"The new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?"
Book Hard neighbours by Colin Calloway
Started this excellent book on Friday ‘Hard Neighbours: the Scotch-Irish invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity’ by Colin Calloway. It seems an even more important read today. There is no celebratory Scots Irish history.
We @foxglovelegal.bsky.social have called on the govt to release info about Lord Mandelson’s links with US tech giant Palantir and its growing number of uk govt contracts www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
The Legislation Upon winning a general election, a Reform government under Prime Minister Nigel Farage will: 1) Leave the ECHR 2.) Repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. 3.) Pass The Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill: This Bill will: Create a legal duty to remove illegal migrants for the Home Secretary The Bill opens with a blunt obligation for the Home Secretary: "The Secretary of State shall ensure the removal from the United Kingdom of each person who does not have extant leave to remain and is not an Irish citizen or otherwise protected by regulations made under this Act." The following parts of the legislation are introduced on an emergency basis, with an in-built sunset clause after 5 years: Disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT) Derogation is justified under the Vienna Convention doctrine of state of necessity: Britain faces a national emergency in which uncontrolled illegal migration undermines public order. These treaties will otherwise be used by activist judges to frustrate deportations, even after the repeals of the HRA and ECHR. Create Detention Power Without Hardial Singh Constraints This means illegal migrants can be detained until they are deported. Activist lawyers routinely use Hardial Singh to secure their client's bail, after which the client absconds. If you came to the UK illegally, you are ineligible for asylum. End of story All asylum claims will become inadmissible if made by a person within the Act's scope. If you came to the country illegally, you are ineligible for asylum in the UK. This strips the Home Office, the immigration tribunals and the higher courts of jurisdiction to even consider claims. A claim that cannot be considered cannot suspend removal and therefore, cannot delay a flight. Re-entering after deportation and destroying ID becomes a serious criminal offence Re-entry after deportation will be…
The Operational Plan We will create an enforcement unit called UK Deportation Command, including an Illegal Migrant Identification Centre - harnessing cutting edge data fusion A Reform government will create a cutting edge enforcement data centre to relentlessly identify and detain all illegal migrants in the UK. Using powers granted by the new legislation, it will automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police. It will power bulk warrants, including mandatory biometric capture during any police encounter. Each power addresses a failure mode observed over the past decade - for example, banks and GP surgeries unaware of a customer's status, or overstayers slipping through because a warrant covered only a single property. Secure Immigration Removal Centres (SIRC) will be built rapidly to detain up to 24,000 Detention capacity for up to 24,000 will be created within 18 months. The Home Office will build Secure Immigration Removal Centres. This will be modular accommodation built in remote parts of the country. Conditions are basic but not punitive: prefabricated two-person rooms, canteen catering, on-site medical suites. Robust perimeters and internal movement controls prevent escapes. This enables detention-on-arrest: no more bail. This capacity would allow for up to 24,000 illegal migrants to be deported per month. Initial Voluntary Return Window A six-month Assisted Voluntary Return window precedes large-scale raids. Illegal migrants will be offered a financial incentive to self-deport. An app will be launched to facilitate this. The Deportation Flights The Home Office will scale up charters to 5 flights per day. To guard against last-minute aircraft unserviceability, the RAF will keep one Voyager aircraft on six-hour 'hot-spare' readiness. If a commercial charter breaks down, detainees can still be flown out that night, preserving operational integrity. The legal reset will mean activist lawyers will no longer be able preven…
The UK version of “Project 2025” by the Reform party includes a British ICE, a concentration camp for 24,000 people, mass surveillance and withdrawing from refugee, anti-torture and anti-trafficking conventions.
It’s on their website. That’s how comfortable fascists are in the UK today.
Resigned, now, to an enduring mental soundtrack of "apocalypse-proof boat...apocalypse-proof boat...apocalypse-proof boat..." Cheers Bear.
Universities across the world seeing this:
"its only wrong 45% of the time!!
Lets buy free licenses for our students, staff and faculty!!
Lets lock into contracts with rapacious predatory AI companies with shitty technofascist politics, sucking up water and jacking up electricity prices!!"
Free broadband: absurd communism, what would they even use it for
Psychosis Wormhole Premium in every home: Mr Altman, you’ve charmed me
Laurie Anderson anticipating AI at the Hirshhorn Museum
People are lonelier than ever, so here is a robot you can talk to. It won't make you less lonely but it will drive you insane. That will be five thousand dollars.
never take freedom of the press or access to news for granted. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/...
Belfast friends bringing home bar receipts from a night out in Dublin so we could all marvel at the cost of a round
Hot take: most online courses taught in universities right now are not designed to maximize student learning.
Why not? Because instead of spending money on recruiting and training excellent educators, universities are spending their money on Learning Management Systems that don't work.
![Fighting Age Males
[2 columns of text. The column on the right starts first. It is narrow, 1-3 words per line. At the end the lines become longer but more broken and fragmented. The text is transcribed below]
video taken on a phone silent men walking through the rubble young men, boys really old men dust and concrete an armchair now and then a part of lamp shards of once lived-in domesticity the men have found someone a child under the wreckage dust still alive one man pulls the child out lifts him up into the strong safe heat of his arms they look to the sky and praise God scroll on still image now men stood against a wall in a line warm colour of their fleshy human skin stark against grey all naked blindfold heads bowed soft bellies skinny legs the shameful shock of it oh fuck scroll past - scroll back- naked men gun point young men, boys really old men thirty to forty fighting age males stripped with hands bound not civilians it says but fighting age at them it says look at these males it says look men look at these Arab men look see look that are these fighting age males look
[see alt text of following post for text of left column]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wbvqv5jjfmj3ip627ln4pl7r/bafkreic2yel6tsnvbkubcwrwyxaxyhymcp67ojnwnt6rwcf6uqvdo2igci)
Fighting Age Males [2 columns of text. The column on the right starts first. It is narrow, 1-3 words per line. At the end the lines become longer but more broken and fragmented. The text is transcribed below] video taken on a phone silent men walking through the rubble young men, boys really old men dust and concrete an armchair now and then a part of lamp shards of once lived-in domesticity the men have found someone a child under the wreckage dust still alive one man pulls the child out lifts him up into the strong safe heat of his arms they look to the sky and praise God scroll on still image now men stood against a wall in a line warm colour of their fleshy human skin stark against grey all naked blindfold heads bowed soft bellies skinny legs the shameful shock of it oh fuck scroll past - scroll back- naked men gun point young men, boys really old men thirty to forty fighting age males stripped with hands bound not civilians it says but fighting age at them it says look at these males it says look men look at these Arab men look see look that are these fighting age males look [see alt text of following post for text of left column]
remembered this today, which I wrote back at the end of 2023, and thought about how most of the people in the images and videos that prompted it will likely be dead now. My son is about to turn 7
Absurd, and deeply troubling. Anyone with even a passing concern for basic democratic norms should be alarmed at what is happening in the UK at the moment.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
Read the entire thread! Very perceptive analysis.
In a week when the divide between direct action protest and terrorism disappeared for the UK Government, Anne Alexander, @aliceellafinden.bsky.social and I share our thoughts on the dangerous chilling effect for Art 10/11 ECHR rights with @opendemocracy.net:
www.opendemocracy.net/en/palestine...
This is a *really* extraordinary story from @kenzabryan.ft.com www.ft.com/content/84d9...
Research from us looking at how social media platforms once again failed to take action on content inciting violence in Northern Ireland last week
Baubi Urquhart of Yell, Shetland: "photographs of Baubi were once used to illustrate two quite different stories – one about folklore, specifically tales of ‘seal women’ or ‘selkies’ from the Northern Isles of Scotland, and the other about women’s work in the rural economy of the 19th century."
Seems today is the day for Irish politicians to use technology to make a holy show of themselves.
www.thejournal.ie/ciaran-mullo...
The EU was asked 15 months ago by Spain and Ireland to consider suspending the favourable trade deal it has with Israel. They were ignored.
Trying to get my head round how this could make it to print. Many warning signs for all of us
I didn’t realize that *every* literary arts grantee, all 51, were terminated by the NEA. lareviewofbooks.org/article/we-d...
“The inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”
Local journalism is one of the cornerstones of a democratic society. @manchestermill.bsky.social's work on the University of Greater Manchester (formerly Bolton) is a reminder of just what we're missing as so many local papers become hollow shadows of themselves manchestermill.co.uk/the-universi...
The epilogue from my book. Siva said it best - “what Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after”
Worrying days for The Shetland Times and all of us. We hold all the editions on microfilm and it’s an essential historical resource. If we lose our newspapers it gets much harder to find and preserve consistent output by trained journalists.
The Irish Journal of Anthropology (IJA) has just released its special issue on "Islandness", which will be of interest to all scholars of Ireland, and of islands more broadly. The IJA is open access and hosted by University College Cork on behalf of the Anthropological Association of Ireland (AAI).
It's nearly 9 years since I moved to Shetland, so it must be at least 8 since my first Sunday Tea, which happened to be run by the Ex-Whalers Association. Delighted to have somehow snuck them into Irish Pages, via a poem called 'Swallowing the Anchor'. Looking forward to reading this Scotland issue.
📣 Islands Symposium registration is now OPEN 📣
Book your place for Island Narratives of Kinship, Place and the Weather, bit.ly/3F0ESa0
📆 3-4 April 2025
📍 Hosted at Cnoc Soilleir with Ceòlas Uibhist &
UHI North, West and Hebrides (South Uist) and online
