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Windrush generation: hundreds ‘sent back to Caribbean from UK hospitals’
Archives show about 400 long-term sick and mentally ill people were repatriated, according to BBC investigation
The site, set up as a standard asylum seeker hotel, has no care workers or nurses there as part of the contract
The PM said exempting child migrants from the plan would risk creating an 'incentive' for people to put more young people on small boats
My blind son was jailed for being at the scene of a murder. Halt this tide of joint enterprise convictions
How many more boys’ lives will be destroyed because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time, asks Janet Cunliffe, co-founder of the J
From the article;
'Jordan had an eye condition called keratoconus that was so severe he was scheduled for transplant surgery in both eyes. Given that my son could not have seen the altercation, or run away from it, and did not come into contact with the victim, I assumed it was a no-brainer that he would be let off.
The prosecutor, Michael Chambers QC, thought differently. He wanted all five of the boys who had been charged to be prosecuted under joint enterprise, a 300-year-old common law doctrine, which was controversially brought back into use under the guise of prosecuting gang violence. Instead, it has led to innocent people – many young, working-class and black and minority ethnic boys – facing mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by others, as was the case for Jordan and so many others like him.'
Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so
As the last few weeks have made abundantly clear, Palestinian lives don’t count
Overseas nurses in the UK forced to pay out thousands if they want to quit jobs
Observer investigation uncovers NHS trusts and private care homes charging staff who leave to recoup recruitment costs
From the article:
'Nurses affected by the repayment terms, many of whom served on the frontline at the height of the pandemic, said they had been pushed into debt or locked into long-term payment agreements after leaving roles, even in cases of bullying or family emergencies. Others stay in jobs despite illness or poor working conditions as they fear they will be unable to repay, charities and unions said.
Parosha Chandran, a barrister and UN expert on human trafficking who helped shape the UK’s modern slavery laws, likened the clauses to “debt bondage” and called for them to be reviewed at the highest level. “This gives rise to very serious concerns about exploitation,” she said.Patricia Marquis, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing, said she was “very concerned” by a practice which flourished “in a climate of chronic understaffing”. The RCN was aware of some employers using punitive clauses which could result in workers being forced to pay thousands of pounds.
“We have also heard of cases in which employers try to frighten and intimidate staff with threats of deportation should they choose to work elsewhere,” Marquis said.
The UK recruits heavily from overseas in an effort to plug a shortage of 40,000 nurses in the NHS alone, with most recruits coming from the Philippines and India.
...In the private sector, the fees can be steeper. One nurse from Zimbabwe was told to pay £10,850 when she tried to leave her job at a care home, according to Unison. She said it was obvious the charges had been exaggerated, “but the manager said she would not give me a reference unless I paid the full amount”.
She said it was unfair for employers to pass recruitment costs on to workers, when hiring internationally can save them huge sums.
It costs between £10,000 and £12,000 to recruit an overseas nurse, but employers can save £18,500 in agency nurse costs in the first year alone, according to one estimate. By comparison, it takes three years to train a nurse in the UK and costs about £50,000 to £70,000. The government does not pay tuition fees, but provides maintenance grants of £5,000 a year.
Stuart Tuckwood, nursing officer at Unison, said the union knew of cases where nurses were “trapped by unethical contracts” – including a case where a nurse was required to pay £14,000 despite her salary being just £16,000...'
So Sally Rooney’s racist? Only if you choose to confuse fiction with fact
The author is the latest to suffer an attempted ‘cancelling’, one born of malice and stupidity
This article got me twitching so badly; it's absurd!
The source of the alleged egregious 'cancellation' is one solitary article written by Jessica Tu in the Sydney Morning Herald, criticising the extent to which 'Normal People' has received such rave reviews.
I've read Tu's article, and not once does she say Rooney is racist. Nowhere does she say Rooney's books shouldn't be published or read. She doesn't even say readers shouldn't like Rooney's work. What's more, she ends the article saying that she's going to read Rooney's next book (even if she expects to be underwhelmed). How is that 'Cancellation'?!
All Tu says is that NP is - for her (a Taiwanese-Australian woman) - a fairly bland story about young, white, able-bodied, cis-het people going about their business. For her (and for many), it's simply quite telling when it's these kinds of stories that are fêted above others, given how well they fit the status quo. It says something about which perspectives are still most valued in the anglosphere
I mean, it's literally called 'Normal People'...
Nick Cohen takes umbrage with this in particular:
"Normal People should be called White People because, in Rooney’s world, people like me don’t exist. In the book, Asians are mentioned only as tourists who choke the pathways of museums in Italy. ‘I don’t know why we’re bothering with Venice – it’s just full of Asians taking pictures of everything’, one of the male characters whines.”
He extrapolates from this that Tu believes Rooney to be expressing her own views here, rather than those of her character. Instead of, you know, Tu expressing a degree of frustration that the only time Asians are mentioned in the book is as a convenient but abstract device as a means of expressing the 'This Person Is Bad' values of a white antagonist, versus the 'This Person Is Good' values of a white protagonist. And how that might sit in quite a jarring way for non-white readers, casually reminding us that we are Other, even if only 'accidentally' so
Anyway, the irony of Cohen's article is *strong*. If Tu's article is about cancelling Rooney, then his could easily be read as cancelling Tu
There's absolutely a conversation to be had about 'performative progressivism' and public shaming etc, but this constant raging about Cancel Culture so often reveals itself to be flimsy and completely lacking in self awareness - let alone awareness of the issues marginalised people regularly speak of
This is Tu's 'offending' article/review
I can’t help but wonder if the novelist would have received such unfettered adulation if she had been Sally Parez or Sally Wong.
Dutch king apologises for country’s historical involvement in slavery
On day to remember 160th anniversary of abolition of slavery in Netherlands, Willem-Alexander says racism is still a problem
Met police found to be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic
Author of landmark report says Met can ‘no longer presume that it has the permission of the people of London to police them’
Windrush scandal caused by ‘30 years of racist immigration laws’ – report
Exclusive: legislation has been designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population, according to leaked government paper
From the article:
'The origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population, according to a leaked government report.
The stark conclusion was set out in a Home Office commissioned paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress over the past year.
The 52-page analysis by an unnamed historian, which has been seen by the Guardian, describes how “the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function”, and sets out how this affected the laws passed in the postwar period.
It concludes that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.'
