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

You’d get kicked out of a pub if you brought your own food anyway, so this is bollocks.

tbh I sort of enjoyed the implication he's too mean to buy his sister pub food, probably using some torturous condescending metaphor about fucking taps

when your relatable anecdotes are a) completely unrelatable and b) make you sound like a cunt

Kieth is kind of a master of this

I used to smuggle the odd bottle of liquor into a dodgy dive nightclub when I was a teenager. The idea of the adult sister of the UK LOTO smuggling sandwiches into a pub as tale of noble stoicism 😝😝😝

All signs point to his being from a weird AF family.

On top of everything else he's a total fucking weirdo.

(xp)

No wonder he's such a fan of Thatcher.

Katherine Swabey, a former NHS nurse, works gruelling 12-hour shifts in a care home for the elderly close to the village of Westerham, Kent where she is responsible for overseeing dozens of vulnerable residents.

Her background is in nursing, but some job adverts listed at the care home show staff are paid an hourly rate of between £8.25 to £8.50.

As recently as last month, Ms Swabey, 57, a mother of four, was sharing a cramped annex adjoining a large, detached house with one of her grown up children and two grandchildren.

She was helping her son to pay rent of around around £1,000 per month in the tiny, three-bedroom annex but has now moved to East Grinstead, where friends revealed she has bought a ‘modest home.’

Ms Swabey’s situation and struggle to make ends meet was highlighted by her illustrious brother Sir Keir in the House of Commons as he lashed out at Boris Johnson’s plans to reform social care.

tbf she does intially sound to be struggling from this Mail piece from a couple of years back, but there is also a hint that Kieth might have got the sandwiches in for her.

ffs the cunt is loaded and he can't even dip his hands in his pocket to help his sister out

the dream move to a modest house in East Grimstead he fixed for her was contingent on her never expecting him to pay for her sandwiches ever again!

'modest homes' in east grinstead cost an absolute fortune btw

£300-400k for modest 3br in that area.

I had a feeling that would be the case

Any old tale where it's a 'lets do austerity' at the end. It's almost insulting how they can't be bothered to lie properly to justify this misery.

L. Ron Hubbard's old stamping ground. Talking of weirdoes.

We want to help people on welfare and into work. We want to reduce pressure on housing and public services, and also to build a more socially cohesive and united country, which is difficult, I would argue impossible, when such large numbers of people are coming into the country.

Sir, this is a Dominos

lol

No one here understands that Starmer is trying to appeal to Conservative voters in the "red wall", who like to vote for people who are nasty, mean-spirited and out of touch. Or something.

It's a grand strategy. Also stop intimating that he doesn't have to pretend, that's a slur

Sir, this is a Dominos

Is that some kind of meme, because it remains me of this from The Day Today?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwFzRA56sI

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sir-this-is-an-arbys

That Day Today clip is a similar idea!

🤔🤔🤔

John Crace
@JohnJCrace
·
19h
My daughter will no longer be able to come back from America and live with her US husband in the UK

Thank you
@RishiSunak

The UK government: keeping families apart

A few weeks ago one politics reporter was complaining about childcare costs on twitter. Fools thought they'd be insulated from this.

they shouldn't have kids if they can't afford to bring them up ;)

Too busy spending their money on mobile phones and wide-screen tellies.

this is a reply I got when I talked about this on twitter yesterday. I do have to wonder how many of the people I see in public every day think like this, and how far they would be willing to go for their ideas.

There is no cruelty to this policy. If a person wishes to marry a foreign national, then they should go and live in that country.

— Linda Anne Goodman (@Lags71Anne) December 5, 2023

it wouldn't be the first time I've seen a mean-spirited, probable racist crank account with a cute black Labrador for a profile pic!

used to be a "racist pets" twitter account but seems they stopped bothering a while back.

Black labs matter

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1193537319787225088/0Dg2Ec5h_400x400.jpg

BREAKING: Rwanda government threatens to pull out of the deal if it does not adhere to international law.

Hugely problematic - and potentially humiliating - for govt if its partner country decides the deal is too toxic.

Statement below 👇 pic.twitter.com/2pGfxNwKXp

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) December 6, 2023

can't see how any self-respecting nation would want to be associated with the UK gov

Robert Jenrick resigning apparently.
He's the minister for immigration apparently.
or he was the minister for immigration, idk

John Crace
@JohnJCrace
·
19h
My daughter will no longer be able to come back from America and live with her US husband in the UK

Thank you
@RishiSunak

i kindly refer you to a daily telegraph writer !

A friend has just messaged in a blind panic to ask if @JamesCleverly’s immigration plan means he can’t bring his partner into the country.

The Gov is doubling the salary required of a British subject to bring a spouse or dependent into the country - to £38,700. 🧵

— Tim Stanley (@timothy_stanley) December 4, 2023

spouses on family visas already have to pay the healthcare surchage https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/who-needs-pay, so the goal is here is certainly not to offset the public funds spent on the average person.
it's to ensure only rich[*] people move the UK.

[*] "rich" here means above the median UK household[**] income, which completely coincidentally (!) is almost exactly the new income requirement.

[**] that tweet above is wrong. the new requirement (38.7k) and the old one (18k) apply to the household income, not just the income of the UK citizen. https://www.gov.uk/uk-family-visa/proof-income.

here we go again.

jenrick resignation due to revised treaty not being hardcore enough re human rights.

fwiw the income requirement does not apply at all if you're willing to be on a family visa for 10 years while waiting for indefinite leave to remain, rather than the usual 5 years. that's the rule you've got to watch for them changing, not just the requirement itself.

I and my wife have just been through the 5-year pathway. In total has cost us something like £10,000+ I think. The initial income requirement was for the British spouse (me) only, though they call it "household" - and it increases for each child you have, so was nearly 27,000 for us. We were able to offset some of this because my mother gifted us some money. It was a very stressful five (more than six actually) years, I have moved around the world since 2003 and never had a nightmare like this before, the sheer amount of paperwork and opaque decision making.

The whole system seems to be predicated on "everyone loves us and wants to move here, we will do everything in our power to keep out the riff-raff" when in reality it's a shithole and everyone correctly hates us.

yeah the household income vs. UK citizen only income thing *seems* to be simpler if you're both outside the UK, in which case they're happy to look at household income. almost like the bar ends up being lower for a couple moving from overseas than for someone in the UK bringing a partner in. difficult to see an ideological reason for this difference, other than opacity and ambiguity has a net chilling effect on migration.

yeah, this does not surprise me, and makes me thankful for the groove me and bh had in 1990 when finland was not yet a full member of the EU.
she had an interview in helsinki,
i had an interview in leeds (with an ex Led Zep roadie !),
and a few photos etc,
and boom, she was allowed in on a 6 month marriage visa,
during which we got married of course (32nd anniverary yesterday).

no doubt such a thing would be totally impossible in this day and age, which is truly sad.

i had no job, and nor did she.
we lived off savings, and got crappy jobs sharpish to pay rent etc.
not once did we hit the benefits system,
but i dont think this makes any difference now ?

I was walking home from work last week and a guy walking towards me stopped and asked if I was a british citizen. I said I was and he told me that he was an Iranian asylum seeker and he wanted me to know that the UK was shit and all the people from around the world ( he mentioned india, pakistan and syria) who wanted to move here were shit too. he seemed amiable enough and asked me what I thought of what he said. I just said good luck. he was coming from the direction of brook house in gatwick which probably more than justifies his statement tbf.

supposedly the income requirement also doesn't apply if you're a parent or eligible for disability benefits (ha!) AND you can prove you won't rely on public funds. looking at the docs now, and how someone with low income *proves* that is beyond me.

in retrospect we did it all wrong, I quit my job three months before moving to the UK and brought my wife with me on a tourist visa, assuming incorrectly that there was a way to convert it, then she had to go back to China with our younger son for what ended up being six months. As a Chinese person applying from China you don't go through the home office, you deal entirely with this evil incompetent company called VFS instead, and they are extremely unfriendly.

oof. i'm following this stuff because 3/4 of us are dual citizens of the UK and US and things in the US could ... you know, go one way or the other re: fascism etc. 1/4 of us has no income though.

just as an example of what VFS is like, after the application has gone in this is the only way you can get an update on your application:

you phone a premium rate phone number, the operator then takes a credit card number from you so they can charge you an additional £7 per minute for the call. After giving them the card details you have a five minute call where they look up your info and tell you "your application is currently being processed by the embassy" - and that's it.

this was all a lot easier 20 years ago. not sure if there even was an income requirement then, I was on £20k when B moved here. she came over on a fiancee visa, we got married here, she had to go back to the US to apply for further? leave to remain, then that was it for a few years then indefinite leave to remain, I don't think it cost more than a few hundred quid. never had to pay some bullshit NHS surcharge either.

if we had these rules then I'm not sure we could've done it. sickening