereignty in exchange for a dream sovereignty which is meaningless. Leavers made the Uk a vassal state of the EU.

As i said before, if the situation was reversed and Johnson was beng asked by France to stop migrants going the other way, he would be slaughtered by the same people complaining about France not intervening. Brexiteers created this problem.

Yep we were basically told we were "taking back control". Ironically the character most responsible for that line and strategy  now loathes his former boss and thinks he was never up to the task. Meanwhile international events will continue to show what a sham the "sovereignty" argument was and our international standing and influence over events will continue to decline......I'm sure our wonderful Home Secretary is all across this though and is about to find a solution which will lead us all, including migrants into much calmer waters.

[steve]

Speldhurst and Bidborough (Tunbridge Wells) by-election result:

TWA: 49.8% (+27.4)
CON: 46.1% (+4.2)
LAB: 4.1% (-4.0)

Tunbridge Wells Alliance GAIN from Conservative.

No Grn (-14.3) and LDem (-13.3) as prev.

Interesting result while the TWA states it isn't politically aligned and is clearly locally focused a quick look at the winning candidates manifesto puts him squarely in what could be described as the lib dem/green approach to localism.
I have no knowledge of this region but the fact that neither lib dems or greens chose to contest is probably not unrelated.

Whole set of seats up last night with broadly no substantial changes from last time they were contested the Lib dems and the Tories overall probably faired best , a bit disappointing for Labour but given that these were mostly last contested in 2017 not particularly surprising.

[Danny]

Nov 25, 2021 22:23:25 GMT alec said:

jib - not something you hear from me often, but great credit to the UK government for the fast action on red listing S Africa and others.

The problem is....there is no evidence any system of isolation has succeeded in keeping out covid, ever. Certainly not in  Europe, though the sutuation has in the past appeared better in the pacific rim. So on past performance, if this new variant is capable of infecting people in the UK and of fast spread here, it will still arrive and spread. We might delay it, but not prevent it.  We could try to keep it out doing a New zealand and totally halting travel in and out of the UK, but if we did we would starve, go bankrupt, and as NZ showed, it would still arrive eventually.

The next question is the extent to which this is a change in the spike protein of the virus. The vaccines have so far concentrated on creating an antibody  response to spike proteins, so they are very susceptible to failure if the spike changes significantly. Whereas natural imunity produced a much weaker spike response, but a stronger all round response to different aspects of the virus. Is our immunty mostly due to natural infection or vaccination? Sage said in the summer, what happens next depends how many people have already been infected.

The other thing I just noticed was an expert interviewed arguing this variant is more transmissable than existing strains, and might evade immunity. I dont dispute the truth of a strict interpretation of what he said, but he and others always give the impresion these two things are different. Whereas the most obvious reason why a new strain would be more transmissable is exactly because it evades immunity.   The best explantion of the behaviour of covid overall is that most people had significant imunity to it from the outset such that after exposure they failed to become ill. Any infection they had was either asymptomatic or so limited it was essentially undetectable with current testing (thats realy not surprising, it was reguarly remarked at the start of this epidemic that testing was unreliable and even people doctors beleved had covid were coming back negative and were therefore re-tested repeatedly until a positve result). Its physical ability to move from one person to another has always been under estimated, because most of the time it failed to establish after arrival because of immunity.  And thus why isolation and other measures  have never worked as well as hoped, because physical transmission between people was never the rate limiting step in the process.

[moby]

Nov 26, 2021 1:26:19 GMT eor said:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/23/britain-should-stay-neutral-in-a-poll-on-irish-unification-says-shadow-minister

Apologies if this has been posted already, but I missed it if it has.

The stance is understandable in itself, but to me it begs a couple of questions. Are Labour now taking the same approach to a hypothetical future Scottish Independence referendum if they were to be in Westminster government at the time? And how many more principled abstentions can they flag before it starts to become an issue for them in itself?

Triangulation can be wise on a given issue but at the same time if people have little idea what it is you're actually for, it makes it a lot harder to win unless you're running against complete catastrophe.

It could be argued that Ireland is a special case. Also you shouldn't ignore the Welsh Labour Govmts new agreement with Plaid......thats going to get Keir thinking......after all Drakeford is quite a wily fox and has a political philosophy which is further left of centre than Keirs!

[Danny]

Nov 25, 2021 23:11:51 GMT alec said:

There is still the hope of the second generation vaccines, with the Novovax shot theoretically more like to be able to combat B.1.1.529 because it is less focused on the key spike protein,

we have always had the option for the safe half of the population to catch covid naturally and thus attain natural immunity, based on the whole virus not just a sample of spike. You are now agreeing with what I have long said, a broader based vaccine might prove more durable, as indeed has been found to be the case in the past with flu vaccines.

We quite deliberately chose not to allow safe people to be infected in 2020 which would have ended the epidemic fast. We deliberately did everything possible to slow down its spread and wait for a vaccine to arrive. It is likely the extent to which we failed to do that will now become an advantage because of the large proportion of the UK population who have already had covid. Unfortunately, if they had it after vaccination, they will not have created as good a broad response as if they simply caught it. Their bodies will not have responded to other aspects of the virus because the immunity they already had from vaccination will have kicked in first and would have covered it. It IS possible for vaccination to make reinfection more likely.

The approach to this epidemic was experimental because it is the first time in human history we tried to combat a new disease with a vaccine isntead of relying upon our immune systems. The risk has always been that if the vaccine fails, then we end up relying on our own post infection immunity anyway, but after having 2 years of ruinous economic disruption, and additional deaths because of all this disruption to health services teating other illnesses over that time.

[steve]

At present there is no evidence that the new variant found in South Africa is more dangerous.
If in fact it transpires to be more infectious but significantly less harmful we shouldn't be trying to control the spread.
Because it will be a cold!

[Danny]

Nov 25, 2021 23:16:55 GMT neila said:

My personal preference would be for the UK and France to set up joint asylum policies, with processing centres based in France that are financed and part-staffed by UK border officers. Those who believe they have a genuine claim for asylum, and genuine reasons to seek it in the UK rather than France (or elsewhere) would be expected to come forward, register their claim, have biometric data taken and be provided with accommodation and living expenses (in France) whilst their claim is processed (in France).

And there precisely is the problem. They don't want to be granted assyum in France but in England. So they wont apply in France if the fact of applying there means they stay there. If you allow them to apply in france and go to England if they choose, they would apply and the illegal route largely end. The problem for the UK  seems to be that most of these people have legitimate claims to assylum, so the only way to exclude them is to provide them with assylum elsewhere first and physically prevent them travelling to the UK to claim here.

I have no idea why France would want to help the UK prevent refugees settling in Uk rather than France.  Why would Johnson or Patel support a measure which would mean more refugees staying in the UK instead of moving to France?

[steve]

You really couldn't make it up!

www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/25/hmrc-to-relocate-to-newcastle-office-owned-by-tory-donors-via-tax-haven

[neilj]

Sometimes lost in the debate, but the vast majority of refugees/asylum seekers do not want to come to the UK. The large majority stay in surrounding countries in the middle east and Turkey. Within Europe many more settle in Germany and France for example than the UK. Worth remembering when we see the narrative that they all want to come here, they don't.

In the meantime we have shortages of labour in large numbers of sectors, there is a solution to that staring us in the face

[steve]

Spaffer just can't help himself, crisis let's make it worse.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59428311

[neilj]

Looking at the latest net migration figures out yesterday, 32,000 more people left the UK for the EU than arrived from the EU
Immigration as a whole fell by almost 90%, giving a total net migration figure of 34,000, the lowest since 1993

[alec]

steve - I posted this before, lifted from some tweet I had seen:

"Diplomacy: What Britain used to do."

If you elect a total @rse at the head of government, expect things to go wrong.

Fundamentally though, this remains all about the UK approach to Brexit. Johnson thinks it's a good idea to constantly antagonize our near neighbours because he thinks that bring him a political advantage. Childishness at the extreme.