Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[garbon]

She will have a national insurance number and tied to that will be the records of her employment and NI payments. Back in the 1970s giving your NI number was all that was required for proof of identity. The rules have been getting ever tighter my entire adult life and people who started on the easier regime are getting caught out 

IMO the government could easily grant some provisional leave to remain to anyone with, say, 5 years NI contributions. This would be an extremely easy way to determine if someone's claim to stay in the UK is a substantive one; but the Home Office seems to get off on being nasty.

I don't know, seems like their needs to be some proof of citizenship, no? After all, I had 5 years of NI contributions when my first visa was up but I had no further right to remain/work and was not an EU national.

[Sheilbh]

I mean it's not stored on your phone - the app receives information from the central Home Office database and whether there's paper certificates or an app, it'll always be the Home Office database/record that matters.

Wasn't the assumption when deleting the Windrush archives was that if somebody needs it they'll be able to prove it by their own paper copies?

Sorry I'm wrong - they were destroyed in 2009-10. Apparently some staff did raise the issue that it would create a risk for individuals but it's not clear how much that was heard.

It was just part of a broader destruction of paper records that were no longer "necessary" to reduce storage space. It's astonishing and hugely consequential that they weren't digitised or archived in some way. I suppose that's the other risk of a relatively paperless society - you can't always guarantee the state has a record either.

[Sheilbh]

Intrigued by this thread from Marcus Rashford:

Marcus Rashford MBE
@MarcusRashford
·
14h
Just heard @spectator are planning to run a story on me tomorrow about how I have benefitted commercially in the last 18 months...To clarify, I don't need to partner with brands. I partner because I want to progress the work I do off the pitch and...(1)
most of any fee I would receive contributes to that. Last summer, 1.3M children had access to food support, through my relationship with Burberry children have a safe place to be after school where they will be fed, following the November investment...(2)
vulnerable children have safe places to go this summer holiday, and due to my relationship with Macmillan 80,000 children now have a book to call their own.

Do I have a larger commercial appeal following the u-turns? I'm sure. (3)
But I'm also a Manchester United and England international footballer. Why has there always got to be a motive? Why can't we just do the right thing? 🤷🏾‍♂️

Ps I actually enjoy reading bits from The Spectator now and again but this is just a none starter...

Have a good night all!(4)

Interesting to see the Spectator coming out against people profiting from their talent and initiative in doing commercial deals. Clearly the class struggle started by England's football team continues.

But I wonder if there is something in Rashford's response that is indicative of a little bit of a generational challenge for both our parties. I feel there's been a few polls and younger people basically seem to be very socially liberal, want a reasonably well-funded welfare state but also are quite capitalist (almost right-wing) in their attitudes to their own situation, which makes some sense given that 50% of younger people are overtaxed - including student loan repayments and National Insurance - while an increasing proportion of our state spending is going to the elderly.

An example is that there's reports the Tories are considering a 1% rise to National Insurance to pay for social care - I'm not a fan of that move (but my preferred option has lost two elections so... ). It's quite a regressive income tax but crucially it would be a tax rise on the younger working population to pay for benefits for the older population (workers over 67 don't pay National Insurance) - so it is also classic political move of taxing your opponent's base for a benefit for your base.

Edit: Also Marcus Rashford admitting he enjoys reading bits from The Spectator is striking and goes to the culture change in English football - Graeme Le Saux received homophobic abuse from fans (and within clubs) for his entire career. One of the damning bits of evidence was that he read the Guardian.

[Sheilbh]

I think it's now pretty unlikely we'll get vaccine passports - Labour has come out against it and there were lots of Tories unhappy with it. I can't see any path to a majority given those issues. Labour's position:

John Stevens
@johnestevens
Labour comes out against vaccine passports

Starmer spokesman: "We oppose the use of Covid vaccination status for everyday access to venues and services...

"Testing for access to venues would be more efficient, and would give people and businesses more certainty"
One of Labour's arguments for testing rather than vaccine passports is that "being double jabbed doesn't prove you aren't carrying the virus"

I don't think this works. I think that - especially given the prevalence at the minute - a double vac certificate is more secure than either an accurate PCR test in the last 72 hours or a possibly false lateral flow test (that's why, while they're widely used in schools, they're followed up with PCR tests to confirm) on the spot.

Looking at countries with strong pre-flight testing requirements (including the UK) not stopping infections arriving, I don't think there's any more reason to think they'd work for internal venues. I think the vaccine certificate is probably the safer option. I also think one of the purposes of the vaccine certificate (and possibly the biggest benefit) is to provide incentives to get dosed - obviously wouldn't be present.

Separately I also don't really like the argument they use about why not vaccine passports I think it's sailing a little bit close to sort of undermining the vaccine program/effectiveness. No-one is saying that they will be 100% effective (especially around transmission) - the point is they will be effective enough. So saying they're not effective enough to give certainty and let you into a pub or club or gig I think is a bit of an issue.

I think it'll probably go down well with online people who just want Starmer to oppose everything - but I think it'll unpopular with the public (including Labour voters) and I don't think it's the right decision.

Edit: Meanwhile elsewhere in the Labour Party people are able to focus on the real issues: factional fights

Paul Waugh
@paulwaugh
During yesterday's meeting to discuss the banning of the Marxist 'Socialist Appeal' from Labour, I'm told that one NEC member (who is also a Momentum activist) asked this:
"Are we sure that being a socialist or Marxist isn't a 'protected characteristic' under human rights law?"
Under UK equalities law, a 'protected characteristic' covers:
age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.
It does not cover being a Marxist.
Am told the question went unanswered, but many present think that's because the answer was so obviously 'no' it wasn't worth spelling out.

[Josquius]

I hope this is labour just being tactical. I won't turn on them just because they don't support this but they might win around some of the nuttier folks for opposing it.

[Sheilbh]

I hope this is labour just being tactical. I won't turn on them just because they don't support this but they might win around some of the nuttier folks for opposing it.

I hope they're opposing it because they think it's a bad idea. But I worry Labour's positions are getting into some difficult positions on this: no re-opening until all publicly accessible buildings have new ventilation fitted; requiring PCR tests for entry into certain venues (even for the double vaccinated) - those positions seem to point to more or less permanent restrictions and I'm not sure they've thought through the implications of that.

[Josquius]

I hope this is labour just being tactical. I won't turn on them just because they don't support this but they might win around some of the nuttier folks for opposing it.

I hope they're opposing it because they think it's a bad idea.

But its a great idea. Night clubs, concert venues, etc... are super spreader events waiting to happen as things currently stand. They'll be key to why we go back into lockdown in Autumn. If we can reduce the risk of them it will really help us along in getting back to normal.

But I worry Labour's positions are getting into some difficult positions on this: no re-opening until all publicly accessible buildings have new ventilation fitted; requiring PCR tests for entry into certain venues (even for the double vaccinated) - those positions seem to point to more or less permanent restrictions and I'm not sure they've thought through the implications of that.

Better ventilation on public buildings is great and should be done even without corona but not allowing reopening until the works have been done is a bit much. Its just not practical.

I don't see the problem with 'permanent' restrictions in the sense that its better to set in place lasting small scale restrictions for a few years to come than to continue the cycle of freedom->infection spike->lockdown->freedom, etc... We need to try and get back to normal and out of recurring crisis mode.

[Sheilbh]

But its a great idea. Night clubs, concert venues, etc... are super spreader events waiting to happen as things currently stand. They'll be key to why we go back into lockdown in Autumn. If we can reduce the risk of them it will really help us along in getting back to normal.

I agree - although I think the biggest benefit would be in just making more people get vaccinated/younger people prioritise getting dosed.

But I'd rather Labour were wrong than playing politics on pandemic issues.

Better ventilation on public buildings is great and should be done even without corona but not allowing reopening until the works have been done is a bit much. Its just not practical.

I don't see the problem with 'permanent' restrictions in the sense that its better to set in place lasting small scale restrictions for a few years to come than to continue the cycle of freedom->infection spike->lockdown->freedom, etc... We need to try and get back to normal and out of recurring crisis mode.

I think the long terms is going to be either very limited or no restrictions at home plus quite strict border measures (for the non-vaccinated) or a more open border policy but some restrictions at home. My preference would be the former.

I just think they are setting a very high bar for what can be an effective measure or for lifting restrictions. So it isn't enough to be double vaxxed you need a test from a day or two ago to use indoor venues (even though I think that's less effective), the bar for re-opening is extremely high in fitting new ventilation for all publicly accessible building (so all shops and restaurants and pubs not just public buildings) - I'm not even sure the timeline you'd need for that given there are a finite number of builders etc to do that work.

I find it really weird because I think Labour have missed obvious big points of failure in the pandemic response. I cannot understand why they didn't come out strongly against lifting the lockdown in December because it was so clear what would happen; or why they aren't hammering the failures on education. It's a really weird combination (and perhaps this is a bit indicative of Starmer in general) of being very cautious on the macro big picture stuff (should we re-open so people can go home for Christmas; how are we running schools in pandemic times) while making quite big and possibly impractical calls on the micro side.

More widely I think a lot about that poll with 20-25% of people wanting all clubs shut down permanently and a permanent 10pm curfew etc and I agree with Marie Le Conte's comments:

Marie Le Conte
@youngvulgarian
IMO an underlying tension in pandemic discourse is that while everyone naturally leans more libertarian or authoritarian, the past 18 months have made people instictively go in harder on one or the other, and am not sure what it'll mean for future politics
I've personally gone from a vague "hooray for broadly benevolent big state!" do an increasingly strident DON'T TREAD ON ME but have seen friends go in the opposite direction, feel like it's been an understudied split

I think it might be really important and I think it might have long-term consequences in politics but I'm not sure - and I've seen something similar among my friends so we're talking about this split within younger people. It may be something that shapes people's politics in the future - maybe.

[Tamas]

Maybe the 10% of night-club closers are religious fanatics (of any denomination, really).

[Sheilbh]

Maybe the 10% of night-club closers are religious fanatics (of any denomination, really).

25% - which I think is a little bit too large to be just religious fanatics. Or the 35% who want permanent 10-day quarantine when people arrive in the UK:


Separately but another example I was just thinking of on Labour is they've opposed making vaccines mandatory for care home workers - which is an area where I think it's probably justifiable to make them mandatory. I don't understand it.

[garbon]

Maybe the 10% of night-club closers are religious fanatics (of any denomination, really).

25% - which I think is a little bit too large to be just religious fanatics. Or the 35% who want permanent 10-day quarantine when people arrive in the UK:


Separately but another example I was just thinking of on Labour is they've opposed making vaccines mandatory for care home workers - which is an area where I think it's probably justifiable to make them mandatory. I don't understand it.

I wonder how long they'll hold onto those extreme positions though. I get it while life is disrupted and that mindest can't but impact their attempt to answer questions.

[Sheilbh]

I wonder how long they'll hold onto those extreme positions though. I get it while life is disrupted and that mindest can't but impact their attempt to answer questions.

Maybe - I think there is a section of the British public that is very puritanical and is horrified at people making "bad decisions" especially poor people and young people. Health and wealth don't reflect public policy or inequality, but moral virtue which, if necessary, should be enforced. The state shouldn't focus on improving services or level people's lives but force them to make good decisions - from the workhouse, to trying to stop those on welfare from "wasting" their money, to closing down venues not necessarily based on their covid risk but more their enjoyment by the young (e.g. we've managed to keep call centres open). I think on quarantine and clubs and curfews there's probably always been a section of the public that's secretly wanted this.

I said at the start of lockdown and I still think it's true that this should put an end to all that nonsense about "freedom-loving Brits" because there's a strong authoritarian streak in this country and we're just lucky that there's rarely been a state project trying to capitalise on that.

I saw this really good piece by Morgan Jones on this which I think is accurate about the lack of imagination (and I'd add compassion) on a chunk of the British public:

21st July 2021   
Lockdown's moral mission creep
Morgan Jones

One of the most astute observations I saw made over the course of the pandemic was that much public discussion about the virus rested on the unspoken contention that covid-19 is transmitted not by close person to person contact, primarily in under-ventilated spaces, but by individual failure: by self indulgence, and by sin. Stories of the neighbours having friends round; scenes of crowded parks; of groups failing to social distance; drinking in public, or dancing; reports of people driving for a change of scenery on their daily walk rather than going for a trudge around the neighbourhood like everyone else. Some of these things legitimately present a risk of transmission; some of them, in any meaningful way, do not. The campaign that called on people to stay at home to "protect the NHS" was effective and necessary; its upshot, however, is that we have all spent more than a year engaged in a campaign of state-sponsored curtain twitching of a particularly extreme bent. It is hard to imagine a more complete exercise in enforced conformity; nor a better way to inculcate in the populace the already prevalent idea that on a moral level some lifestyles are simply better – for us, for me, for us, for all – than others.

It is not surprising, given the all-encompassing scale of this project, that we are beginning to see a kind of psychic mission creep. Recent Ipsos Mori polling for the Economist found that 19% of people, regardless of the Covid situation, support a 10pm curfew; 26% support permanent closure of night clubs. This week the launch of the new national food strategy has been couched in the pandemic-familiar language of "protecting the NHS", with report author Henry Dimbleby asking Today programme listeners, "is the freedom to keep Frosties cheap worth destroying the NHS"?

If we step back and look at the kind of life that might be permissible under these frames, its shape is likewise unsurprising. Don't go out too late or eat too much; don't be frivolous, do be monogamous, eat your vegetables and be in bed by ten.

There is a lot you can say about this. You can argue that sugar taxes are taxes on the poor in all but name; you can say that in a country where half of people socialise outside the home only once a month or less (and if we're doing public health: that loneliness is as bad for you as heavy smoking) anything that creates stigma around socialising is very bad indeed. You could say that Covid is offering the opportunity for the DWPification of the entire apparatus of the state, the chance for us all to live in the venal bureaucratic morality tale of the two-child cap and the benefits fraud hotline. You can say that the government hung all kinds of people and whole sectors of the economy out to dry to create a permission structure that views any non-working life outside the home as at best indulgent and at worst immoral.

You could say all of these things, but I will say this – if you think everyone should be home by 10pm, or that eating fatty foods constitutes a failure in your duty to the NHS, or your answer to "when will the we have proper gigs again" is a purse-lipped "maybe never", I think you are possibly someone who has no capacity to imagine other people's lives. I do not mean to loosely picture their day to day, to know that out on the streets there are others also: I mean to be able to think about what it is really like to be someone else, someone whose values and experiences are perhaps radically different.

The stock of libertarianism is not high on the British left, more likely to summon up images of Sajid Javid reading Ayn Rand than anything else. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for the animating conviction that people's lives are their own. One person's frivolity is another person's priority. Some people would happily never set foot in a nightclub again; some people would not know who they are without them. Our lives are not held in trust; we are not going to get money taken off the deposit if we mistreat them. If a state or a culture is acting if this is the case then they are the ones who are sick.

Individual choice and collective responsibility are some of the biggest questions going. The answers are not simple, and the terrain on which they are fought is often disingenuous – I do not, for example, think that anyone's freedom is meaningfully curtailed by being made to wear a mask on public transport – but we should be more spirited in our defence of people's ability to live the lives that they find worth in (you do not need to spend all of your time reading Hakim Bey to recognise that there is value in entering unfamiliar states) and more condemnatory of the cultural undertow that would like to see us all turn into minor characters in Brief Encounter.

In his recent, entirely charming defence of smoking – and of allowing people to choose their own vices – the artist David Hockney wrote that "longevity shouldn't be an aim in life; that to me seems life denying". You may agree with him; you may not.  Nonetheless, our aims in life should be our own; I have no desire to see the excesses of austerity laundered through personal responsibility into a bourgeois morality state.

Edit: And there may be a sense in which some of those policies just seem sensible - if you never go out after dark, or you're really afraid of crime, if you don't go clubbing, if you don't go on holidays overseas then those policies might be perfectly attractive. They increase the safety of society as a whole (because there will be new diseases and new pandemics) without any cost to you. Looking into it more widely - over 80% of people wanted curfews after the London riots, Tony Blair introduced "yob curfews" for teenagers with the anti-social behaviour legislation (again it will have polled well), apparently in 2008 Yougov did some polling in response to one of them and over 80% of people supported general curfews of 9-10pm for under 16s.

I think you're right that covid is part of it and people almost can't imagine not the present/living without restrictions. But I think it's a wider social thing in the UK.

And it's worth noting I've not seen a single piece of research from people I follow on covid or in any newspaper that indicates that curfews have any effect on the transmission of disease.

[garbon]

I wonder how long they'll hold onto those extreme positions though. I get it while life is disrupted and that mindest can't but impact their attempt to answer questions.

Maybe - I think there is a section of the British public that is very puritanical and is horrified at people making "bad decisions" especially poor people and young people. Health and wealth don't reflect public policy or inequality, but moral virtue which, if necessary, should be enforced. The state shouldn't focus on improving services or level people's lives but force them to make good decisions - from the workhouse, to trying to stop those on welfare from "wasting" their money, to closing down venues not necessarily based on their covid risk but more their enjoyment by the young (e.g. we've managed to keep call centres open). I think on quarantine and clubs and curfews there's probably always been a section of the public that's secretly wanted this.

I said at the start of lockdown and I still think it's true that this should put an end to all that nonsense about "freedom-loving Brits" because there's a strong authoritarian streak in this country and we're just lucky that there's rarely been a state project trying to capitalise on that.

I saw this really good piece by Morgan Jones on this which I think is accurate about the lack of imagination (and I'd add compassion) on a chunk of the British public:

I think you're right that covid is part of it and people almost can't imagine not the present/living without restrictions. But I think it's a wider social thing in the UK.

And it's worth noting I've not seen a single piece of research from people I follow on covid or in any newspaper that indicates that curfews have any effect on the transmission of disease.

Yes, I'm not surprised there could be people who'd be happy for all clubs to be closed/happy if people can't get about in the night as it doesn't affect them and they seem to think that allowing those things only has negative ramifications for themselves (ignoring, of course, that perhaps it is a good idea to let people have avenues to let off steam).

However, for many to say that they want in perpetuity a 10 day quarantine for anyone coming into the country (or the nebulous proof of vaccination - against what?), there has to be a singificant role on current emotions/tensions around COVID. Unless that 1 third to half of the country constitutes never travellers (and not directly connected to tourism industry), that stance makes no sense in a true long-term scenario.

[garbon]

That said, I don't think I would have ever thought of Britain as "freedom-loving" given all the CCTV and anti-free speech laws (e.g. hate speech).

[Tamas]

That said, I don't think I would have ever thought of Britain as "freedom-loving" given all the CCTV and anti-free speech laws (e.g. hate speech).

Comparing the state of trains and train stations between Hungary (no CCTV) and England (CCTV) I am ok being on camera when in public spaces.