Incarceration of migrants 1

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One gets the impression that the US is the only country holding migrants in what amounts to jail.  But a snapshot by The Guardian of 200 migrants held in seven British detention centres found more than half were suicidal, seriously ill, or. victims of torture, with 84% not told when they would be deported. Almost half the detainees had not committed a crime but had been detained for an average of four months. The situation appears to contravene UN human rights guidance that immigration detention should be a last resort.

The UK government detains just over 25,000 people every year pending deportation, at an annual cost of £108m. But fewer than 50% of those held in removal centres actually end up being deported, and most have lived in the UK for five years or more. A handful of private firms are paid hundreds of millions of pounds to run the detention centres, making up to 40% profit.  The UK is the only European country without a limit on how long these people can be detained.  The Labour shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said: “This is a scandalously inhumane and unjustifiable system.” James Price from the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “A bureaucratic and lengthy wait [for deportation] is bad for the welfare of those detained, as well as costing taxpayers and meaning less money for essential services.” A Home Office spokesman said the home secretary, Sajid Javid, wanted to “go further and faster” in finding alternatives to detention. (Guardian 11 Oct 2018),

Writing as someone who has migrated to another country (and am now a dual citizen), and made sure I did everything legally and above-board, I must say that entering illegally and hoping to get away with it, against the law, is something hard to support.  It’s illegal, dammit, even if you are escaping a dangerous and corrupt country.

Having said that, the way illegal migrants are treated in camps and for-profit detention centres is another matter.  I will comment on that tomorrow.

A humiliating way to treat an old warmonger

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From the New York Times:

Many of the people who have worked for President Trump have ended up “diminished” or humiliated in some way. To that long list we can now add a new name: John Bolton. Trump’s national security adviser won the role by impressing the president with his regular bellicose contributions to Fox News, but he appears to wield little influence with the White House these days. One can only imagine how cross the old “warmonger” must have felt recently when Trump recently shook the hand of Kim Jong Un. This, after all, is a man who cited the lifting of sanctions against Pyongyang in 2008 as evidence of the “total intellectual collapse” of the George W. Bush administration.

To make matters worse, Trump was accompanied on the trip to Korea’s demilitarised zone not by Bolton, but by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who last month called Bolton a “bureaucratic tapeworm” for whom war is “always good business”. (To add insult to injury, Trump referred to Bolton during the trip, not for the first time, as “Mike”.) “It’s nightmarish to live in a country where our foreign policy has been reduced to an intramural battle between Fox News reactionaries.” But if anyone deserves to be cut down to size, it’s Bolton.  (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times, 12 July 2019)

Unfortunately, while the far-too-numerous Democratic Presidential candidates bicker, seek attention, splinter the opposition and suggest policies that will bomb on election day, a wolf prowls the playground.  The wolf is already surprisingly well-organised on the ground and is prepared to do anything (literally) to win a second term.  If reports are not exaggerated he fancies (on and off, like everything else) overthrowing the Constitution and remaining in power sine die, with help from his packed Supreme Court. Nothing he says or does is off-limits to a base without principles or empathy and that votes for the very class of rich, unprincipled, money-obsessed  people who have caused their misery in the first place  The parallels are inexact, but one is reminded of Mussolini, who took a bit of an effort (understatement of 2019) to dislodge. But he was an amateur compared with this modern version. I mention this in passing owing to the grim effect all this has on Epicurean peace of mind.

P.S: Donald Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters rose by 5 points to 72% in the week after his racially charged Twitter attack on several Democratic congresswomen.  (Ipsos/Reuters) 

A statistic that needs no comment

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Out of England’s 334 high-rise blocks of flats with the same cladding as Grenfell Tower, 69 have so far had it removed.  ( U.K Ministry of Housing)

(The cladding on Grenfell Tower turned out to be flammable.  Scores of people were trapped in the burning high-rise apartment block on 14 June 2017 and were killed)

Trump Justice Department to resume federal executions

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From The Hill

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced  that it will resume capital punishment for the first time in nearly two decades.

Barr’s announcement comes as the number of executions in the United States has declined over the last decade amid concerns about whether capital punishment disproportionately impacts African Americans. Only three federal executions have taken place since 1988, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. All five of the death-row inmates named in Thursday’s release were convicted for the murders of children.

Some states have put a moratorium on the practice or suspended it, as wrongful convictions have also been spotlighted by groups such as the Innocence Project, which have secured the release of a number of death-row inmates in recent years.

The death penalty has been abolished in about 70 percent of countries, particularly democratic nations similar to the U.S.  In America, policies on executions vary greatly; states including Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and California have issued moratoriums on capital punishment, while it has fallen out of general use in other states. But for some red states, such as Texas and Alabama, the death penalty is still a common practice.   (The Hill 25 July 2019)

My comment: Taking another person’s life is immoral. Period. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth might have prevailed as a revenge policy in primitive society, but has no place in more enlightened (?) times – nor should it have a place.

But there is an equally important and pragmatic consideration –  the death penalty is totally ineffective in preventing premeditated murder.  If your mind it twisted enough to seriously contemplate and plan the murder of another human being,  then either you are gambling on not being caught and executed, you don’t care or you would yourself welcome death.  On all counts you are mentally deranged and should be locked up.  State executions are executions in which all citizens are, by extension, implicated.  No thank you!

Home schooling in Britain

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From The Week:

One effect of schools “off-rolling” low-achieving pupils has been an increase in the number of children who are home-schooled. Almost 60,000 children in England are estimated to have been educated at home last year – double the number in 2014 – though since there is no national register of home-schooled children, the exact figure is uncertain. In some areas, the rise has been staggering: in Northamptonshire, the number of children registered as home-schooled has increased 350% in the past five years. Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, explicitly blames off-rolling for this: while some parents may choose to home-school their child, she says, others have been pushed to do so by schools, preoccupied by results, expelling difficult and unmotivated pupils.

As home-schooling is largely unregulated, there are concerns that the pupils affected – particularly those who may have been off-rolled as a result of having special educational needs – have been cast into a sort of educational limbo and aren’t receiving any sort of proper education. However, the Government is now looking at a plan to set up an obligatory register for parents who home-school so that local authorities know whether and how children are being educated, and can intervene if standards are low.  (The Week 15 June 2019)

My comment:  Some people think that obligatory registration of home-schoolers might impinge on the liberty of parents and deny them the opportunity of teaching their children at home.  Of the 60,000 children being home-schooled there must be a healthy number who are being well taught by educated and dedicated parents.  But there must also be those who do not have the time or skills, will not follow a rigorous curriculum, and will produce adults with few attractions to an employer, let alone a college or university.  What will become of these home-schooled children?  Some will be smart self-starters who will do well; others? ….well… ….  The parents want “liberty”, but  many children must need extra attention, have ADD etc, are quite possibly being denied a good start to life and a career.

Three of my grandchildren are being homeschooled, entirely voluntarily and from the beginning.  Their parents are lovely, loving and educated people, doing their best for their children, fiercely independent, rejecting the big classes, the bullying and other bad influences associated with public education.  The  ultimate fate of the children will be determined by the reaction of future potential employers to their CVs when presented, and this we have no way of foreseeing.  All grandparents can do is help by helping to fund wide experiences and educational encounters outside the home (especially time with children their own ages) and encouraging independent thought and life-long learning.  But not all grandparents have the resources, ability or energy to fill this role..

Meanwhile, the  government want a register and inspections, but to what end?  What will they do with the children?   The perennial hallmark of Conservative government is cutting funding. Period. What is needed is help, and well paid teachers, for weak students to avoid producing a generation of disaffected, deprived and resentful people, with the social turmoil and crime that goes with it.