Immigration

An infection control specialist who has been offered a job as a senior NHS biomedical scientist to help tackle the pandemic is facing deportation by the Home Office, prompting fresh calls for a more “humane” approach to skilled migrants.

The government has refused Charles Oti, 46, from Nigeria the right to remain in the UK even though the job he was offered is among the government’s most sought-after skilled positions.

Hmm. OK, the laddie’s Nigerian. On what grounds should he – or should he not – be here.

However, the Home Office – which recently accepted that Oti suffered experiences akin to torture during a racist attack in Northampton – said he faced being deported because he did not have the correct documentation.

That’s all they tell us. We don’t know whether it’s just failing to have got a form signed for permission to stay. Or that he swam the Channel and has no docs or rights at all.

Funny that really.

“By 2031, one in five Britons will be from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background and that number is forecast to increase to almost one-third of the population by 2061.

It was democratically decided, wasn’t it?

After all, we have those who insist that the price of tampons must be democractically decided. So larger questions must be too, right?

These are just a few of the experiences that those from a visible ethnic minority have to deal with regulalry – you may have even failed to notice – until now – that you don’t’ have to deal with the same barriers. It is important to be aware that being born with a certain skin tone affords people certain advantage in life that people of another skin colour are not afforded. By creating greater awareness and understanding we help to build a fairer and more equitable society for future generations.

Apparently it doesn’t include spelling or grammar.

Because of the intersectional nature of society, this means that it’s incredibly likely you have experienced some form of oppression – the gender pay gap is still 18.4%.

Or statistical numeracy. Or even logic – as we all know some to all of that gap is because of voluntary differences in male and female behaviour.

For example, while white British women are paid on average £11.21 per hour, Pakistani women make £10.10.

That’s casuistry – black British women get paid more than white. Sure, largely a London effect but still.

BAME* young carers and their families identified language barriers as one of the key reasons they’re unable to access support.

And isn’t that just a surprise. Not speaking the language of the country you’re in makes things difficult.

Do:
Be open to start the conversation with others who are interested and willing to learn, even if they don’t understand.
Share fact-checked resources, examples, information and statistics with others.
Look after your mental health, and take breaks where needed.
Keep cool – stick to the facts and show some patience.
Pause the conversation with someone refusing to listen – suggest they continue their research.

And when do these ghastly little shits start to do any of that themselves?

Small Axe is great: now let’s have some films about black life outside London
Lanre Bakare

The ‘authentic’ black British experience doesn’t begin and end in the capital. It’s time the UK film industry woke up to that

Begin and end perhaps not.

There are about 2 million blacks in the UK, about 3% of the population. Half and half African and Afro-Caribbean.

Half of those are in London. So, the median, mean and modal black experience of the UK is London. Seems a reasonable enough target for the film industry, no?

But this kind of appointment is not an exception for this government; it is the rule. Again and again, those who deny or question the impact and cause of racism are selected for key equality positions: Trevor Phillips, who was suspended from the Labour party over alleged Islamophobia, was appointed to the inquiry on the impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities; Dr Raghib Ali, who denies racism has any role in disproportionate coronavirus deaths, was appointed a government Covid adviser; and Tony Sewell, who has questioned the idea of institutional racism, was appointed chair of the government’s commission on race and ethnic disparities. On top of this, Truss’s fellow equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, has bizarrely claimed that the authors of some of Britain’s bestselling anti-racism books “actually want a segregated society”. With Munira Mirza, a strong critic of Theresa May’s Race Disparity Audit, installed as No 10’s policy director, it’s clear that the current government is unlikely to identify systemic racism as the cause of racial inequalities in health, criminal justice, housing, employment or any other area – regardless of the litany of independent racial inequality reviews that suggest otherwise.

Anyone who doesn’t already agree with the programme can’t be allowed to monitor, decide upon, design or control the programme.

Of course we have democracy, it’s just that as The Party is objectively correct then therefore only Party members may stand for election…..

Poor Chinese and Indian children set a puzzle for educators by succeeding where better-off children fail. Why?

A likely answer being that race doesn’t matter but culture does….

This is the flip side of our oft agreed observation that while the UK isn’t perfect it is one of the less racist places on the planet. Well, outside the Jezza wing of the Labour Party it is at least. Take this from a Brit who moved to Portland:

The first surprise was the lack of non-white people. I later discovered that the 2010 census found Portland to be the whitest big city in the US. When our daughter started daycare, she came home and said she didn’t like her brown skin; she wanted to be white like the other kids. She was three. I felt like a fool for moving her out of a city where she would have been surrounded by people who look like her.

Living in Portland was also the first time I felt noticed for being in a mixed-race marriage.

“Mixed race marriage” is something so common as to be not remarked upon – almost – in London these days.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized American identity does not need to function like a sword hacking away at our differences, or a snake digesting them. In his 1996 book The Coming White Minority, Dale Maharidge explores the view that multiculturalism presents “two stark choices: the United States sticks with a white-centered melting pot, or degenerates into separate conflicting societies.” He reveals an alternative to assimilation. He quotes a researcher who imagines it as “a continuous cauldron of activity, rebirth, reformulation.”

Multiculturalism is not a threat to civilization. The only thing it threatens is extremism. As America becomes more mixed, we will have a greater capacity for empathy. People with hyphenated identities are familiar with multiple ways of being; they can readily inhabit different people and diverse realities.

It seems so obvious now as I sit on the grass with my five-year-old niece, who is Mexican, Puerto Rican, Black, and American, fluent in Spanglish and Shel Silverstein.

Quite so, a few generations of miscegenation and the job’s done, right?

Earlier parts of the inquiry, which have looked at institutions including the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, focused on many of the worst-known scandals involving such organisations. It was anticipated that the organised networks strand of the inquiry would examine the most infamous examples of group grooming and exploitation.

Over the past decade, big trials have exposed a previously hidden crime model that involves the systematic targeting and sexual abuse of teenage girls by groups of men who were largely of south Asian origin.

Since 2011, groups have been prosecuted for sex-grooming in towns including Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Telford, Burnley, High Wycombe, Leicester, Dewsbury, Peterborough, Halifax and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The IICSA held two weeks of public hearings for its “organised networks” investigation from late September, and a final day for closing submissions is due to take place on Thursday. It decided to hear no evidence from survivors or those with expert knowledge of the crime pattern.

The inquiry chose instead to select six areas of England and Wales: St Helens, Tower Hamlets in east London, Swansea, Durham, Bristol and Warwickshire “because they represent a range of sizes, demographics and institutional practices”. None of the six has witnessed a major prosecution of a south Asian sex-grooming gang. In all six areas, according to the 2011 national census, the proportion of the population that is of Pakistani origin is lower than the national average.

Henrietta Hill, QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, told the hearing on its opening day that the inquiry “carefully considered the extent to which, if at all, it should focus on areas such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford, all of which have attracted public attention”.

The IICSA decided, she explained, that it was “more appropriate” to focus instead on “different areas, not least because it was intended that this was a forward-looking investigation building on analysis that’s already been done”.

Lions, with fire.

Actually, lions with flamethrowers riding T-Rexs with head mounted laser beams.

Also, if it were true that non-whites suffer from systemic racism throughout their lives — adversely affecting their health, education, income, housing, employment (the key determinants of health) — this would be reflected in life expectancy and overall mortality figures that are the best measures of overall health.

However, data from England and Scotland has shown that most ethnic minority groups have both better overall health and lower rates of all-cause mortality than white groups. Even over the course of the pandemic, despite the higher Covid death rates, overall mortality in ethnic minorities has not been higher than for whites.

Foreign rough sleepers face deportation from UK post-Brexit

Ms. Patel has just gained herself some millions of votes. Whether she should or not depends but I think that will be the general reaction.

A German court has ruled that a Muslim doctor should not be granted citizenship after he refused to shake hands with the woman presenting him with his naturalisation certificate.
According to the administrative court of Baden-Württemberg, the Lebanese man had forgone his right to become German because his refusal to shake the bureaucrat’s hand was evidence that he saw her as “posing the threat of sexual seduction.”
The judges explained that obtaining German citizenship was dependent on the applicant being able to demonstrate that he lived according to the values set out in the German constitution, which enshrines sexual equality.
A handshake “has a long tradition of signalling greeting or saying farewell that exists irrespective of social status or sex,” the ruling stated. “Although there are other recognised greetings in Germany, such as kissing or a ‘high five,’ the handshake holds a special importance” because of its formal use in the completion of a business transaction and as a signal of agreement in certain courts, the judges added.
The incident occurred in 2015 at a citizenship ceremony that was supposed to be a simple formality after the man had obtained the highest possible score in his citizenship test, an exam that probes how well immigrants understand German history and its democratic values.
When the female bureaucrat offered her hand and he declined to shake it, she refused to hand over his certificate. The 40-year-old has an otherwise impeccable record of successful integration. He moved to the country as a language student in 2002 before qualifying as a doctor and then working his way up to the position of consultant physician at a hospital in southern Germany.
To support his case, he said that he had made a promise to his wife never to touch another woman. But the court remained unswayed, describing his actions as “fundamentalist” and reflective of “a Salafist worldview.”

Wouldn’t that be fun if we did it? You only get to be a citizen if you agree with our ancient cultural worldview? Perhaps those who regard teenage girls in care as being part of a girlfriend farm might not gain their citizenship. Or those who might saw the head off a military bandsman.

Sadly, given who would end up writing such a list of no nos we’d end up with the latest demands of the Woken SS enforced. Only those who believe that people with cervixes and women are not exact cognates may enter perhaps?

The squalid conditions inside former military barracks hastily converted into refugee camps are revealed for the first time today amid mounting opposition to the Home Office move.

Images of the “unsanitary and unsuitable” living quarters inside the disused army training camps show crowded dormitories where it appears challenging to socially distance. The British Red Cross said that the Ministry of Defence sites, surrounded by barbed wire and high fences, were not fit to house vulnerable and traumatised asylum seekers who had fled conflict.

So far two sites – in Penally, Pembrokeshire, and Folkestone, Kent – which together could house more than 600 asylum seekers while their claims are being processed, have been converted.

Jennifer Blair of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which supports refugees who have endured extreme cruelty, said the pictures from inside the military camps prompted fresh disquiet.

“For a start, there’s a lack of privacy for showers and sleeping, and for survivors of rape and abuse that is unacceptable. The Welsh site in particular looks really rundown, with bunk beds and concerns over social distancing.

“It is unacceptable to house survivors of torture and human trafficking in unsanitary and unsuitable conditions. The use of barracks as refugee camps has been done without adequate risk assessment, proper vulnerability screening and specialist trauma-informed healthcare.”

But there is no evidence suggesting that asylum fraud occurs on a wide scale. The Trump administration has often cited the national asylum grant rate, which is currently about 12 percent, in arguing that most asylum claims are illegitimate, but that’s disingenuous: Being denied asylum says nothing about the credibility of an asylum seeker’s underlying account. Rather, it simply means that an immigration judge has found that they don’t qualify for the specific kind of protection afforded under the law.

Priti Patel looked at idea of sending asylum seekers to South Atlantic
Home secretary asked officials to see if applicants could be processed on isolated St Helena

Not got the transport links, d’ye see?

Yes, African-Americans were always at the bottom, but there was no monolithic “whiteness” in the mosaic anywhere. Remember: when I was at Harvard in the 1980s, when an Italian-American Catholic married an Irish-American Catholic in Boston, it was a “mixed marriage”, and people would shrug their shoulders and say it was unlikely to last.

To an extent the same was true in the UK. Don’t forget, Catholics couldn’t build churches until the 1840s. The Navy was very much a Protestant citadel until well into the 20th century. Glasgow doesn’t exactly have an entirely harmonious mix between Paddie Papist and Prot today. The idea of a unified whiteness just wasn’t the historical truth at all. And given the mixed marriage – or at least mixed child parentage – rate in London today I expect those racial boundaries to decline rather faster than those earlier ones.

The Navy could be called in to help reduce the number of illegal migrants crossing the Channel after 235 reached the UK in a new record for a single day.

Don’t they already do this? In fact, didn’t we build/buy some new ships so they could?

The “uncomfortable” history of the Commonwealth must be addressed, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said, as they tell young campaigners the world cannot move forward until it “rights those wrongs of the past.
The Duke, whose grandmother is head of the Commonwealth, said there is way that we can move forward unless we acknowledge the past, with “still so much more to do” to tackle racism.

It’s not going to be easy and in some cases it’s not going to be comfortable, but it needs to be done, he said, explaining institutional racism still exists because someone, somewhere, is benefiting from it.

The Duchess, who noted she had “personal experience” of racism and unconscious bias, added that “we’re going to have to be a little uncomfortable right now” in order to “push through” and “get to the other side
The couple, who are president and vice-president of the youth organisation Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, spoke to young people via video link from their new home in Los Angeles, following their recent vocal campaign work in the Black Lives Matter movement.

No, no, noNo, no, no, Laddie.

The standard line is that the Commonwealth is the solution to this evils of Empire problem, not a cause of it itself.

And as for wossname, “push on through” what? The “other side” is what?

Drivel.

Of course there is actually a solution and it’s the one that will eventually come about. Harry and wossname showing us how to do it as well – actions, not words that is. To use the old language Archie’s a quadroon. And when all are octoroons there’s no more division into Eloi and Morlock, is there? That is, current distinctions of race are going to be solved the same way all the other past ones were – there are very few indeed who worry about that division between Norman, Angle and Saxon these days – which is a couple of centuries of vigorous miscegenation.

Not that it’s politic to point this out these days but then bully for the politics of these days.

Mr. Ecclestone says:

“In lots of cases, black people are more racist than what white people are [sic].”

A Fulani speaking about Ibibio, a Zulu about Khoi San, could certainly make you think that. Robert Mugabe’s treatment of Ndebele might lead you to that conclusion.

But is he right?

If there’s going to be distinguishing by race then we’ve got to have a definition of race. You know, that thing that doesn’t exist