Is being ashamed of what other people do a common phenomena?
The behaviour of Robert Jenrick, the voters of Newark, the population of the UK, or the people of Europe, has very little bearing on how I feel about myself.
Some people obviously carry a heavy burden!
its performative.
I think you’re right. The question is really “To whom are they performing?” there’s a good percentage of Tory voters who think that their immigration and migration policies are unnecessarily cruel and inhumane. There’s an even bigger percentage of the total population who think the same.
Who you're being cruel to doesnt really matter so long as it isn't 'me'. In the past it has been variously Single Mums, People who don't open their curtains early enough in the morning, Homosexuals, Miners, Teachers, Experts. In this case I think the performance isn't to 'a good percentage of tory voters' but the noisy minority of tory activists. The ones you have to appease by giving Sulla Bravaman a job. They constantly demand they have bones thrown to them then complain its the wrong bone and you didn't throw it properly and they don't want it now because you touched it.
I genuinely don’t understand how he had the authority to give the instruction….. ultra vires and all that.
he’s the minister for immigration. It’s an immigration centre - is he not ultimately responsible for everything that happens there? The order for the paint literally comes with his name on it. Next time something goes wrong and they try to say it’s really run by civil servants - they are going to have a challenge showing that he wasn’t in control of every detail.
Why wasn’t he simply ignored?
The article does say staff resisted, but ultimately there will have been a do it or your fired implied threat. Consciously or sub consciously the staff involved balance up competing issues:
- their need to pay the mortgage
- their individual moral compass, a significant number of people in the U.K. think we are too welcoming to immigrants, some of those people inevitably work in the immigration department chain of command
- the fact if they take a stance, someone else will likely do it eventually
- the risk of the vacancy you create being filled by someone much more sympathetic to the tories
- the damage to the kids from the art being removed
- the damage to Jenrick from the story being passed to the media - the damage is greater if he ordered it painted over and it got done than he suggested it.
Presumably the Border Force or whoever is responsible for the building isn’t predominantly staffed by the most pro-refugee lefties in the country? If you sit at that end of the spectrum I am guessing you don’t apply for a job at the place designed to keep people out?
It's not just Jenrick, his permanent secretary and others would have been involved. It's not as if he deals directly with the managers on the ground
he’s the minister for immigration. It’s an immigration centre – is he not ultimately responsible for everything that happens there?
I wouldn't expect him to be responsible for the day to day upkeep of individual buildings and the colour scheme used on walls, no.
Well not unless he is immigration-reichsführer.
The question is really “To whom are they performing?” there’s a good percentage of Tory voters who think that their immigration and migration policies are unnecessarily cruel and inhumane. There’s an even bigger percentage of the total population who think the same.
the problem isn’t actually the regular Tory voters or Tory activists - the sort who will vote for whoever wears the blue rosette regardless; they are actually trying to appeal to the floating voters and least loyal of the Labour Party. That’s why Starmer isn’t clearer on this - because he knows there’s a large chunk of immigrant hating racists within his party’s traditional voters.
Some people obviously carry a heavy burden!
It's mostly due to having empathy with the group* being oppressed due to toxic populism
*insert whoever the tories and RWM are punching down on this week.
Just for clarity, a mod edited my thread title. I certainly didn't describe that POS as a man!
because he knows there’s a large chunk of immigrant hating racists within his party’s traditional voters.
Well that is obviously bollocks. "Immigrant hating racists" are very much a small minority among voters, and getting smaller. Which is why the NF and the BNP, who are openly "immigrant hating racists" have disappeared up their own arses.
You need to knock on doors and meet traditional Labour voters.
Yes, at first glance it looks like a ‘Tory being mean story’. But it says that the centre is for unaccompanied child asylum seekers. Now, we know there is no war in France so these children have travelled from I’m guessing Iraq/Syria at least. On their own, of their own volition, and not stopping in the first safe country but travelling across many further safe countries until they reach the UK… </p><p>To me that seems pretty spectacular for a child. How did they raise the money for a start before we even get into the logistics of travelling across a continent. Yes, you do hear occasionally of the child who manages to take a plane journey on their own. But they’re certainly outliers, from wealthy western families where the child has a passport and access to funds. I’m amazed that there are indeed so many children like this that a dedicated centre in Kent needs to be built to process them. Or are these in fact those “children” with full lustrous beards? In which case is a Micky Mouse mural really appropriate
Oh this thread is descending into proper predictable bollocks. Time to move on!
Hear me out on this jambourgie, it's just a wild guess, but maybe it's possible that some of the children were sent by their families?
A long shot I know, it's entirely understandable that such a far-fetched theory didn't cross your mind when you were composing your post. But maybe there's a smidgin of a chance? No, probably not.
Changing the subject completely, but have you ever heard of Mo Farah, by the way?
I wouldn’t expect him to be responsible for the day to day upkeep of individual buildings and the colour scheme used on walls, no.
and that is exactly the sort of defence they try to use when something bad happens, but officially every decision is made in their name. government contracts are issued in the name of the Secretary of State for Education, rather than “department for education” etc. He’s been badly advised doing it, because at some future inquiry or court case he will try to say he had no involvement with some element of safety / I’ll treatment etc and someone will say “so you ignored the safety stuff but you were involved in deciding which paint went on the walls”. Imagine paying all these Spads to keep you right and still being this clueless?
of course it does give potential lines of attack against the future Labour immigration minister. “So you spent tax payers money on redecorating a wall which was only a few years old” or “you complained about Jenricks murals but you’ve done nothing to fix it” - lose-lose.
Is being ashamed of what other people do a common phenomena?
The behaviour of Robert Jenrick, the voters of Newark, the population of the UK, or the people of Europe, has very little bearing on how I feel about myself.
Some people obviously carry a heavy burden!
It has a very real effect on me how we, as a country, are viewed by the outside world. I went to Germany a few weeks ago and had to explain to a few people in the bar why Brexit had happened, why our politicians were acting like a corrupt regime in some 3rd world country and why not all of us are racist gammony bigots. I made a point of having the legal white UK badge on my car but also my old European GB one too, much to the annoyance of the elderly couple behind me in the Channel Tunnel. The woman was particularly annoyed when I said that I had renewed my passport early so as to get one of the last burgundy ones, even had a little dig at her that her proudly held blue one was Polish.
Should I have to go abroad and feel like I have to apologies to everyone for the way the country is acting and being run? No but it definitely feels like it's required to avoid being judged.
Jambourgie - it’s almost like there’s people actually smuggling folk across borders. Imagine how grim it must be in your own country, if you either pay a random person to take your child away to another one in the hope they do better there or hand them over knowing that they will become slaves at the end of the process but that seems better than keeping them with you.
erniynch - you don’t need to shave your head and get a swastika tattoo to be racist, UKIP, the Tories, even parts of Labour, and the right wing press have all found ways of presenting racism in ways that make BNP redundant. The biggest mistake the opposition parties can make is thinking that anti-immigration sentiment doesn’t exist in their voters or that it’s an ecconomic and humanity concern not a xenophobic/racist/religious factor. The biggest mistake the government can make is thinking it’s high up people’s priorities.
Should I have to go abroad and feel like I have to apologies to everyone for the way the country is acting and being run? No but it definitely feels like it’s required to avoid being judged.
No, you could grow a spine and stop the pathetic virtue signalling. Honestly, reading your post I felt embarrassed that people like you are representing us abroad. But mostly I just felt embarrassment for you.
Yes, you do hear occasionally of the child who manages to take a plane journey on their own.
what has ‘hearing about it’ got to do with whether something happens often or not.
you don’t here about it because it’s too common to be news worthy. My girlfriends first job nearly 30 years ago was as a children’s worker in Heathrow airport working with unaccompanied child migrants and asylum seekers. It was common enough for the job to exist. People go to great sacrifice to get their children to a safe place in desperate circumstances. And ‘sacrifice’ can mean more that cost or effort. It happenes more often than we like to think it would seem, and for longer than we’d seem to have realised too
still spouting the first safe country crap....
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is clear: “there is no requirement under international law for asylum-seekers to seek protection in the first safe country they reach”
what has ‘hearing about it’ got to do with whether something happens often or not.
you don’t here about it because it’s too common to be news worthy. My girlfriends first job nearly 30 years ago was as a children’s worker in Heathrow airport working with unaccompanied child migrants and asylum seekers. It was common enough for the job to exist
Thanks for that. I honestly had no idea this was a thing. Yes, I realise it’s highly irregular to admit on the internet to not knowing everything 😉
It seems to me though that ultimately, responsibility for these children lies with their parents. Why is this illegal trade being enabled? Keep the mural but send the children back to their parents where they belong. I mean what next, sending kids to the UK via DHL? Probably safer and cheaper actually.
Why is this illegal trade being enabled?
please tell me this is a rhetorical question.
Which is why the NF and the BNP, who are openly “immigrant hating racists” have disappeared up their own arses.
They disappeared because their agenda was adopted in full by men who wore suits and spoke with the 'right' accents so they didn't look like thugs*, first by UKIP, which was then itself appropriated by the Tory party and here we are...
* this has now gone full circle with the 'New Conservatives' like Johnathon Gullis who is clearly just a meathead football hooligan in a suit
Yeah and then when you ask the question "why aren't they voting Tory" the reply comes back "because the Labour Party is now the party for immigrant hating racists”.
It is just nonsense used in a desperate attempt to explain something which clearly doesn't fit into the preferred narrative of middle-class Herberts.
It seems to me though that ultimately, responsibility for these children lies with their parents. Why is this illegal trade being enabled?
parents who send their children to safety do so because there’s the real risk they and their children might die.
my aunties and uncles were evacuees (my mum was too young) - sent away to safety, for years, separated from their parents and each other, to escape from the bombs falling on our cities. Can’t believe my grandparents were so irresponsible.
After press reports of him making a widely-reported Covid-lockdown visit to them, I discovered that his parents live only a few hundred yards from me. Next time I'm walking past with the dog, I'll check if they have a lawn, and then maybe take a diversion to the freezer section of the Co-op for sausages.
my aunties and uncles were evacuees (my mum was too young) – sent away to safety, for years, separated from their parents and each other, to escape from the bombs falling on our cities. Can’t believe my grandparents were so irresponsible.
Wow. That’s amazing. Where was this from and too if you don’t mind me asking? When roughly was this? Was it during an age vastly different to the present one. (Like when the ECHR were written). Were criminal gangs used to ship your aunties and uncles in unsafe boats?
Jenrick is whatever he thinks people want him to be.
If he thinks ‘racist thicko’ plays well in Brexit Britain then that’s the persona he will adopt.
He obviously thinks it is a rich vein to tap. He is, most likely, correct.
Very much ^^this^^
The ambitious wing of the party is very much caught up with performative bastardry at present.
They've twigged Lil' Rishi is a lame duck, but they're not getting Bozza back any time soon. Hence they're far more focussed on using their remaining time in "power" to draft the opposition narrative for the next parliament by supporting unenforceable racist policies and deliberately not addressing immigration backlogs all while trying to whip up a faux moral panic about "the boats". All of this will come to fruition during Labour's stint.
The game now is for Jenrick and his ilk to try and position themselves as the political mouthpiece of frustrated Bigotry for the next decade, ideally with media Access to complain loudly about the world but without the means to enact anything... That's the dream.
Petty shit like painting over a mural for refugee kids is just to keep their hand in. Real full fat gittishness takes far more effort and is seldom as politically rewarding...
Absolutely this!
Hence Cruella positioning herself ready to be an absolute shoe-in when they jettison Rishi after losing the next election. Egged on by the racist pensioners of Eastbourne, the Daily Mail and conspiracy-theory nutjobs on Twitter, she will drag the party further into the wild shores of the far right, where previously only Tommy Robinson and Nick Griffin could be found
Jenrick is presently Cruellas sock-puppet, I'm sure he's hoping he still will be once she's installed as party leader. I'm sure she'll be happy to reward his like-minded cruelty and intolerance
Egged on by the racist pensioners of Eastbourne
I have no time for any racist who might live in Eastbourne but just to give this issue some context:
'Last year, hundreds of asylum-seekers were forced to sleep outdoors in squalid conditions near an overcrowded reception centre as the number of people arriving in the Netherlands outstripped the available beds. Dutch aid agencies provided assistance.
Just over 21,500 people from outside Europe sought asylum in the Netherlands in 2022, according to the country’s statistics office."
I haven't yet heard of hundreds of asylum seekers being forced to sleep outdoors in the UK. And last year there were 74,751 asylum applications in the UK, so considerably more than in the Netherlands.
The UK imo has long had fundamentally racist immigration policies, but I would be genuinely interested in being given an example of another similar European country which doesn't, or at least less so.
Wow. That’s amazing. Where was this from and too if you don’t mind me asking?
From London to pretty much every corner of the UK - My mum was the youngest of 7 and didnt really know who her brothers and sisters were until they came home at the end of the war.
Ahh, during WW2. Fascinating story that. Thanks for explaining.
It was completely different circumstances though.
its performative. It’s not about being cruel, it’s about being seen to be cruel. It’s what their voters (or the voters they want to appeal to) want to see.
they want to see other people being treated badly. It’s important to make sure it’s clear that there are people who are outside the club so that it feels like you’re inside the club. People will overlook a lot about their own circumstances if they see others who they think deserve to be worse off being demonstrated to be worse off.
100%
The question is really “To whom are they performing?” there’s a good percentage of Tory voters who think that their immigration and migration policies are unnecessarily cruel and inhumane. There’s an even bigger percentage of the total population who think the same.
The last reliable opinion poll, conducted in 2016, would suggest otherwise. That's certainly where the likes of Jenrick are taking their cues from.
He even played the wounded soldier over the trumped up antisemitism 'row' in the Labour Party. Think about that for a moment - playing that card whilst conducting the UK's current immigration policy.
It was completely different circumstances though
The circumstances probably don’t look that different if you’re Syrian
Are Russian/Assad bombs different from Nazi ones in some way?
@jambourgie People don't send their children away, unless they see no hope where they are. They send children away when days are fraught with danger and death is imminent. Safety is not in a refugee camp or just over the border to the neighbouring country often the same forces that have wrecked their home country are often present in the neighbouring countries and the camps. Safety is ideally with trusted family and in the affluent so called 1st world
Fortunately I don't speak from experience.
The last reliable opinion poll, conducted in 2016, would suggest otherwise. That’s certainly where the likes of Jenrick are taking their cues from.
In 2016 39.6% of Newark voters voted Remain, 60.4% voted Leave, Robert Jenrick voted Remain.
With such a huge Leave majority it is unlikely that the Local MP wasn't aware of local feelings.
I think you give Robert Jenrick too much credit with regards to how much he cares about the opinions of his constituents. He has one of the very safest Tory seats in the country, he knows very well that he can do pretty much whatever he wants and still get re-elected.
Were criminal gangs used to ship your aunties and uncles in unsafe boats?
You're gonna absolutely lose your mind when you find out Jews bought forged passports and paid people smugglers to escape the Holocaust. Presumably you would have preferred they sat around waited for the safe, legal Holocaust Escape Bus (with three point safety belts and sanitiser dispensers).
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/jewish-history_a-tale-of-passports--profiteers-and-escaping-nazi-persecution/45479902
https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2016/03/28/passage-over-the-pyrenees/
https://auschwitz.net/espana-refugio-de-judios/
Interestingly, from that last link, it seems the Auschwitz Memorial's slogan is "Not long ago. Not far away". That seems very appropriate.
much to the annoyance of the elderly couple behind me in the Channel Tunnel. The woman was particularly annoyed when I said that I had renewed my passport early so as to get one of the last burgundy ones, even had a little dig at her that her proudly held blue one was Polish.
tbh mate you and this (probably fictional) couple sound like you deserve each other.
jambourgie I have taught and currently do teach unaccompanied migrants from a few different countries Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine for example, I have sat and listened to their stories. All I can say is that you either need to gain a shred of empathy, educate yourself or if you cannot do either just focus on shutting up.
If Remain had won, Jenrick would currently be the most One Nation Tory going.
He is simply taking his cues from what he thinks keeps him at the trough longest.
He has no shame, no conscience. He will sit there and lie to your face over and over. No wonder he prospered mightily under Johnson.
He was caught breaking the law (the actual law, not the pretend law that parliamentary standards committees waste their time with) with Dodgy Desmond whilst he (Jenrick) was housing minister. He shrugged and carried on in the job without missing a beat.
He was an early one to be exposed breaking covid rules - rules that his government imposed. He just tossed a few interviewers off with bullshit and carried on regardless.
He is an utter ****. The fact that he now pretends to be more Brexity than a sovereign ring in the kisser is secondary, but only just.
The fact that he’s best buds with Jake Berry tells you everything you need to know.
Handy when getting funds signed off…
https://twitter.com/marinapurkiss/status/1315253148894859265?s=46&t=1lK7Dw1b6RqGJyvufO-trQ
He’s openly corrupt and doesn’t give a ****, because as comrade Ernesto has pointed out, he’s in a constituency where you could pin a Tory rosette on a baboons arse and it’d get elected
He has no shame, no conscience
But he does have 63% of his constituency vote and a 21,816 majority.
I don't know why you think Jenrick gives a toss what people think. IMO he is an arsehole because that is what he is - an arsehole.
It isn't some sort of act to garner votes which he doesn't need anyway.
Yep. He's a copper-bottomed crook using the nastiness of Brexit Britain to get ahead in life. No need for further comment.
jambourgie I have taught and currently do teach unaccompanied migrants from a few different countries Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine for example, I have sat and listened to their stories. All I can say is that you either need to gain a shred of empathy, educate yourself or if you cannot do either just focus on shutting up.
Bollocks. I have plenty of empathy and continually try to educate myself.
FFS stop blaming every conceivable story on brexit. Robert Jenrick was a **** when he voted Remain. Brexit didn't make Robert Jenrick a ****.
The circumstances probably don’t look that different if you’re Syrian
Are Russian/Assad bombs different from Nazi ones in some way?
Oh absolutely. Just completely different in every other possible way.
Brexit didn’t make Robert Jenrick a ****.
It made it more expedient for him to openly act like one.
In the same way that it makes it expedient for Starmer to pretend he's an idiot.
Or are these in fact those “children” with full lustrous beards? In which case is a Micky Mouse mural really appropriate anyway?
It seems to me though that ultimately, responsibility for these children lies with their parents. Why is this illegal trade being enabled? Keep the mural but send the children back to their parents where they belong.
seems like you might want to try a bit more of that self education you mentioned.
