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The podcast episode discusses the UK government's approach to immigration and the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring the Rwanda policy unlawful. The host criticizes the policy for its inhumanity and lack of effectiveness. They also caution the Supreme Court about making too many rulings as it could lead to a loss of power. The host mentions that the Conservative party may use the immigration issue to win the next election, as Labour lacks a coherent approach. The episode ends by highlighting the importance of immigration as a top issue for voters. Hello and welcome back to episode 4 of the Generation Z political podcast. Thank you for joining me today and I'm glad to report that the number of viewers on the last episode has risen exponentially to three. We've got a viewer from Canada who seems to have watched the video, listened to this podcast for seven seconds and then decided, nope, this isn't for me. And to the two other viewers, thank you for listening to it. They're both from the UK and thank you very much. And it's only up from here, although actually in other words for viewers we can actually go down, but that's besides the point. So today what I want to discuss is immigration and annexation. We'll begin by tackling the UK government's recent approach to immigration, especially with their Rwanda policy and the new thresholds which were announced yesterday. And then we're going to shift over into something else. We're going to talk about annexation. We'll cover the Israel-Gaza conflict and I'd also like to raise a point about Venezuela, because you probably do not see this, but they recently had a vote to annex Guyana and the vote succeeded. However, it is more interesting than that vote in Venice, because annexing a place that's not a sovereign country is quite interesting, but it's even more interesting than that when you actually go down and look at things like turnout, because it actually shows a reflection of how Venezuela is doing at the moment. But I digress. Today we will start by talking about the UK government's current approach to immigration. So to begin, we need to go back to the time of the dinosaurs. No, I'm joking. We don't need to go that far. We need to go back to the time of Boris Johnson, when they proposed the Rwanda policy. Now, initially, when I think the majority of people saw this, they were like, what the hell? And I expected it not even to get to Parliament. And then it did get to Parliament, and then it passed both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which I guess I should have really expected, because it was, I think, in the era when Boris Johnson was losing support, and he needed to shore up support from the right of his party. So it would make sense that he would pursue a hardline immigration policy. And then also we had Swedish Reverend as Home Secretary, or was it Priti Patel? Either way, they're as bad as each other. We should push the votes back. It is undeniable that there needed to be a response to the immigration crisis. The votes cannot keep coming in such large numbers. It is unsustainable. And too many people are going to end up dying in the Channel, because these evil people smugglers that take all your life savings and put you on a dinghy, and you're very likely to drown. But this is the wrong response. Not least because of what has just happened, which we will get into, but also because it is completely wrong to send people to Rwanda and not even give them a fair hearing, and also to send them to a country that they don't want to go. Now on the arguments about whether Rwanda is a safe country, I would argue that to the extent that it wasn't fair. Rwanda is probably one of the safest countries in Africa. But the way they are a safe country is because they are a dictatorship, and they clamp down on LGBTQIA+, rights, and free speech. So I don't think that immigrants would be unsafe there, because it is one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, and it is much safer than, say, a country like the USA, with the murder rate 25 times lower than the USA. But what it isn't is where immigrants want to go. And if you're going to deport an immigrant, you should send them back to their home country. But you should not send them back to a country which they may never have heard of. Because also, I guarantee that a lot of people in the UK are illiterate and incompetent morons, and have never heard of Rwanda before it was reprised. Although they might have heard of it from the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s. But then the problem with the immigration policy was not that it was inhumane, which it was, but the other problem was that it simply was never going to work, because it got bogged down for years in the courts. The first policy plane was about to take off, and then the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights, meant that they were unable to take off, and they literally had to stop the plane taking off, which meant that the Tory right to propose to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and the more was saying, oh, this is the EU intervening in politics, and it's not, it's just another institution that has no relevance to the EU whatsoever, without even beginning to think about all the good things that the ECHR has done, like freedom from domestic abuse, freedom from torture, freedom from uncruel detention, freedom from arrest without a warrant, all that stuff, the right to having a lawyer. So that also was a failure of the Rwanda policy, which is that if we were to hold discussion of whether to leave the ECHR, and I suspect when Sudan loses the next election, and Babarman, who I suspect will be the next Conservative leader, well and behold, she will make it her pledge to leave the ECHR, because generally, just to digress, but parties tend to shift to the extremes when they lose power after a while, because all the MPs that are left, the MPs are in the super seats, and so they can be as extreme as they like, because they know they have no chance of winning an election, and they think, well, we might as well go for it, that's what Corbyn, and then William Hague, and then Michael Foot, and Neil Kinnock, they all were too radical, and they all failed to get elected. And now, with the Rwanda policy, moving back to that, we now have the Supreme Court recent judgement, which has declared the Rwanda policy completely unlawful, and has basically scrapped the whole thing, which means that the last year and a half has been a complete and utter waste of time. Now, I am not exactly cheering the Rwanda policy being scrapped, because, although I don't like it, and I never wanted it to go ahead, it just shows the government to be completely incompetent, which they are, but it also means that we have no solution to the small votes crisis, the votes are going to keep increasing in exponential levels, and more people are going to die, and it is just a complete waste of time, it was simply a method just to shore up the Tory right, and make it seem they are doing something on immigration, and they will go, and they will claim that it's part of the deep state, and everything else, and in fairness, they have a small bit of a point, the Supreme Court in the US, UK, is nowhere near as powerful as the Supreme Court in the US, but it is now taking a more vigorous approach to policy, it has ruled on Scottish independence, it has ruled on the proroguing of Parliament, it has ruled on Brexit, it has ruled on immigration, in the 12 years since it was set up, in 2011, actually it might be 2009, the point is in the last decade and a half since it was set up, it is now starting to finally have a tangible impact on British life, which is good, because we need a third check to the executive, the second check to the executive, because the executive is too powerful, however, the Supreme Court should be careful in what it does, because we are not like the USA, where the Supreme Court is entrenched in a higher bill, we have an uncodified constitution, and the power of the Supreme Court can be taken away just like that, I remember in 2020, before COVID hit, which was a few weeks, there were plans by Dominic Raab, who was the Justice Secretary, I think at the time, or was he the Foreign Secretary, whatever, there were plans to limit the power of judges, basically to make sure that the government always got its way, and that would have been incredibly dangerous, because it would have meant that they were unable to rule independently, it would have undermined a key principle of the judiciary, so it's not that the Supreme Court shouldn't rule on immigration, it shouldn't rule within its remit, but I would just caution that it needs to be careful of how often it makes these rulings, because it will only take one Act of Parliament to strip the Supreme Court of their powers, and then they become a defined body, or even worse, we end up a system like the US, and we become even more powerful, and then we just end up in an endless gridlock and delay. And so, moving back to the immigration argument, well, it is now in a crisis, because Sunith's fifth pledge was to stop the vote, and he has failed to stop the vote, and now we see that James Cleverley has signed a new Rwanda treaty in Rwanda, so obviously trying to reinforce this treaty, and it says that it ensures people in a case of surrender are not at risk of being returned to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened, and there's a new appeal body, and they're basically trying to shore up the policy for another attempt at the Supreme Court, so when the Supreme Court rules again, be that in a few months, it will hopefully prove that it's lawful, and then soon enough we'll be able to go into the election in 2024 and say, look, I've found a policy, this is how we're going to stop the vote, this is how we're going to win the election, and we'll beat Labour, because Labour do not have a coherent approach on immigration, which is true, because Labour still do not have a coherent approach on immigration, they have failed to provide one, and until they do provide one, the Conservatives still have a chance of winning this election, because immigration is now rocketing up the agenda as a top issue, it used to be an agenda, that's why you have the rise of UKIP, that's why we have the EU referendum, that's why we have the mess that we have at the moment, but then obviously after we left the EU, it has dropped, and people care more about stuff like the economy, and crime, and education, and health, especially after Covid, but now that the small votes are increasing in immigration, increasing to levels that will soon be, I argue, unsustainable, we need a new approach, we should not have so much illegal immigration across the channel, sorry for the jumpy audio, my audio quality is terrible, so therefore we need to change, and we need to have more, not necessarily control, but we actually need to have a way that stops people crossing the channel, so we see this with James Cleverley saying today, and this is more to do with legal immigration, saying that people are not allowed to come to the UK as legal immigrants unless they own £37,000 a year, which is incredible, because frankly, if you're in an entry-level job, you will not be earning £37,000 a year, the average wage in the UK, I think, is about £27,000, so therefore if you are a immigrant coming to the UK, especially if you're coming from, say, a country in Eastern Europe, say like Poland, or Romania, or Bulgaria, countries that are poorer than the UK, the chances of you earning that much money in your new job are very low, because you will likely be saying you're slightly lower to start with, and so what this does is severely limit immigration, which is obviously James Cleverley's approach. He's also trying to inspire a new skills-based economy by making sure that the people who are getting hired aren't the people that are just going to do unskilled labour, and we all know how well that went when we didn't have enough people to try to trust to carry the petrol a couple years ago. The point is, and I'll kind of wrap this point up, is that immigration is now a massive deal, both legally and illegally. Legally, it is, at this point, pretty hard to come to the UK. I mean, obviously, there are ways, as the education visa, which makes it very easy to come to the UK, but now it is going to get even tougher if you want to come here and you're not in education and go to university in the UK. So the Conservative government will likely reduce the numbers of people going to the UK, because obviously now that we have left the EU, we no longer have freedom of movement, so they will be able to claim a cut in legal immigration before the next election, and they will place that as their big promise, and they will say that we're stopping the votes, even though that's not at all what stopping the votes means. In terms of whether they will stop the votes, I highly doubt that the Supreme Court will rule in favour of the Rwanda plan, if it does end back in the Supreme Court, and I also highly doubt that they will have time to put it back in the Supreme Court before the next election. If the next election is by May, they definitely will not have time to put it back in the Supreme Court. If the next election is November, there is a chance, but there will also have to be other things going on, because they will have the local elections in May, and then by the time we get to, say August, or by the time we get to July, we'll be in campaigning season, because nothing ever happens in the UK government over August. So, frankly, the government's immigration record isn't tattered, and this is kind of the one area in which I think they are still ranked higher than Labour, or ranked very close to Labour. It's the one area that they seem to trust, voters seem to trust Conservatives on more than Labour, but now that is shifting to Labour, with the failure of these plans, and we will see what happens over the coming months. I suspect it will be more blustering and more saying, are we going to solve the immigration crisis, when in fact they are not going to solve the immigration crisis, and it will be the first thing on Labour's new agenda, will be to work out a policy of immigration, and I do not envy Keir Starmer when he comes in to number 10, and whoever the Immigration Minister is, and the Home Secretary is, presuming he doesn't do a cabinet reshuffle, although I don't think he will do a cabinet reshuffle until the next election, will have to deal with that immigration crisis. So, to wrap up on that, and now we're going to shift our attention further westwards, and then down south to Venezuela, the land of, I don't know what's from Venezuela, the land of Nicolas Nduru, Hugo Chavez, and that brilliant episode from Parks and Recreation. It was, there was a treaty, not a treaty, a referendum yesterday, which was legally non-binary, when Venezuelans had voted to annex Guayana, according to AP News, that was on Sunday, a pre-referendum called by the government of President Néstor Maduro's case of an oil and mineral rich area of Guayana, he argues, was stolen when the border was drawn more than a century ago. Now, I'm not going to weigh in to whether Venezuela does have a claim over Guayana, but I will say this, if we go through every territorial claim that every country has to everywhere else, the whole map of the world would change. I mean, Britain probably still has a territorial claim to most of France, if we want to enforce it, or if we want to talk about the USA and the Native Americans, and that would completely destroy them, who should get representation. But the point is that there are a million land disputes, and we cannot keep changing every one of them. But what is more interesting about this is how low the turnout was. The turnout was 50%, which is incredibly low. It says here on AP News, the National Electoral Council claimed to have counted more than 10.5 million votes, even though few voters could be seen at polling sites throughout the voting period for the five-question referendum. The council, however, did not explain whether the number of votes was equivalent to each voter, or if it was the sum of each individual answer, and then they had questions on the referendum, and then apparently the turnout could be as low as 2.1 million, which is highly interesting and reflects Venezuela's regime. Venezuela is a dictatorship, there is no doubt about it. Any of the liberal elites who say, oh no, it's total democracy, oh no, it's socialism, actually, oh no, it's a lovely country in South America that's flourishing, it is not. It is a failed state. The government cannot control its people, crime is rampant, poverty is rampant, money is worthless. And it often happens, and this is a thing through history, when you're the barely legitimate leader of a struggling country, because if you remember, Maduro is not recognised by the majority of countries, they recognise the other guy, whose name begins with G, I think, I figure, and it was like 2018 when this was all going down, and there are presidential elections in Venezuela next year, now these elections will almost undoubtedly be rigged, however, if the turnout is this low, and is at 10%, which is what it could be, at this election, Maduro will have very little legitimacy, and obviously in a dictatorship, that means nothing, because as long as you keep the military on your side, you can pretty much rule by whatever means. However, what this does show is why he is doing this, though, because generally throughout history, there is a pattern of when you find yourself struggling, you either blame something else, or you start a war to make everyone forget their problems, which is what he's doing now, he is distracting their problems over Guayana, and he's moving that to say, oh, we should have had that, and he's stirring up national patriotism. Now, there's nothing wrong with patriotism, but in this context, it is being used in a political manner, it is being used to aid Maduro, it is being used to make Venezuelans not think about the dreadful damage he and Hugo Chavez has done to Venezuela. So it is an interesting exercise in power, and how power is demonstrated through many means, this is an authoritarian country using democracy to legitimise their power, and also to encourage people to support Venezuela, their country, and obviously, if you don't support the government of Venezuela, you are anti-patriot, and you don't like your country, and therefore, you shouldn't be in this country. So it's a smart move by Maduro. And whether the actual conquest or invasion of Guayana goes ahead, I was highly down to it. South America is generally regarded as the place that everyone forgets about, because nothing ever happens down there. Obviously, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But what I mean by that is they haven't fought any major wars for the last hundred years, because generally, countries are fairly peaceful. So this would break that consensus of peace in South America. Now, I doubt that Maduro will do it, because he will face massive Western opposition, and also Venezuela is not in the right state to be fighting against what is known as another country, and against the West. But it is also interesting that South America and Argentina, incidentally, who elected their new president, are moving towards a nationalist movement of invasion, because the Argentinian president pledged to reconquer the Falklands. Now, in fact, every president of Argentina seems to be pledging that, and they never do, because they are owned by Britain. They are British. I'm sorry if anyone is Argentinian listening to this, and therefore they should be in Britain's hands. However, it does show that in the world, and in South America, there is a trend towards military aggression to stop people worrying about their own problems. I mean, Argentina has massive rampant inflation. It has some of the highest inflation in the world, and the new president of Argentina will attempt to deal with those problems, and he will use his libertarian mindset to deal with those problems, putting a massive chainsaw through the government, saying that we'll get rid of the Department of Culture, the Department of Sport, the Department of Public Works, because it's racist. That's not my words, that's his words. But what these things demonstrate is that South America can no longer be seen as a bastion of peace. It is increasingly looked like it is militarizing, and we may see conflict through there very soon. So that's a joyous note, and now we're going to move on to an even more joyous note on Israel-Palestine. The fighting continues at pace. This adds to your answers that the humanitarian crisis is worsening in Gaza. Israel has mass fighting intensifies. Top UN officials warning of an apocalypse situation, a war-torn Gaza with no place to go for civilians, as Israel's war-torn Hamas spreads to the south where many had previously sought refuge. If you remember, Israel told all the citizens in the northern Gaza Strip to move south because it was going to bomb the area, and it did, and we've seen the horrific pictures of the devastation to the area, and it is now moving south into the rest of Gaza to probably conquer the entire Gaza Strip. And you can see on CNN that there are people suffering greatly. Any minute now is our last visit by one dozen women, and Israel is attempting to surround Hamas. The idea of saying it is the most intense fighting since the ground operation began in late October. Hamas saying that 15,800 people have been killed by Israel's campaign, including about 6,000 children. Now, that is probably an exaggeration because it is run by Hamas, who are evil and terrorists, and certainly wiped off their worth. Now, Israel is currently in a calm unit, and it has also been bombing, I think, a refugee camp, but Israel is claiming that this is being used for Hamas terrorist operations. Now, whether that allows you to bomb a refugee camp, it certainly does not, but it does explain it because it is consistent with Hamas's bonus operandi of placing their military apparatus specifically into civilian targets just to encourage Israel to avoid them. So, to offer a sobering perspective on this, it is only going to get worse. Israel shows no sign of relenting, Hamas shows no sign of surrendering, and I will say that if Hamas surrenders, this will end on Hamas to surrender. That does not mean that Israel should keep bombing Hamas indiscriminately, but it does mean that anyone who blames Israel should mainly be blaming Hamas. They started this, they could have chosen to surrender at any time they wish, but they are letting 6,000 children, according to them, die. In my opinion, the war does not have much longer to go. Israel, I suspect, will want the war finished by the end of the year, they won't want it to drag on, they will want it to become another forever war, like the Ukraine war has now become, but Israel will keep fighting until it is done. I suspect they will conquer the rest of the Gaza Strip quite easily, I do not think that Hamas have the resistance to stop them, and then who knows what. The major danger will be if the attacks of Hamas on October 7th spread to other countries. I hope they don't, but I fear that they will, because especially now, with the bombing Israel was inflicting, it will inspire more people to be masters to the Islamic cause, and could lead to some horrific attacks in the rest of the Western world, which is a sad thing to say, but unfortunately, it is the truth. And so, to conclude here, what we have said today, with annexation, war is now increasingly becoming a tool for governments to use, either to defend, or they take the initiative to deal with other problems. We are no longer living in an age of no war, we are living in an age of constant war. That does not mean the war has not decreased, and civilians are far less likely to die in war than they were, say, in World War I and World War II, say, in the Soviet Union, but that war is back and is a key part of international relations and world politics. Thank you for listening. The next episode will be out in a couple of days. I feel like, you know, I'm not sure if anyone is actually listening to these, but if they are, thank you, and I will see you all, probably on Thursday or Friday, where we will discuss Boris Johnson at the Covid Inquiry, I think is what I will tackle, which should always be fun. There should be some good clips from there. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.
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