Jenrick, Suella’s attack poodle
Rwanda asylum bill is too weak to be a deterrent, says Robert Jenrick
Jenrick, Suella’s attack poodle
Rwanda asylum bill is too weak to be a deterrent, says Robert Jenrick
I didn’t mean smart in the American sense. I use it in the usual UK way, meaning socially advantaged, for want of a better way of putting it. Nothing to do with intelligence or education.
I gathered that you hadn’t meant “ clean, tidy, and well dressed”, so just went with “ astute, having or showing a quick-witted intelligence”. I hadn’t thought of the “smart new restaurant” meaning fashionable and expensive.
I’ve not heard ‘smart’ as socially advantaged. Perhaps, what I have previously taken to be compliments, weren’t!
Jenrick’s brain is too weak, more like.
From the article:
Even if the Rwanda plan takes the full number of asylum seekers that has been agreed with Rwanda (not forgetting that it is a symmetric agreement so we have to take the same number from them) I can’t see that 0.25% chance of getting shipped to Africa will put people off - after all that they will have gone through to reach the northern French coastline and the distinctly non-zero chance of death attempting to get from there to the UK.
The scheme is not designed to dissuade people from crossing in small boats, I’m not sure the government wants to stop that at all because if they do then they lose their manufactured problem about which they can, with great fanfare claim to be “attacking the problem” but about which they do precisely zero which makes a difference.
The sad thing is that all this performance does is waste money - some £240-290 million on Rwanda, £1.6 billion on the Bibby Stockholm which at present is housing only around 1/3 of the 500 that it was intended to hold - and it looks like the barge will never be declared safe for that number anyway.
It will never satisfy the likes of Farage who consider legal migration far too high anyway - even if every single one of the 40,000 or so who try to cross the channel annually were turned away it would be less than 10% of the current annual net migration. No matter how hard the Tories try Farage, Tice and the rest of them will want ever more - rather like Le Pen senior they will not be satisfied until we are actively shipping out immigrants, probably to the 2nd or 3rd generation.
In which case Sunak, Patel and Braverman might well rue what they achieved.
Posh, really, terrible word.
Sounds condescending. Typical British snobbery. A secret language full of put downs for non-Us
I have just navigated my students through some English niceties, saying “the elderly” rather than old people etc. Don’t even know where I would begin if I had to include innuendoes and slurs. They often watch American movies and ask me about the language. At least then I can roll my eyes and say, “Oh well, that’s American!”
Amazing, isn’t it? This is the sort of scum the scum running the UK are dealing with. Birds of a feather.
Sep 27th 2021
ON SEPTEMBER 20TH a court in Rwanda found Paul Rusesabagina guilty of links to terrorist groups and sentenced him to 25 years in jail. His real crime, however, was to oppose President Paul Kagame. Mr Rusesabagina had been kidnapped in order to stand trial in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in proceedings widely condemned as a travesty of justice. That has been the fate, and much worse, of many who have stood up to Mr Kagame. Mr Rusesabagina, however, is no ordinary Rwandan. A hotelier who courageously saved hundreds of lives during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, in which about 500,000 people were killed, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2005. A celebrated film, “Hotel Rwanda”, was based on his life. Yet his appalling treatment and the absurd sentence has scarcely caused a ripple of criticism or pushback. America and Belgium both expressed “concern”. That’s it. Why?
Mr Rusesabagina’s treatment is not an isolated case. Evidence of the brutality and ruthless repression of the Rwandan regime has mounted. Mr Kagame was the de facto leader of the country from 1994 to 2000, when he became president. He long ago quashed any semblance of democracy in Rwanda, and is regularly returned to power with over 90% of the vote. Opponents abroad have been shot or strangled to death. None of these murders has been pinned directly on Mr Kagame’s intelligence services, but the president has openly said that the victims got what they deserved. A recent book by Michela Wrong, a British journalist, chronicles in detail the murder of Mr Kagame’s former intelligence chief in South Africa—and she leaves no doubt as to who she thinks ordered the hit. Mr Kagame has denied that Rwanda was involved in the killing.
Yet through it all, whereas other dictators have been blackballed and sanctioned, Mr Kagame has enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of Western politicians, and in particular the largesse of their governments’ aid agencies. Rwanda has received about 50% more aid per person than comparable countries in the region. The World Bank has committed about $4bn to Rwanda since 1994. By successfully posing as the man who saved Rwanda from the genocide (the truth is more complicated), he convinced a generation of Western leaders—notably Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—that he alone could bind Rwanda’s wounds and elevate its people. Mr Kagame also played expertly on Western guilt for the blood-letting. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written: “The whole world wanted to believe in the miracle that was Rwanda—a country built from the wreckage and devastation that intertribal violence and ethnic cleansing had caused…To our shame, our need for Rwanda to succeed far exceeded our desire or ability to see the cost at which that success was bought.”
If the arbitrary justice meted out to his opponents does not dent Mr Kagame’s reputation, perhaps his record on development will. It was previously his strongest suit, but Rwanda’s government has recently been accused of manipulating statistics to improve its apparent economic performance. Certainly, there is a consensus now that the rapid growth of previous years has evaporated. If Rwanda’s economic miracle turns out to have been a mirage, then, perhaps, people might at last be less starry-eyed about the strongman of Kigali.
The Economist.
I must admit that’s something I love about British English !
I’m not fond of that sort of pussy-footing about.
My bug bear is “passed”. They didn’t pass, they died as shall we all.
There is indeed a lot of pussy footing language to know for someone hoping to enter a service industry.
Cabin crew are taught to take care of ‘elderly’ passengers. Calling a spade a spade is all very well in personal life but may be received as rude in some quarters.
It seems that the civil service don’t see the Rwanda policy working anytime soon…
Not true!
Try the building industry if you want a proper discussion using real language.
I’m sure the construction industry has a uniquely descriptive lexicon but it is not (yet) a service industry.
The construction industry as a specific area of the building industry is indeed not a service industry as it is creating something that hasn’t previously existed however the building industry as a whole does have many areas that qualify as a service industry as once the constructors have done their bit their creation has to be maintained.
The construction industry privides a valuable service and has many secondary off shoots but in itself is not part of defined ‘service industries’.
Maybe because construction involves producing something physical.
Lexical semantics.
Exactly what I said!
Sorry! I do rather enjoy builder’s salty language. I just don’t teach it to my young students.
Actually, one of my young persons has some interesting social acquaintances and keeps me updated on bits of France’s ‘cultural’ terms. Seems quite a bit of Arabic is being adopted. Something to further upset l’Académie française!
This was inevitable really.
To think, this happened on the day the UK’s MPs are discussing (again) the Rwanda deal and how, as Ian Dunt so eloquently puts it, they can allow “the executive to define, by legislation, the empirical reality the courts base their judgements on”
Quite normal, Algeria was a département until 1962. A lot of French army slang is based on Arabic just as in the British army it was based on Hindustani (as was).