To think Count Binface is doing a great job in the Clacton by-election?

I can't answer that question.

And how will the people be served when their benefits are stopped?

The money spent on subsidising rural transport was never supposed to be a profit making scheme, it was a social one and successful at that. It enabled, as such non-profit making schemes often do, people who were previously isolated to participate in work and leisure. Obviously the ring fenced money for the rural bus subsidy scheme was withdrawn under the coalition government who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

So, a little more nuanced than your version of money being thrown around and still no profit!

When Prescott was in charge of transport there was a lot of money thrown at rural services (all over the country, not just Lincs) but it turned out not to be cost effective.
Private companies couldn't make it pay either.

Maybe the people could ask their MP for help with those transport issues?

Better than taking away their disability benefits.

Also DV and animal cruelty with Mr Punch - seems he's a real shady character. 😮

Tice's constituency is a very rural area where transport is a problem, so it's not really surprising.
The main road into Boston has buses only every hour and the main Boston Pilgrim Hospital has a similar service from Lincoln.

Well needed at the moment.

I think this is where Binny has been a public good. He's a reminder that there is another way, one that is humourous, not filled with hate speech and self interest and I still think...I hope..that has huge appeal to what is best about the British national character, the "mild knobbly faces" of Orwell who support the underdog and value tolerance.

Yep, it's been on the rise since the coalition government of 2010, just quietly working away in the background until we get to the point where right wing populists can brazenly make comments about "suicidal empathy".

I saw an exhibit at a museum in Berlin. It consisted of many floor to ceiling length sheets each with lists of legislation brought in from the first Nazi coalition government in 1933 onwards. There must have been thousands of these laws, starting from relatively minor restrictions and ending - well, we all know where. It was a visual representation of the slow creep of oppression.

Oh no I think they also believe it will stop the other people they don’t like claiming pip-the mentally ill. They don’t believe in mental illness -everyone with a MH issue is either a snowflake or a criminal in the view of reform.

Ifs actually quite hard to get PIP as it is-the assessment process can be quite brutal and is rigorous. But Reform don’t let that get in the way of their rhetoric do they?

And their paymasters

Suicidal empathy is heaviy promoted by Musk and the US Christian right wing.

Yes and in Nazi Germany and similar states there was a warped ideology behind it all, hideous and terrifying but a kind of systematic 'reasoning'.

What is happening here is all about the coin at the heart of it and like Al Capone's tax bill, I hope that will be their undoing.

I feel like there's been an upsurge in Nazi type stuff. The announcement of the attack on disabled people - calling benefits to disabled people ' suicidal.empathy' - there's some pretty deranged stuff around at the moment. Whose survival.are we talking about? Seems it's largely the leaders of reform.

I agree, and if it wasn't so serious, it would be interesting to see how the same tactics are being used by Reform et al as were used in Nazi Germany (or the Rwanda genocide or any other comparable instance really). You only have to look at Farage's rip off Nazi poster to see that it's being done overtly, presumably on the basis that you'll always get people who will cheerlead for atrocity.

Sadly, we know @ClarkeandNewman it has happened before. Study of the Holocaust was a major part of my degree and I ended up with no doubt that given the right encouragement and environment, some Brits would have happily run concentration camps. It starts with the othering and the permission to see certain groups of human beings as less.

Maybe one day climate change will radically affect how we live in the UK. If your area became uninhabitable and there was nowhere for you to go in the UK, you might have to become an "economic migrant" to survive. Would you like to be trapped on a deserted island, in the cold, in a tent? If not, why is it ok for others?

You say you and your husband are very ordinary people. I fervently hope that's not true. I don't want it to be commonplace for people to have no empathy, no imagination, to be cruel and treat others as a subspecies because of pure accident of birth.

Sorry I wrote my very long post before reading than that last comment about putting people under canvas in freezing conditions.
What every gets you and your DH going I suppose.

Have sent email. We can only ask!

The problem is general migration and asylum seekers are talked about as if they are the same thing. Most migrants are primarily "economic migrants" or people who move for love or family and apply for work, family visas etc ahead of time and outside of the UK. Maybe there are too many economic migrants, maybe there are too few. But if we drastically reduced it our prisons would face staffing issues and we might have to release murderers etc (oh wait!) and people would be sad their American husband couldn't come and live with them.

Asylum seekers (people who are in the process of applying for refuge) and refugees (approved including people who got here 50 years ago) are a much much smaller group. In total they are 0.7% of the population. Asylum seekers whose claims are being processed are a fraction of that 0.7% and the ones with no legitimate claim are a fraction of that. Which is still a lot if you are trying to find accomodation for people while their claims are being processed. But they are not the reason for any demographic changes people might see and like/dislike. Neither is it an invasion. We already have quite robust standards for rejecting people falsely claiming asylum. (I guess that's what you mean when you say economic migrants being processed). However, for a long time no-one was actually sent back because the last government (Tories) had a stated plan to "deter" people by not processing their claims. This just meant the numbers of people waiting built up and up. It did not deter anyone. Even though Jenrick painted over that children's mural.

I agree we need to process claims and send back people with no right to stay. The problem is a large proportion of people applying have legitimate claims, they aren't tempted here by the luxurious conditions in migrant housing and aren't economic migrants. The conditions in the hotels are probably a bit worse than the average homeless hostel which are also bleak. They are living where they have been told to live by the government. You can't apply for asylum outside of the UK so everyone that does it has to get to the UK first and then apply. This isn't the same thing as being "illegal" or cheating the system. They are following the rules of the system as it exists.

I don't know what housing people on remote islands would do for "deterrence". For one thing, there are already people living in Scottish islands and if a hotel of migrants in a city is such a disaster** I don't think housing all the asylum seekers in tents on winter in an area with 100 local people is better? If nothing else, it's going to be annoying for the Scottish crofter to keep tripping over the frozen bodies of children and adults on a winter morning. The current plans to house migrants away from urban areas on former army bases is giving the far right reasons to demonstrate so why would they be OK with Scottish rural areas? Unless it's just a fuck the Scots thing.

Also how bad do you want it to be for the deterrence to work? I guess your description of tents/portacabins on northern Scottish island = bad but I don't want to put words in your mouth by calling it a concentration camp. But... it sounds like a concentration camp. The worst case scenario for these kinds of plans is you have people forced into very poor living conditions. And then we can point to the consequences of these poor conditions (cramp anyone into a very small space and restrict food and you will see worsening mental health, suicides, an inability to keep the area clean because the infrastructure isn't there to remove waste, criminality because ummm they are freezing to death) and say "see these people are bad". And it is also counterproductive as presumably when someone is granted asylum they will struggle more having lived in a concentration death camp for five years.

I completely get the frustration when people with legitimate concerns about migration are labelled racist. But can't you see how "put them all in tents in freezing Scottish islands, that'll learn em for fleeing war" opens one to legitimate criticism?

**I lived near one with no problems and without realising it existed. I appreciate other people have had other experiences.

Anyway, as there are plenty of threads other than this nice one for people to share ill thought out Final Solutions to the migration issue, I'm going to email @MNHQ and ask for a Q and A with Count Binface. They've had loads of other politicians on so don't see a problem if he were up for it.