Scrutable

They've now voted down Clause 11! That's the one that would have created a two-tier system for refugees.

Every time I think "hooray for the lords" I do a little bit of sick in my mouth, but at least they're not as bad as Tory MPs.

I think the Lords is sometimes accidentally an effective check & balance on Parliament. Dunno why. Maybe being generally older & at the end of their careers means they don't give a stuff anymore/aren't beholden to vested interests/free to develop a conscience, or they're just more likely to consider the longer term.

raven wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 5:46 pm I think the Lords is sometimes accidentally an effective check & balance on Parliament. Dunno why. Maybe being generally older & at the end of their careers means they don't give a stuff anymore/aren't beholden to vested interests/free to develop a conscience, or they're just more likely to consider the longer term.

Age might be an influence on The Government succeeding in the Lords, but I think the biggest factor is that no party has an overall majority. This makes it a lot easier for the Government to lose a vote.

I think the biggest factor is that many of the Lords are not politicians and feel much freer to do as they think is right rather than what they think will get them re-elected.

Does anyone know how deportation flights actually work?

As the racists are fond of pointing out, many migrants are "fighting-age males". They do not want to get on a plane. If a regular passenger is disruptive (or, say, appears to have been taken ill...) before a flight takes off, the standard action is to remove them from the aircraft. Given a 767 with 250 seats, how many unwilling individuals can you transport? How do you stop them kicking off, either before or after takeoff? How many police officers do you need to have shuttling back and forth to Kigali in these planes to deal with 20,000 annual arrivals?

I found this description of a US deportation flight, where the men were shackled but the women weren't. But (reading between the lines somewhat) it seems that most of the men had some kind of criminal conviction. The claim for the Rwanda scheme is that people will be driven from Dover to the airport, no judge, no nothing.

In any case I presume no major airline will touch these flights with a bargepole. This story reports that a UK deportation flight to Jamaica was operated by a Spanish charter company called Privilege Style, which is pretty f.cking ironic — their cabin crew are presumably trained to be nice to Champions League footballers and horrible to deportees.