Friday, December 29, 2023
Vive la difference - or not!
An indication of how little changes in politics, and how much common ground exists between Labour and the Tories, is evidenced by two articles in today's Guardian.
In the first, the paper reports that sending asylum seekers to holding camps on the Scottish island of Mull and removing them to “safe havens” in third-party countries such as Turkey, South Africa and Kenya, was among the “nuclear options” considered by Tony Blair’s government.
They add that twenty years before the Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, “big bang” solutions were discussed after Blair expressed frustration that “ever tougher controls” in northern France had failed, and demanded “we must search out even more radical measures” to tackle the growing number of asylum claims, which had reached 8,800 in October 2002.
In the second, the paper tells us that the current war between the Tory governnment and the BBC over impartiality and bias was a common feature back in the 2000s when Blair's government were equally as frustrated (as indeed were Thatcher's government before them).
They say that recently released papers show that the former No 10 spin doctor Alastair Campbell suggested setting lawyers on the BBC, while Tony Blair was warned to expect a “magisterial rebuke” from senior figures at the broadcaster, as the row over its coverage of the war in Iraq intensified in the early 2000s.
The pressures of government are the same, regardless of the party in charge, and so are the solutions, it seems, no matter how illiberal.
In the first, the paper reports that sending asylum seekers to holding camps on the Scottish island of Mull and removing them to “safe havens” in third-party countries such as Turkey, South Africa and Kenya, was among the “nuclear options” considered by Tony Blair’s government.
They add that twenty years before the Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, “big bang” solutions were discussed after Blair expressed frustration that “ever tougher controls” in northern France had failed, and demanded “we must search out even more radical measures” to tackle the growing number of asylum claims, which had reached 8,800 in October 2002.
In the second, the paper tells us that the current war between the Tory governnment and the BBC over impartiality and bias was a common feature back in the 2000s when Blair's government were equally as frustrated (as indeed were Thatcher's government before them).
They say that recently released papers show that the former No 10 spin doctor Alastair Campbell suggested setting lawyers on the BBC, while Tony Blair was warned to expect a “magisterial rebuke” from senior figures at the broadcaster, as the row over its coverage of the war in Iraq intensified in the early 2000s.
The pressures of government are the same, regardless of the party in charge, and so are the solutions, it seems, no matter how illiberal.
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Would a LibDem government deal with the problems differently? For example give as much help as possible to the countries migrants come from to improve there lot at home?
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