Georgie Newson is a writer living in Oxford.
When it was revealed earlier this month that the number of people who had reached the UK on small boats since Labour came to power in July 2024 had reached 50,000, the familiar circus of blame began. The Tories reproached Labour for scrapping the dismal Rwanda plan; Labour pointed to the legacy left by the Tories; Reform, as ever, reaped the spoils. But the tussle between the dominant parties over who can most bullishly ‘defend’ Britain’s borders is not only an ugly spectacle; it rests on a misguided premise.
On 23 May, the day after he called a general election, Rishi Sunak said in a radio interview that his government’s flagship Rwanda deportation scheme will only go ahead if the Tories are re-elected on 4 July. This admission came as a surprise: many had assumed that part of the rationale for calling an early election was to get a campaign boost as the flights got underway. For anyone...
One of the shiniest new initiatives at COP28 in Dubai last December was the world’s first ‘Voluntary Recycling Credit’ scheme, which will allow companies to ‘offset’ their waste products by purchasing credits from recyclers. The marketplace for these credits will be blockchain-based, so that transactions can be tracked. Building on the dubious success of...
On 11 November, Armistice Day, some 800,000 people, a crowd larger than the population of Manchester, congregated in Central London to march in solidarity with Palestine. Measuring the exact size of demonstrations on this scale is difficult. In 2019, the Met said that it didn’t ‘have the expertise’ to make accurate calculations and would no longer release estimates. That...
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