BEST FOR BRITAIN'S 

WEEKEND WIRE

Dear John,

With their anti-migration push facing defeat after defeat in the courts and in Lords, the Government is on the hunt for distractions to throw to the chomping Brexiter base. From our end, it looks like slim pickings.

Lording it over the Anti-Asylum Bill

The Government’s attempt to force their hardline anti-immigration agenda through Parliament saw another defeat on Monday night, with the House of Lords adding a series of amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill.

The amendments dealt a serious blow to the government’s attempts to subvert international law and give ministers wide-ranging powers to deport people seeking asylum. They included provisions limiting detention time for children and pregnant women, as well as protection for LGBTQ people.

Tories 1.83 metres under

Get ready to start paying your council tax in farthings, because the Tories are going to bring back the glory days of empire, and their first step is restoring our Great British weights and measurements.

In true Tory fashion of ignoring business input and spurning actual strategic thinking in favour of a nostalgic do-nothing patch job, ministers are reportedly resurrecting plans to axe metric, which had gained the support of the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, before the upheavals of last year saw the changes put on the back burner.

Should this idea  fail to drum up voter enthusiasm for the flagging Tories, they could always take the strategy one step further: revert to the Julian calendar and hope that enough voters turn up 13 days late to tilt the election in their favour.

New Horizons

The UK’s scientific community could be back on the upswing after years of Brexit upheavals and lost funding opportunities, and it’s all thanks to the very same Government that foisted Brexit on them in the first place.

This week, the UK and EU reached a draft agreement to restore the UK’s membership in Horizon, the EU’s €95.5bn flagship research and innovation programme. Despite EU membership not being required for participating states, Boris Johnson failed to secure a deal that kept the UK in Horizon. As a result, the UK’s scientific sector has been seriously impacted by the loss of Horizon’s funding and collaboration opportunities, with many scientists relocating abroad.

With a deal agreed in principle, observers are now pressing the Government to complete the negotiations, whether or not the Prime Minister can be bothered. You can too in just a few clicks using our handy online tool.

Rejoining Horizon Europe was one of the key recommendations included in the UK Trade and Business Commission’s Trading our way to prosperity report, which was released last month.

Brexit FDI crash

The challenge? An economy still struggling to recover from the global financial crash and weighed down by austerity. The plan? Cut ourselves off from a 28-nation barrier-free trade bloc. The result? Cash money. It’ll work, trust me.

This week, Bloomberg reported new UN data showing that, while the UK has seen some cash money in the form of FDI, the amount has tanked since Brexit officially took effect. In 2021, FDI flows were net negative, meaning firms pulled more money out than they invested. 2022 saw them return to the black, but at $14.1bn, the total was less than a fifth of the average level in the three years prior to 2020. 

2022 also saw France overtake the UK as a destination for new FDI ventures for the first time in two decades, an EY survey revealed. However, the UK has remained firmly ahead of France in the amount of blue on its passports since Brexit, so it’s not all bad.

New Con

If you heard an extra-high frequency screeching emanating from the Parliamentary estate this week, don’t fret–London has not come under sonic attack. It’s just the New Conservatives, the latest (and one of the lamest-named) groups of Tory MPs braying for a higher-cruelty government.

The New Conservatives, who boast of 25 members but who have apparently failed to rouse many of them  to appear at their launch on Monday, are demanding the Government go to war with woke and slash immigration numbers. Accomplishing their goals, they claim, is as simple as 1. Give international students the boot right after graduation day and 2. Close visa routes for *checks notes* care workers. 

The Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates-led group did not provide specifics as to how they would quickly train an army of care workers to fill the thousands of vacancies already plaguing the care sector. 

Please share your WhatsApps with the class

The world is about to get an up-close-and-personal look inside the psyche of Boris Johnson, and we’re not talking about his Daily Mail column.

On Thursday, the Cabinet Office lost its legal challenge against the Covid inquiry and will be forced to hand over the full, unredacted sum of Johnson’s WhatsApp messages. The Government now has until the 4pm deadline on Monday to pony up. A government spokesperson said that they were eager to assist the inquiry in full “candour and transparency”--after using taxpayer funds to mount a legal challenge to avoid doing so.

The contents of the messages are expected to be damaging to the current Government, including the Prime Minister, whose over-budget Eat Out to Help Out scheme was blamed for spreading the disease after the first lockdown. 

A spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK called the Government’s attempt to keep the messages secret “a desperate waste of time and money”.

We aren’t allowed to say what we really think, so we’ll just say ‘Grinch Jenrick’

Self-reflection apparently hasn’t been on Robert Jenrick’s mind recently, because reports this week alleged that the Immigration Minister ordered that an immigration detention centre in Kent paint over a mural depicting cartoon characters meant to ease the fears of children arriving there.

Jenrick apparently wanted the change to make it clear to the frightened children who’d been forced to flee their homes that the centre is a “law enforcement environment” rather than a “welcome centre”. At first, horrified staff reportedly refused to carry out the order, but Sky News later in the week confirmed that the mural had been removed.

The news set off a firestorm of condemnation across the political spectrum. While this is an officially agnostic communication, with thunderstorms in the forecast for the weekend, we’d advise Jenrick to stay indoors to be extra safe from any divine wrath he may have incurred.

If you’re feeling inadequate this weekend, rest assured in the knowledge that you, unlike Robert Jenrick, do not spend your time trying to make refugee children’s lives worse.

Best wishes,

Tommy Gillespie 
Press Officer, Best for Britain