The convoy arrived just after sunrise: a stream of police vehicles, council trucks, mounted cranes and coaches, ready to dismantle a tent city of migrants and refugees in the heart of Dublin that had become too big, too visible, too political.

They fenced off streets and herded shocked, sleepy men from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other countries on to buses and began to extirpate about 200 tents, gradually extinguishing all traces of the camp, but no amount of sweeping and hosing could remove the whiff of elections and diplomacy gone wrong.

Everyone agreed the shantytown around the government’s International Protection Office (IPO) at Lower Mount Street was an abomination – unhygienic, unsafe, unfair, a stain on Ireland ’s conscience – but the manner and timing of its removal reeked of politics, both Irish and British.

Read More..

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “The government’s move to detain people is causing fear, distress and great anxiety among men, women and children who have fled war and persecution to reach safety in the UK.

Labour has denied it will continue with the Rwanda removals in government, after a senior source told the New Statesman the party could retain the scheme while it tries to agree a returns agreement with the EU.

Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said Labour would categorically not send any asylum seekers to Rwanda – though he said the party would not seek to bring back any people who were sent there under the Tory government.

Read More..

Khan, who is up for re-election on Thursday for a historic third term, said the Tory candidate, Susan Hall, was the most “dangerous” Conservative opponent he had faced after it emerged she had joined a Facebook group containing Islamophobic hate speech and abusive comments about him.

Khan suggested the Conservative party was “testing” whether their tactics in London – a lunge to the right with closed Facebook groups, YouTube and Instagram attack ads, and paid direct mail – could be used at the general election.

He defended UK Labour’s focus on winning back voters it lost in the 2019 general election wipeout even though it could cost him some progressive support, after the party faced some internal unrest over the dominant use of the union flag in campaign material.

Read More..

Another child was in the care of children’s social services when he received a notice of intent for Rwanda awaiting the outcome of an age assessment.

“We know that last year, there were numerous cases of children who had been detained as adults being issued with notices of intent to remove them to Rwanda on flights that ultimately never took off.”

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “One of the most egregious elements of the Rwanda plan is the very real risk it could see children, incorrectly judged as adults, being shipped off on a one-way ticket to enter another country’s asylum system that our supreme court has ruled is unsafe.

Read More..

“Workers are often forced to accept poor conditions and precarious contracts across sectors due to desperation and extreme power imbalances between employers and employees in the UK,” the union’s general secretary, Henry Chango Lopez, said.

But Starmer and his chief of staff, Sue Gray, have come under pressure internally to drop the commitment to begin legislating for it within 100 days – including from some senior party figures – in order to give more time to consult on the different and complex definitions of employment status.

Labour is understood to be finalising a dossier for the implementation of the new deal, combining the original proposals in the green paper and the changes that were agreed at the National Policy Forum (NPF), including on zero hours.

Read More..

A secret, unpublished memo from Margaret Thatcher’s tax-cutting chancellor Nigel Lawson warned against merging national insurance and income tax because it would “create many losers” including pensioners.

In the brief, Lawson says he has considered “the scope for integrating income tax and national insurance contributions”, but concludes: “I see little practical merit in moving in this direction; it would destroy the contributory principle and create many losers, especially among the elderly.”

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow paymaster general, called the Lawson memo “the unexploded bomb which blows apart Rishi Sunak’s case for the merger of income tax and national insurance, and if he wants to persist with that plan now, he will need to explain why he is ignoring the advice of his own hero and instead asking pensioners to pay the price”.

Read More..