Jonathan Potts

Lulu
Bluebeard
Death In Venice
Turandot
The Midsummer Marriage
The Bassarids
Threepenny Opera (?!)
Klinghoffer
Cunning Little Vixen
La Dueña

A randomised control "style" approach is that like when I get "Greek style" yoghurt from Lidl

Yes I rather fear so

> they didn't notice, which someone should have done, or they believe it themselves which is ... well ...

I do worry about the advice she's getting. Either officials have said the Convention isn't drafted that way in which case she's gone against advice, or they've equivocated in which case that's bad, or she didn't ask them and they felt it imprudent to point it out, which would be a poor call imo, or>

I mean, the premise of the first part is wrong, but it's a fair Qn to raise. That the second part (Tory failure to grip) is undeniable, and while as you suggest the language of invasion is misplaced, I can see how it feels like a breach to many people - you can't send boat arrivals straight back.

The rhetoric is crazy. But I guess their pitch, expressed more moderately, is "our predecessors allowed too many people to come & live or work here without thought to the longer term consequences, and they failed to grip the boats thing. We're taking back control of this stuff". Debatable at least.

Financial Times lede on Home Secretary's plan to cut off support for certain asylum seekers

We've been here at least twice before, haven't we, under Howard and then under Blunkett? The Howard changes would have made many in-country asylum applicants destitute & only didn't happen because the Govt had inadvertently left in statute a safety net pushing these folk onto local authority support

(It was to do with asylum law, but as the point was about Ministers' intentions in specific cases, it was a point of fact and thus in front of a doubtless somewhat bemused jury.)

I appeared at the Old Bailey as a witness for the prosecution in a hijacking trial.

Indeed. Ministers of whichever party seem to swing about between "Convention is out of date" and "Convention is in date but drafters didn't mean what it says". Or both.

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.

I always forget, about now, that I suffer from hay fever. I was wondering if I had a cold. Must get the tablets out and put a reminder in my calendar for next March ... thanks for reminding me 😀

On the current thing, it seems short sighted not to want *any* students from eg Sudan or Afghanistan to come, when they might have future influence in those countries (different of course if they are Govt spies, but that's not what this is about).

There may be criteria, even if unpublished (discoverable? I'm not up to date). Or it may be on likelihood of overstaying (subjective) following a general instruction to be more critical.

Rather sadly she is Jimmy Reid's granddaughter

I guess the question is what's it based on.

And no-one gets their hair cut by their Mum/Dad/sister/partner. That would be illegal.

Interesting and I imagine Govt will hesitate to try the same blunt approach with some of the bigger fish in this pool.

The Telegraph names the sitting MP and her husband

It's annoying isn't it! Btw really enjoyed Newcastle (my birthday treat) 😀

I'm taking this out of context of the interesting thread it's part of - but I'm in the same place as Phil on this, and I'd add that more generally the assumption that a party's leader is what it's all about is both mistaken and corrosive. In 12 GEs I've mostly voted in spite of a leader not because!

Legit in the sense that there are rational alternatives which could be advocated using the argument that this is an anomaly. But one should not have to accept that it *is* an anomaly, any more than is the Commonwealth itself.

BBC #Today presentation of Iran seems to have reframed the whole story as How bad is this for Starmer? rather than How do we stop this mad idiot President making everything ten times worse for everybody? For once I feel pretty sympathetic to KS, and at last he seems to have a capable spox (Jones)

Seems to be one of those characters who's there to serve a purpose, and the character changes with the purpose

Not terribly convinced by R as a whole tbh

"In tension with" is nicely put. Successive Governments, knowing that re-negotiating the Convention would take decades if it were even to get off the ground at all, instead try to minimise its inconvenience (to them) in ways that are hardly in its spirit but likely to weather domestic challenge.

I'm no expert but I suspect the position is that the Sovereign Bases follow (some?) EU laws for practical reasons, but this does not make them part of the EU (see also Gibraltar). Whereas of course Northern Cyprus is de jure part of the EU but EU laws don't apply there ...

The two Cyprus bases are sovereign - they are a specific flavour of British Overseas Tertirory. Not part of UK, but under UK jurisdiction and not in the EU (which Cyprus of course is).