LabourRealists

This is very welcome news - as we argued two years ago.

We have made the point repeatedly that exempting care workers from these reforms would lead to an exodus from the sector that would require government intervention. This has never been refuted by supporters of a carve-out - in fact, it is a central point of their proposition that these workers will become net contributors by leaving the sector. The boom and bust cycle on migration has to come to an end. Burnham should back the reforms as they currently stand.

As Alex Younger said, the Russians "did not create the things that divide us, we did that to ourselves". The end results of state failure and foreign disinformation operations look remarkably similar. Burnham should be cautious about giving rise to the suggestion that the fears and concerns of ordinary people are the construct of foreign information warfare. labourrealists.substack.com/…

At the heart of this problem is the fact that the Charity Commission sees charities as being exploited by bad-faith actors, rather than vectors of the problem themselves. It is very easy to circumvent Charity Commission oversight. Organisations simply stop posting content online, switch from open websites to private Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups. This wouldn't be too hard to solve with tough transparency requirements, such as requiring all sermons or events to be uploaded to a portal, and preaching solely in English in the most extreme cases. We've written a plan for how to do this which we'll publish in the coming weeks.

As we noted in December last year.

It is time that the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and many others in the Labour Party re-evaluated their priors on how the world functions

Yet another example of Labour fixing the rotten foundations of the state left by the Conservatives. Under them, thousands of British nurses and doctors left without work, nurse bursaries stripped, doctors trained at the taxpayer expense without a job to go into and driven abroad as a result. All being fixed under a Labour government. teapawt.org/mckinneytweets/status/…

Whilst this might be technically correct, it is not the case that being in the EU helped us manage migration. It shied away from the democratic prerogative to do so entirely, leading to Brexit. Britain's migration crises are the result of interlocking bad policy-making by Conservative ministers - Ben risks absolving them of blame here. Absent those policy choices, Brexit could have led to a low-migration Britain (with other economic and political consequences). It is also not true to state as some others do that the Dublin Agreement helped us manage illegal migration. In 2019, Britain received more individuals under Dublin than it returned! Where Brexit has inflicted damage through the lack of information sharing post-withdrawal. Losing access to Eurodac blunts our ability to make good asylum decisions, including rejecting those who have spent considerable periods in Europe before arriving here for a second bite at the cherry. In terms of the EU reset, Labour should not shy away from more plausible goals such as renewed information sharing, notwithstanding significant challenges to rejoining these systems. Read in full here: labourrealists.substack.com/…

Even if found guilty, under current conditions the UK government cannot send these men back to Iran due to their Article 3 rights.

This tweet and headline is misleading. Abu Wadei cannot be deported due to Article 3 of the European Convention. The Home Secretary currently has no choice but to grant him limited leave to remain.

Mike Tapp used to believe a reliance on overseas labour undercut the wages of British workers. What changed your mind on this, Mike? teapawt.org/MikeTappTweets/status/…

This case is emblematic of a longstanding failure by the British state to join the dots between migration and security. Whilst terrorism is one of the few activities that excludes an individual from humanitarian protection under the Refugee Convention, Mr X could have claimed to be a member of Hamas’ political wing which at the time was not proscribed. Alternatively, the British government has long had a de-facto, never publicised, position of granting asylum or leave to remain to individuals it knows it cannot remove, such as those from conflict zones like Gaza, Sudan, or Eritrea to name just a few. It is important to remember the centrality of asylum to Britain’s wave of jihadist terror and radicalisation. A relatively small number of Islamist refugees, often members or supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, fled from authoritarian regimes across the Middle East, particularly Egypt or Syria, arriving in London in the 1980s and 90s, making it a global hub for global jihadi salafism. In 1993, the Salafist Abu Qatada claimed asylum in Britain on a forged passport. Despite his heavy connections to jihadist violence including 9/11 and having claimed asylum on false pretences, Qatada could not be removed due to the risk he would not obtain a fair trial in Jordan. He was eventually removed after a specific agreement was reached with Jordan to facilitate his trial. But others remain. Hani al-Sibai, an Islamist preacher, a key al-Qaeda inspiration, continues to reside in Britain, and criticises Syria’s president (and British ally) Ahmed al-Sharra as an apostate, inciting violence against the fledgling Syrian state. Confronted with immense resourcing pressure, Britain’s security services have turned a blind eye to subversion of this nature, and lack the resources to monitor to any serious degree those with loose connections to terrorist organisations. This is why Britain must adopt the precautionary principle, and limit their ability to reside in Britain in the first place. Reviewing asylum grants for Islamist dissidents should be a priority for the Home Office, with revocations required for any who abuse British generosity to continue the behaviour that had them expelled in the first place. A beefing up of Charity Commission powers is also necessary to impose serious consequences on organisations that host and facilitate extremists. We've written privately on how to do both of these things - get in touch to discuss further.

We're at Labour conference. If you want to meet to discuss foreign policy and national security under Burnham get in touch in our DMs or email [email protected]

David Lammy's progressive realism was an attempt to explain to Labour voters that there is a necessary trade-off between interests and values. Miliband insists that no such trade-off exists - encouraging this kind of activism. This approach is not sustainable without vandalising the international partnerships that guarantee the safety and economic well-being of Britain and its people.