Giles was an extraordinary lawyer and legal writer and was always willing to take the time to help a good cause.
Really sad to hear about this. May his memory be a blessing. nearlylegal.co.uk/2026/04/gile...
Looking to rehome these journals for the cost of postage only - UK based. Costs £12 to post 20kg and less to post less #booksky #academia #archaeology #history
Long thread alert 🧵
1. The Home Secretary has accepted she has discretion to grant leave on the five-year route without imposing a no recourse to public funds condition. Until now, applicants were told to accept the condition or switch to the ten-year route.
New from FM: Home Secretary accepts she can grant further leave on the five-year route without the no recourse to public funds condition | Nakita Hedges
This sort of thing is very irritating. The Home Office are telling people that they WILL be able to apply for settlement after 10 years (this is from a grant under the current 10 year route). Totally irresponsible given the Earned Settlement proposal is a near certainty.
Re: the current moment
Perhaps a big disconnect comes from the gap between "people who can see through the hype and are assessing utility in a post-hype environment" and "people who know how dangerous the hype is precisely because being able to see through it is actually pretty rare in humans"
Thank you!
Now officially my most read post on there, hopefully helpful for anyone planning to do a complaint (which I am going to sit down and do next week, once rested)
Over the last 4 yrs, @dotwuk.bsky.social has participated in the UK COVID-19 Inquiry. Yesterday the Inquiry published its report on vaccines and therapeutics.
It is a huge win to see the Inquiry officially recognise that NHS migrant charging and Home Office data-sharing undermined vaccine uptake.
A copy of the Immigration Act 1971 inscribed and signed by Gerald Kaufman, former Labour Shadow Home Secretary with a commitment to repeal it.
Found this in the archives. Just imagine.
It’s genuinely staggering how little substance there is to today’s instalment of the BBC’s attempt to create a national crisis out of a few unproven allegations of immigration fraud 1/
This really does look like one of the best jobs ever. And the recruitment process is impressively inclusive as well.
(Maybe I'll start writing more public-facing pieces so next time this comes up I'll meet the requirements! Absolute dream job for a researcher with great writing skills...)
BBC News is going very hard on its investigation into advisers who help people ‘fake’ asylum claims, focusing especially on people who falsely claim to be gay. But it doesn’t say what percentage of claims are made on the basis of sexuality. As of 2023 — the last available figures — it was 3%.
The real issue this highlights is decades of cutting legal aid, and creating a complicated, unfair and impossible to manage system, make people very vulnerable to anyone who tells them they can help, and can I have all your money please?
Another way asylum seekers are exploited.
The *top two* stories on the BBC site, plus a 3rd further down, are now about the claims of scammers which the BBC presents as evidence of the asylum process being “systematically exploited” - whilst also admitting they don’t know how widespread the issue is. Practically a Reform mouthpiece now.
Thought this was an interesting little chunk. The people running this government have forgotten how to make a sincere argument for what they are doing.
The ICIBI invites anyone with knowledge and experience of the Home Office's engagement with local authorities in the planning and development of asylum accommodation to submit evidence for the inspection:
Shoutout to @jdportes.bsky.social for getting this info as Govt. have been refusing to publish economic impact assessments. That £600m "saving" will end up being spent on managing hate crime/community cohesion and trying to fix an utterly decimated care system. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Lessons for the Brits exist abroad. We're the last domino in a European wide cycle. We've theoretically got the most advantageous position against authoritarian/fascism. Will we make the most of it?
My analysis of the fiscal impact of the "earned settlement" proposals, based on government's own data.
The direct savings are a fraction of the Home Secretary's misleading claims, and likely to be offset by the substantial costs of lower work-related migration.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Once again the government are moving asylum seekers who are members of our congregation, with almost no notice, to cities hours away, and no matter how many times it happens I don't get any less mad.
Screenshot of POLITICO London Playbook email, showing Palantir sponsorship
Oh, FGS -
@politico.com is taking sponsorship money from Palantir - running their ads through news updates.
That's absolutely the *last* thing we need in our politics, Palantir going straight for the political-media environment at a time when we need massive scrutiny of their contracts in the UK.
Journalists know that losing the Wayback Machine would be a nightmare: www.wired.com/story/the-in...
The team from HS2 are very nice about the fact I hadn’t noticed their massive new overpass. “Of course, you’ll have seen this from the train,” they say, as we drive beneath the Small Dean Viaduct, one day to speed trains across the A413, a local road and the existing Chiltern rail line. But despite the fact it’s 345 metres long and weighs 4,500 tonnes, I’d missed it, because I’d been looking out of the wrong window or possibly at my phone. Oh well. At least I get to see it now. It’s pretty good. Top viaduct. Would pass under again. Every now and again, someone is nice enough to invite me to go and look at a half-finished construction scheme somewhere, so I can marvel at the cleverness of a modern engineering project. In the past few years I’ve had a go on Cecilia, the Tunnel Boring Machine then gnawing its way under the Chilterns; I’ve been down in a waterlogged hole in the ground that will one day house Old Oak Common station; and I got a sneak preview of the Elizabeth Line, a trip that resulted in a grumpy DM from a current Cabinet minister asking how the bloody hell I’d got onto that mailing list and how he might do the same. Today – just over five months ago, actually, but let’s not be picky – I’m off to a relatively rural stretch of Buckinghamshire to look at some more megastructures that will one day be part of HS2. When I’d told people I was doing this, some expressed surprise, of the “Oh, are they still building that?” variety. The last government did scrap everything north of Birmingham, it’s true, with abysmal consequences for service patterns, value for money and faith in the ability of this country to do literally anything all at the same time. Actually, the mad idea of terminating trains at Old Oak Common, rather than Euston, has thankfully been dropped – the tunnel boring machines began their journey east early this year – and the stretch of the line from the western outskirts of London
A couple weeks ago, Nicholas Keung at the Toronto Star reported on how generative AI is being used to assess immigration applications in Canada...and how it's led to refusals because of stuff the AI tool added in, that humans (clearly) failed to check.
www.thestar.com/news/canada/...
Look, at this point *everyone* agrees we should spend more time away from screens, children and teens especially, outdoors even.
But it's not going to work if you say teens should never do physically boisterous stuff in large groups. They're gonna do it anyway because it's thrilling and fun!
A little bit of my brain melts every time.
the simulation within which we live saw fit to have Colbert recite mountain goats lyrics with superb dramatic weight about 14 minutes in
youtu.be/YOzyCF3cFNc?...
Good luck!
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