Note:
- Asylum seekers are not legally obligated to seek refuge in the first country they get to, and transit through a safe country is not grounds for refusing asylum under the UN Refugee Convention.
Ok, to answer some points below:
- Yes, the UK could pull out of the UN Refugee Convention, but that's not the current policy of HMG and diplomats have to work within that.
- Having a UK warship tow a boat to France without the consent of the French is an act of war.
Note:
- In case this needs to be clarified, but I'm not endorsing the Home Secretary's comments or the UK's approach to asylum seekers. My personal views on this are very different.
I'm simply trying to illustrate the difficulty inherent in her call to secure French cooperation.
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The book's premise is that trade policy is a growing part of the conversation around issues, from jobs to healthcare and even war that voters actually care about...
... but it's complex and counter-intuitive, so politicians can lie about it with impunity, and that matters.
1/ I like people and think they're overwhelmingly good and decent.
My default assumption is that whatever the slogans, or extremist elements, the vast majority of the people on the streets are just appalled by the images coming out of Gaza, and are calling for peace.
2/ Has every single person marching got a comprehensive and fool proof 12 point plan for reconciling Palestinian independence, Israeli security, regional geo-stability and the million other factors at play?
No, and that's fine. Marches are about sending signals that we care.
3/ Do I, as a Jew, wish the marchers were a little bit more thoughtful about the implications of some of their messaging?
Sure. I guess.
But it's a mass movement and like all such things, creates its own social incentives for having the spiciest take in the room.
1/ International law lacks enforcement because major powers negotiating it did not want mechanisms that could kinetically prevent, curtail or punish the pursuit of their ends, even if the means involved breach the letter or spirit of the law.
2/ What little power international law has is almost entirely normative.
It only matters as long as countries believe it matters - and so for lack of better options we repeat ad nauseum that it does, while also arguing its broad benefits outweigh any specific constraints.
3/ What's infuriating about this is that reinforcing the normative power of international law rhetorically requires a great deal of exaggeration, selective vision and hypocrisy.
To make the case that international law matters we have to ignore all the times it clearly didn't.
The US has exactly as many serving troops fighting in Ukraine as its NATO European allies: zero.
The US **is** contributing a lot of materiel, but Europeans collectively are also sending a lot, both in real terms and as a percentage of GDP.
This conflict started in 2014 under Obama, continued throughout the entirety of Trump's term, and sharply escalated in 2022 under Biden when Putin arbitrarily decided to seize Kyiv.
If you want to draw causal linkages there you're welcome to. I struggle to see them.