Keep poor people out

The BBC reports that:

The government has pledged to cut net migration from 242,000 - the figure for the year ending September 2010 - to the "tens of thousands" last seen in the 1990s.

It plans to do this by making the UK such an unpleasant place to live that large numbers of current residents leave.

Well, no. That's just a happy side effect of its other policies. It plans to directly do this by setting a really high minimum salary - over £31,000, or more than 75% of existing workers earn.

Because the Conservatives are a pro-family party, people wishing to live with their non-EU partner in this country will be subject to a somewhat less strict standard. Their partner need only earn around £20,000, or around median wage, to be allowed in.

(Their pro-business and pro-British credentials are going to take a bit of a hit from this "minimum wage increased for foreigners only" policy, too)

"Genuine and continuing"

In my earlier post on consultations, I found one by the UK Borders Agency on family migration.

If you're interested in that area, and would like to encourage the government not to put too many additional barriers in the way of bringing families together (family values, right?), then it's worth completing the consultation if you have time.

The first question is complex enough in itself. From the consultation document, emphasis mine:

2.8 Migration based on marriage or partnership must be based on a genuine and continuing relationship, freely entered into by both parties. It must not be based on a marriage or partnership of convenience, entered into in an attempt to gain immigration advantage. And it must not involve coercion.

This seems all very well, but the problem that arises is what does "genuine and continuing" actually mean, beyond an "I'll know it when I see it" definition that varies depending on the views of the immigration officer in question. In practice there's a risk that relationships sufficiently different to a "default" relationship will be excluded, depending to at least some extent on the privilege and heterocentrism of the immigration officer.

So, it's understandable that the government wants to have a more formal definition¹ of "genuine and continuing", and there would be benefits in the transparency of the process if they did - but of course I don't really trust them to get the definition right².

The current rules significantly privilege people who are either married or in a civil partnership, or intend to do so in the UK. Coming to the UK to live together but not marry or enter a civil partnership is more difficult.

Existing marriages and civil partnerships are taken into account - but of course, there are relatively few countries where same-sex marriages are allowed at all, and many of those are inside the EU anyway.

If the applicants are not civil partners or married (or intending to become such), then they must have lived together "in a relationship akin to marriage" for at least two years, already in the UK.

"Akin to marriage" is an interesting term. In practice, it implies an exclusive monogamous relationship. Again, this gives an unusual inconsistency - someone could be in a poly relationship and able to sponsor a partner to whom they were married but who had been outside the country for years to come to the UK, but not a partner to whom they were not married but had spent several years living with in the UK.

A codification of the existing rougher standards would be very problematic. On the other hand, a codification of a broader standard could be very useful to families wishing to move to the UK.

The first consultation question asks how they could go about making a written standard for "genuine and continuing" relationships. I wasn't able to suggest an answer to that - how do you write a standard that isn't exclusionary? - but I did recommend some areas not to include in the definition, and that if they did make a definition, that was itself put to further consultation.

Footnote

¹ This of course doesn't just affect migration - if the codification of a definition of "genuine and continuing" appears "successful" to the government when used there, it may well be extended to other areas of government work.

² And in the current anti-immigration political climate, they have quite a bit of incentive to get it wrong.

Scapegoating refugees for political advantage continues

[trigger warning]

So the news today is reporting that the Home Affairs Committee has described the news that 40% of asylum cases since 2006 have been given leave to stay in the UK as an "amnesty".

Well, of course they do. The idea that it's even remotely possible that anywhere near 40% of asylum claims might actually be justified is hardly going to be considered by politicians who view "immigrants" as a convenient scapegoat for all the country's ills.

Cue the usual comments from the usual suspects about "illegal immigration" and "overstaying visas" - none of which apply to asylum claims that are pending a decision, but it's useful to that argument to pretend all immigrants are coming over here to take our jobs and claim our benefits - and how the government hasn't yet succeeded in building a ten-mile high wall around the country to keep those nasty foreigners out. Except the white English-speaking ones, of course.

The idea that people might actually be claiming asylum because they face persecution and possibly death in their original country seems irrelevant - and with large parts of the world being unstable - indeed, with the UK playing its part in keeping large parts of the world unstable - the idea that 40% or more of claims might be justified doesn't seem unreasonable.

Given that the [trigger warning] deportation of LGB asylum seekers back to Uganda and other unsafe countries continues, despite assurances from the government that it wouldn't, it seems there's a very strong case that the UK isn't being generous enough when it comes to saving people's lives.

More bad education policy, more misguided criticism of same

Education funding policy is back in the news again after journalists noticed that David Willetts MP (Conservative, Havant, Minister for Universities and Science) had suggested that in addition to the publicly-funded places, universities should be able to offer unfunded places to UK students, with the fees payable up front.

Cue massive misplaced outrage about the rich being able to buy university places.

The proposals had a lot wrong with them, and they appear to be being either quietly dropped or quietly hidden for a few weeks. That they let the rich buy university places was not one of the problems.

A quick recap

Undergraduate places available to UK applicants are subject to a strict quota, with universities facing harsh penalties to either under- or over-recruiting to that quota¹. Since the universities have to make offers to most potential undergraduates without knowing if those undergraduates would make the grade, this causes a lot of tension among admissions departments, since making the wrong number of offers is a very costly mistake.

On the other hand, if there wasn't a penalty, then the government could be required to pay for far more places than it had budgeted for (yes, they're going to end up doing this anyway)

Places for international undergraduates are not subject to any direct² quota - universities can recruit as many suitably qualified applicants as they can attract. However, there is no UK public funding for these students (though some may obtain grants from their home country's government, of course) and so they must pay the full costs of their degree - which can be whatever the university declares them to be.

The proposal would allow (or rather have allowed) universities to also supply "off-quota" places to UK students, on the same terms. This would quite clearly not have worked.

Why it was (yet another) doomed idea

Students needing these places are the ones who have failed to successfully compete with the other UK undergraduates for the publicly-funded places. That doesn't make them underqualified - universities reject plenty of straight-A students - but it does mean that they're unlikely to do any better competing against the international undergraduates for the off-quota places.

While there's no externally-imposed limit on how many off-quota undergraduates a university can take, there are plenty of internal limits. Lecture theatre capacities, availability of academics to teach, and for some universities the availability of accommodation for students are all limiting factors. Being willing to pay the off-quota fees doesn't avoid competition - it just gives a second chance.

Since the students who go to study abroad tend to be the best a country has to show, getting a place on this second chance is probably going to be even harder than getting one of the publicly-funded places.

The idea was that the fees would be paid from corporate or charity sponsorship, rather than directly by the student - but what company³ is going to sponsor someone to go to university who couldn't get an offer the normal way? Far more cost effective for them to provide some living-cost grants to several students who did get in.

The number of UK students who actually took an off-quota place - and bear in mind anyone rich enough to do this could study abroad instead - would be tiny.

Like many of this government's policy ideas, it seems to be a way to generate controversy, reinforce their reputation (both constituent parties) as a party for the default, and not actually help any of the people they were nominally supporting.

Not buying places for the rich

What this outrage basically ignores is that the ultra-rich can and do already buy university places for their children.

The admissions processes of universities try to be fair and judge each candidate on their merits. This just isn't possible from a few expected grades, a short personal statement, and maybe a 10 minute interview - especially not with the number of applications that need processing - but universities generally do their best.

The problem is that - as with everything else - a context-free equality of treatment just gives the advantage to those who already have privilege. Rich families can give their children many of:

1. A home environment focused on academic learning⁴
2. Private schooling
3. Interview practice (especially for Oxbridge)
4. Private tutors
5. Access to expensive extra-curricular activities, including gap years, that look good on a personal statement

Middle-class families can give their children enough of those privileges to give them a good chance at a place as well, which is why there's not much wider complaint about this arrangement.

Being outraged that the rich would be able to buy their children university places at market rates rather than subsidised rates is rather strange, in that context - I'm sure that if a "left-wing" group had proposed means-testing fees support so that the ultra-rich weren't entitled to any and had to pay up front, there would have been very little complaint⁵.

Footnotes (and extended asides)

¹ The total quota for all UK universities is smaller than the number of people who would like a UK undergraduate place. This is a major reason why the whole "market in higher education" won't work - as can be seen by the vast majority of universities declaring at £9,000 - demand outstrips supply. The threats of "A uni that as an Oxbridge graduate I consider a Third Rate Ex-Poly can't charge £9,000 - students will go elsewhere" that ministers were making were completely empty: applicants have nowhere else to go except "not to university at all".

Then recall that students are effectively not paying the fees with their own money due to the extremely generous loan repayment terms (which resemble a tax more than a loan), for many students the repayments when/if they graduate on a £7,000 a year degree and on a £9,000 a year degree will be exactly identical; for the rest there will be relatively little difference, and earning a salary in excess of £40,000 a year^1a will probably make them uninclined to care.

So demand is higher than supply, and the difference between the low and high prices is negligible. No-one has an incentive to charge a low price, and no-one has any economic reason not to pay. (Fear of debt, because of all the huge numbers being thrown around, is a reasonable but not economically sound reason)

I've actually been quite surprised by how many universities haven't declared £9k fees across the board - I expect by 2014 or thereabouts the fees will have crept up to this.

^1a I'm not saying all graduates will go on to a 40k or above salary - I'm saying that only those who do will notice a difference in repayments between those two costs of degrees.

² The whole "we will cap immigration to a round number whether it's a good idea or not" policy that the government is imposing does provide a national limit. This has already led to conflicts on international student numbers between the government departments responsible for racism ("keep those foreigners out!") and money ("they're willing to pay tens of thousands to UK organisations, let them in!")

³ Of course, a family rich enough to afford the up-front fees can probably also afford a front company to pay the grant, but they can probably also afford to just buy the place the old-fashioned way.

⁴ And because this is something that the rich provide, academic learning becomes morally more valuable than other ways in which a home environment can be good.

⁵ I would have objected to this, because the problem with this means-testing (and it's a problem with the existing set-up too) is that it assumes that the only barrier to all young applicants to university getting financial support from their families is their wealth. Applicants whose families don't want to fund them through university but theoretically could get the short end of this stick.

The NUS LGBT campaign has been pointing out from years that the students they represent are particularly vulnerable to their family refusing financial support; they're not the only un-privileged group of students this applies to.

The danger of headline statistics

One of the most common ways of misleading people with statistics is to carefully select a statistic from a larger data set, and then make inferences from that statistic as if it were representative of the data set. This can lead to headline statistics which imply the opposite of the underlying reality.

Being able to spot these and show up the misdirection is sometimes quite tricky.

For a (relatively straightforward) example, a statistic that often gets quoted in arguments about gender equality is that "over 80% of those dying in workplace accidents are men". I'll use this to illustrate some of the common problems with these sorts of headline statistics.

[trigger warning: workplace deaths, murders]

Problem 1: scoping of the statistic

There's no indication on this statistic of what country it's related to or when the data was gathered. I couldn't find a formal breakdown for the UK at all, and didn't feel like guessing from the names on the accident summaries. Looking at the available statistics for other rich industrialised English-speaking nations, the headline figure is almost certainly true, though.

However, not having a year or country specified makes it very difficult to look beyond the headline at the details - which details?

Specifying "workplace accidents" also statistically excludes those cases where someone is intentionally harmed while working, since that would be compartmentalised as a police rather than a health and safety matter. The various murders of sex workers would not, for instance, be counted, which significantly skews the gender balance of the statistics, but not of the actual workplace dangers.

Problem 2: implying a cause

The implied cause is that there is discrimination against men which causes them to die more in workplace accidents. There are actually several other factors involved.

Who can die in the workplace?

Firstly, more men than women have jobs at all. Here's the UK's Labour Force Survey.

In 1971, the ratio of men to women in employment was 3:2. ¹

In 1992 - the first year for which detailed statistics are available - the ratio is closer to 5:4, but the detailed statistics show that almost all the men are in full-time employment, while only slightly over half of women are.

In 2010, the base ratio is around 8:7, but the full-time/part-time patterns are much the same. There has been a slight rise in the number of men working part-time, and a slight rise in the number of women working full-time, since 1992, but it's not a major difference.

If we assume on average that a part-time worker works half the hours of a full-time worker, that means that men are collectively working in paid employment between a third more and twice as many hours as women collectively work in paid employment (depending on the year)

So, some of the difference is caused by the difference in hours worked. Men are more likely to die at work because they collectively spend longer there. Note that greater male employment is generally not considered evidence of discrimination against men.

Who is likely to die at work?

Some jobs are considerably more dangerous than others. The Health and Safety Executive collects data on fatal injuries at work (including fatal injuries to members of the public who were in a workplace).

Many of the deaths of workers occurred in the Construction and Agriculture sectors, both of which mostly employ men and involve large amounts of heavy machinery.

There are a number of reasons for most employees in these sectors being men, but they are not reasonable to describe as discrimination against men.

Problem 3: missing the real problem

The problem with workplace deaths is not that men die in workplace accidents, it's that people die in workplace accidents. The correct thing to ask the magical society fairy for is an end to workplace accidents, not an equalisation of who dies in them by gender.

There can't be many accidents that wouldn't have happened if - all else equal - the worker in the unfortunate position hadn't been a man². Nor are there likely to be many potential fatal accidents which were only avoided (or at least not fatal) because the worker wasn't a man.

So, primarily, the solution is to try to make workplaces safer. This - at least in the UK - is happening. Fatal workplace accidents have fallen to less than a half of their rate in the early 90s³. A combination of regulation and guidance of health and safety has helped make the UK one of the safest places in the world to work⁴ (though that's not the only reason, of course; see below).

Problem 4: not distinguishing between primary and secondary effects

There are privilege-related issues here - class, gender, immigration status, and disability, for instance, can all lead to situations where someone has to take a job which is less safe. Internationally, the UK is able to use its trading wealth to export a lot of the more dangerous work to other countries so that foreigners die on our behalf.

These are all important issues, with established campaigning groups for all of them, especially in the trade union movement.

For immigration status, it's a direct consequence of the harsh treatment we give to undocumented migrants - and the low value we place on their lives as a society - which makes it easy for unscrupulous employers to exploit them knowing that they can't easily report their employer to the authorities.

The danger they are in is a primary consequence of their immigration status, and so the solutions have to consider that: generally making workplaces safer won't help because there is no practical mechanism for enforcement against that employer (who is already breaking a vast range of laws and won't mind breaking health and safety law too).

For gender, the disparity in workplace accidents (not workplace deaths in general - see above - but accidents specifically) is not a primary consequence of the workers' gender, but a secondary effect from a number of gender-related issues:

• Men are more likely to have paid work, and for more hours, due to well-documented discrimination against women, childcare being seen as primarily (or even only) a woman's job, and so on.
• Men (especially working-class men) are encouraged into paid work requiring physical activity, whereas women are discouraged from this. This happens both at the stage of career choices, and in the workplace itself where hostile anti-women environments can be self-perpetuating. The "men's work" is generally better paid than the "women's work" for equivalent knowledge and experience.

As a consequence of these, there are more men in dangerous jobs than there are women - but it's a consequence of discrimination against women, not discrimination against men: all of the components that cause it are positive for men, even if this one side-effect is negative.

Conclusion

The headline statistic is often used to imply discrimination against men. The underlying data shows no such thing (though there are genuine issues related to gender and other aspects of discrimination).

Footnotes

¹ As with all UK official statistics, the existence of people who are neither men nor women is ignored. Depending on the method by which statistics are collected, misgendering of at least some of the trans people in the sample is also extremely likely. The lack of useful data means that I can only discuss men and women for this post.

² I've no idea about how you'd ethically go about testing this, but it's not a completely outlandish hypothesis that since men are socialised to be more confident than women, and get more tolerance for minor errors, they're more likely to cut corners on safety procedures as confidence shades into recklessness, and this accounts for a higher proportion of accidents in male-dominated workplaces.

³ Adjusted for the relative proportions of industries, the UK has the lowest fatal accident rate of all EU countries, and less than a third (per 100,000 workers) of the rate in the USA.

⁴ Naturally, rather than taking some pride in this achievement, many of the popular papers and politicians feel that we aren't, as a nation, killing enough workers, and want to see much of the protective regulations repealed. The people suggesting this generally do not work in jobs involving heavy machinery, steep drops, or other dangerous environments, where the trades unions representing the actual workers tend to be quite in favour of workplace safety.

Save Refugee and Migrant Justice

Via Left Outside and Anji Capes at The F-Word, the news that the charity Refugee and Migrant Justice, which provides free legal representation for asylum seekers, is in danger of closing.

They have produced a leaflet (PDF) explaining the reasons for the problem and summarising the valuable work they do.

If you have time, please write to Kenneth Clarke QC MP, Minister for Justice, and to Damian Green MP, Minister for Immigration, to ask them to reverse the changes in how legal aid funding is paid and so keep a valuable service running.

Here's the letter I've sent. Refugee and Migrant Justice have their own suggested letter (though, if you have the time to write your own, do so - it will have more impact) and contact details for the ministers.

Dear Kenneth Clarke QC MP, Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor

The charity Refugee and Migrant Justice, which provides asylum seekers with legal representation, is currently facing major financial problems due to a change in the way that the Legal Services Commission funds legal aid work.

Rather than being paid monthly to cover costs incurred, payment is now being made only at the conclusion of each case, which can take many months, and leaves the charity having to fund a large amount of expenditure in advance.

The charity does excellent work in its provision of representation, which improves the efficiency and accuracy of the asylum process. It would be extremely unfortunate if it were to close solely due to a failure of the Legal Services Commission to pay promptly the money owed to it.

Without the work of Refugee and Migrant Justice and other organisations, asylum seekers that the previous government would have wrongly and shamefully sent back into danger would not have had access to the representation they needed.

Please ensure that the asylum system is able to conduct itself with fairness, transparency and integrity, show that you are committed to improving on the record of the previous government in this area, and either reverse the change in the Legal Services Commission rules, or if this is not possible, provide interest-free loans to Refugee and Migrant Justice to allow it to keep operating under the new rules.

Yours sincerely,

[me]

Too high a standard

The BBC reports on the proportion of potential new citizens to pass the citizenship test. The overall pass rate was 70.9%, and to pass requires answering at least 18 questions out of a 24 question test correctly.

When the test was first announced, this sample test (flash-based, might not be very accessible, at least two of the questions on the sample test have answers that are not strictly true) got passed around various forums. Numerous UK citizens had a go at it.

The pass rate for UK citizens, I think, was between 10% and 20%. Without cheating and looking things up on the internet, I got 13 out of 24, which is nowhere near enough, but was a fairly typical score. It should tell you how useful some of the knowledge tested is to being a UK citizen, anyway.

There's a booklet that one can get before taking the test, that goes through the facts that might be tested. What the test is actually testing is that:

1. You can read English well enough to read the book and then interpret the questions.
2. You have a good medium-term memory for apparently pointless facts.

Unsurprisingly, the pass-rates for migrants from countries where English is an official language are really high (presumably the people who failed were those who were never any good at exams, and/or had disabilities that made the test environment inherently unfair), and the pass rates for migrants from other countries were much lower.

It's in keeping, of course, with the country's apparent need to be unfriendly to immigrants (while remaining reasonably friendly to ex-pats) that it sets a test for citizenship that the majority of the existing citizens would never pass without practice.

Some good news

Bita Ghaedi, one of the four people the government was sending back to Iran, in the knowledge that this would likely lead to them being killed by the Iranian government or their family, has been given at least a temporary reprieve.

They will now have a hearing on 21 July, although they will be detained in the infamous Yarl's Wood until then.

I cannot understand how anyone can claim with a straight face that we have a good asylum system when it takes a combination of a volcanic eruption and both the UK and European courts to save someone's life.

I hate this election so much

There's less than a week to go before the general election now, and I'm tired of it. None of the candidates I could vote for are ones that I really support, and another pile of election publicity has just come through the door. In common with most election publicity, it actually makes me less likely to support the party it's from.

This has been an election by and for the default, as usual, and it's getting less and less hopeful by the day.

In my constituency, ignoring the far-right BNP, the almost as problematic UKIP and the independent candidate (nothing against independent candidates in general, I just don't agree with either of this particular candidates's major policies), that leaves the three main parties. The Conservatives of course are the party of the default, and their claims otherwise are not believable. Unfortunately it's looking more and more likely that they'll win nationally.

That leaves two candidates - Labour and Lib Dem. They're better than the rest, but that's such a low bar.

Labour

Labour have come up with some excellent policies over the years that weren't for the benefit of the default. They undid most of the homophobic legislation that had built up over the years, introduced SENDA (which provides some legal protections for students with disabilities) and the Equality Act, introduced hate speech protections for LGB people, and many other good things. They're also the party with by far the greatest proportion of non-default candidates and former MPs - though still much less than the population in general - and have taken significant steps to fight entrenched privilege internally to get that far.

They've also done a lot of things wrong. The Equality Act was good in many ways, but went backwards on trans* rights and in some areas of anti-racism. The laws protecting LGB people from hate speech were modelled on the religious hate speech rather than the stronger racial hate speech laws, and missed out protection for asexual people entirely (and that was before the Lords diluted them further).

The areas where they've spent the most time following the demands of the right-wing press and ignoring the needs of people, though, as far as I can tell, have been on immigration, terrorism and disabilities.

On disabilities, they have introduced incredibly tough checks to try to catch "benefit cheats" (despite disability-related benefits having the lowest fraud rate of all benefits), designed without any consideration of whether it's reasonable to put disabled people through those checks.

These are especially bad for people with disabilities with intermittent symptoms, who might well be able on one particular day to carry out the demands of a job designed by people with abled privilege, but who won't be able to consistently do the same every day, every week, every month. So they're "well enough to work" and don't get the benefits from the point of view of the government, but not "well enough to work" from the point of view of anyone offering employment (and, of course, this was introduced mid-recession, so there are even fewer jobs around than usual). There is an anti-discrimination law in place, but it doesn't go far enough as regards making employers make the necessary adjustments.

In the name of fighting terrorism, they've brought in more and more powers for the police - which they've then used in non-terrorism cases, disproportionately against black African-Carribean people. They've brought in compulsory strip-search scanners, with all the horrible implications for everyone with a non-default body of any sort. They've contributed to the demonisation of Muslims, and it's looking very likely that at the very best they've not done enough to stop our allies using torture on our behalf. And that's at best. That would all be bad enough, but then there was the assistance with the invasion of two countries, causing the avoidable deaths of thousands of people, and then failing to deal with the aftermath of invasion at all well.

On immigration, they've bought entirely into the racist rhetoric and framing of the subject (and then act surprised and shocked when their own supporters repeat it back to them). They've passed 5 separate acts related to immigration in the last 13 years - all designed to increase restrictiveness of non-EU immigration (EU immigration cannot be restricted under the terms of EU membership, but then, most of the people migrating around the EU are white, so maybe they don't want to)

The Yarls Wood detention centre is infamous for its abuse of detainees. Oakington is perhaps less well known, but a man died there not long ago. There are probably many others where I haven't seen the news, or no-one's reported it. Rejection and deportation of LGBT asylum seekers seems to be almost automatic, no matter how likely they are to be killed when we force them back. The Labour government has not only continued previous immigration policies, but extended them to make them more restrictive, more harmful, more racist, and more violent.

In the recent Labour publicity today, there are these lines:

There are three important facts you should bear in mind before giving [the Lib Dems] your vote:

1. They want an amnesty for illegal immigrants even though this could encourage more illegal immigration to the country.

...and in a separate letter, personally signed by the local ex-MP...

And [the Lib Dems] policy on immigration could encourage more people to try and come here illegally.

This is unsolicited publicity. I haven't written to them and said "I'm a bigot and worried about black people coming over here - can you do something about it?". This is what they think will appeal to me. This is what they think I want. This is one of their reasons I shouldn't vote for the other party. This is in the same leaflet where they criticise the Conservatives saying

The Tories haven't changed. David Cameron and the Tory policies deliver for the privileged few not the many.

Hah. The Conservatives certainly would do that, but Labour don't have the moral high ground here.

This is not what I want. I want an immigration policy that treats people as people. I want one that doesn't bend to the dehumanising wishes of racists.

Enough of this.

The Liberal Democrats

So, with my anger at Labour out of the way for now, let's look at the only plausible alternative on my ballot paper, the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dems have, as a point in their favour, not been in power for decades, and so have not as a result of their policies yet killed anyone.

Their party constitution is the only one to include an explicit non-discrimination statement. Their voting record on LGBT rights is extremely strong (and they put forward many good amendments to the Equality Act, many of which didn't even make it to a vote). Their manifesto includes a range of good policies, many of which explicitly for non-default people.

They support electoral reform and proportional representation, which I believe would make it easier for views outside the default to be represented in government.

And yet...

For all these fine words and talk, I'm very uneasy. They have this big policy on non-discrimination in their Constitution - but they also have the lowest proportion of the three major parties of female candidates (lower even than the Conservatives) without anywhere near as much use of the partial excuse that the other two parties have that in most cases incumbents should be allowed to continue (the same was true a few years back in local elections here). They refuse to use all-female shortlists which even the Conservatives are trying, and which Labour's use of is the only reason we're on ~20% women in Parliament rather than about 6%.

Of their BAME candidates, of which they only have 43, none are in a seat they could plausibly win. Regardless of the election result, the Lib Dem parliamentary party is likely to remain extremely white (and it shows in their policies)

On abortion and pro-choice legislation, the party is split roughly 50:50, compared with Labour whose MPs mostly vote in favour. (On the other hand, they do have the strongly pro-choice Evan Harris, who did a lot - without success - to try to get actual pro-choice amendments passed).

And then there was Charles Kennedy. He was elected as leader of the party, replacing Paddy Ashdown, in 1999. Over the following years, he led the Lib Dems to their highest number of seats since the collapse of the old Liberal party in the early 20th century. In 2006, he announced that he had been seeking treatment for alcoholism to pre-empt this being announced in the press. Within a day, most of the senior Lib Dem MPs had said that they could not accept him as leader. He'd had this condition for a while and at the same time he'd run the party well and led it to its best election results. Once he announced that he was seeking treatment for it, with some success, though, no, he had to go.

The Lib Dems remind me very much of my days as a Students' Union officer, where we had a massive equal opportunities policy, listing about 20 separate grounds on which discrimination would not be tolerated (and still omitted gender identity, because we were cisnormative like that), and officers for each of the types of discrimination that Students' Unions considered major (sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia) - and did very little useful about any of them (a good LGBT association excepted) because there was so much privilege in the people who could do something that we were no less discriminatory than we would have been without the policy. We also liked STV.

So, it's not like they're particularly trustworthy on these matters either. They'd make different mistakes to Labour, but that's not necessarily a reason to vote for them.

Spoilt Ballot

I can't help feeling that after thinking about this for so long I should be able to make some decision between the two least worst options available.

I'm furious with both parties for their failures, which are not exhaustively listed above (but neither are their successes, so that seems fair). I do know that both would be better than any of the alternatives. A spoilt vote gives equal weight to all six parties on the ballot paper. That's definitely not what I mean. I can't give them half each, so giving one of them 1 whole vote is better than giving the BNP or UKIP even a sixth of a vote.

Help?

If anyone knows anything about the two parties that I'm missing - good or bad - along the same lines as above, that you think might be useful for making my decision, please let me know in comments. (But bear in mind, I am really not in the mood for partisan apologists right now)

ETA: I've already read Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy, and Penny Red on this subject, both of which were helpful and on similar lines. Neither is particularly convincing about why the Lib Dems are better, though they are right about why Labour is not good enough.

Is the aim to be a fatally unwelcoming country?

[trigger warning]

Via Shakesville, the news that yet another asylum seeker has had their application refused, on the apparent grounds that "will be executed because of their sexuality" is not sufficient persecution.

There is a petition to sign.

It is also possible to contact the Home Office and the Home Secretary Alan Johnson directly, even though the general election means that there are currently no MPs. Contact details are on the Home Office website.

My letter to them follows. You may find the government's information on UK asylum policy useful when drafting your own.

Dear Home Secretary Alan Johnson,

The asylum decisions made in the case of Kiana Firouz, a lesbian actress from Iran, have recently been brought to my attention. It is my understanding that the Home Office has rejected her asylum request and appeals.

According to the UK Asylum web pages,

"Asylum is protection given by a country to someone who is fleeing persecution in their own country"

and

"The UK also adheres to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents us sending someone to a country where there is a real risk they will be exposed to torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

In Iran, the penalty for homosexuality is 100 lashes for the first three offences, followed by execution for a fourth offence. All of these surely count as "torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" and the strong possibly of execution surely must count as "persecution"

Returning Kiana Firouz to Iran is likely to lead to her death, and this decision seems to have been taken despite it contradicting both the European Convention on Human Rights, the Home Office's own statements on the criteria for accepting an asylum application, and the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which states:

"No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of [...] membership of a particular social group."

I ask you to please reverse this decision in the case of Kiana Firouz, and to take steps to ensure that the UK never in future abandons any person to be executed, imprisoned or otherwise persecuted on the grounds of their sexual orientation.

Yours sincerely,
[me]

An unvalued life

[trigger warning for links]

A 40-year old Kenyan man has died in detention at the Oakington "Immigration Reception Centre", after apparently being refused medical treatment. Other than the article linked, there's this piece in the Morning Star, a couple of pieces in local news, and a short piece on the BBC. No other major news sources have mentioned this, as far as I can tell, nor the protests by the other people in detention there.

It's not the first time Oakington IRC has been in the news for mistreatment, either. The centre is run by the private security company G4S on behalf of the UK Border Agency, in the usual way of hiding the accountability in the fine print of the outsourcing contracts.

Yarl's Wood detention centre, also run by a (different) private company on behalf of the Border Agency, likewise has a catalogue of abuse. The surprise nowadays would be to find one that doesn't.

The government defends these places, and refuses to close or completely overhaul them. The principle, presumably, is that asylum seekers claim to have fled an extremely dangerous and/or abusive situation, so won't complain if put in only a very dangerous and/or abusive situation, or perhaps that if the asylum process is made as unwelcoming as possible, people attempting to flee to a "safe" country won't consider Britain "safe".

It's another very stark reminder of how the government and the mainstream media consider the lives of foreign, mostly-BME, mostly-poor people (and there are intersections with other types of discriminations such as ablism and sexism as well) worth far less than the lives of mostly-white UK citizens, and also less than the relatively small increases in costs associated with properly training the staff at these centres, having proper monitoring and accountability to stop abuse occurring, and immediately dismissing and pursuing criminal charges against anyone who does abuse a detainee.

There have been a few civil cases where people subjected to abuse at these centres have managed to get significant settlements from the government as some form of partial compensation - but where are the criminal cases against the abusers themselves, who are presumably able to do the same again.

The media and the far-right parties have managed to create a very racist and dangerous set of attitudes towards foreigners (except the white English-speaking sort) and immigrants, which rather than pushing back against, the more centrist parties, including the allegedly centre-left Labour government, have encouraged and competed with a race to who can be tougher against immigration and asylum seekers.

They would all complain extremely loudly if other countries were to take a similarly abusive approach to the UK's citizens, of course (though it might take something happening to a rich white citizen before anything more than complaints were done). Meanwhile, another person is dead, almost certainly in part due to racism, and nothing will be done.

We're not sufficiently unfriendly yet, then

So, a group of 20 MPs and peers has called for immigration to be capped to keep the UK population below 70 million.

Last year the Office for National Statistics said, if current trends continued, the UK population would rise by 10 million to more than 71.6 million by 2033 - the fastest rise in a century.

Now, firstly, of course, the latest ONS report says that last year's current trends, unsurprisingly, didn't in fact continue, and the population estimates have been revised downwards considerably. It's likely, therefore, that no matter what anyone does, the UK population will stay below 70 million for some time to come. The government can therefore do absolutely nothing and meet this policy anyway.

This doesn't stop this group making some unpleasant and inconsistent arguments to advance their case for a formal cap. After denying that this is about limiting non-Christian immigration, Lord Carey goes on:

But, he said, immigrants must "understand" the UK's culture, including parliamentary democracy "which is built upon Christian heritage", "our commitment to the English language" and an understanding of the country's history.

Much easier, of course, for immigrants from English-speaking majority-Christian countries such as the US or many Commonwealth countries, than for others. But this isn't about limiting non-Christian immigration at all. Really.

The system should not "give preference to any particular group", he said, but added that points-based immigration could take these cultural aspects into consideration.

So, they want to take cultural aspects into consideration in a way that gives certain people an advantage, but they don't want there to be an overall bias. I wonder what bonus points that are really hard for English-speaking Christians to pick up they want to include.

He added that immigration was an issue that mattered to "ordinary working-class people" and that it was important to tackle "that kind of resentment which could build and is building up already".

It's resentment that's building up because no prominent politician is willing to publicly challenge the myths around immigration and to argue that it's a good thing for the country, and a lot of unchallenged and generally accepted racism used to argue that it's a bad thing. So instead you have people arguing that we must cap our population at an arbitrary figure or some loosely specified crisis will ensue. What happens at 70 million that doesn't happen in largely the same way at 69 or 71? But no, round number equals crisis.

Lord Carey said too much population growth in the UK could foster "dangerous social conditions", with some minority ethnic groups, such as young Muslim men, suffering "disproportionate" unemployment.

So, some groups are disproportionately unemployed, for a number of complex reasons including racism in the recruitment process and racism and classism in the country more generally. The solution to this, apparently, should be to stop any more people from those groups coming to the country. I'm not sure how that will help either the people from those groups already here, or the potential immigrants we would reject under this policy, or indeed anyone else.

The high unemployment rate (which has also risen disproportionately during the recession) is a real problem, but the solution is definitely not to reinforce the existing racism by suggesting that further immigration from those groups should be heavily restricted. Furthermore, this high unemployment rate is also a problem for people whose families have been in the country for decades or centuries - it's not a case of people immigrating here and then being unable to find work.

"Poll after poll shows the public to be deeply concerned about immigration and its impact on our population."

I've done a few polls with questions about this myself for YouGov. The question they ask - and it may be different for other polling agencies - is to list a number of areas of government policy (health, education, defence, employment, etc.) including immigration, and to tick those that you are concerned about (or the three that you're most concerned about, sometimes).

I am quite concerned about the government's immigration policy - especially the horrific mess that is our asylum process, which is on many occasions intentionally inhumane. I never tick the "concerned about immigration" boxes on the surveys because there is such a strong assumption that anyone ticking that box does so because they think there is too much immigration. Pretending to be apathetic on those issues, while technically incorrect, seems safer.

"It is time parties turned their rhetoric into reality by making manifesto commitments to prevent our population reaching 70 million by 2029."

Well, yes, this is the core of the problem, isn't it. The government doesn't - as such - have a general problem with immigration or immigrants. The largest category of migrants to the UK is international students, who the government is very happy to have in the country because many pay substantial fees to universities, and in many cases effectively subsidise the Higher Education system for UK students.

On the other hand, the major parties believe that racism is a vote-winner (and most of the major newspapers try to push them this way), which means that they have to publicly come out against immigration in terms of rhetoric, and try to restrict it in areas that don't have that much actual effect, or against immigrants they don't particularly care about (asylum seekers, for instance).

Obviously, the actual effect of the policies doesn't match the rhetoric. I'd like to see the rhetoric adjusted to match the policies - for politicans to publicly state that the vast majority of immigration is either clearly economically beneficial to the country, or morally necessary as decent humans, since the alternative is to give in to the demands to adjust the policies to match the rhetoric. When the majority of the groups given press attention are calling for harsher policies, though, this is unlikely.

No recourse to public funds

I mentioned the No Recourse to Public Funds mass lobby of Parliament last week. Living up in the North, there's no chance of getting down to London on a weekday. Amnesty International have a page of alternative actions - here's the text of the letter to my local Councillors based on their suggestions.

Under the "no recourse to public funds" rule it is not possible for many non-citizens to claim benefits such as housing benefit and income support. An unpleasant consequence of this rule is that people trapped in an abusive relationship are often unable to use shelters for the victims of domestic violence, as they are unable to claim the benefits that the refuges use for funding, which would be available to UK citizens who were victims of domestic violence.

Could you please tell me:

1. What measures Durham County Council has in place to ensure that victims of domestic violence who are affected by the "no recourse to public funds" rule are able to access the services that they require.
2. What pressure the Council is placing on central government to ensure that its costs for providing these services are covered.
3. What steps the Council plans to take more generally to improve the range of services available for victims of domestic violence.

WriteToThem provides contact forms for your Councillors as well as MPs, which makes this a bit easier.