Latest news with #Home Secretary
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Starmer's claim that he's tackling immigration now looks more ridiculous than ever
Why precisely is it that, over the past two decades, the UK has imported so many millions of foreign workers? Supposedly it's because our country has severe 'skills shortages'. Personally, though, I have my doubts. Especially now that this newspaper has unearthed a list of the occupations that immigrants can cite when applying for 'skilled work visas'. And among them, believe it or not, is 'poet'. Now, it may well be true that our country no longer produces great poets of her own. Even so, I'd be surprised if many British employers have been anxiously petitioning Yvette Cooper to allow in more poets from abroad. 'Honestly, Home Secretary, we'd love to hire homegrown poets. Sadly, though, British workers nowadays are just too lazy and entitled to master iambic tetrameter. They'd rather sit at home claiming benefits than get up at 6am to do an honest day's graft on a villanelle or a rondeau redoublé. That's why we urgently need to recruit thousands of hard-working young poets from Poland, Pakistan and Somalia. Otherwise, this country's Petrarchan sonnet industry will collapse.' Even more surprising, however, is another job on the 'skilled visa' list. It's 'diversity and inclusion expert'. If there is one line of work in which Britain does not face even the faintest hint of a skills shortage, surely to goodness it's 'diversity and inclusion'. Every single year, without fail, our universities turn out hundreds of thousands of expertly brainwashed, virtue-signalling woke ideologues. That's easily enough to staff the nation's HR departments. So why on earth should we allow foreigners to come over here and steal these jobs in DEI, when our own deranged Left-wing fanatics could be doing them? Still, perhaps some good will come of this farce. The middle-class Left may finally turn against mass immigration, now it's putting their own jobs at risk. The single stupidest trigger warning yet Readers have long grown wearily inured to the dismal sight of trigger warnings on books that contain politically incorrect language. Even so, the one appended to a new novel entitled Men in Love merits special attention. Because, despite stiff competition, it must be the single most pointless trigger warning ever written. 'As a novel set in the 1980s,' it reads, 'many of the characters in Men in Love, as in society in general, express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory.' The warning then hastily reassures us that the author's use of such hurtful language is not 'an endorsement' of it – it's merely his 'attempt to authentically replicate' the way that all too many people used to speak in those shamefully unenlightened times. At first glance, the above may seem no worse than any other trigger warning. But what makes this one so outstandingly imbecilic is that Men in Love happens to be by Irvine Welsh. Indeed, it's a sequel to Trainspotting – his bestselling 1993 novel about the harrowing misadventures of a group of Scottish heroin addicts. Bearing this in mind, I'd love to know who exactly the trigger warning is intended to appease. Men in Love 's publishers, it would seem, believe that Mr Welsh has readers who will happily lap up graphic depictions of drug abuse, violence, underage sex and dead babies – and yet be horrified by the occasional scrap of sexist dialogue. God only knows what sort of complaints they expected to receive, if they didn't add the trigger warning. 'Dear Sirs, 'For the past three decades I have been an avid reader of your esteemed author Mr Irvine Welsh. With unalloyed pleasure I devoured Filth, his charming 1998 tale of a psychopathic, cocaine-snorting, sexually abusive police officer with a talking tapeworm. I equally adored Porno, his joyful 2002 romp about a gang of thugs attempting to produce a pornographic video. And, like millions of other cinema-goers, I delighted in the 1996 film adaptation of Trainspotting – thanks not least to that splendid scene in which a gentleman with diarrhoea explosively fouls the bedsheets of his young lady companion, and then accidentally sprays the sheets' contents all over her parents while they're eating breakfast. 'You will surely understand my disgust, therefore, when I opened Mr Welsh's latest novel Men in Love – only to discover that one of the characters refers to a woman living with obesity as 'a fat lassie'. 'Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled. Never in all my years of reading Mr Welsh did I imagine that he would stoop to writing something so unspeakably offensive. 'Please inform this sickening lout that, unless he makes his cast of violent working-class Scottish smackheads start talking like a panel of Guardian columnists discussing gender equality at the Hay Festival, I shall never read another word he writes.'
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
If you dial 999 you CAN expect an officer to attend, but we're pretty stretched, says Met Police chief
The chief of the Metropolitan Police has admitted the service is 'stretched' but maintained that members of the public who dial 999 can expect an officer to attend. Sir Mark Rowley spoke on Sky News ' Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, where he attempted to reassure viewers that officers would respond to urgent calls. 'If you are in the middle of the crisis and something awful is happening and you dial 999, officers will get there really quickly,' he said. 'I don't pretend we're not a stretched service. It comes as Sir Mark has called for better resourcing for police. He added: 'We are smaller than I think we ought to be, but I don't want to give a sort of message of a lack of hope or a lack of determination.' 'I've seen the mayor and the Home Secretary fighting hard for police resourcing,' he added. 'It's not what I'd want it to be, but it's better than it might be without their efforts.' The police chief went on to say that racial disparities in the criminal justice system are 'shameful' for London. He said racial disparity among suspects and victims of crime in the capital was a 'difficult' issue for the force. The Met Police Commissioner said there was a history between policing and black communities 'where policing has got a lot wrong, and we get a lot more right today '. 'But we do still make mistakes. That's not in doubt,' Sir Mark added. 'I'm being as relentless in that as it can be.' He continued: 'The vast majority of our people are good people. 'But that legacy, combined with the tragedy that some of this crime falls most heavily in black communities, that creates a real problem because the legacy creates concern.' 'It's not right that black boys growing up in London are more likely to be dead by the time they're 18, far more likely than white boys,' the commissioner said. 'That's, I think, shameful for the city. 'The challenge for us is, as we reach in to tackle those issues, that confrontation that comes from that reaching in, whether it's stop and search on the streets or the sort of operations you seek. 'The danger is that's landing in an environment with less trust. 'And that makes it even harder. But the people who win out of that, all of the criminals.' He added: 'I'm so determined to find a way to get past this because if policing in black communities can find a way to confront these issues, together we can give black boys growing up in London equal life chances to white boys, which is not what we're seeing at the moment.' 'And it's not simply about policing, is it?' he added. 'I think black boys are several times more likely to be excluded from school, for example, than white boys. 'And there are multiple issues layered on top of each other that feed into disproportionality.' Sir Mark also said that the criminal justice system was 'close-to-broken' and can be 'frustrating' for officers. He said: 'The thing that is frustrating is that the system - and no system can be perfect - but when the system hasn't managed to turn that person's life around and get them on the straight and narrow, and it just becomes a revolving door. 'When that happens, of course that's frustrating for officers. 'So the more successful prisons and probation can be in terms of getting people onto a law-abiding life from the path they're on, the better. 'But that is a real challenge. I mean, we're talking just after Sir Brian Leveson put his report out about the close-to-broken criminal justice system. 'And it's absolutely vital that those repairs and reforms that he's talking about happen really quickly, because the system is now so stressed.' Sir Mark gave the example of Snaresbrook Crown Court in London, which he said had more than 100 cases listed for 2029. 'If it's someone on bail, then who might have stolen your phone or whatever and going in for a criminal court trial, that could be four years away. 'And that's pretty unacceptable, isn't it?' he added.
BBC News
6 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Digging into Channel migrants deal and how we verified luxury yacht fire
Update: Date: 09:42 BST Title: Welcome to BBC Verify Live Content: Rob CorpBBC Verify Live editor Good morning. We're working to unpack the UK government's pilot scheme agreed with France that will see Britain return migrants who arrive in small boats back across the English Channel. Our fact-check team has been listening to the home secretary on BBC Radio 4 this morning talking about the plan and will report here about what she's said. We're also working to verify footage posted online showing an apparent Russian drone strike that's damaged a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv following another night of air attacks across the country. And we're monitoring social media for the latest verifiable information from Gaza where more than 60 people were reportedly killed yesterday by the Israeli military - eight of the victims were children queuing in front of a health clinic.
