I suspect part of the challenge is that parliament doesn’t always pass the law that it thinks it’s passing, whether due to poor drafting, poor scrutiny or any combination of other factors.
It then comes down to the justice system to interpret and enforce the law as written. If parliament doesn’t like that interpretation then it’s their job to rewrite the law to meet the intent.
It’s really quite inappropriate to criticise the judiciary for doing their job, much as Trump is doing and Johnson did, just because they don’t like the decisions.
From reading the illegal immigration policy document it would seem that Farage has learnt from the mistakes of others. Reform’s intent is to first change the law so that the justice system cannot make rulings that Reform finds inconvenient. In this way Reform would be able to avoid any scenario of seeming critical of judge’s decisions.
One has to accept that if a particular party wins an outright majority in a general election, then if there are pre-existing laws that would be obstructive to their policy, then they can simply repeal them.
It’s interesting that Reform are now allegedly thinking of dropping FPTP, as it was one of their main pushes initially. They’ve worked out that FPTP actually favours their kind of populist nonsense, rather than the oft stated received wisdom that ‘PR will let the nutters gain power’.
For PR to work there will have to be an element of ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, but the alternative is way worse.
I’m confused. Do you mean they’re going to change the laws or limit the scope of judges to enforce the laws? The latter would be quite concerning.
I’ve had a read and I’ll struggling to find this bit.
Overall though, it’s quite a Trumpian work of fantasy, full of tax cuts and spending increases. I look forward to them being rigourously questioned on it but I won’t be holding my breath
My understanding is that Reform intend to enact certain new laws and to repeal some existing ones in order to prevent the justice system from being able to interfere in Reforms implementation of policy.
If you would care to read their policy document on illegal immigration, the link to which I previously posted (post 214), then I think you will find their intent clear enough.
The UK does not have a written Constitution - only “custom and practice” embodied in laws enacted by Parliament and past judicial decisions. So Farrago with a Parliamentary majority can change anything he likes - as long as he can get his new laws through both Houses.
Ironic that the UK has fewer actual guardrails in place than America, where Trump with the help of a compliant Supreme Court is currently riding roughshod over the US written Constitution, which in theory offers more robust protections against tyranny.
Spent the afternoon in the company of people who think AR has 4 properties, to which my only reply is let the internal enquiry find out the facts. You just can’t shift the opinions of farage supporters
Good Lord! I take myself off for a long weekend in Paris and you are all still winding each other up with the merits and not of the various UK political figures of merit and not And all oblivious to what is maybe coming down the line here after next week
OK, I would quote from the document but it is presented as a PDF containing an image per page - so it is impossible to copy text. I could OCR it but don’t want Reform chasing me down for copyright infringement so I shall paraphrase.
A high estimate even if you include those waiting for asylum claims to be processed - the more usual estimates top out at 750k. It is notoriously hard to estimate the true number though as they are largely invisible to the authorities.
So, this is confused I think. Actual illegal immigrants do not cost the taxpayer for “welfare and accommodation” because they are specifically excluded from benefits. They might “compete” for low wage jobs and overcrowded lodgings as they are typically exploited by dodgy employers and landlords, but to what extent they take jobs from people here legally is difficult to estimate. Some of the jobs would not exist if they were not here to exploit, many would not be taken on by any legal resident (we saw the difficulty of farmers replacing eastern European labour, for example).
Hoo boy that doesn’t add up. We do spend just shy of £6 billion on processing asylum seekers which are not illegal (but see later) but if we’re wasting that amount the net saving in the first five years would be £25 billion (5 x 7 -10). Something Nigel isn’t telling us perhaps?
OK they want to deny the human right to asylum and need to make it impossible for those pesky courts to say otherwise. We will join that select club of nations that have done so - none of whom I want to be my friends. I have no doubt the “British Bill of Rights” will be missing a few for the rest of us as well.
Wow, number one is going to be quite the data grab. Hello police state - which the muppets will have voted for in their eagerness to stuff someone else. Well I suppose Farage got the turkeys to vote for Christmas with Brexit - why would he not think he can get it to work again?
We can see the problems caused by accommodating asylum seekers now - even given that the idea is to place the centres in “remote areas” this will be a logistic nightmare getting the necessary planning permission. In fact I suspect they won’t bother with niceties such as planning but unless they actually want death camps (I wouldn’t put it past Reform) you have to get food and supplies to these centres as well as inmates to and from. You’d need a lot as well - the Bibby Stockholm wasn’t exactly small but only held 500 residents so you would need 48 centres holding 500 people. Reform can barely run a county council (in fact I haven’t seen any evidence they can run a county council, even barely) - I don’t see them building 50-odd detention centres (noting in passing that the Tories were unable to increase the prison capacity by a similar number despite Johnson’s promises and later downscaling of the numbers).
5 flights a day - a billion quid a year probably just on running costs (maybe the airlines have five spare A380’s lying around but I’m not sure - maybe Reform would need to buy them first, roughly £2,5 billion) but where to because they are not going to get other nations to just flip over and agree to take people without a very big bung indeed. Don’t forget the nearly £300 million we gave to Rwanda and that was for a reciprocal agreement, not a unilateral one.
In all it’s a mix of tin pot dictatorial totalitarianism and half baked ideas. But I expect no less from Farage.
I’ll come back to - what do you do when you have sent the migrants that you can easily find, i.e. those asylum seekers in the system (having stripped them of their right to asylum and arbitrarily declared them “illegal”). By definition actual illegal migrants are hard to track down. I guess the next soft target would be those already given leave to remain by retrospectively declaring them illegal because of their means of arrival. What next - reinventing the Stasi to bash down the doors of cheap labour sweat shops? And not mind too much if anyone who is actually here legally, or even a citizen is swept along?
And there are better ways to save the money - dealing with the backlog for one thing would save ~£5 billion a year in accommodation costs.
She’s right (I love Tony Benn in the background). Starmer, no less than Blair (what’s he up to in Gaza?) is only Tory light.
Going back to the discussion above, I see he’s a new spin doctor, the fourth in five years. For him it’s not about substance, it’s about spinning shit. He’s no plan, he doesn’t understand the economy, neither does the banker Reeves and he knows she’s way out of her depth, his response it to install some economic muscle in Number 10 which will only cause a rift with Number 11.
He’s an ass.
@billybutcher Your long post above doesn’t address the solution to this divisive issue. Which is take it head on, explain it’s not actually an issue. It wasn’t an issue when Alf Garnett got worked up about it. It wasn’t an issue when the “rivers of blood” speech was made by Enoch Powell and it isn’t an issue today. Starmer needs the balls to tell the truth. Not waste time on a fabricated issue that has fixated the great unwashed for sixty years.
And all oblivious to what is maybe coming down the line here after next week 