Mailwatch(ed) Forum

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/art ... lum-system

Labour urged to drop Tory rhetoric or risk failing to fix broken asylum system
Exclusive: End focus on deportations and use language of ‘compassion and humanity’, says Refugee Council

Some of this is fair comment, but again, the implication seems to be that deporting people with no right to be in the country is out of order.

On 21 August, Cooper said 300 caseworkers had already been reassigned to progress thousands of failed asylum and returns cases, including enforced and voluntary returns, and announced the reopening of two controversial immigration removal centres.

Solomon said the home secretary’s plans for mass detention and deportation of refused asylum seekers were immoral, expensive and impractical.

It clearly isn't impractical seeing we were doing exactly what Labour's proposing until Covid and Sunak showed up.

If Solomon wants to run for office on never deporting anyone, which seems to be the alternative policy, that's up to him. But this isn't what Labour ran on. Doubtless the Jez people will run with this sort of stuff, in a vague way, aimed merely to cause a stink rather than put a policy (which would be far more unpopular) before the public. Or maybe they'll just be dishonest, like in the general election where they implied that Bangladeshi Britons were going to be summarily rounded up. Weren't a lot of them going to be visa overstayers? The Bangladesh government seemed happy enough to facilitate removal back to Bangladesh.

Doubtless he wants a different policy, but having got rid of Rwanda and got all these extra caseworkers working, I don't think it's unfair to say Labour is trying to fix asylum.

I'll resist the impulse to stick this on the Owen Jones thread. but it turns out that Labour may actually have thought about what it was doing here. Pension credit and housing benefit are every bit as means tested as the winter fuel allowance will be. Is he suggesting they be paid to every pensioner as well?

In response to claims that many pensioners will not be able to afford to heat their homes as a result, the government has launched a campaign to encourage take-up of pension credit. Only around two-thirds of people who are eligble claim the benefit (worth on average £3,900 a year), and as a result around 880,000 pensioner households are thought to be missing out.

In response to a question about the risk of vulnerable pensioners losing out this winter, Reeves told MPs today that the government was working with charities and local councils to ensure that people who are entitled to claim pension credit do claim it.

She went on:

The DWP will also bring together the administration of pension credit and housing benefits, so that pensioner households currently receiving housing benefit also receive any pension credit that they are entitled to – something that the previous government deferred for years despite knowing that the poorest pensioners were missing out.

This could have been done without restricting winter fuel allowance, and there are certainly some non-rich losers from that, but this is surely positive. That's a non-trivial amount of money to the poorest pensioners. Add this to the public sector wage settlements, and George Osborne isn't the first comparison that comes to mind.

Insofar as the UK has any control over Israel, what's been announced is a major diplomatic move against an ally by the UK which Israel really hates. Can the UK single handedly stop F-35s flying? That's the implication and I rather doubt it. What is actually being supplied now, by the UK? We never get told this by Sultana and co, presumably because it's not actually very much.

Call for complete embargo if you want, but don't overstate how much difference it would make.

John Healey explained this earlier today. Parts for F35 fighter planes are not shipped directly to Israel (or directly to any other individual country) but go into a pool of spares which is drawn on by all of the 30 or 40 countries that are flying F35s. You can't specify which countries get the parts and which do not. Embargoing F35 fighter spares totally would therefore damage UK industry and endanger UK jobs.

Like most holier-than-thou Trots, Sultana likes to rumble on about principled action, but is actually rather dim and uninformed.

That is very interesting.

I had a look at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade website just now.

https://caat.org.uk/data/countries/isra ... -aircraft/

It's got a good list of firms that makesparts for F-35s. One of those is based at a business park next to Coventry. Doubtless if you asked Sultana about the impact of an embargo on the firm, she'd claim it would be very small. Schrodingers Embargo- massive effect on Israel, but no probllem for local emplyers.

I see McDonnell and Burgon have been more balanced, in fairness to them, although they want a full embargo.

You're telling me that the Labour Government are doing something to offset the loss of the £300 for pensioners who don't get pension credit? I'm stunned.

UK state pension to rise by more than £400 a year, say reports

https://www.theguardian.com/money/artic ... ay-reports

Cue people breaking it down into however many pennies per day.

All the Tory leadership candidates will just say they're going to bring back the WFA. The left opponents will probably ignore this till the budget, then claim their "campaigning" forced it.

Not that Sunak matters much now, but this is the line.

Sunak says a train driver on £65,000 will get a pay rise of almost £10,000. But a pensioner on £13,000 will lose money. Why?

Starmer shows admirable restraint by not using the phrase "shit sandwich", but points out the number of strikes there've been in the last year.

From a strong supporter of Palestinian rights. This is a fairer reading than the Jez stuff.

Not just a Labour matter of course, but in lieu of a dedicated Grenfell thread it does touch on impressive the way that certain things, briefly significant, just cease to matter.

Angie Rayner said that she thought many of them were keen to get off and get started on reading the report (all 1700 pages) themselves. Which I’d guess is fair enough.

You don't have to hear the PM's statement in person, but it does seem odd to me that more wouldn't stay for it.

To me it simply says “we don’t care”, harsh but what else can I take from it, although not surprised at the Tories departing in shame

Interesting by Stephen Bush here.

https://www.ft.com/content/8fc6e94f-eb6 ... 032464c1cb

I hadn't appreciated that the UK is now a relatively high spender on health compared with Western Europe.

The British government is paying an above-average OECD fare but not getting an above-average set of outcomes. It may be that a government that is really focused on reforming how the NHS operates can get better outcomes without much additional money — and part of how Labour does it will be decided by its ability to change how public services operate, given the state of the public finances and the promises it has made.

In terms of improving outcoms, settling long running disputes ought to help. I'm sure there are areas where extra money will be needed to kickstart/alleviate, but it's no longer incomprehensible that money isn't that much of an issue generally. I might even be tempted to swerve reform and all, but I guess you have to say that or else people will just claim you inherited Tory long term brilliance and got a free ride.

Single fucking ICT system. That'll save a few quid.

Or get some foreign students back. Which may be happening.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/a ... iversities

Amateur hour by (surprisingly) Diana Johnson.

Minister misspoke over hints of winter fuel payment changes, say government sources

i think it's likely that a sweetener (say a one off extra bit on the pension above the triple lock will be added) but that has to be Rachel Reeves or Starmer's to announce.

Did I put this up before?

Exclusive: Councils will be allowed to run local buses as Labour scraps Thatcher's ban
It’s understood Labour’s rule changes, to be tabled in the Commons on Monday, will lift the ban on local councils setting up community bus companies, allowing more local leaders to take more services into public control

I noticed that Ken Livingstone and Sadiq Khan have been happy enough with the private providers in London, so I'd be surprised if too many took up the offer. But we will doubtless get the "Arriva made £xm profit, we could be putting all that into buses if we ran them ourselves".