Theresa May

Theresa May drops a bobo

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Just recently the press has been awash with reports of three women held as slaves in South-West London. The police have disclosed only meagre details like they were originally “a collective” and shared a political ideology.

Despite every few details, UK Home Secretary Theresa May has – no doubt trying to benefit from the shock and outrage – declared tackling slavery in modern Britain “a personal priority.”

The trouble is that this slavery story is totally overblown. It looks like their shared ideology was Anarchism and they probably just wanted out and were not slaves at all. No handcuffs except for “invisible handcuffs.” I’m calling it bollocks.

25/11/13 Looks like I was wrong on the Anarchism. Slavery case: two arrested ran a revolutionary Communist collective. I wonder if I’ll be wrong on the “invisible handcuffs.

25/11/13 5.20 p.m. There appears to a prejudged approach and a lack of sensitivity to this news story. Political ideology and the fact that the group has lived at many different addresses in London are repeatedly emphasized.

Living in London on a low income has always been precarious, more so for people reduced to living in squats: squatters would often be forced to relocate as properties are repossessed. I’m talking from experience.

Slavery is about being held as a prisoner and denied basic rights. It is not about people pursuing a different, alternative lifestyle. Nor is it about being a dysfunctional family.

26/11/13 ‘Slavery’ in London: an hysterical morality tale even features dysfunctional and an iceberg …

Image of an iceberg

Continue ReadingTheresa May drops a bobo

Theresa May must not further erode Britons’ rights to citizenship

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/14/theresa-may-erode-britons-citizenship-right

Image of UK Home Secretary Theresa May

Theresa May has said she wants to extend her powers to strip citizenship from suspected terrorists, even if doing so renders them stateless. Under current law the home secretary may denaturalise anyone with dual nationality whose UK citizenship is deemed by her to be “not conducive to the public good”. But if May has her way, even British-only nationals will lose their citizenship. The consequences will be profound.

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In her first 30 months in office, May deprived 16 Britons of their citizenship, almost all of them on grounds of being linked to terrorist activities. One such ex-Briton is Mahdi Hashi, a Somali-born UK citizen who grew up in Camden, north London, and subsequently became involved in the al-Shabaab group. The home ecretary ordered that he be stripped of citizenship while he was in Somalia, cancelling his passport and right to re-enter Britain, and leaving him vulnerable to rendition to the US. Hashi now languishes in jail in New York on terror charges.

The vast majority of these former citizens were outside the UK at the time, giving the lie to their right to appeal to a UK court, and freeing the home secretary from full scrutiny. Few of them have ever been charged in a British court with any criminal offence. The protections that each and every British citizen should have against arbitrary decision-making and against a life without citizenship have been gradually and deliberately stripped away.

During the dark days of the second world war, when Britain was in mortal danger, only four people were stripped of citizenship. Theresa May has denaturalised more than four times that number of in the last three years alone. Now she wants to increase the state’s power further by consigning British-only citizens she deems undesirable to statelessness. We would do well to note the refugee scholar Hannah Arendt’s observation that one can measure the extent to which authoritarianism has infected a government by the number of denaturalisations it orders. This growing erosion of the security of UK citizenship needs to be reversed.

[It’s important to realise that we are discussing suspects. It is likely that there is little or any evidence against them and that action to deny nationality is essentially arbitrarily applied.]

Continue ReadingTheresa May must not further erode Britons’ rights to citizenship

Anti-racism campaigner and immigration caseworker sent ‘go home’ text messages by Home Office

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/antiracism-campaigner-and-immigration-caseworker-sent-go-home-text-messages-by-home-office-8886200.html

UKBA left red faced after Suresh Grover and Bobby Chan receive texts telling them to leave the country

Image of immigrants go home van

Less than two weeks since the Home Office anti-immigration vans were banned by the advertising watchdog for using “misleading” statistics, the UK Border Agency has come under fire for telling an anti-racism campaigner and an immigration adviser to leave the country in a text.

On behalf of UKBA, private contractor Crapita sent leading campaigner Suresh Grover a text telling him he had no right to live here. The same text was sent to Bobby Chan, an Immigration Caseworker at Central London Community Law.

Mr Grover, who founded the anti-racism charity The Monitoring Group, has campaigned for justice for Stephen Lawrence, Zahid Mubarek and Victoria Climbie. He also runs race relations advice surgeries across London.

He told the Independent “ I was absolutely shocked and quite horrified to receive the text. I thought it wasn’t meant for me. I came here with my parents in 1966, I was born in East Africa and have always had a British passport.”

<original posting snipped>

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27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

dizzy

Continue ReadingAnti-racism campaigner and immigration caseworker sent ‘go home’ text messages by Home Office

In Theresa May’s surreal world, feelings trump facts

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/12/theresa-may-health-tourism-facts

The home secretary’s claims about health tourists are both wrong and an insult to voters

[Well done by] Nick Cohen

Image of Home secretary Theresa May

When historians of modern folly write their accounts of our capacity to ignore inconvenient truths, I hope they find the space to mention the performance of Theresa May on BBC Radio 4 on 10 October 2013 .

Britain’s home secretary announced that she was cracking down on the “health tourists” who were using Britain’s hospitals for free. The interviewer pressed her. How much money were these health tourists stealing from our pockets? May did not know. The Royal College of GPs, which ought to know, puts the cost at 0.01% of Britain’s health budget – or next to nothing. When the European Commission asked Britain for proof that sly continentals were sneaking into our hospital beds, Whitehall replied that its demand for hard facts was an affront. “We consider that these questions place too much emphasis on quantitative evidence,” it huffed.

Far from being embarrassed, Mrs May was triumphant. Feelings mattered more than facts. Her job as a senior politician with ill-disguised ambitions to become prime minister was to pander to popular prejudice rather than tell the public the truth.

People feel it is unfair that illegal immigrants can use services, she said. They “feel it’s too easy to stay here illegally”. They had the “feeling that people who are here illegally were accessing services”, she continued, before degenerating into a babble of random noise, from which I just about made out that the “people” who had these “feelings” were, of course “hard working”.

In For the Time Being, Auden has Herod explain why he must save the classical world by killing the infant Jesus. If religion triumphed, “Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions… The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age”.

Mrs May can make you feel that way, as, indeed, can an hour spent watching prime-time television or reading the tabloid press. As Ukip threatens its core vote, the Conservatives will spend 18 months trying to flatter the deluded into voting Tory by telling them that they are right to put their “riot of subjective visions” before paltry facts.

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Auden warned that when populist heroes are worshiped, “the general, the statesman and the philosopher become the butt of every farce and satire”. If our statesmen (and women) choose to put feeling and prejudice before thought and evidence, however, a butt is what they deserve to be. Let us hope they become one. Let us hope that the mocking laughter becomes so loud it drives them out of public life.

Continue ReadingIn Theresa May’s surreal world, feelings trump facts