"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.
"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.
Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.
"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.
Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."
Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"
"I am speaking out today because many more asylum-seeking children are at risk due to plans to withdraw support and forcibly remove children whose families have failed asylum claims." The children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza says no child should be made destitute to enforce harmful immigration rules.
Zoe Grunewald finds that Brexit has made worse the very problems it was promised it would solve: "What comes in the next decade depends entirely on whether Britain’s mainstream politicians can finally do what it has spent the previous decade refusing to: tell the truth about what Brexit did, who bears the cost, and why the man promising to fix it helped cause it all in the first place."
"That Tory share was its lowest in all 17 sets of full London borough council elections ever held. It was also smaller than every vote share won by the Conservatives in the Greater London administrative area – formally created in April 1965 – in the 16 general elections held since that year." Barnaby Towns finds that the Conservatives are still going backwards in London.
Susanna Crossman sets out to learn more about the beliefs and practices of the folk healers called 'fire-tamers' who operate an "alternative, unofficial and ancient grassroots system of care" across France.
"He swiped, slogged and occasionally savaged, under the guise of scoring 'easier' runs against the new ball given how this pitch is playing. Instead, his 30 off 20 balls created a febrile storm that swept up Jacob Bethell, Harry Brook and Ben Duckett." Vithushan Ehantharajah watches Ben Stokes' last Sunday as England's captain.
Moreau Vazh finds that Witchfinder General, despite its place in the folk horror canon, most closely resembles a Sam Peckinpah Western.
"One minister described the chaos as 'probably fatal'. It was, said another source, a 'tipping point' and 'the week that No 10 lost control'." Catherine Neilan and Rachel Sylvester listen to the insider voices suggesting Keir Starmer is on the way out.
Michelle Pace says Britain should think twice before copying Denmark's asylum policies: "Refugees I’ve spoken with have told me how they often feel that integration is pointless if they might still be deported. Social isolation and limited rights for asylum seekers are the norm. Families face long waiting times for reunification despite few cases and refugees face temporary permits that hinder long-term planning."
Stephen Cushion finds that Michael Prescott's memorandum on the BBC falls well short of the standards of impartiality he demands of others.
"People burned what they could afford: cheap, sulphur-heavy coal. The cleaner Welsh anthracite was being exported to pay off Britain’s debts. Home fires, factory stacks, and power stations belched black smoke into the unmoving air. The fog – that familiar London damp – merged with soot and sulphur dioxide to create a deadly, acid-laden smog." Londonopia remembers the city's Great Smog of 1952.
JacquiWine went to the Tirzah Garwood exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery earlier this year.
"James Cubitt specialised in Nonconformist chapels during the 19th century, and the Islington Union Chapel was one of his first, and probably one of his most important works. Many of his other chapels across the country have since been demolished, but Union Chapel remains." A London Inheritance appreciates the famous Islington concert venue as a building.
Helen Charman dissects the claims of the flag-bearing demonstrators. "One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George's Cross, is 'Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners'. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and 'foreign' women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted."
All good Liberals know the tale of Harry Willcock – "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing" – and his part in the abolition of national identity cards after the war, but there was another hero in his court case. It was the unexpected figure of the ferocious Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Neil Hickman explains.
"For over three years, the people of the UK have opened their homes to Ukrainian families and welcomed them into our communities. Offering them safety in the face of Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of cities and the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. However, at no point over these three years has our government provided Ukrainian families with certainty or stability." Rowan More looks ahead to a debate at the Liberal Democrat Conference.
Finlay McLaren finds that the chief effect of podcasting has been to give more publicity to people who were already famous.
James Wright suggests commercial interests may encourage the spreading of unverified stories and pseudo-archaeology connected to ancient buildings.
"Old Nick was so enraged he laid an everlasting curse upon them, and hence it was said that after Michaelmas Day, any blackberries on the bushes now belonged to the Devil Himself and it was most unwise to pick them." Jim Moon knows why you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michaelmas.
"For so long the US has been the core UK and European ally, the backbone of NATO, the largest contributor to the WHO, and the loudest voice in proudly proclaiming its democracy. It seems unbelievable to state baldly that the US is a threat to the global economy, to global health and to global stability. But it is, and the sooner this is acknowledged the better." Christine Pagel shows that Trump is following the playbook that has seen democracy die in other countries.
Nataliya Gumenyuk explains why Ukraine wants to fight on: "The horror of Russian military rule has been felt not only in areas of the south and east, where much of the war has been fought, but also near Kyiv in the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion, when Russian forces committed widespread atrocities in the capital’s suburbs."
"I have been very anxious to show that these young people are not 'problem young people,' but young people with problems." Richard Kemp reminds us that one of his key themes as Lord Mayor of Liverpool are the problems faced by care-leavers and many other disadvantaged children in the city.
So concern for the Welsh language scuppered a nuclear power station? Rubbish, says Dan Davies.
Brian Klaas on what Detectorists has to teach us about the meaning of life: "Throughout the show, the allure of money and valuable treasure lurks, but whenever it seduces the detectorists and they lose sight of their intrinsic motivation, their lives begin to fall apart, cursed by a momentarily conversion to the False Gospel."
Colin Yeo, an immigration lawyer, reviews Paddington in Peru.
He has been one of the UK’s favourite and most prominent refugees for two-thirds of a century. Now Paddington Bear – official name Paddington Brown – has been granted a British passport.
The co-producer of the latest Paddington film said the Home Office had issued the specimen document to the fictional Peruvian-born character – listing for completeness the official observation that he is, in fact, a bear.
Aw, innit cute?
Ten years ago, as the first Paddington film was due for release, I quoted Free Movement blog:
Paddington stows away and deliberately avoids the immigration authorities on arrival. He is in formal legal terms an illegal entrant and as such commits a criminal offence under section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971. It is an offence punishable by up to six months in prison. If or when detected by the authorities it is more likely he would simply be removed back to Peru than that he would be prosecuted, though. To avoid that fate he would need to make out a legal basis to stay.
Incidentally, for offering a home to Paddington - or harbouring him, as the Home Office would have it - Mr and Mrs Brown could potentially face prosecution under section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971, entitled "Assisting unlawful immigration to member State". The maximum sentence is 14 years.
Whatever Paddington's status now, he didn't have a British passport when he arrived in 2014. So I stand by my reaction then:
I saw this film at the Renoir, an arthouse cinema near Russell Square in London, in 2001. I remember being attracted by a quote in the window, which I suspect was this one from Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review:
This is a British film with pertinent things to say about contemporary Britain, urgently and powerfully expressed in a cinematic language far from the callow, Lottery-nurtured idiom of Tepid Britannia comedy thrillers.
He might have added – as it was the year 2001 – that most of those tepid thrillers were directed by mockneys with expensive private educations.
And Bradshaw was right: Last Resort was a very good film. It offered a tender love story, political criticism and a portrait of contemporary Britain that made it seem at once familiar and strange.
Artyom falls in with a gang of local children who smoke, drink and steal, while his mother tries to earn money from an online pornographer. When she tells the authorities she wants to withdraw her claim of asylum and go back to Russia, she is told that even this could take six months to process.
The two – first Artyom and then Tanya – are befriended by Alfie (Paddy Considine), a former prisoner who manages an amusement arcade in the town. He helps redecorate and refurnish their flat and takes them out for a day on the seafront. He and Tanya develop a romantic relationship, but she decides she has to stop dreaming and get back to Russia. (The more streetwise and cynical Artyom thinks they would be better off sticking with Alfie.)
So the three hide in a beached boat to defeat surveillance, and when the incoming tide lifts it they sail along the coast until they are well clear. Alfie arranges a lift to London for them and they part, with Tanya giving him the painting she had brought with her from Russia.
Dina Korzun and Artyom Strelnikov are both perfect for their roles, but the actor who stood out for me was Paddy Considine. I was so impressed that I will still watch a film just because he’s in it. I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.
A word too for Lindsay Honey, who plays the pornographer who offers Tanya work and makes him a human, even likeable, character. Honey, under the name Ben Dover, was a star of pornographic films, and is the father of Tyger Drew-Honey from Outnumbered.
If Considine has a rival as the standout star of Last Resort, then it is Margate, the town where it was filmed. Since then, the Turner Gallery has been opened there, in the hope that it would spark an economic revival in what had once been a prosperous resort. The Dreamland pleasure park, seen lying near-derelict in Last Resort, has been revived too.
A year later, the star-packed cast of Last Orders were to arrive in Margate to shoot the final scenes of that film. One of them, David Hemmings, has been persuaded by his parents to enter a singing contest there and won it, which was the first spark of a career that saw him as a boy opera star and then a film actor and director.
Perhaps most remarkable of all is the way the film was shot by its director Pawel Pawlikowski:
When he first landed in Margate with his skeleton crew, Pawlikowski had little more than a loose semi-autobiographical story to go on. (He came to Britain from Poland with his family when he was 12).
"Initially Alfie [played by Paddy Considine, a former boxer who made a startling screen debut in Shane Meadows's A Room for Romeo Brass] was to be a much more ambiguous, slightly threatened character, but the chemistry with Dina was magical. Paddy is a real phenomenon.
We all lived together during the shoot, that is part of my method, so we were able to improvise scenes and come up with new ideas in the evening and over dinner. I am an insomniac, too, so I just kept writing all night sometimes. That is the way I like to work."
In other hands, you suspect, such an approach would result in a mess of a film, but Pawlikowski and his cast produced something magical.
In the 24 years since Last Resort was made, nothing has improved in the way Britain deals with asylum seekers. The last Conservative government effectively ceased processing applications at all in an attempt to stoke a sense of crisis that they hoped would benefit them at the polls.
This is what Pawlikowski found when he discovered the perfect location for his film:
"When I first when down to Margate, my first contact was with the Roma, the Gypsies, who were the only refugees really who interacted with the locals. Even with them, what struck me was how little their world extended beyond what they called Margatta. They would make epic journeys to a strange place at the far end of their known world called Greyvas End.
"You don't have to be there long to realise that most of the asylum-seekers are clueless peasants. They are Kurds and Afghans mostly. Some have not even lived in cities before. They are all stunned, many don't move because they don't know what to do.
"When the local Margate kids go round spitting at them, you can see their shock because they come from cultures were people have manners, where strangers receive hospitality. To me, they looked like they were living inside a Kafka story."
I will leave you with this clip of him talking about the remarkable film he made there.
Victoire Ingabire Umahoza, leader of the opposition in Rwanda, explains why UK government's rhetoric is misleading and Rwanda is far from safe: "Human rights organisations have regularly reported that ordinary Rwandan citizens do not enjoy inalienable human rights. Those who dare to or are perceived to express opinions that challenge the Rwandan government’s narrative suffer reprisal."
William Wallace is our guide to the factions into which the Conservative Party is rapidly dissolving.
"The new ruralism is nebulous but tangible. Mildly countercultural, it has been buoyed by the New Nature Writing but is more than a literary phenomenon. It has slowly gathered adherents since the millennium, fuelling a flight from the city to the country, bringing an activist spirit to rural towns and villages. These developments were intensified by t he importance to health and happiness of access to green space during the Covid-19 lockdowns." Matthew Kelly reflects on Jeremy Burchardt’s Lifescapes: The Experience of Landscape in Britain, 1870-1960.
William Fear looks at the attitude to truth that George Orwell and Albert Camus shared.
"Victoria did manage to have her own secret lavatory built within a hidden door off the Sovereign’s Robing Room in the Lords, rumoured to be the first flushing toilet in London." Chloe Challender reveals the meagre provision of women's lavatories at Westminster during the 19th century.
"The brief cockney revival at the turn of the 1960s was an interesting moment in British pop," says Alwyn Turner.
The Tories have reached the "invade France" stage of the immigration debacle, and it's only Wednesday.
He was talking about a statement that Giles Watling, the Conservative MP for Clacton, places on his website today:
Giles Watling MP is backing stronger borders and an end to illegal migration. Giles is set to back the Government on the Rwanda Bill again this week to deport illegal entrants but warns that the legislation does not go far enough - and will not ultimately succeed in full. He believes that we must stay focussed on the mission, which is to bring the evil cross-channel trade in human misery to an end.
Mr Watling said:
"It is undeniable that we need to police our borders and strengthen them. Fundamentally, it is perfectly acceptable that those who are not here legally should be deported to have their cases assessed – we cannot reward those who break the rules and I welcome the Government finally getting to grips with this issue.
"However, and despite intense lobbying from colleagues of mine on both sides of the party, I am afraid I simply could not support any amendments to this Bill. This is not because I did not agree with them in principle, but simply because I do not believe that this Bill goes far enough – even with the proposed amendments, should they have passed.
"The Home Office has demonstrated time and again that it is either unwilling or unable to grapple with the scale of the challenge facing it, and to that extent I believe it is time that it is relieved of the responsibility of policing our borders and instead the issue is handed to the Ministry of Defence. This is after all a defence of the realm matter and we need British boots on the ground.
"Our borders must be stronger, and in order to achieve that we must explore negotiating with our continental neighbours, pointing out that they would regain control of their overrun towns from Dunkirk to Boulogne if they allow that, in addition to the people we already have in their command and control centres, we put British boots on the ground in Northern France to assist their efforts.
"This is a relatively small piece of coastline with only a few practical places to launch these boats. We have drone technology and efficient armed forces. We should easily be able to stop the boats from even reaching the beaches and destroy them. In a very short time I believe that the migration route will stop. We will save lives, free up the French ports and stop illegal entry in this manner.
"All it requires is determination and diplomacy of the highest order."
Watling appears an amiable sort - see his recent interview with our own Jamie Stone in the John O'Groat Journal and Caithness Courier - and if you read beneath the bluster there is an appeal for international cooperation in there somewhere trying to get out.
So what has made him feel he has to sound as though he wants to invade France?
A new poll suggests Nigel Farage could comfortably win a seat in a constituency formerly held by UKIP, beating the incumbent Tory MP for Clacton by ten percentage points.
The 'Honorary President' of Reform UK polled at 37 per cent of the vote in the Essex town, based on a Survation survey of 509 people conducted through the week.
The Tories were only marginally more attractive to voters than Labour, which received 23 per cent. Six per cent would have voted Lib Dem and eight per cent other parties.
Were Mr Farage attempt to unsettle Giles Watling MP from the seat he has held since 2017, it would be his eighth attempt to become an MP.
Poor Watling. Driven mad by Nigel Farage.
There is another possible explanation: have a look at the video above. Because the very Sixties small boy in it is... Giles Watling.
He played John Gregson's younger son in the police series Gideon's Way. And this clip comes from one of the better episodes, The 'V' Men.
The orator the young Watling was listening to was Sir Arthur Vane, leader of a far-right party called The Victory Movement. Could it be that he was more affected by it than anyone realised? 1964, after all, before anyone thought of safeguarding for child actors.
If so, it would be an irony, because Gregson's George Gideon, like his creator John Creasy, was a liberal. He manages to find out who planted a bomb outside Vane's flat, while maintaining the peace between the Movement and left-wing demonstrators.
All this despite having Allan Cuthbertson, whose very looks screamed "ex-colonial police office who believes in crowd control by violence", wished upon him by the top brass.
