Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

It's a disgrace. The FCDO and MoD who are on the ground should just get whoever they can and wants out, out - have a fight with the Home Office over the application of the rules later. The US has evacuated equivalent people from their embassy. Instead the FCDO and MoD have both issued statements basically saying they will grant the applications from these contractors - but it's a crisis I just don't think the application route is really appropriate right now.

Although I'm not sure it's particularly UK-specific. I believe there were similar issues with German-employed contractors and the European bureaucracy not quite working. The Dutch nationals all went to a safe location for their embassy last Sunday without informing Afghan national employees who just had to go home, I think the Swedes did something similar and there was a story about Afghan nationals calling their "friends" from the embassy and just getting through to voicemail. Again I think all are trying to get them out now.

It feels like actually this would probably be a good case for European (or NATO) cooperation on limited resources like troops on the ground at the airport, planes, embassy staff and just issue visas for each other and deal with it once we've got people out of Kabul. You know we all pick up anyone in the airport whichever country they were working for etc - instead we've had almost empty planes leaving because there aren't the right people with the right paperwork and there's Afghanis clinging to the wheels and dying during the flight

[viper37]

2 weeks ago, Canada woke up.  "We will repatriate everyone and their families who worked with us".  2 weeks ago.  FFS.

Now today, the Prime Minister has said, in the general indifference, that not everyone will be brought back to Canada.

Indifference by the same people who called everyone racist when we told them we didn't have the capacity to grant asylum to as many Syrians as the Libs promised.  Which was very true and caused unnecessary suffering for them.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/19/geronimo-the-alpaca-given-24-hour-reprieve-owner-says

Geronimo the alpaca given 24-hour reprieve

Geronimo, the condemned alpaca, has been granted another 24-hour reprieve, with its owner claiming the UK government hopes she will carry out its "dirty work" and put her beloved animal down herself.

"They don't want blood on their hands," said Helen Macdonald, a veterinary nurse. "They're trying to wear me down and get me to euthanise a perfectly healthy animal. I'm not going to do that. Simple as that."

...

Macdonald said there was still another way. "They could order that he stay here for research and we'd all learn something. He doesn't have to die. Defra have a choice. They can either work with us or they can try and kill him in front of the world."

...

[Sheilbh]

Oh God. They're going to chant 'the whole world is watching' at some vets aren't they

[Syt]

I can assure you, nobody's watching in Austria.

[Sheilbh]

Lots of pressure building on Raab over his holiday to Crete while Kabul fell.

But it turns out that the Permanent Secretaries (most senior civil servant) for the FCDO, MoD and Home Office were also all on holiday at the same time - I can only assume it was a lads holiday in Magaluf.

I tend to be very against criticising MPs, ministers or civil servants for taking holidays because I do think they should like the rest and shouldn't be held to some ridiculous standard, which is often the case in the UK press. I think they have a right to a life like the rest of us.

But this seems to go beyond that because if you are in a senior role, there will occasionally be crises while you're on holiday and you need to come back and I think this is one of them. The slow return of Raab, but also apparently the senior civil servants seems like a problem to me. Similarly I have no issue with WFH but, again, I feel like for these sorts of roles there may be exceptions where you can't rely on the AirBnB Wifi and actually need to be in a situation room in Whitehall.

[Tamas]

There is a general tendency to mention silly British tabloid news in Hungarian media as amusing trivia and such but I am afraid Geronimo hasn't been mentioned even there. It takes a special mix of well-off problem free and stupid to get worked up about the demise of an infectiously ill farm animal.

[The Brain]

Lots of pressure building on Raab over his holiday to Crete while Kabul fell.

But it turns out that the Permanent Secretaries (most senior civil servant) for the FCDO, MoD and Home Office were also all on holiday at the same time - I can only assume it was a lads holiday in Magaluf.

I tend to be very against criticising MPs, ministers or civil servants for taking holidays because I do think they should like the rest and shouldn't be held to some ridiculous standard, which is often the case in the UK press. I think they have a right to a life like the rest of us.

But this seems to go beyond that because if you are in a senior role, there will occasionally be crises while you're on holiday and you need to come back and I think this is one of them. The slow return of Raab, but also apparently the senior civil servants seems like a problem to me. Similarly I have no issue with WFH but, again, I feel like for these sorts of roles there may be exceptions where you can't rely on the AirBnB Wifi and actually need to be in a situation room in Whitehall.

Holidaying abroad during a pandemic shows incredibly poor judgment, which is a negative trait in both politicians and civil servants.

[Sheilbh]

One for Tamas

Will anything ever stop the madness of the British housing market?
In the last year, the average house has earned more than the average worker – and the government is to blame.
By
Jonn Elledge

Sometimes, things become memes for a reason. In the financial year ending March 2020 – that is, the year before the pandemic – the median household income in the UK was £29,900. In the year to June 2021 – after the pandemic – the average price of the house that contained the average household increased by £31,000. That took it to a record high of £266,000.

In other words, at a time when incomes are under pressure from a virus that has made the entire economy sick, the average house has earned more than the average household. This little factoid pops up so often that it should be getting dull. Somehow, though, it never ceases to be shocking.

(Yes, I am conflating median with mean there. I will apologise for this just as soon as the multimillionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak apologises for thinking higher housing costs are a good thing.)


UK average house prices and weekly earnings, indexed to Jan 1970

Remarkably, that isn't even the worst thing about the latest house price figures dropped by the Office for National Statistics this week. The worst thing is best summed up by this headline from the Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott: "UK house prices rise at fastest rate since 2004". Can you think of anything that might have happened in the economy or the housing market after 2004 that might make this phenomenon a tiny bit worrying?

There are people in the property industry who certainly think so. George Franks, a co-founder of the London-based estate agent Radstock Properties – the sort of company that tends to be in favour of ever-higher house prices – described the increase as "frankly obscene". Others are more sanguine, by which I mean very obviously delighted. Nicky Stevenson, the managing director of another estate agent, Fine & Country, noted that, "While we expect things to steady later in the year, there is nothing in this data to suggest the brakes will be applied heavily to what has become a runaway market." Let joy be unconfined.

Reading between the lines of Stevenson's comment, you get the impression she's a little disappointed that London has seen a relatively modest price increase of just 6.3 per cent, compared with 13.2 per cent in the UK as a whole, making it the least boom-y region of the country this year. You don't have to look hard for a reason: the pandemic-driven trend towards home-working, combined with the lengthy shutdowns of social and cultural venues, has left many Londoners wondering whether it's really worth paying quite so much for a shoebox with no garden, and whether it might be time to move out.

This is perhaps the reason why, in the two regions around London – the south-east and east of England – house prices climbed by 10.5 and 12.1 per cent respectively in the year to June 2021. That's nothing compared with much of England, though: house prices climbed by 14.3 per cent in the East Midlands, 15 per cent in the West Midlands, 15.8 per cent in Yorkshire, and a frankly absurd 18.6 per cent in the north-west. Even without a pandemic to contend with, it seems highly unlikely that pay packets would have risen at the same rate. But we do have a pandemic to contend with, which makes things worse.

Don't worry too much about the poor, left-behind homeowners of the capital, though: the average London house price in June stood at a record high of £510,299, so it's in no immediate danger of losing its crown as the country's most unaffordable region. As the Economist's Duncan Weldon noted: the increase in the value of the average London property since 2006 would, by itself, be enough to buy you two average homes in the north-east.

And remember: this boom in house prices, unaccompanied by a boom in incomes, has once again been engineered entirely deliberately, as a way of kick-starting a sluggish economy and to hell with the consequences. Where George Osborne did it using Help to Buy, Sunak used temporary cuts to stamp duty to give the impression that bargains were on offer. Given those cuts' impact on house prices, it's very far from clear that this was so.

The stamp duty holiday is winding down now. Perhaps that will mean a sudden dip in house prices, leading to instability, negative equity and, quite possibly, recession. Then again, perhaps it won't – in which case the Chancellor has successfully made housing even more expensive, and put homeownership out of reach for yet more young renters. (It's striking that, when Stevenson predicts London prices might rise faster in the autumn, she expects investors from the Gulf to prop up the market.)

Both these options seem plausible. Neither are good. And either way, it's Rishi Sunak who should get the blame.

Jonn Elledge is a freelance journalist, formerly assistant editor of the New Statesman and editor of its sister site, CityMetric. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.

And that peak right now doesn't look at all concerning and bubbly

[Valmy]

Maybe you guys can go live on one of those isolated Scottish Islands without electricity before they get too expensive.

[Zanza]

I can assure you, nobody's watching in Austria.

Germany's Spiegel had an article on Geronimo the Alpaca a day or two ago... 

[Sheilbh]

Seems like probably a good idea:

Teachers in England encouraged to tackle 'incel' movement in the classroom
New curriculum will give teachers flexibility to explore topics such as relationships and hatred of women
Richard Adams, Ben Quinn and Vikram Dodd
Fri 20 Aug 2021 19.23 BST

Teachers can help counteract the rise of the "incel" movement and the dangers of misogyny with school lessons on respect for women and healthy relationships, ministers believe.

A government source said that Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, expects teachers to be able to tackle the risks from incel culture through the relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) curriculum within schools.

It follows concerns sparked by Britain's worst mass shooting in over a decade, in which Jake Davison, 22, killed five people including his mother and a toddler in Plymouth last week.

After the attack, it emerged he had shown interest in the incel – or involuntary celibate – online culture fuelled by misogyny and abuse of women. Police are investigating whether this was a motive for the shootings. On Thursday, an inquest heard that he argued with his mother, for whom he expressed hatred online, before the killing spree.

The new curriculum, to be fully introduced this year when state schools in England reopen, gives teachers wide flexibility to explore topics such as beneficial relationships as well as darker aspects such as coercive control and hatred of women.

The government source said teachers should be encouraged to incorporate discussions about incel culture within the topics, with Williamson endorsing the "key point" that teachers had the flexibility allowing them to do so.

A spokesperson for the government said: "Schools play a crucial role in helping pupils understand the world around them, both through the RSHE curriculum – which allows for a school-led approach on teaching pupils about a range of current issues, including on incel culture – but also through their safeguarding duties, supporting staff to identify young people that may be at risk of radicalisation.

"The Prevent duty is also a vital part of our work to keep vulnerable pupils safe, and schools must take steps to protect them from being drawn into terrorism.

"We work closely with schools and local authorities, who must ensure their staff, including social workers, are able to identify pupils most at risk and recognise where early intervention is needed."

Schools, universities and local authorities also have a statutory duty to protect students from "radicalisation and extremist influences", the government noted.

It comes as teachers in Scotland are also to undergo training to recognise signs of young people being radicalised by incel ideas. Education Scotland will hold a video seminar next month on "incel ideology and how it can present both on and offline" hosted by Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, a lecturer at the University of Kent who specialises in digital culture and its effects on gender and relationships, the Times reported.

She praised the Scottish authorities for recognising incel violence as a form of terrorism and creating strategies to address it in schools, contrasting it with England. "In Scotland, there is an understanding that it is a pattern of behaviour that can be tracked and monitored," she said. "In England, it has not been termed terrorism and is still being dealt with using the lone wolf, one-off narrative."

Before last week's shooting, UK ministers had been concerned enough about the threat posed by the incel phenomenon to order new research into how social workers are managing cases where it and other emerging subcultures could be a factor in the radicalisation of children and young people.

The draft report, drawing on consultations with 10 local authorities, police and Home Office research, was published in June.

The incel threat was named by the Department for Education tender commissioning the research. It noted that the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall QC, had identified that an "increasing number of quite young people are being caught up in terrorism, including new forms of terrorism – not just conventional Islamist, extremist or right-wing terrorism, but other new emerging forms, such as the incel movement".

The report, by consultants Cordis Bright, found that most areas reported an increase over the past three to four years in referrals involving extreme right-wing ideologies and mixed/unclear ideologies, though in many local authorities they were a smaller proportion of radicalisation referrals than those related to Islamist extremism concerns.

The category of "mixed/unclear ideologies" was said to include: "Unclear ideologies, such as conspiracy theories, misogynistic viewpoints, a fixation on school shootings, or Q-Anon."

In many cases, the specific ideology itself was not important to children and young people and the report found that some continually switched between ideologies, making it difficult to categorise the risk and develop a response to it.

While an investigation into the Plymouth shootings is underway, counter-terrorism officials have previously identified at least two British plots where incel ideas may have been a factor in young men in their early 20s plotting mass casualty attacks.

In Scotland, Gabrielle Friel was found guilty in 2020 under the Terrorism Act of possessing weapons but cleared of another charge alleging he wanted to carry out a "spree killing". The charge that he was motivated by incel ideology was "not proven" under Scottish law. In Middlesbrough, Anwar Driouich was jailed in 2020 for having an explosive substance after a court heard he trawled the internet reading about mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and incels.

A spokesperson for counter-terrorism policing told the Guardian it defines incel as an ideology and where the terrorism threshold was met would classify incel cases under a category known as Left, Anarchist and Single Issue Terrorism (LASIT). Such cases were considered on a case-by-case basis, and would continue to be monitored as an emerging threat.

The government's Prevent frameworkhas recognised incel as a category within radicalisation for a number of years. However, referrals relating to incel ideology were said to represent such a tiny proportion of the overall number that they were subsumed into the "other" category in the annual Prevent statistics.

William Baldét, a Prevent coordinator and practitioner in countering violent extremism for 10 years, said: "I've not personally seen anyone coming through who was explicitly driven to violence by the incel community but we have seen an increase in people engaging with those subcultures. It may be because we are better at recognising it, it may be because of an increase, or both."

He added: "It's clear that misogyny as a concept runs deep through a lot of extremist ideologies. Incel is different in that it's built around a hatred of women and feeling of inferiority, rather than bringing about societal change, but there's a related need to tackle misogyny across society. That should be part of the whole system, at every level, and not just framed trough counter-terrorism."

I'm still not sure if terrorism is quite the right frame to understand it - as mentioned before a lot of the solo attacks seem like school shootings/spree killings to me and I don't think they become terrorism just because they should "allahu akbar" or because they've been radicalised into incel ideology online. As I say I think it probably leads to a different policy response that's more focused on having mental health services available for people and enough teachers/social workers etc who can recognise and help v looking for ideologically driven networks.

But maybe that's just old-fashioned nonsense and we're in an age of the individual terrorist rather than the terrorist group/network/cell etc.

[Sheilbh]

On Geronimo-watch, the owner has acquired or has access to four other identical alpacas. She will be putting them in the same field/barn to bamboozle the DEFRA vets.

I'm now at an Innocent III level of tolerance and just think they should kill them all, God will know his on. But also given that Geronimo has bovine TB it feels like we'll have to do it at some point?

Although now we're moving from moral outrage to increasingly unhinged schemes and capers my sympathy is swaying a little bit.

[Tamas]

OK so now surely all alpaca must be put down having been exposed to TB?

[Duque de Bragança]

I can assure you, nobody's watching in Austria.

Germany's Spiegel had an article on Geronimo the Alpaca a day or two ago... 

Still unheard of in France and Portugal.