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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   911 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 10, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Another day, another humiliation for Britain: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/15/24000-afghans-offered-asylum-mod-data-breach-revealed/

Britain has offered asylum secretly to nearly 24,000 Afghan soldiers and their families caught up in the most serious data breach in history, it can be revealed.

The leak, which can be reported following the lifting of a superinjunction, led the Government to earmark £7 billion to relocate Afghan refugees to the UK over five years, threatening to open up a new black hole in the nation’s finances.

The revelation is set to overshadow Rachel Reeves’s Mansion House speech on Tuesday night, at a time when the Chancellor is already considering raising taxes in the autumn to balance the books.

It is not known whether the huge cost to the taxpayer of resettling the Afghans has been factored into the Government’s budget or whether taxes might have been raised to pay for it, as the secrecy around the data breach has prevented proper scrutiny.

The breach occurred in February 2022, when a Royal Marine sent an email to a group of Afghans and accidentally included a spreadsheet containing the identities of 25,000 Afghans who were applying for asylum – soldiers who had worked with the British Army and their family members.

If I was facing a fiscal emergency, I would simply not spend money on bringing tens of thousands more Afghans into the country.

Some of those who will now come to Britain had asylum applications rejected previously, with officials forced into a reversal.

This is somewhat confusing, I conclude that huge amounts of money was already being spent on asylum speakers or that the whole thing is a giant shambles with money being shuffled around randomly:

It is understood that the direct costs of the leak to date have been £400 million and that £850 million has been set aside to complete the resettlement of Afghans affected by the data breach. It is not believed that this includes any potential compensation costs.

The Government originally set aside £7 billion, MoD lawyers told the High Court, but ministers expect to save around £1.2 billion after closing all Afghan asylum schemes this month. The scheme set up as a result of the leak – the Afghanistan Response Route – will be closed on Tuesday.

Whatever the real cost, Afghan refugees are notoriously rapey, plus the soldiers we were fighting alongside with were notorious for 'green on blue' attacks, boy rape, drug-addiction and corruption. That's why they folded so quickly to the Taliban. The opportunity cost to British taxpayers (with sewage bubbling up in hospitals, streets full of uncollected garbage, rampant petty theft) is considerable. Huge amounts have already been spent on Afghans and it's not clear that this investment yields returns or is even spent on the deserving.

It emerged in May that the estimated cost of hotels and other accommodation for asylum seekers had risen from £4.5 billion between 2019 and 2029 to £15.3 billion. It is not known whether any of the rise in cost can be partly explained by the data breach.

You can just turn back the boats, copy Australia. Put up posters saying 'you will NOT be resettled in Britain if you arrive by boat.' Order the navy to turn them back. Ignore the French if they complain. You can ignore international law if you don't like it, or make up some creative interpretation. You can ignore the ECHR, they're not a real court. Just unsubscribe from the ECHR.

I've been trying to work out what the position of the average Uniparty politician is regarding the small boats. Clearly they don't want to stop the boats. The actions you've outlined have been proven to work in other countries. At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.

The conclusion I've come to is that they want the boats to stop, but they don't want to stop the boats. The more deluded ones think there is some form of action (the Rwanda scheme, 'smashing the gangs') that can stop the boats coming without actually turning away or deporting any of them. The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it. So they muddle along and hope the problem will solve itself, or that France will generously decide that it would rather keep all these vibrant young men.

At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.

What's the evidence for this?

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