“I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie” - UK politics June 23 on

Prosecution is a ahocking assault on Unionist culture

Orange Bastard In Nonce Shocker

"In the 1980s he ran the constituency office of Enoch Powell, the former Conservative MP". sounds lovely.

I'm a yank obv but wonder what UK folks think about this take: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1774030136737730661.html?

My job is related entirely to foreign students in the UK, and yes there has been a sustained assault on them as a ploy to get immigration figures down, already we have almost zero EU students, and this year masters-level students are significantly down due to new restrictions on bringing their families over.

Just ridiculous

Allergic to the economic argument for migration, but yes it's accurate as to what is happening. We will all be a lot poorer in all sorts of ways as routes for migration are shut.

In some ways the Tories are throwing the economy under the bus for the next government but it's unlikely Labour will do anything #provemewrong

I don't like economic arguments for anything but it pisses me off that the people who make economic growth their only stated goal are still doing this despite the obvious damage to the economy. Even by their own rules it's stupid and only harmful to the country.

Housing capacity (that is affordable for students en masse, let alone working graduates) is so bad this is the inevitable knock on effect.

I mean we all know that there is loads of unused housing around the UK including London, so I don't see that as an excuse.

fwiw the account in question belongs to someone who most likely agrees with you all about the economic arguments, but is just trying to get at how dumb and cruel the policy is.

Not to mention that compulsory education standards have been in decline due to government policies for years, so if the claim is that easier access to university places should improve life opportunities for British students they might want to start there. Not that I'm expecting sense from anyone, this argument is just theoretical.

i know the attack on humanities degrees as lacking practical utility is hardly just a UK thing, but the sustained assault here seems to be accelerating of late. this twitter thread has been shared by cunts far and wide

If you’re shocked by the £800k taxpayer-funded Shakespeare study, then I’ve got more bad news (although knowledge is power 💪) 🧵

Here are other examples the Arts and Humanities Research Council has funded (with our money):

— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) March 24, 2024

Thought that stuff was silly, grifter twitter rubbish. There is nothing Gill can do about academic studies if the uni sector was in a healthy state.

The main attack on UK uni sector really started with tuition fees and the managerialism that came into the sector. Ultimately, that's driven by questions as to how a thing like a University functions within society, but that is a bit out of bounds for this discussion.

I don't read it as grifter rubbish considering that she works for the Mail and I hear about something like this every other week

https://www.change.org/p/save-arts-humanities-and-social-sciences-subjects-at-the-university-of-kent

I shouldn't have looked but hey, didn't take long to get to the nub of it: 1) decolonising; 2) queer and trans; 3) Islam. One senses it's not the money that's the issue.

To me, that falls into a constant noise made by the press about what goes on in Universities: what kind of courses are taught, by whom, what are they for, how do they prepare the young for work, and so on xp

Like I say, it's my job, so I have more awareness of it for sure, but it's absolutely the case humanities departments are being gutted all the time these days.

fwiw the account in question belongs to someone who most likely agrees with you all about the economic arguments, but is just trying to get at how dumb and cruel the policy is.

You see, there's this group of people who are known as Tories...

oh come on man lol, i am not that thick

you can look him up, he is very much “my team” iykwim

tbh, it’s kind of silly to position the hypothetical international student with dependents a someone with a great first degree to wants to study at UCL but has a young kid. They exist but if that was the typical profile it’s hard to imagine the government would be legislating to stop them.

The last fifteen years of student migration policy has been a back and forth between liberalisation and curbs, either because the government is really bad at tweaking things to get the intended outcome (making the U.K. a competitive place for attracting international students) without the unintended outcome (a lot of people who are mostly motivated by permanent migration opportunities) or , more likely, because that outcome is basically impossible to dial in.

The current restrictions come on the back of the opening up of post-study work opportunities, the removal of which were one of the main reasons applications from outside of China and the EU tanked. The goal was to divert some of the young graduates who are currently going to Canada, predominantly, towards choosing to study in the U.K. with the carrot of a couple of years of work at the back end and potentially a route to a longer-term stay after that.

It did kind of work to an extent but the perception, at least, was that the majority of the people who found the offer compelling weren’t really looking at getting work experience post-study, long-term migration was the goal and study, often ‘low-quality’ business admin, etc, degrees was a means to an end. In a lot of cases, they were much older than the target profile and already had established families. The percentage of visas granted to dependents went up from a couple of percent to 24% and would likely have gone higher. iirc in some major sending countries, applications from dependents were higher than the number of applications from students.

There has always been a huge amount of arbitrage and (outright fraud) in international student migration as it’s basically the only option available to a lot of people who want to live in the U.K. There probably isn’t really a lot you can do to stop it, it’s the price of having a competitive education sector. I doubt Labour will take a particularly different approach. You can probably expect a liberalisation in three years followed by a reactive curb in five when the ‘wrong sort of students’ come.

liz truss posts an Easter picture of her carrying a lamb outside a church. only the church has shuttered windows and is surrounded by security fencing. could she not see?

it's a visibly distressed lamb that doesn't want to be held by clumsy Truss, so obv the lamb is part of the deep state.

Many conflicting feelings:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/31/boat-race-organisers-ask-defeated-oxford-crew-rowing-clarify-sickness-claims-cambridge

It’ll get worse - I reported a leaked document last year showing Sunak was explicitly told that if he cut HS2 and the Euston rebuild it includes, the station will regularly have to close due to “gross exceedance of passenger comfort levels” (overcrowding) https://t.co/EMHwxCFsKN https://t.co/vahrwSP8qD

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) April 3, 2024

Don’t let the doomsters and the naysayers trick you into talking down our country.

The UK is as strong as ever 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/0TsDiFcryO

— Conservatives (@Conservatives) April 4, 2024

something very out of time about the aesthetic of this poster. Kind of a mid to late 2000s landfill indie album cover look, or the opening titles for a comedy panel show from the same era that borrowed elements of that look, Mock the Week, Would I Lie To You etc. Landfill politics.

ahh no greater unifying force in these isles than the England football team

You might argue that the appeal to anybody whose primary voting motivation is "our country" doesn't want to be sophisticated

like these lovely people

Could @Nigel_Farage ‘s 60th birthday party go down in history as the defining moment for the 2024 General Election?
Plenty of famous faces in the house!@realDonaldTrump @TMartinOfficial@JimDOfficial@DavidDavisMP@THEJamesWhale@JuliaHB1@TiceRichard@LeeAndersonMP_… pic.twitter.com/hlVAV1570W

— Charlie Mullins OBE (@CharlieM_OBE) April 4, 2024

Don’t let the doomsters and the naysayers trick you into talking down our country.

The UK is as strong as ever

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWEwZGZhODctZjY0MS00MTViLWE5NDUtMDczZDNiNzBkYzZlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg

(xp) Hey, don't forget Charlie Mullins!

... oh the tweet's by Charlie Mullins lol

Well, that didn't take long.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKVav4_XAAARjxb?format=png&name=900x900

lol perfect

Pay no heed to the naysayers. Drinking sewage is good actually

Full of roughage iirc

shit in the water at night, Oxford rowers delight!

I seem to recall Charlie had a brexit tantrum and joined the LibDems in a fit of pique as a demonstration of his strong political convictions .. lol. A Trump vid on a television doesn't really count as "in the house"

Second toughest in the infants.

who on earth is that tory ad aimed at

Cunts?

Starmer

Welcome to #Dover.#VoteLabour pic.twitter.com/BD6gaDOMda

— Mike Tapp (@MikeTappTweets) April 4, 2024

Yeah, the new Labour voting base I guess. Makes sense.

look at the size of those fucking medals, he must be a great guy

is that how you wear medals of honour or whatever the fuck they are? it looks weird tbh

oh it's a parody account. I'm so bad with this shit these days or alternatively they are so on point it's impossible to tell.

It's a fascinating photo. Big big man, big big flag backdrop, but little little flag pin on his lapel, maybe sending "Little Britain" message? Big big medals, but then little man, miniscule replication of the big man, at the top, dwarfed by the medals and his own face. Gutwrenching disparities of scale, some sort of nationalist code. Eyes like snakes, as metallic as the medal surfaces. And to top it off, the rusty dilapidated underbelly of the board, of the country, barely hidden by all the this shiny bombastic pablum. It's art.

xp
pretty sure it isn't, there's loads of videos of him talking to camera, unless AI is now much better than I thought it was.

Not a parody

https://miketapp.co.uk/

he's wearing a regimental tie too. what a prick