
Here in Kent they want to stop the boats. Did voting Reform help?
'It's mostly about immigration,' says a smartly dressed man on the town's Sandgate Road.
'We voted Reform to sort out the small boats,' says a woman in New Romney.
'There's nothing we can do about stopping the boats, absolutely nothing,' says David Wimble, with a broad smile. This is odd, because Wimble is the newly elected Reform councillor for Romney Marsh. It sounds as if there have been some crossed wires.
Reform won a landslide in Kent, overturning a huge Conservative majority, and Wimble's thumping victory was the party's biggest: he increased its share
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The Guardian
38 minutes ago
- The Guardian
With his immigration bill, Canada's prime minister is bowing to Trump
There are many stereotypes about Canada – that we are a nation of extremely polite people, a welcoming melting pot, and that we're the US's laid-back cousin who lives next door. But right now, Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, is bucking all of that lore after pressure from the US in the form of Donald Trump's 'concerns' about undocumented migrants and fentanyl moving across the US-Canada border. In response, the recently elected Liberal PM put forward a 127-page bill that includes, among other worrying provisions, sweeping changes to immigration policy that would make the process much more precarious for refugees and could pave the way for mass deportations. If passed, Carney's Strong Borders Act (or Bill C-2) would bar anyone who has been in the country for more than a year from receiving refugee hearings. That would apply retroactively to anyone who entered the country after June 2020. If they arrived on foot between official ports of entry, meanwhile, they'd have to apply for asylum within 14 days of entering Canada – a disastrous outcome for people fleeing Trump's persecution. The bill also gives the immigration minister's office the authority to cancel immigration documents en masse. This bill has been widely condemned by politicians and advocacy groups such as Amnesty International and the Migrants Rights Network, who are rightly worried about just how much havoc a change like this could wreak. Jenny Wai Ching Kwan, a member of Parliament for Vancouver East, told reporters the bill would breach civil liberties and basic rights. So what excuse does Canada have for this kind of 180 on its immigration legacy? According to the government, the aim of this legislation is to 'keep Canadians safe by ensuring law enforcement has the right tools to keep our borders secure, combat transnational organized crime, stop the flow of illegal fentanyl, and crack down on money laundering'. In reality, the Bill C-2 contains measures that public safety minister, Gary Anandasangaree, has admitted were a response to 'the concerns that have been posed by the White House'. 'There are elements that will strengthen [our] relationships with the United States,' he said in a press conference. 'There were a number of elements in the bill that have been irritants for the US, so we are addressing some of those issues.' Tim McSorley, the national coordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, condemned the federal government over the senselessness of this move. 'If the government is serious about addressing concerns regarding illegal gun and drug trafficking, it must introduce legislation specifically tailored to that goal, as opposed to a wide-ranging omnibus bill,' he said. The demonization of immigrants has been a talking point for populist leaders throughout the west, so it's not surprising to see Carney lean into that rhetoric in order to appease Trump. Spurred on by the xenophobic rhetoric coming out of the US, Britain, and large swaths of Europe, anyone who comes from away is forced to bear the blame for the economic messes and ensuing societal erosion these countries have found themselves battling. By feeding directly into this pipeline, Carney makes Canada not the powerful country poised to beat Trump at his dangerous games (elbows up, my foot), but a cowardly ally in the US's campaign of terror against immigrants. Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist


The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
With his immigration bill, Canada's prime minister is bowing to Trump
There are many stereotypes about Canada – that we are a nation of extremely polite people, a welcoming melting pot, and that we're the US's laid-back cousin who lives next door. But right now, Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, is bucking all of that lore after pressure from the US in the form of Donald Trump's 'concerns' about undocumented migrants and fentanyl moving across the US-Canada border. In response, the recently elected Liberal PM put forward a 127-page bill that includes, among other worrying provisions, sweeping changes to immigration policy that would make the process much more precarious for refugees and could pave the way for mass deportations. If passed, Carney's Strong Borders Act (or Bill C-2) would bar anyone who has been in the country for more than a year from receiving refugee hearings. That would apply retroactively to anyone who entered the country after June 2020. If they arrived on foot between official ports of entry, meanwhile, they'd have to apply for asylum within 14 days of entering Canada – a disastrous outcome for people fleeing Trump's persecution. The bill also gives the immigration minister's office the authority to cancel immigration documents en masse. This bill has been widely condemned by politicians and advocacy groups such as Amnesty International and the Migrants Rights Network, who are rightly worried about just how much havoc a change like this could wreak. Jenny Wai Ching Kwan, a member of Parliament for Vancouver East, told reporters the bill would breach civil liberties and basic rights. So what excuse does Canada have for this kind of 180 on its immigration legacy? According to the government, the aim of this legislation is to 'keep Canadians safe by ensuring law enforcement has the right tools to keep our borders secure, combat transnational organized crime, stop the flow of illegal fentanyl, and crack down on money laundering'. In reality, the Bill C-2 contains measures that public safety minister, Gary Anandasangaree, has admitted were a response to 'the concerns that have been posed by the White House'. 'There are elements that will strengthen [our] relationships with the United States,' he said in a press conference. 'There were a number of elements in the bill that have been irritants for the US, so we are addressing some of those issues.' Tim McSorley, the national coordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, condemned the federal government over the senselessness of this move. 'If the government is serious about addressing concerns regarding illegal gun and drug trafficking, it must introduce legislation specifically tailored to that goal, as opposed to a wide-ranging omnibus bill,' he said. The demonization of immigrants has been a talking point for populist leaders throughout the west, so it's not surprising to see Carney lean into that rhetoric in order to appease Trump. Spurred on by the xenophobic rhetoric coming out of the US, Britain, and large swaths of Europe, anyone who comes from away is forced to bear the blame for the economic messes and ensuing societal erosion these countries have found themselves battling. By feeding directly into this pipeline, Carney makes Canada not the powerful country poised to beat Trump at his dangerous games (elbows up, my foot), but a cowardly ally in the US's campaign of terror against immigrants. Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist


New Statesman
3 hours ago
- New Statesman
Is Keir Starmer turning into Harold Wilson?
Photo by Henry Nicholls -Another week and another crisis for Keir Starmer after another U-turn. It should not be like this, of course. He is one year into a five-year parliament with a working majority of 165. The Conservative Party is in free fall. Nigel Farage leads a party with just five MPs. And yet something is clearly wrong in this government. The Parliamentary Labour Party is refusing to be led. Hostile briefings are everywhere. The Chancellor is under attack; so too the Prime Minister's most influential adviser. Starmer himself appears remorseful, apologetic and unsure what to do, searching for a sense of mission and direction, assailed from all directions by the kind of advice no one wants. There is a scene in Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wilson that I cannot shake at moments like this. Wilson was a wily intellect and an even wilier politician, able to dodge and weave to keep his party together and himself in power. He also had a clear sense of direction, promising to modernise Britain and reinvigorate its faltering economy. It was a sparkling prospectus, delivered with sparkling rhetoric. And yet, it failed. By 1976, after an unlikely return to power, Wilson retired a broken man, drinking in the afternoon, quick to tears, mournful and unsure. Before he left office, he told one interviewer that he hoped to spend more time thinking about the country's problems. I once retold this bathetic story of political history to one of Starmer's closest aides, warning him of the dangers of power without a clear sense of direction. I tried to make a joke of it, not wanting to be too Eeyorish. Still, Wilson's fate seems to hang over this government in some strange, spectral fashion. 'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,' Karl Marx once observed. So they do. Whether Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, it often seems as though our ruling class is haunted by the traditions of those who came before, a feeling captured on page 50 by Nicholas Harris's review of Shifty, Adam Curtis's new series about Britain in the run-up to the millennium. Our new culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, is haunted by different ghosts on page 32. In many ways Starmer is underestimated as a politician. Although the calibre of prime ministers has noticeably declined since Wilson's day, it still requires skill, political acumen and what might generously be called 'wiles' to reach the pinnacle of British politics. (The most powerful leader in this issue isn't even a politician: read Zoë Huxford on page 33 to see what I mean.) Starmer has all these traits and more. Yet the man before us today looks far more like late Wilson than he should at this stage of his premiership. At the heart of Starmer's apparent crisis of confidence lies a crisis of direction. From as early as 1967, Wilson began to lose his verve after abandoning his economic plans and devaluing the pound. In Pimlott's telling, Wilson's failure to see through his economic plan became a crisis for social democracy itself, which never really lifted. Without economic planning, what does Labour stand for, Pimlott asked? For a while Blair and Gordon Brown appeared to answer this question, but their model – as we can now see – died with the financial crisis of 2008. In many ways, Starmer's crisis is the reverse of Wilson's. His plan cannot be said to have failed, because he did not have one to begin with. Rather, his struggles are those of a man searching for a plan and finding instead a fleeting politics, as Finn McRedmond finds at Glastonbury on page 8. My ambition for the New Statesman is to step into this obvious ideological void on the left of politics; to be a journal of ideas that can help light a new direction for this government, and for progressive politics more generally. Our cover story this week begins this process. As Will Dunn writes on page 20, it is time for the government to confront our baffling, irrational tax system, which fails to raise enough for the kind of country we all want to live in. Without a clear direction, Starmer is being pulled in all directions. His friends urge him – in private and, it seems, in public – to ignore the Blairites, move left and abandon his hopes of recovering voters lost to Reform. Those of a more Tony-ish hue whisper to me and others that this is the siren call of Milibandism. A battle is now underway for Starmer's ear – and for the soul of this government. As both Andrew Marr and George Eaton write, a new politics is opening up, one that is far more radical and dangerous for both of Britain's main political parties than before. History appears first as tragedy, and then as farce, Marx observed. It seems he knew what he was talking about. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: The rebellions against Starmer are only just beginning] Related