Was quite a relief at the start of the week - I found fascist graffiti in the building entrance and wondered if I was being dramatic, but one of the local antifa said no, that’s a new development in this area, and cleaned it up. Things are slowly but definitely intensifying in Berlin.
📢"The UK can have a functioning immigration system without abandoning the principle of equal protection under the law."
Our CEO @minnierahman.bsky.social in @lbc.co.uk on the Government's ICE-style asylum reforms this week.
www.lbc.co.uk/article/labo...
Ahead of International Women’s Day, pleased to support Disay* to share her story with @thelondonstandard.bsky.social about her experiences & the changes we need in order to ensure all migrant domestic workers, a mostly female workforce, are protected & safe at work
www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...
From yesterday: Home Secretary succeeds on children’s best interests ground in section 3C leave challenge | Chai Patel
Westminster Meeting House raided by Metropolitan Police again. Statement: “For Quakers, faith and action are inseparable. Peaceful protest, prayer and nonviolent action are integral parts of many Quakers' religious life. Whilst we take the planning of criminal acts very seriously, we believe that this incident is a deliberate targeting of committed young people who want to make our country a more equitable place. This raid is part of a systematic stifling of dissent. That this is the second time in a year that the police have raided our meeting house dramatically illuminates the broader trend in the UK of cracking down on those who disagree with the government. The right to protest is fundamental to our democracy. It's a key part of how people make their voices heard between elections.” – Oliver Robertson, Head of Witness and Worship Quakers in Britain, 5 March 2026
Yesterday evening, for the second time in a year, the Met Police raided Westminster Quaker Meeting House and arrested a number of young nonviolent activists.
STATEMENT: www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...
Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.
At Shabana Mahmood’s press conference and journo right behind me asked for Pakistanis to be banned 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
It continues to be very unclear whom Mahmood thinks she is appealing to, but what is clear is that she has an incredibly low opinion of the average voter's compassion and common sense, and Labour are rightly going to suffer the consequences of underestimating the British public again and again.
Article 34 - Naturalization The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees. They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings.
Here it is in black and white.
But people don't need to read the refugee convention to want refugees to feel safe to build lives here, to integrate into society, to have jobs and homes. And they and their children can't do that if they're being threatened with deportation every few years.
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.
Asylum policy shouldn’t be about “appealing to people who feel that we’ve lost control.” It shouldn’t be about appealing to anyone. It should be about doing what is best and safest for the people who are here seeking protection.
Does anyone think that this - effectively describing people who came here at *our* invitation to work in care homes as would-be parasites on the welfare state - is what she meant?
Yes. Also if we are going to have proscription offences then I'd suggest they should apply to the organisations who want to violently deport British people to countries they've never known.
But fundamentally Mahmood’s video is just a shocking way to speak about people. Abandoning refugees is bad! Reducing numbers is not a valid policy goal! (Until you’ve sorted out the causes of forced migration, which she seems to have no interest in.) People aren‘t a means to a party political end!
I think it means people should not interpret polls for a living
Join us! We need more people to say very loudly that the proposed changes are bad for EVERYTHING from integration to the economy. I promise it will be fun :)
This IPSO adjudication against the Telegraph is quite something
Confirms their story titled: ‘We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays’ was completely fabricated, with the family involved non-existent and stock pictures used
www.ipso.co.uk/rulings/0210...
I knew you would get some. I am genuinely astonished by the sheer quantity and that they universally double down or disappear instead of apologising.
Its genuinely mad that we are, arguably, the most successful multicultural state on earth and instead of celebrating that we...
...keep trying to copy nations who have very evidently done worse at it than us
Denmark has *far* worse outcomes - economic, social and integration - than the UK.
Just a fantasyland for those who want an excuse for their own xenophobia and/or are incapable of doing the hard work of confronting the UK's real problems.
www.thetimes.com/world/europe...
Very clear that for Starmer, 'sectarian voting' is when British Muslims don't vote Labour, and for many others, it is just when British Muslims vote.
It is tired of your slavish devotion. It is feeling stifled and bored and is now hurting itself and you just to feel something.
This is what I find so frustrating about longtermism and Effective Altruism becoming obsessed with tail risks where the answer is just “don’t do this”.
Again and again we see the reasons why all centralised id databases must be resisted.
In the UK we already have this in place for migrants and they called it the 'hostile environment' deliberately. It has to be repealed and we certainly can't allow it to be extended any further.
Some voters are sending An Urgent Signal Which We Must Reflect On Very Seriously, and some aren’t, how might we tell them apart I wonder
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
Take two seven year olds in a primary school in the Prime Minister’s constituency.
His Dad is a banker
Her Mum is the cleaner at that bank
Is the Government’s Ipoproposal that richer child gets permanent status at age 10 while in primary school & working class classmate not until they are 22?
From today the word 'sectarian' means the opposite.
Update your dictionaries accordingly.
A reflection from the leader of a migration charity. We have been told over and over again by politicians - even from “partners” and “allies” that we will not win on our policies unless we concede. Throw some migrants under the bus - they’re too unfavourable. Public doesn’t agree with us.
Democracy Volunteers were founded in 2016
They had 4 people in the constituency today.
They produced this report in 2024 on the general election
committees.parliament.uk/writtenevide...
