Lead With The Sympathetic, But Bury The Lede...

Vulnerable families including women fleeing abuse are being illegally “dumped” hundreds of miles away by London councils in a practice “ripping at the social fabric” of deprived towns, a Guardian investigation has found.

Well, as this is the 'Guardian', this will come as no surprise: 

Charities described the policy as “inhumane” and accused councils of targeting vulnerable refugees who speak little English and have little ability to understand or challenge the move. If they refuse, they are in effect forced on to the streets.

An Albanian woman who fled a sex trafficking gang in Manchester was unlawfully told to move out of her property in Ealing, west London, to a property 260 miles away in County Durham despite being highly vulnerable and having two young children.

 Their concern, as usual, is all for those who don't belong here in the first place! Including those granted expensive real estate living space in the capital city. 

But the article did contain an interesting titbit about the competence of local councils:

When she raised concerns to Ealing council, officers provided the details of two sex trafficking support organisations it said were in County Durham – except one was based in Durham, North Carolina in the US, and the other in Durham, Ontario, Canada.

Am I going to hell for laughing at this? 

'Guardian' Puzzled By Recurring Phenomenon...

 

Because it's summer, you loons! 

Such A 'Piece Of Nothing' That You Felt Compelled To Write A Column About It

I refer, of course, to the past that haunts Green party leader Zack Polanski. As his star has risen, so have the number of people ready to share their opinion on why they would never vote for him. I’ve met Greens who deplore his focus on social justice, considering it fatally undermining of the real cause, which is environmentalism. ... But then there are the people who would never vote Green because of that time in 2013, and I’m going to run through the details in full, because a lot of these Green refuseniks are hazy on them; they just know that it happened, and it gives them the ick. At that time Polanski was a hypnotherapist, and a Sun journalist approached him wanting to know if she could “boost cup with mind”.

Ah, it was that cunning 'Sun' journalist that done poor David wrong, is that the line that you're taking, Zoe?

As a twist of fate, then, it is staggering, but as an indication of Polanski’s character, it is a frippery. He wasn’t touting his services as a boob-magician. He was just a hypnotherapist being polite to a client with very strong motivation in that area. I guess the ideal hypnotherapist-later-progressive-politician response would have been: “No, the power of the mind won’t help you here, and anyway, you’re fine as you are and your insecurity is just internalised patriarchal oppression.” But we are where we are, and this story is a piece of nothing.

Well, sure, that's why you've used your column to leap to his defence, with the claim that he's just naive, not a chancer on the make. 'Stand by your man' isn't just a song it's a political statement for you then. 

Yet More Sob Stories In The 'Guardian'...

They just can't help themselves, can they?

Afran – not his real name – hit the headlines when he became the first asylum seeker to return to the UK in a small boat after being removed to France under the controversial “one in, one out” scheme on 19 September. He was sent back to Paris for the second time on 5 November.

“France, UK, France, UK, France – it’s not my choice,” he says. “I went to UK twice because I felt I had no other option. The smugglers in northern France attacked me and threatened my life before I crossed to the UK for the first time on August 6. When the Home Office returned me here the first time I believed the smugglers were still searching for me.

And rather than risk your life trying to cross the English channel in a small boat, you didn't think to go elsewhere in Europe by land? I womnder why?

Afran is sitting with three other recent returnees from the UK, including the first woman removed under the scheme. Soon after they speak, the policy will be followed by draconian measures that the government says will deter asylum seekers from crossing the Channel in small boats. But the group’s stories – of danger, dislocation and a lack of protection even after removal – are a stark illustration of how those theories of deterrence can collide with the desperate logic of survival.

No, sorry, 'survival' is not the issue here or they would not choose the small boat route, which is insanely risky. They are determined to get to the UK and the UK only.  

Afran pushes fish fingers aimlessly around his plate and sips tea. The group, thrown together by circumstances, wear a jumble of donated tracksuits and lack weatherproof shoes and warm coats. All of them in turn laugh hysterically and weep at the hopelessness of their situation. “I know the security now in the detention centre I’ve been locked up in twice,” Afran says. “I told them I’ll be back for Christmas.” He laughs hollowly and then starts to cry.

Reader, he probablt will... 

On the other side of the Channel, another man, an Eritrean, is awaiting his fate in a detention centre. He was the second to return to the UK after being forcibly removed to France.

And he too has not been deterred, he too is still fixated on the UK to the exclusion of anything else.  

He says he came back to the UK again because he felt unsafe in France. After getting medical help for several conditions from a charity in Paris, he returned to his shelter late and was refused entry because the gates were already locked. ”I called my family and told them about the bad things that had happened to me. They arranged for me to return to the UK in a small boat because they understood that France was not safe for me.”

What about Holland? Belgium? Denmark? 

He adds: “I have suffered a lot and am terrified of being forced back to France. If the security at the Paris shelter had allowed me back inside when I returned from the medical appointment I would not have been attacked on that night – it was 23 October – and I would still be in France now. Because of the bad experience I had I no longer believe France can protect me.”

Documents seen by the Guardian, written before he was removed to France, show that a detention centre doctor judged his account – that he had been trafficked and tortured in Libya after fleeing Eritrea and before first reaching the UK – to be “consistent with torture”.

Lochlinn Parker, the acting director of the charity Detention Action, says...

Who cares? He's not exactly impartial, is he? He's making a nice living off this.  Being one of the employees in its £608k staffing costs. 

The three male asylum seekers around the table in the Paris cafe are protective of the woman who is with them. “Why did they send a woman back to France? This is really bad,” Afran says. “Even the security staff in the UK were shocked the Home Office was sending me back to France,” the woman says.

Yes, concern for females. This is believeable. 

“Before I came to the UK my mental health was normal. Now it is not. I do not know where I can go or what I can do to be safe. The Home Office is no good for humans. They have broken me. They have finished my life.”

They are still pretty good for this human, despite everything else, if they are keeping people like you out of my country. 

Any Sympathy I Have Is For The Poor Donkey…

Another in the never-ending story of the 'Guardian' taking out a hankie for refugees:

They were huddled together on the bare floor of an abandoned house – four orphans who had travelled nearly 1,000 miles after having to flee from their home in the city when Sudan’s brutal civil war erupted.Having escaped ferocious fighting around Omdurman, twin city of the capital, Khartoum, they had arrived in Darfur...“But we couldn’t stay, it was too deadly,” says Asrar, 13, sitting beside three of her siblings, twins Mustafa and Mujtaba, nine, and seven-year-old Fatima.

I find I immediately flash on to this comment from one of Tim's regulars. 

 

Outside the house, located in the devastated West Darfur city of El Geneina, another two of Asrar’s siblings were trying to make money for them all to eat: Haroun, 21, working at a mechanic’s workshop, while Abdallah, 15, pounded the streets with a donkey selling water all day.

Poor bloody donkey. There's a recurring advert for a horse and donkey charity on tv, continually begging for money to treat these poor beasts. The day they announce they will use it to hire mercenaries to shoot the owners who mistreat them is the day I'll give them some.  

Asrar and her siblings have been alone since July last year, when their mother, Aisha, died from dysentery at their home in Omdurman. “There was nowhere to go to treat her. She got sick and was gone in two days,” says Asrar. Haroun, arriving back at the house after his workshop shift, adds: “We were devastated when she died.” Their father disappeared before the war started, leaving the house one day and never returning.

Such a familiar story. He's probably tucked up in a hotel in Kent.

Another brother who lives in Libya sent them money by phone to pay a driver to take them to El Geneina, where their parents were from and an elder sister, Israa, 30, still lived.

They paid a driver in advance but he abandoned them along the way. “He left us there with nothing,” Haroun says. “We had already paid him, and we had run out of money, so we had to sell our mother’s perfumes and clothes and survive on beans.”

It's called the Third World for a good reason. 

On arriving in the Darfur city last month, their elder sister could not be found, most likely having fled across the border to Chad. They found her house in ruins and moved into a nearby derelict house that had been left completely bare after being looted. A threadbare carpet serves as their bed. Despite escaping Omdurman, life in El Geneina is also fraught with risk. The city has witnessed myriad war crimes, including one of the worst atrocities of the war – a frenzied episode of violence, rape and looting by the RSF in 2023, in which almost 15,000 people were killed.

Clearly, the thrust of the 'Guardian' article is to drum up sympathy for refugees. Does it work? Not on me. 

If It's Too Early To Lay Blame, It's Surely Too Early To 'Console'...

After the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Ronald Reagan ended an Oval Office address with the consoling thought that its crew had slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. Successors such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden also shone in the crucial US presidential role of consoler-in-chief.

But that was then, this is now. And that’s why a ‘Guardian’ columnist is speaking favourably of ol’ Ronnie.

How would Donald Trump fare in his first test since returning to the White House?

You just know he's itching to write his foregone conclusion, no matter what, don't you? After all, this is a 'Guardian' column.  

In grave, mellow tones, Trump did the things that heads of state are supposed to do, acknowledging an “hour of anguish” for the nation, paying tribute to emergency rescue workers and offering solace that the victims’s journey ended in “the warm embrace of a loving God”.

But...but... 

Did he leave it there, channeling the sombre mood, fading with dignity into the background and handing over to experts who know what they are talking about? Are you kidding? This is Trump. He went on, ominously revealing that he had “strong opinions” on the collision (never mind the facts). With aggression creeping into his voice, Trump pivoted to an all-out attack on his Democratic predecessors and blame the accident on policies of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

But if it's too early to lay blame, isn't it also too early to 'reassure' the nation? And after all, didn't NASA incompetence and carelessness cause the deaths of those astronauts?

Do we know that the policy of DEI didn't play a part? After all, the helo wasn't following the flight plan it was supposed to. The ATC didn't notice this. No-one did anything to prevent the collision.

Trump claimed Obama had pushed “mediocre” standards for air traffic controllers, a job that requires “superior intelligence”, but Trump had raised them during his first term. “When I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before.”

And indeed, there's a class action lawsuit ongoing regarding these wretched Biden era standards that focussed on everything but competence at the job. 

Last week Trump signed an executive order restoring his standards. He explained: “We have to have our smartest people. It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are. It matters intellect, talent – the word talent, you have to be talented, naturally talented genius. You can’t have regular people doing that job.” It’s almost as if you need a master race.

If you want to stop aircraft parts raining from the sky on a regular basis, maybe you do.... 

The Dear Old Grauniad Starting 2025 Off As One Expects...

...with rampant misandry. Wonder what the stats are for men killed by other men? And by the way, it isn't even accurate (would anyone expect anything less?):

None of these incidents are linked in any way other than that a woman has been killed and a man charged in connection with her death.

So they stuck in that 'allegedly' but if he's acquitted, the number will come down, won't it? 

Quite Easily, It Seems…

Tim Worstall does a great job of fisking the article, which is just a lot of squealing that black racists are being held to the same standards as white racists, so I won't bother. 

I would just like to point out that if I ran a 'Blog Comment Of The Month' award, this would be a shoo-in:

And so do I, Simon, so do I...

People In Glass Houses, Martin…

Under Keir Starmer, there is a moral compass in Downing Street once more. But something else has gone missing. Too often, Labour now seems to lack not a moral compass, but a fully functioning political one. It has never needed one more than it does today.

And why is that, pray tell?

The most recent evidence that Labour’s political compass has been lost is in the unnecessary and overwrought row about its role in the US election. Here, once again, Labour has allowed its actions to be defined by its critics. As such, it fits a pattern: the failure to spot the danger in the freebies-for-ministers revelations; the tangled rise and fall of Sue Gray; the peremptory cull of winter fuel payments. With a good political compass, all of these could have been avoided.

Martin seems to have forgotten the 'Guardian's' own little foray into US politics, and just how effective that was!   

Your Prejudices Are Showing, Gaby...

And they aren't, of course, as the total waste of public money that was the trial of an armed officer for shooting dead a deadly threat has shown...

For Kaba’s grieving family, this latest in a string of acquittals was proof the police “can kill with impunity”, as a campaigner said.

Funny sort of 'impunity' that puts you on trial for following your training. Are you sure you know what that word means, Gaby? Will this help?

Police chiefs, conversely, have responded by demanding more safeguards against prosecution. Though the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has agreed to demands that officers in such cases remain anonymous until convicted – not unreasonably, given the threats reportedly made against Blake and his loved ones – she has ordered an independent review into some of the more questionable asks on the National Police Chiefs’ Council wishlist, alongside a crackdown on police vetting and an overhaul of CPS guidance on charging officers. It’s time to get to the bottom, once and for all, of why successful prosecutions are so rare.

Because every member of that jury would have put themselves in the place of that officer facing a man using a vehicle as a deadly weapon and wondered just what else he was supposed to do, Gaby.... 

The home secretary cannot, however, let herself be held to ransom.

The Home Sec has already been held to ransom (by the racehustlers) many times, what's one more? 

...let us also hear from those who think justice is already almost impossible to get and who understand the human consequences of some of the NPCC’s more technical-sounding demands, such as making it harder for inquests to return verdicts of unlawful killing against police officers.

I think we've heard quite enough from that quarter, with their selective outrage when blacks are harmed by someone not also black, don't you? 

It’s true that we expect extraordinary things of firearms officers. Of the two other fatal shootings investigated in the year Kaba died, one involved a white man with a knife who attacked a police station and charged headlong at a Derbyshire firearms officer, who held off firing until the man was barely arm’s-length away. The other was a white man in Cumbria, holding a knife to a young child’s throat. He was shot after repeatedly refusing to drop the knife, and the child survived. The skill and steadiness under pressure involved in both cases is astonishing, and the consequences of a mistake unimaginable. I certainly couldn’t do it. But the same is true of brain surgery, and that doesn’t render surgeons above the law.

It does mean that it seems to take an extraordinarily long time to bring them to justice, Gaby. And I'd bet there's far more surgeons than AFOs in the country.

Have You Run Out Of UK Sob Stories Then, Frances?

It is breakfast and I reach for a painkiller dropped off by a Boots delivery van. The sleep apnoea machine by the bed is beeping and I plug it in to the mains to charge. I can’t stop thinking about the disabled and ill people in Gaza; the dialysis patients who were halfway through their treatment when the power stopped, the children surviving off animal feed who can’t find bread, let alone a wheelchair.

I guess now Labour's in power, everything in the UK is rosy, and you have to look further afield, eh, Frances?

There is one aspect that is rarely talked about: what is happening to disabled Palestinians. That adults and children with disabilities are often the worst affected by conflict is an atrocity as old as war itself. If you are paralysed, you cannot run from shrapnel. If you are deaf, you don’t hear the sirens warning you to take cover. More than a decade of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel mean disabled people in Gaza were living without treatment and equipment long before the first missiles fell.

Congratulations, Frances, you've finally found a truly deserving cause, and you only had to go abroad to find it!  

I unplug my sleep apnoea machine and I wonder if the real darkness will come when any of this seems normal.

No doubt you'd demand we ship them all over here, eh, Frances? Or is that next week's column?

'Nurse! He's At It Again!'

George Monbiot, our country's biggest joke in the journalism world, and boy, is that a tough field..!

The mocking on Twitter was as swift and merciless as those same predators bringing down a hapless buffalo:

Leading one to wonder what would happen if the lions did too good a job?

Guardian Schizophrenia

Make up your minds, will you?

Good, Let's Keep Pricing Them Out!

The usual whines and complaints in the 'Guardian' about 'institutional racism' being behind the disparity in maternal deaths by race in the NHS. 

And hidden amongst the usual squealing about 'microagressions' (and the usual dodgy stats, discussed at length at Tim's place) is this gem:

I know many great women dedicated to anti-racism who want to be midwives who are quitting because they cannot afford to live on a midwife’s salary.

Frankly, that's a good thing. We need midwives dedicated to one thing, and one thing only. You can't serve two masters, Candice! 

As the cost of living continues to rise, it is becoming unaffordable to live on a public sector salary. This cannot continue. We must support Black people into these professions by encouraging equal access to education, and supporting them with a fair and decent wage when they are in the job.

What 'unequal access' does she think they have, then? And how do the white/brown/yellow folks manage? 

Getting more Black people into senior roles is fundamental, too.

So they should be promoted regardless of merit? 

...seeing more of our own faces in spaces where we are vulnerable would allow us to nip microaggressions and racist behaviours in the bud – and to influence attitudes that have been proven time and time again to harm us.

I can't remember going into a NHS hospital recently and seeing no black faces, can anyone else? 

But maybe I'm being too harsh, she's clearly a medical expert or som...

Candice Brathwaite is a journalist and author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother, Sister Sista and Cuts Both Ways.

Ah. 'Activist wants more activists in key roles' is a great subtext, eh? 

But You Don't Appear To Have Understood It At All...

Sasha Mistlin is sure he understands the appeal of the latest left-wing hate figure, Andrew Tate:

Reprehensible it may be, but Tate’s baseless misogyny and “me-first, get-yours” narcissism is alluring to young men at a time when mainstream culture is telling them to check their privilege for reasons they don’t fully understand.

Well, perhaps, then, the culture should stop telling them that? 

We can’t afford to be English about this sort of thing.

Wait, what..? 

On the surface, Tate preaches hard work, determination and “no excuses”: values my cousin probably sees as parallel to the philosophy of our Nigerian immigrant family.

Oh... 

My friends and I didn’t get any proper education about sex, consent or relationships until we were 13, by which time we had learned it all from internet porn and lads’ mags. Teachers and parents have to be proactive about telling boys what mutually respectful sex is before they’re exposed to something else all together.

So it's only males that need to be taught this?  

My cousin’s had a tough time recently, riven with personal and professional insecurity, amped up by a pandemic and a recession. In that context, I understand Tate’s appeal – an alternative lifestyle guru, saying get yours, before someone else takes it.

Sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?

*snaps fingers*

Oh, yes! Of course! Rap music. Say, why does that get a pass, while you focus on one lone white man, Sacha? 

Newsflash, Owen...

...it's no big deal there, either. Apart from a small minority who don't seem to want to accept reality. 

Not that you ever seem to speak out about them, eh, Owen?

I Know The Answer, Mark...

I made a mistake and because of it, on Wednesday 18 May, I will be put on a Home Office deportation flight to the country of my birth and torn apart from my five British children and my family.

Gosh, what sort of 'mistake'..? 

Did you tick the wrong box on a government form? I mean, yes, those things can be tricky... 

I came to the UK in 2000 at the age of 21. In 2017, I received a four-year sentence for growing cannabis plants.

Oh. You're a drug dealer.  

I hold my hands up, I did something wrong, I served two years of that sentence, and would never do anything like that again. I have not committed any further offences. But this government does not accept that people like me deserve a second chance. One mistake and my life and my future have been shattered for ever.

Welp, those are the rules! Why should we keep you here when we don't have to? 

I’m a parent; my two youngest children are eight and 10.

And the other three? You claim to have started growing cannabis because of a 'financial crisis' - I'm betting it wasn't child support!

If I am forced on to the plane I know my life will be at risk in the country of my birth. I will be looking over my shoulder 24/7.

Just like natives of this country have to do in certain areas, eh, Mark?