I’m all for appropriately punishing people for the crimes they commit. But we usually don’t deprive solo-nationality citizens of their citizenship (leaving them stateless) for the crimes she is accused of - this is a punishment that is only being applied to UK (including UK-only) nationals who have recent foreign ancestors (i.e. so who could hypothetically - but often not in practice - be eligible for another country’s citizenship - in her case, Bangladesh). We also don’t usually apply extreme punishments like this to people for crimes committed as children, and we don’t usually punish children who were groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists as if they were the perpetrators.

The reality is that if Shamima Begum was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl whose parents and grandparents were all from Surrey, the media would have described her as a victim of sex trafficking; and the law that permits this punishment to be applied to her could not even have been used.

The legal system should not treat UK citizens differently according to whether or not the Tories think they look a bit foreign.

It’s more than just a product of it - it’s the main factor.

Over the last half century or so, the UK has experienced around 200 civilian deaths from Islamic terrorism and around 2,000 civilian deaths from Irish terrorism. Which community do you think the far-right in the UK tend to target?

Muslim immigrants will have de facto faced as much (if not far more) hostility and prejudice before any of those events.

What changed is that by the late 20th century, it had become politically unacceptable for right-wing parties to be perceived to be preying on overt racism towards their countries’ brown-skinned citizens. But the War on Terror at the start of the 21st century created a new organising framework for nativists, whereby they could incite hatred against exactly the same brown-skinned people as before, but claim they were targeting them for their religion and not their skin colour. At the heart of it is still the same prejudice towards those who are different, it’s just that the aspect of difference they choose to focus on today is more politically acceptable than the one they used to focus on.

From the perspective of a brown-skinned Muslim immigrant, the ideological hoops the far-right jump through are likely irrelevant. These people were targeted by nativists before, and they get targeted by nativists now.

I mean, bigotry and unenforceability aside, it’s also pretty unambiguously illegal.

Italy is a signatory to the ECHR which creates an explicit right to privacy (Article 8) and freedom of religion (Article 9).

The Italian constitution itself also specifies a right to religious equality before the law (Article 8).

I was similarly pretty confused here that it was referring to the little seaside town in Yorkshire, which I assume all these other Scarboroughs (that I too had never heard of) are named after.

I’m a hard no.

I think people should vote, and voting is generally pretty easy in this country - including easy access to postal and proxy voting. So anyone who fails to do the basic bare minimum in a democratic society (of turning out to vote in a general election every five years) is someone who is clearly so disengaged from politics that I really wouldn’t want them casting their uninformed RNG vote and deciding the future of this country.

This is what happened at the EU referendum. There had long been an assumption that a higher turnout was good for Remain (Leavers were more motivated, so higher turnout meant it was more likely that moderate Remain voters were turning out). But what actually happened was turnout went so high that it blew past them and into a load of nihilists who didn’t give a shit about anything and voted Leave just for the fuck of it. These are not the people who should be deciding our future.

I would prefer that voter turnout was higher than it is, but that’s because I think political engagement should be higher. That’s the thing we should be targeting; voter turnout is the symptom, not the cause. If you force people who aren’t evenly barely politically engaged to cast a vote, you’re asking for a shitshow.

Ahh, that makes sense!

I’m unsurprised that a religious school is failing to teach science properly, but which bits of geography are they objecting to?

Perhaps today is a good day for my voice to break!

Worf’s Klingon prosthetics literally changed between season 1 and seasons 2-7 of TNG. This obviously raises serious continuity issues about whether seasons 2-7 of TNG are even canon…

https://screenrant.com/star-trek-worf-tng-klingon-makeup-change-reason/

Humza Yousaf became the first Muslim head of state in western Europe in 2023 when he was appointed First Minister of Scotland.

This is a really specific point, but the sub-heading irks me in several ways.

First, how do so many people not know the difference between a head of state and a head of government? Scotland’s head of state is Charles III.

Second, by what definition is Yousaf the first Muslim head of government in western Europe? I assume they must at least mean ‘in western Europe in the modern era’, since various parts of Iberia obviously had Muslim rulers for over seven centuries in the Middle Ages.

Third, Scotland isn’t an independent state, and the head of government of the United Kingdom is Rishi Sunak. So if they’re counting Humza Yousaf, that means they’re counting leaders at sub-national levels of government (such as devolved government in the UK, Länder in Germany, etc). But if they’re counting devolved government, why does Humza Yousaf (first minister of Scotland, population 5.4 million, since 2023) count but Sadiq Khan (mayor of London, population 8.8 million, since 2016) apparently doesn’t?

Anyway it was two right-wingers in the second round so

A centrist, europhile, pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism, former patron of Helsinki’s Pride event, vs the literal Green League candidate.

Michael Gove says a lot of things.

Cheap food imports? During a cost-of-living crisis? Blasphemy! Bring back the Corn Laws!

[Mogg] declared the death of “Davos man” - members of the global and political elite who descend on a Swiss ski resort every year for a global economic forum.

Ah, yes the famously left-wing extremists of … the World Economic Forum.

Maybe turn on the human being bit of your brain. The guy has cancer.

Imagine asking if it’s good or bad news that an old man has cancer.

No, the NHS under the Tories received real terms budget increases every year but one (in the second year of the Coalition, when NHS spending rose by very slightly less than inflation).

The problem is that, with large sections of the general public living more and more unhealthy lives, the demands on the NHS have been growing even faster than the real-terms budget. Obesity is correlated with a range of serious health problems - diabetes, cardiovascular disease, various cancers - that devour NHS resources, so the real-terms NHS budget would need to grow at a much faster rate than inflation to cope with the continuing deterioration of public health.

Ultimately, this isn’t a problem we should have been trying to spend our way out of anyway. The solution to an obesity epidemic shouldn’t have been to try and load the consequences onto the NHS; it should have been to take strong preventative measures to head it off well before the point when a quarter of the adult population of England were technically obese (and as many again were overweight).

When Covid hit, we went into lockdown to avoid overwhelming the NHS - where was the obesity equivalent of the Covid lockdowns?

Yes, my point was that above-inflation budget increases (so real-terms budget increases) ought to have led to improving services, other things being equal. But other things aren’t equal - partly because people are getting older, but also partly because people are living unhealthier lives.

So just to stand still, the NHS would have needed even larger above-inflation spending hikes than it got; or, heaven forbid, government policy would have had to start treating mass obesity as the public health emergency that it is, rather than fretting about the Tory press calling this a ‘nanny state’…

This is a really big factor. The public discourse around the NHS would lead you to think that NHS spending had been squeezed over the last 14 years - but it hasn’t. Cameron made a big political choice in 2010 that the NHS would be exempt from the budget cuts that affected the rest of the public sector; and the NHS budget has actually consistently grown faster than inflation under a decade and a half of Tory health secretaries.

So why does the NHS feel under so much more pressure today than under New Labour?

Broadly, two reasons. The first, outside the government’s control, is that the population has aged since 2010, and old people are more likely to need GP appointments and hospital beds. And the second, at least somewhat more in the government’s control, is that public health has continued its deteriorating trend of the last several decades - the share of people overweight or obese in particular, who also find themselves disproportionately taking up health services.

We can’t do anything about people getting older but we can act on the public health problem. We should be treating combating obesity with the same urgency we treated Covid.