Conduct unbecoming

I am ashamed of my Government.  My recent asylum/immigration training has alerted me to the Government's hidden agenda.  In order to make the UK an unattractive target for those seeking asylum, the Government is systematically stifling off publicly-funded representation for asylum-seekers.  Even the most committed, idealistic lawyers are in despair at the prospects.

• Immigration advisers are already subject to impossible time-constraints in the preparation of appeal cases, with the Government now paying for just 300 minutes of their time, an allowance which is pitifully inadequate for most cases.
• They now get no funding whatever for time spent attending the key first Home Office interview (at Croydon, Birmingham or Liverpool);  they are forced to leave the asylum applicant without support at the key initial stage of the proceedings; for those speaking English there is not even the presence of an interpreter.
• Each Immigration Adviser must, as from next April, prove formal "Accreditation" (passing a Home Office exam reputed to be highly technical), a process which is likely to reduce adviser-numbers drastically.

Proper asylum representation will soon become the exception, rather than the rule.  My Government is resorting to nastiness by the back-door.

• And I am ashamed.

Five Year
Blarney

I was dismayed by the last week of the Parliamentary year, just passed.  I know it is exploited by Government, to make one-way pronouncements without the possibility of effective reply.  But even so, I am speechless, pole-axed, by the events of this week.  Blair's pedestrian speech at the Party's Saturday "Policy Forum", the sham show-down with the Unions, the unprincipled promotion of Mandelson, the re-cycling of repressive and elitist policy ideas as pretentious "Five Year Strategies" - it all dried, like cardboard, in my mouth.  I was left breathless by Blair's claim that the Labour Party "had never been more united.."

• It will take a few days for me to get my breath back.  But watch this space..

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Dangerously misinformed

"Planning", in its popular sense of town-and-country planning and development control, is poorly understood.  As a specialist planning barrister by profession, I can understand laymen's confusion over a number of its key concepts.

But I cannot and do not forgive senior politicians who peddle mischievous and ill-informed fallacies about what "planning" can and cannot achieve.  The system has become grossly overloaded with popular expectations, which ill-informed politicians do nothing to dispel.  Among the most destructive current misunderstandings relate to -

= Losing school playing-fields;
= Imposing quotas for "affordable housing";
= Housing for "rural residents"

Politicians continue to mislead the public in these sectors, remaining stubbornly misinformed...

• Would you Adam an' Eve it?

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Natural Europeans

The Irish have proved "natural" Europeans.  They share with the UK an easy assumption of international horizons, as well as a clear sense of responsibility towards that wider world, and for its proper ordering.  They have seized without cavilling the opportunities which the wider alliance gives them.

It is often difficult to believe that, at just 3.6m population, Ireland is much smaller than Scotland and just a little bigger than Wales.  Irish politicians have made played leading international roles, accepting personal responsibility easily.  Over the Euro, there was none of the ridiculous nationalist posturing that still characterises the UK.

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