This is, at least, a ray of sunshine in the midst of an otherwise constant shitstorm.
I remain sceptical that Liz Truss pulled this off herself and find it likely that more seasoned diplomats deserve the majority of the credit, but honestly I’m so relieved that she’s coming home I will throw Truss this bone anyway.
She was released after the UK paid a decades old £400M debt.
The UK needs oil.
… and she had served her sentence, and was due for release anyway. A great triumph for the negotiating skills of Truss!
I assumed so. And I assume the US signed it off - the US wants lower gas prices too. Be interesting to see if Iran increases oil production
The West needs more sources of Oil to get off the dependence on Russia.
I don’t doubt that the settlement of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe case and they paying off the old debt will clear the way for some progress with the deal for Iran to stop trying to develop a nuclear weapon capability.
Sanctions against Russia may lead to a relaxation of existing sanctions against Venezuela and Iran. All those Big Oil investments in Russia need to be replaced with something.
Liz Truss will be there to take any credit, if at all possible.
Nazanin’s already completed one sentence and been released. But after that sentence, she was effectively under house arrest at her parents’ house, and then was charged with another crime and sent back to prison. The Iranians were using Zaghari-Ratcliffe as a pawn. It’s a bit either naive or dubious to assert that she wouldn’t continue to be used as a pawn if the UK hadn’t made concessions to Iran. The present-day Foreign Office deserves credit for getting her release over the line. Liz Truss, personally, probably doesn’t deserve that credit since it’s been a long effort, but she was the leader when the ministry finally succeeded.
Also, overall Truss has been effective as Foreign Minister. Indeed, the senior cabinet, other than Johnson has had a good run this year, and Johnson’s been lucky to have the spotlight off of the parties. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is having to deal with inflation and increased costs of living, but he’s got a lot of goodwill from his handling of the nation’s finances during Covid, and is seen as wanting to deal with the problems honestly and effectively. Ben Wallace, the Defence Minister, was an adamant supporter of Ukraine against Russia before the invasion, and the most vocal supporter of arms transfers to Ukraine. Sajid Javid is dealing with the ongoing Covid issues, and the effects of its aftermath on the NHS. The Home Secretary Priti Patel needs to raise her game, in my opinion, but if the Ukrainian refugee influx works out, and she’s able to get some legislation passed strengthening protection of women, even she could be looking good in a couple of months. Johnson may just be able to duck behind his cabinet and be regarded as a success, despite the massive controversy over the Downing Street lockdown parties. That’s not a prediction, but given Johnson’s past to escaping controversies, a possibility that should be considered.
Don’t forget also a new government in Iran. In fairness to Truss she did say this was a factor.
The same Liz Truss that got her backside embarrassingly handed to her by Sergei Lavrov?
The same honest and effective Rishi Sunak who wrote off literally billions in fraud and is now making the rest of us pay more to make up for it?
The same Priti Patel whose absolutely shambolic refugee policy implementation sent fleeing Ukranians running all over France looking for visa centres that didn’t exist?
You have some interesting metrics for success, I must say.
Yup. Especially that Sunak “is seen as wanting to deal with the problems honestly and effectively.” By who? I mean, apart from the person who wrote that.
Priti Patel and the govt are currently underscoring their reputation as racists - IMO, anyway - by suddenly offering money out of nowhere for people to house Ukrainian refugees. As if the refugee crisis is something new.
We have no arrangement with the Ukraine that makes their refugees in the slightest bit different to any others - we’re not in the EU, they’re not in the EU, and they’re not a former colony or member of the Commonwealth.
I doubt it will ever actually work - it’s just kite-flying. But man, it’s not a good thing that it’s only being done now we have white refugees.
Racist? I don’t think so.
The political response the Ukraine crisis is heavily influenced by geopolitics. Putin’s expansionism has become an existential threat to the security for much of Europe. Who is going to be his next target? Russia also has nuclear weapons. The economic effects of the Ukraine invasion are also a huge concern with energy and food prices rising and creating a cost of living crisis. It is in the national interests of the UK to join with the international community to support Ukraine and the stream of refugees escaping the bombing.
How does this compare with the geopolitics surrounding the other refugee crises? How much political self interest is there for the UK with respect to the Syrian compared to Ukraine? Not nearly sure much. This is the cold logic of international politics.
The humanitarian response to the victims of war is emotional. With Ukraine it is simple. There are few moral ambiguities to consider. It is not a civil war where there are confusing factions and interventions by other states. It is a pretty simple case of Russian invading Ukraine and bombing civilians.
This has led to a hasty adjustment to Immigration Act, one of the centre pieces of Brexit intended impose strict control over borders and who can gain entry to the UK. Suddenly this is not quite so important. But Pritti Patel did not seem to get the memo and claimed the detailed processes and long lines of Ukrainian refugees trying to join relatives in the UK was intended to ensure they were not security threats. It made the UK policy towards Ukraine look contradictory and absurd.
The UK is currently run by a party that has questionable policies with regard to immigration, refugees and asylum seekers. It has decided it can implement a system of controls that attract only the brightest and best and at the same time keep out economic migrants doing low status work. In the best British tradition class trumps race. The rules will be a poor match for the needs of the country and it will be administered by the Home Office. An office of state that is notorious for its incompetence.
Racist? I don’t see that. But crass stupidity - lots of that.
Boris Johnson did play something like the race card when trying to defend his promotion of his wealthy Russian chums interests.
Apparently we must reject Russophobia.
I think he was being too general there. Better not to tarnish all Russians, it is not as if they have much say in what Putin thinks or does.
What he really means is we must guard against unfair prejudice against Russian Oligarchs who stole their billions from ordinary Russians and are connected with Putin and are generous benefactors to his Conservative Party.
Until quite recently he was quite keen to discourage this prejudice in the security services. But like Patel Patel, Boris Johnson is playing catch up. The name of the game is now international politics rather than the internal party plotting and intrigues that is the main skill set of this Conservative government.
My aopoligies for fisking, but this seems like a post where a point-by-point rebuttal is required.
Yes. The Liz Truss who confronted Russia, and presented the UK’s position, and was tactful while being treated rudely by Sergei Lavrov when there were still hopes of avoiding a Russia/Ukraine war. Truss was supporting Ukraine back in December when the Russia/Ukraine war was just a build-up of Russian forces.
You do realise that it’s prudent to write off bad debts? That doesn’t mean that the debts are forgiven. It’s a recognition that the debts shouldn’t be regarded as assets, but as losses. And the governmental accounting has nothing to do with whether those debts will be referred for collection. I trust you’ll agree that Sunak is looking to squeeze every penny of revenue that he can
It’s nice to think that the government can create a refugee visa processing centre out of thin air, but the reality is that facilities have to be set up, employees need to agree to be reassigned and travel, foreign authorities need to be contacted for approval, etc. And that’s before political considerations. Should Ukrainian refugees have priority over Afghan or Yemeni refugees, or expedited treatment? I don’t mind if the Foreign Office takes its time rather than kowtowing to emotional appeals that sound like back-channel charity commercials.
Thanks. I pride myself on being an interesting person.
ETA: Weird; I wrote this about two weeks ago, but it looks like it never posted. Therefore the untimely response.
Also, replying to filmstar-en. I think this is a quandary for the UK government. My personal belief is that the UK government should have a growth policy and that an immigration policy needs to be a major part of that growth policy. I think increased control of immigration is one of the benefits of Brexit. But one of the failures of the Johnson administration is that Brexit was their signature win, but they haven’t taken sufficient advantage of it. Admittedly Covid gave them a lot else to worry about, but it didn’t affect the Foreign Office that much.
Basically, my view is that the UK must maintain its working age population while supporting its post retirement population. That’s not going to come from organic population growth, so it needs immigrants that will support and enhance both the economy and the health and care systems. That requires entrepreneurs, skilled workers, unskilled workers in underemployed industries, and seasonal workers. The Foreign Office should be issuing visas for such immigrants, and it should be declaring its intentions and numbers. It also needs to support immigrants for humanitarian reasons, and again have a numeric target. I suspect my hypothetical target would be higher than Johnson’s or Patel’s, but would still be much lower than the number of refugee immigrants wishing to enter the UK.
So with regards to Ukraine, the government is caught out because it doesn’t have a clear immigration policy, humanitarian or otherwise. If it did, it could state that it was expanding its refugee immigrant target to support Ukrainian refugees, but that would raise the question of why Ukrainian refugees were more deserving than those from other war-torn countries. Ukraine is much more visible at the moment, but it’s far from being the only place where people are fleeing war. So should the Johnson government be prioritising Ukraine refugees, or treating all war refugees equally? I strongly suspect they’ll never answer the question, but will try to hide behind stories of MP’s opening up their constituency homes as places for Ukrainian refugees to stay.
Diplomacy is hard. Anyone can go to a meeting and present a position. Actually achieving something is another thing altogether. Maybe next time we should send someone competent at it.
I mean, Truss actually encouraged Brits to volunteer to fight in Ukraine, followed by the defence chief telling her that this was unlawful and the Russians publicly mocking Truss for it. She also blamed a Labour MP and an unspecified law firm she couldn’t actually name for the Government’s failure to sanction many Russians, refused to say Russia’s invasion was a “war of aggression” saying she “doesn’t understand what that means”, and claimed the ICC would handle this kind of issue (Narrator: “It doesn’t do that”).
“But the Russians were rude to her!”. It’s almost as if you don’t quite grasp what that job involves.
Interesting that you’ve reframed “fraud” as “bad debt”. Just one of those things that happen, I guess. Can’t be helped.
But yes, now that literally billions have been funnelled off to friends, family and donors of the Conservative Party, he is now looking to squeeze the rest of us to cover it. Odd that you consider this sound governance likely to make him popular.
Yeah, setting aside the “Look over there - Yemenis!” distraction, let’s just consider the UK’s response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis:
Dominic Raab claimed that “we have a reputation second to none across the world” for accepting refugees, immediately followed by claiming that the EU were better at helping refugees than the UK because they’re closer to the Ukraine. N.B. Ireland took 3500% more refugees than the UK despite being further away.
The government then said Ireland welcoming refugees constituted a security threat to Britain because the Ukrainians we are supposedly welcoming might come to the UK using a border scheme the Conservatives designed.
Boris Johnson then claimed that the UK would set up “safe lanes” and Priti Patel said she would set up “a new humanitarian route to enter Britain”, followed by Johnson saying that the UK wouldn’t set up humanitarian routes.
Patel then claimed the UK had (already) set up a “very generous” visa processing scheme based in Calais. After Ukranian refugees travelled to Calais, No 10 admitted there was no refugee centre in Calais. So they put up posters in Calais telling the Ukrainians who had travelled there on the word of the Home Secretary that there would be “no visas delivered in Calais”.
But then Patel said that while the centre wasn’t set up, the UK was “planning one” and that refugees should instead phone the “free application hotline”. (Narrator: “The hotline was not free. And not accessible outside the UK.”)
And then the UK boasted of having put in place “the first visa scheme in the world” to help Ukraine, hoping that nobody would notice that this was because all the other countries didn’t require visas for Ukrainian refugees and just took them in.
Which is presumably why Patel’s next move was to tell refugees who had reached the UK to go to Paris or Brussels instead.
As an added bonus, Edward Leigh claimed Lincolnshire was “too full for Ukrainians” despite being one of the most sparsely populated counties in England.
Also, Brexit rules have repeatedly tied up at Dover charity supplies to refugees on the continent.
And that was all in one week.
In short, dozens of other countries managed to come up with arrangements to accept Ukrainian refugees without this level of omnishambles, and without requiring a litany of excuses about how hard this is and how there are “political considerations” and how there are other refugees from elsewhere and how the sun was in their eyes and the dog ate their briefing papers etc etc to handwave away a long series of brazen lies, fundamental incompetence and deliberate cruelty.
I look forward to your next carefully-framed narrative on how this all demonstrates what a brilliant job the Conservatives are doing and how much the British public love them for it.
To make progress in the Conservative Party you have to send messages that appeal to the party faithful.
Johnson would rather like to emulate Churchill. So far he is doing rather well if you consider the vast number of mistakes and misjudgements that constituted the bulk of Churchill’s career. Johnson’s singular achievement has been to become famous as a maverick and a TV personality in order to rise above the mediocrity of his rivals. These days it seems that is all that is needed to lead a nation.
Liz Truss is playing the same game. Her habit of regularly copying Thatchers poses in photo opportunities is famous. She has been fortunate in that she has found a suitable cause. Thatcher was a Cold War warrior standing up to the Soviet threat. Today we have Truss trying to look bold in the face of Putin from a safe distance on the other side of Europe.
What these two have in common is that neither have managed to create a solid relationship with a US president as Churchill did with Roosevelt and Thatcher did with Reagan.
I don’t think Biden has any time for either of them and their Brexit crusade is widely regarded as an reckless folly that will endanger the hard won peace in Northern Ireland in which the UK and US invested significant political capital. Boris has yet to shake off the label of a Trumpian populist that Biden eyes with a suspicion. The UK must look elsewhere for a trade deal and what Truss has been able to negotiate on her many foreign trips is meagre indeed.
Johnson was an awful Foreign Secretary and Truss is not much of an improvement. Their posturing is mainly for domestic consumption. The rest of the world has been treat to years of the UK engaged in its own Brexit conversation with itself. In a large part this consisted of rejecting European Union and withdrawing from European institutions.
Now Europe is united as never before in the face of the threat from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They are urgently putting in place an economic strategy to counter his aggression and committing huge funding to defence. There is a European plan being made in which the UK plays no part.
Bluster and bombast towards Putin’s invasion and military support for Ukraine undermined by the embarrassing spectacle of Brexit inspired immigration policy designed to keep foreigners out. Except. Of course, the Russian oligarchs who gave been buying up London and political influence for years.
Johnson, Truss and Patel are populists who are discovering that popular sentiment can turn very suddenly in response to events over which they have no control. Inflexible immigration laws and strong border controls intended to keep out asylum seekers and refugees are no longer the policies that the public wants to see. Suspicion of Putin’s oligarchs is no longer to be dismissed as ‘Russophobia’ as Johnson would have it. They are the security risks that the secret services warned they were.
The Conservative government performance during the Covid pandemic has been woeful. Johnson did not take it seriously and ended up in hospital while his party and the dubious characters that surround them got lucrative contracts paid for with vast amounts of public money few checks and safeguards. The UK Covid body count will eventually show the cost of their mistakes.
Here is Liz Truss, who knows that image and the right pose are important for a politician aiming for the top job. At some point she will discover being a stateswoman is also a necessary attribute. Something she has shown no sign of possessing.
The UK has a conspicuous lack of politicians of any great calibre. They are party hacks and crowd pleasers posing as leaders. I wish it were otherwise.
This is only the first tranche of fines.
This Twitter thread is a work of genius:
Meanwhile, there are hints/nods and winks that the sudden spate of negative stories about the hitherto front-runner to succeed might have been inspired by someone in No.10 (but my money’s on the slithy Gove who is currently nowhere to be seen).
Boris Johnson goes to Ukraine.
Boris was always an admirer of Churchill and here he is in Ukraine supporting Volodymyr Zelensky a politician who has grown internationally famous and widely admired for his leadership of Ukraine in the face of the Russian invader.
Johnson desperately needs some positive international headlines to drowned the procession of damaging domestic news stories, the litany of sleeze and incompetence that dogs his administration.
Supporting Ukraine is a position that few could take take issue with. Sending weapon systems to Ukraine is clearly a lot easier than undoing the tangled mess of immigration controls that is hampering Ukrainian refugees from reaching the UK.
Boris Johnson leads a party that is anti-immigration and got elected on the back of Brexit and it’s rejection of the EU and European institutions.
His support for Ukraine is an opportunity to salvage some kind of foreign policy from this mess. It is remarkable that a few months ago he was accusing UK officials of Russophobia when they questioned the security implications of making a Russian Oligarchs son a member of the House of Lords. The Tory party has been extremely close to Russian Oligarchs (and their money) for quite some years now.
It will doubtless please the members of the Biden administration who clearly are no fans of Johnson. The current Cold War crisis is a big reset for many countries in their foreign policy. Cold War warrior is very appealing to the Tories, it goes back to the Thatcher/Reagan years. Standby a few Mrs Thatcher impressions by Liz Truss.
Heroic headlines will take the heat off a domestic crisis. Russia and Ukraine are safely on the other side of Europe, so taking the initiative and leading the shipment of arms to Ukraine is an pretty safe option for the UK.
It is rather a different matter if your country is right next door and maybe next on Putin’s hit list.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency of the United Kingdom (yes, really), posted this gem on Twitter this morning:
The Honourable Member for Dickensian Workhouses appears to have forgotten that the Ministerial Code specifically references spousal businesses and income in reference to clear conflicts of interest for ministers, including the Chancellor and himself. And that the Conservatives have never had any problem linking spousal incomes when dealing with government benefits such as Universal Credit.