refugee crisis
Defending utopia from outsiders, dissidents and saboteurs?
‘In this he follows those other utopian traditions of the French revolutionary great terror, the purges of Stalin and Mao. His walled island state now resembles North Korea. If he were to enforce his ideal…
Home Office ‘target culture’ from Blair to May
‘For me, the surprise is more in the way the media and parliamentary system has reacted to ‘target-gate’. We have had almost two decades of opposition parties, select communities and the media grilling governments on…
Stains on our democracy
‘The name Immigration Removal Centre sounds harmless enough; just a pragmatic facility for holding people briefly on their way to another place. Don’t be fooled by the name. These places share the most punitive attributes…
Talking Turkeys: five poems for Christmas 2016
At the ragged end of a sorry year Fay Young goes in search of poems for Christmas and finds five offering humour, humanity and even a hint of hope that the world is not definitively…
Divided nation – Germany’s refugee crisis
Germany’s welcoming culture for more than a million refugees last year is under siege as Angela Merkel struggles to retain control. The Far Right is capitalising on doubts and anxieties, notably since the New Year…
Europe, sovereignty and the Far Right
All eyes on Dave and Donald but, virtually unnoticed, Europe’s main Far Right parties met recently to plot their common future – and regaining national sovereignty is at the heart of their “Other Europe” strategy.…
Has Denmark jettisoned the European jewel?
Denmark, one a paragon of liberal tolerance, is pilloried for its parliamentary vote to seize refugees’ assets to pay for their welfare and upkeep. But the vote is very unpopular at home. And accusations it…
Wrong approach to language and integration
David Cameron’s ham-fisted plans to help mainly Muslim women learn English have rightly been condemned for stigmatising people – not least as government funding for teaching English as a second language has been cut. Here…