Was quite a relief at the start of the week - I found fascist graffiti in the building entrance and wondered if I was being dramatic, but one of the local antifa said no, that’s a new development in this area, and cleaned it up. Things are slowly but definitely intensifying in Berlin.

📢"The UK can have a functioning immigration system without abandoning the principle of equal protection under the law." Our CEO @minnierahman.bsky.social in @lbc.co.uk on the Government's ICE-style asylum reforms this week. www.lbc.co.uk/article/labo...

Ahead of International Women’s Day, pleased to support Disay* to share her story with @thelondonstandard.bsky.social about her experiences & the changes we need in order to ensure all migrant domestic workers, a mostly female workforce, are protected & safe at work www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...

From yesterday: Home Secretary succeeds on children’s best interests ground in section 3C leave challenge | Chai Patel

Yesterday evening, for the second time in a year, the Met Police raided Westminster Quaker Meeting House and arrested a number of young nonviolent activists. STATEMENT: www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.

At Shabana Mahmood’s press conference and journo right behind me asked for Pakistanis to be banned 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

This just isn't true. The 1951 convention requires state parties to facilitate the integration and naturalisation of refugees because the people who drafted it weren't moral vacuums or stupid enough to think that persecution that made people flee for their lives would magically go away in a year.

Asylum policy shouldn’t be about “appealing to people who feel that we’ve lost control.” It shouldn’t be about appealing to anyone. It should be about doing what is best and safest for the people who are here seeking protection.

Does anyone think that this - effectively describing people who came here at *our* invitation to work in care homes as would-be parasites on the welfare state - is what she meant?

Yes. Also if we are going to have proscription offences then I'd suggest they should apply to the organisations who want to violently deport British people to countries they've never known.

But fundamentally Mahmood’s video is just a shocking way to speak about people. Abandoning refugees is bad! Reducing numbers is not a valid policy goal! (Until you’ve sorted out the causes of forced migration, which she seems to have no interest in.) People aren‘t a means to a party political end!

I think it means people should not interpret polls for a living

Join us! We need more people to say very loudly that the proposed changes are bad for EVERYTHING from integration to the economy. I promise it will be fun :)

This IPSO adjudication against the Telegraph is quite something Confirms their story titled: ‘We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays’ was completely fabricated, with the family involved non-existent and stock pictures used www.ipso.co.uk/rulings/0210...

Its genuinely mad that we are, arguably, the most successful multicultural state on earth and instead of celebrating that we... ...keep trying to copy nations who have very evidently done worse at it than us

Denmark has *far* worse outcomes - economic, social and integration - than the UK. Just a fantasyland for those who want an excuse for their own xenophobia and/or are incapable of doing the hard work of confronting the UK's real problems. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

Very clear that for Starmer, 'sectarian voting' is when British Muslims don't vote Labour, and for many others, it is just when British Muslims vote.

This is what I find so frustrating about longtermism and Effective Altruism becoming obsessed with tail risks where the answer is just “don’t do this”.

Again and again we see the reasons why all centralised id databases must be resisted. In the UK we already have this in place for migrants and they called it the 'hostile environment' deliberately. It has to be repealed and we certainly can't allow it to be extended any further.

Some voters are sending An Urgent Signal Which We Must Reflect On Very Seriously, and some aren’t, how might we tell them apart I wonder

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Take two seven year olds in a primary school in the Prime Minister’s constituency. His Dad is a banker Her Mum is the cleaner at that bank Is the Government’s Ipoproposal that richer child gets permanent status at age 10 while in primary school & working class classmate not until they are 22?

From today the word 'sectarian' means the opposite. Update your dictionaries accordingly.

A reflection from the leader of a migration charity. We have been told over and over again by politicians - even from “partners” and “allies” that we will not win on our policies unless we concede. Throw some migrants under the bus - they’re too unfavourable. Public doesn’t agree with us.

Democracy Volunteers were founded in 2016 They had 4 people in the constituency today. They produced this report in 2024 on the general election committees.parliament.uk/writtenevide...

A lot of stuff about this story raises questions from a methodological standpoint but to me I think this is the weirdest. I can't the 12 percent figure here. The offence under the act is not one of collusion it is of intent to influence. There is an influencer and influencee.

Since we’re all going to become experts on this, here’s what seems to be the relevant part of the Ballot Secrecy Act 2023 - we can see that it criminalises influencing other voters (or intending to), and not as the “Democracy Volunteers” have suggested, conferring or colluding

European politicians pull away from (rhetoric of) migrant integration, towards the Arab Gulf model: low-paid work by insecure “temporary” migrants. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Latest migration stats are out! It's the same, sad story: ❤️‍🩹Health & care visas down 91% in 2 years 👨‍💼🧑‍🏭Non-health related skilled worker visas down by a third in a year 🆘Asylum seeker numbers still at a historic high Govt will try to paint this as success. Is it?

Indeed. Refusing these claims means a) they can't work legally b) one way or another they will be dependent on state support. This is just deliberately wasting taxpayers' money for the sake of (politically counterproductive) performative cruelty.

A den is a childish statement of belonging, but let’s not mistake childish for trivial. Den making is the instinctive behaviour of homemaking: collecting materials from the world around, as you work out what can be borrowed, salvaged and adapted into shelter. Nearly everyone has built a den.

so you've probably heard about the London measles outbreak. A lot of people are talking about anti-vax misinformation, but that's not actually the problem here. The problem is austerity. 🧵

The Woman in Black. An unpublished illustration I made for the book by Susan Hill. Image size: 21.2 x 31.5cm £150 plus P&P Email me at: [email protected] for enquiries (Pen not included).

Incredible that Labour have the nerve to criticise Reform’s immigration plans given their own efforts to make permanent residence impossible for many people for decades, or at all

I am so ANGRY watching this Reform press conference. How can we just let them get away with saying they will deport "hundreds of thousands" of people here "illegally" and in the same breath say that they will make it illegal to simply be here. These policies are horrifically racist and DANGEROUS.

Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.

I saw Stand By Me and walked around kicking stuff for ages absolutely furious that that hadn't been my childhood.

Once again, the UK performs *far* better on almost all measures of migrant integration and outcomes than Denmark Why would we take lessons from them? www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

I thought giant monopolistic companies would just continue to lock down their software to make it impossible to not rent from them to use their ecosystem - not that they'd just buy the entire hardware supply so you can't do personal computing lol

😬Not the best look for Reform’s Gorton & Denton candidate Matt Goodwin White supremacist far right activist says “you've appeared on our podcasts, had dinner with us, had us write for your Substack, and sought our advice on how to write your social media posts” Tad awkward😬

My brother wanted a London pub crawl. The result? My new Substack post: "Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?" How private equity reshaped the local, which pubs are most at risk and most importantly what to do about it. open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Exactly, this has to be the starting point of any further reform.

"Without a convincing narrative that goes beyond vague paeans to diversity, Starmer—and the UK—will remain trapped: each attempt to “restore control” undermines the very economic and social foundations on which durable political consent depends." www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/724...

yes. the things that would make social media safer for children are almost all just the things that would make social media non-harmful/much less harmful for *all of us*. if you do it by age verification then nothing will stop a child in a difficult home accessing stuff via parents' accounts

Matthew Goodwin's thing on giving women incentives to have more children - does it apply to migrant women/women of colour or just white british women? Pls can a journo ask him.

"Millions must go" is a statement about legal migrants, including those with settlement rights (which Lowe would abolish ILR). He has been as far as I know silent on whether he exempts EU settled status. x.com/RupertLowe10...

We have already moved on from restricting future migration to proposing mass expulsions of people already here, so it seems optimistic to think reducing numbers will improve the standard of our political debate. All that’s likely to happen is the demands of the far right get ever more extreme

'The new rules won’t simply mean a longer wait for ILR. They will mean many people don’t qualify for ILR at all and have to leave the country'. @jamesbowes01.bsky.social on the government's earned settlement proposals ukandeu.ac.uk/remigration-...

How can you change the public vibe about immigration? Well, that's a good question, worthy of discussion. One thing is clear, though: *changing the reality of immigration policy won't do it, because it isn't meaningfully connected to the reality of immigration policy*.