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31 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This should be a much bigger story than it is: as part of its crack-down on asylum, the Home Office ignored health warnings & detained hundreds of asylum-seekers in overcrowded and insanitary military barracks. More than half contracted Covid. ft.com/content/d7bb7c…
Public Health England warned in advance about "the COVID-safety of the accommodation". "Given the cramped communal conditions...once one person was infected a large-scale outbreak was virtually inevitable". The Fire Safety Inspectorate raised "serious concerns about fire safety".
A report by the Independent Inspectorate found that a third of residents felt suicidal. "People at high risk of self-harm were located in a decrepit ‘isolation block’ which we considered unfit for habitation". gov.uk/government/new…
At the peak of the outbreak, "over a hundred people were confined to their billets for approximately four weeks and unable to go outside except to use the mobile toilets or showers. They were warned that they might be arrested if they left the camp". gov.uk/government/new…
An absolutely shameful story. Sadly, shame seems to be in short supply in government these days. ft.com/content/d7bb7c…

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Robert Saunders Profile picture
29 Mar
Into the second hour of my first attempt at baking in some years. Recipe says "Preparation Time: 10 minutes". In what? Dog years?
Apparently the next bit needs a brush. Who knew?
I suspect the words "It's the thought that counts" are going to get an airing.
Read 5 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
21 Mar
Orwell once wrote: "In England all the boasting & flag-wagging is done by small minorities. The patriotism of ordinary people is not vocal".

Like so much modern Toryism, this salute-the-flag stuff is imported from the US Republican Party. It owes little to any British tradition.
Orwell was a man who took patriotism seriously. But as he went on to argue, the ability to laugh at performative displays of patriotism, especially by those in authority, was something in which patriots themselves should take pride, as a defence of "English" traditions of liberty
As it happens, I'm one of those who thinks patriotism can be progressive &that the Left should stop ceding this ground. I'm hoping to write something on this. But enough of the loyalty tests, the performative patriotism & the "my way or the highway" tweets like this from Tory MPs
Read 4 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
21 Mar
Why are there still hereditary peers in Parliament? Why is Lords reform "the Bermuda Triangle of British politics"?

The House of Lords is back in the news, so here's an article I wrote for the @NewStatesman on the history of Lords reform. Extracts follow. newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…
Most of the hereditary peers were expelled by the Blair govt in 1999. That Act significantly improved the Lords. For the first time in a century, it no longer had an in-built Tory majority. It became a more expert, independent-minded Chamber, more confident in challenging govt.
The 92 hereditary peers that survived were intended partly as a security for the Tory Party, and partly as a guarantee that further reform of the Lords would follow. With Johnson ballooning the number of Tory life peers, the first goal is now redundant. The second clearly failed.
Read 7 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
16 Mar
If the UK really is going to tilt from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, that reverses a policy shift made in the 1960s: well before Britain joined the EU. It's not clear Johnson understands why that decision was made, or the implications of reversing it. THREAD theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
2. When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964, he, like Johnson, wanted to reassert Britain's global role. "Our frontiers", he boasted, "are in the Himalayas". He told the US proudly that he would "rather pull half our troops out of Germany than move any from the Far East".
3. The following years offered a brutal education. Without an empire, Britain could no longer project power on the cheap. With its share of world trade contracting, & demands on domestic spending rising, Britain simply lacked the financial muscle to project force across the globe
Read 12 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
9 Mar
This by Rees-Mogg suggests an unhappy grasp of history. The point is not that "somebody once said" this. Since 1990 it has been the position of the UK govt itself & a founding assumption of the peace process that London has "no selfish strategic or economic interest in N Ireland"
The "no selfish interest" principle was first set out by Margaret Thatcher's Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, in November 1990. It was a carefully choreographed speech, designed to send a signal across the Irish Sea, and was approved by Margaret Thatcher herself.
That principle was reiterated by John Major, on behalf of the British government, in the Downing Street Declaration of 1993: a crucial moment on the path to peace. He was backed in Parliament by the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair. cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/peace/d…
Read 5 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
5 Mar
So many of our Brexit problems have a common source: the govt's refusal to be honest about the deal it negotiated. It persistently represents its own choices as hostile incursions, to be repelled by a sovereign state. It's a case-study in how dishonesty drives bad policy. THREAD
1. The govt's first key choice was to leave the Single Market & Customs Union. For good or ill, that choice put the UK outside the trade barriers the EU erects to non-members. We knew those barriers existed. (We'd benefited from them in the past). We chose to move outside them.
2. Yet Johnson told voters his deal raised "no non-tariff barriers to trade". To defend that myth, changes on which ministers themselves insisted have to be recast as aggressive acts - "blockades" or "bullying" - against which Britain must now "retaliate". telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/…
Read 10 tweets

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