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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Brexit holiday chaos

The Independent reports that millions of Britons are barred from entering the EU by post-Brexit passport rules that are set to cause chaos over the Easter holidays.

The paper says that an estimated 2.4 million travellers have documents that can’t be used for trips to the EU because of the change in expiry requirements:

Since Brexit, British passports must have an issue date less than 10 years old on the day of departure to the EU, and must have at least three months left before their expiry date on the intended day of return. But millions of passports issued prior to September 2018 have longer validity periods.

Analysis by The Independent suggests 200 people every day are falling foul of this rule at UK airports, with thousands expected to see their holidays ruined over the upcoming break.

The rule change follows Britain’s Brexit deal with the EU, which puts the UK into the “third country nationals” category – alongside Venezuela and Samoa – with different expiry rules than when it was a member state. It means Britons are being turned away at airports, ferries and trains bound for Europe even if they have previously travelled to the EU on the same document.

The 17-day Easter break is a particularly busy time for British travellers and an estimated 6.4 million trips will be made from the UK to Europe – 1.6 million over the bank holiday weekend alone.

Longer validity on older passports was a useful way to avoid wasting part of the life of a passport, since holders could renew up to nine months early without losing any time. But after the rules changed, many have been confused into believing they have more time on their current passports to enter the EU than they actually do.

For example, anyone with a passport issued before 28 March 2014 will be prevented from going to Europe today, even if they have many months remaining before expiry. This confusing rule will potentially affect everyone whose passport was issued before September 2018: an estimated 32 million people.

Well, that wasnt on the side of the bus. This is what happens when you pull up the drawbridge and try and go it alone irrespective of the consequences.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The long-forgotten George A. Smathers

In reflecting the other day on the ttactics being used by the Tories to discredit Keir Starmer I was motvated to look up a notorious speech that was allegedly delivered in a Florida primary contest in 1950 by George A. Smathers.

As Florida Today says, personal attacks and name calling have a long tradition in American political campaigns and when polled, people overwhelmingly say they do not approve of such tactics, yet election results demonstrate that such negative campaigning is frequently successful.

They add that when modern political commentators discuss the divisiveness of contemporary American politics, they often refer to Florida’s 1950 Democratic Primary as an example of a particularly contentious campaign.

In that contest, George Smathers defeated Claude Pepper for Florida’s seat in the United States Senate, and legend has it that he did so with a cynical speech aimed at unsophisticated Florida voters. However, despite the speech being quoted in the April 17, 1950, edition of Time magazine, Smathers denies ever having delivered it. This is the key passage:

“Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”

The version I vaguely remember was a bit longer and had something about Pepper's sister matriculating at college before she became a known thespian, but you get the drift. Florida Today takes up the story:

“The idea was north Florida voters weren’t very bright, and if you used big words, you could confuse them and make the opponent sound terrible, simply by saying truthful things,” said James C. Clark, author of the book “Red Pepper and Gorgeous George: Claude Pepper’s Epic Defeat in the 1950 Democratic Primary.”

“Clearly this speech by Smathers was never given,” Clark said. “Smathers offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who could prove that the speech had been given. It’s amazing that Smathers served three terms in the Senate, he was close to Kennedy, he was close to Nixon, did a lot in Latin American affairs, and what he’s best remembered for is a speech he never gave.”

Unfortunately, this piece of political satire is sometimes still quoted as an actual example of campaign tactics in Florida.

Claude Pepper is today affectionately remembered as a champion of senior citizens, but in the decade leading up to the 1950 Democratic Primary, he was a controversial figure.

“Before World War II, he was the leading advocate for a military buildup in this country,” said Clark. “He told everyone who would listen that Hitler was going to be a problem for us. For that he was mocked. People on the Senate floor mocked him, called him ridiculous.”

History proved Pepper to be correct about America’s participation in World War II, but not about our developing relationship with the Soviet Union.

“After the war, he thought that the coming issue would be relations with Russia, but this time he guessed wrong,” said Clark. “He bet that we would have good relations with Russia, and if he championed that, he would come out with a better reputation, just as he had with Hitler. Relations with Russia did not get better, they got far worse.”

Pepper visited Josef Stalin, and his stance on communism became a key issue in the 1950 campaign.

President Harry S. Truman and Pepper were political adversaries, and Truman personally asked Smathers to defeat Pepper in the senate race. The campaign was contentious, even though all three men were Democrats.

Smathers served in the United States Senate from 1951 to 1969 but is still remembered for a speech he never gave. 

Although he lost the Senate seat he had held since 1936, Pepper went on to serve Florida in the United States House of Representatives from 1963 until his death in 1989.

Update: The New York Times has more:

But the history of the remark attributed to Mr. Smathers is perhaps most interesting as a case study in how real and fictional events, stump speeches and reporters' gossip, ideology and dirty tricks blend together to form the sustaining mythology of this town's political community.

'It was a campaign of vicious distortion,'' Mr. Pepper said, ''calling me 'Red Pepper,' calling me a Communist. That fitted right in, you see, with the McCarthyism that was sweeping the country.'

But Mr. Smathers insisted that not all the tough talk had come from him. For example, Mr. Pepper liked to wave his Alabama birth certificate at all-white audiences and remind them that Mr. Smathers was born in New Jersey. No son of the South, Mr. Pepper said in replying charges that he was pro-black, needed instruction from a Northerner on race.

Such theatrics drew national press attention, and it was apparently a mixture of journalistic interest and the candidates' torrid rhetorical exchanges that gave rise to the famous remark.

According to Mr. Smathers, newspaper reporters, chiefly William H. Lawrence of The New York Times, began inventing double-talk quotations and swapping them over drinks. Mr. Smathers said these wisecracks became the running joke of the campaign and that Mr. Lawrence kept him posted on the latest version.

William Fokes, a Tallahassee lawyer who was Mr. Pepper's administrative assistant at the time, also confirmed that reporters were passing around these jokes. In interviews, people from both camps agreed that there was no record that Mr. Smathers used any of the joke lines on the stump.

But there is evidence that once the jokes got started, the Smathers organization helped spread them. The idea was not to mislead ignorant voters with fancy words but to undermine respect for Mr. Pepper by making him an object of ridicule in the conservative Panhandle of northern Florida, recalled Daniel T. Crisp, a Jacksonville public relations man who worked in Mr. Smathers's behalf.

'It was actively used because it was funny,'' said Mr. Crisp. Two years before the election, he recalled, he was hired by Edward Ball, manager of the DuPont interests in Florida, to rally the conservative vote against Mr. Pepper. The jokes about celibacy and matriculation were part of an arsenal of anti-Pepper humor. 

'There were several things,'' Mr. Crisp said. ''One was a little card passed from one businessman to another, saying: 'Florida's fastest growing industry: Canning Pepper.'

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

What city are we in again?

We knew that the Tories were losing any sense of reality, especially when it comes to understanding the British public, but the least we should be able to expect from politicians soliciting our vote is to know what city they are standing in. Unfortunately, that is also a lost art for the governing party.

The Mirror reports that bungling Tories have been forced to delete an election campaign video that showed New York instead of London.

They say that in the weird clip, the party claimed “the metropolis [is] teetering on the brink of chaos”. But rather than depict the capital, it actually used footage of a stampede during rush hour at New York's Penn Station after false reports of gunfire in 2017:

In the Tory video, a narrator says: “London, a city steeped in history. But tonight, its ancient streets bear witness to a different tale, a tale not of kings and queens, but of crime and desperation.” He adds: “Gripped by the tendrils of rising crime, London's citizens stay inside. The streets are quiet, quieter in the night now than they used to be.”

Voters in London will pick who will be Mayor in local elections in May. The Tories have faced criticism for picking Ms Hall, a little known member of the London Assembly, as their candidate. The former Harrow council leader has been outspoken in her praise for Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss's disastrous mini-Budget.

In September 2022, she tweeted: "Oh deep joy, a proper #Conservative government - thank you @KwasiKwarteng - thank you @trussliz #MiniBudget."

Ms Hall previously urged Mr Trump to win the US Presidential race, tweeting, "Come on Donald Trump - make sure you win and wipe the smile off this man’s face," alongside a picture of her Labour rival Mr Khan. She has also slammed Black Lives Matter, backed the Government's Rwanda policy and supported Home Secretary Suella Braverman when she controversially warned of an "invasion" of migrants by small boats.

The new video is also factually incorrect. Far from being a crime capital, London is in fact the 14th safest city in the world as cited here.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Political stress

Having once been a full-time Parlimentarian who employed staff to carry out research and undertake casework, I am very aware of the unique stresses and strains of that job, not to mention the lack of job security, which impacts on staff far more than on the elected politician. 

This is one of the reasons why the Welsh Senedd has invested in support for staff (and MSs) who lose their job after an election, with a view to helping them find alternative employment. They also set aside money to improve the safety of constituency offices.

As far as I know, Westminister has not followed suit in accepting their duty of care to MPs support staff, while controversy still rages about the way many of these employees are treated and sometimes abused, by their employer. If you then factor in outside pressures such as intense 'lobbying' of MPs' offices, external threats and abuse, it must be a pretty awful time to work on the political side in the House of Commons.

This is reflected in an article in the Guardian, which says that a survey has found MPs’ staff are suffering from growing levels of serious psychological distress amid heightened tensions over the war in the Middle East.

The paper says that the findings suggest nearly half of the 3,700 workers employed by MPs experienced clinical stress similar to emergency service workers last year, while one in five said they feared for their own and colleagues’ safety, prompting calls for a new whistleblower-style hotline for workers to raise concerns.:

The survey of 357 members of MPs’ staff, the largest of its kind, was carried out before the heightened tensions in Westminster over the Israel-Gaza war, which many say has added to their fears.

Concerns over the safety of parliamentarians ramped up last month after the controversy over the handling of the Gaza ceasefire votes by the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle .

Hoyle broke parliamentary protocol to allow three separate votes on a ceasefire in Gaza, to the ire of the Scottish National party and the Conservatives. An emotional speaker later told MPs he had taken his decision, which allowed Labour to dodge a difficult vote, because he was fearful of MPs’ safety.

Several members of MPs’ staff told the Guardian the episode had “put a target on our back” and led to them being accused of “subverting democracy” because Hoyle breached parliamentary protocol over the debate.

One said they felt the concern over the protests had been “politicised” and that the primary fear was the “widespread bullying and harassment of junior staff” by MPs and other senior colleagues.

They added: “There is definitely a huge level of fear around the aftermath of what happened to Jo Cox and David Amess and the comments [by Tory donor Frank Hester] about Diane Abbott being shot.”

Cox died after being shot and stabbed in 2016 and Amess was fatally stabbed in 2021.

“All of that is really scary because you’re public-facing, and you’re sometimes having to vet people before they get to the MP – that adds a level of fear.”

The survey found that 46% of staff met the medical threshold for psychological distress – more than twice the level in the general population.

This is up from 42% in 2022, reflecting the increased pressure last year amid the fallout of global conflicts including in Gaza and Ukraine.

It had fallen from 49.8% in 2021 when MPs were flooded with concerns from the public about the end of Covid-19 support measures such as furlough.

Nearly half said they frequently or always hid the nature of their work from others because they expected a negative reaction.

One said they were questioned about the state of the NHS by a nurse “as I was going in for an operation” after disclosing their job in politics.

The MPs’ staff working wellness group, which commissioned the survey, called for a new whistleblower-style hotline for workers to be able to use.

They said the safety of staff was a “major area of concern, particularly so in recent years” and that those based in constituency offices felt more at risk than those in Westminster.

It said it was “astounded” that nearly one in 10 constituency office workers said their MP or office manager had rejected measures that would improve the safety of their workplace.

The survey also highlighted anxiety over the looming general election, with more than half saying they felt it would negatively impact their job, and 48% feeling unprepared to seek a new role.

Employees outside Whitehall said they were treated like “slack-jawed yokels” and “second-class citizens” by the parliamentary establishment, often working in unpleasant offices.

One said: “Our constituency office is awful – there’s damp, mould, the toilet and kitchen are so old and don’t work properly, the heating is awful, there’s no real natural light. The carpets are filthy and the whole things needs a proper renovation.

“The building is owned by a property company from the local political party so we have no say in how it’s kept. All requests for modernisation, cleaning and decoration are rejected.”

It is time the House of Commons took its duty to MPs staff seriously.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Plaque of the day

Do the residents of Royal York Crescent in Clifton, Bristol have too much time on their hands or have they stumbled onto a genuine sradonic tribute? According to the Guardian a mysterious plaque has appeared on a bench there outing an adulterous husband:

The brass plate engraved with “For My Love/Husband, Father, Adulterer/Yes, Roger, I Knew” quickly attracted attention after it was attached to a wooden bench on the grand crescent’s terrace at the end of last week.

Most residents doubt its authenticity. Rachel Weaver-Tooley, whose balcony flat overlooks the bench, points to the date of Roger’s birth on the plaque: 06.09.69. “Revenge is a dish best served cold … and in a brass plate,” she says in the spring sunshine. “But look at the numbers in dates 69 69. Come on!”

Yet some on the picturesque Georgian crescent, which has served as a location in films including Starter for 10, are determined to uncover the secret plaque maker. “We asked in the cobbler’s earlier because we’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” says Kim Collins, 52, another resident. “They are the only place in Clifton village that engrave stuff, but they said it wasn’t anything to do with them.”

The main suspects appear to live on the crescent. “There are loads of quite eccentric people here. There are lots of novelists and artists, with time on their hands,” says Jason Smith, 53, who lives with Collins.

“I think it is someone living along here who wants to get people talking and laughing.”

It’s not the first time a mysterious plaque has appeared in the area. At the end of the crescent someone has fixed a similar plaque to a bin. It reads: “This bin is dedicated to Craig of Royal York Crescent who spends many a restful moment hither.”

Rumour has it that Craig, a familiar sight on the terrace, who purportedly likes to lean on the bin of an evening, suspects Smith.

Yet Smith denies involvement with either plaque and appears to have an alibi. “I wasn’t here on Thursday [when the plaque was spotted]. You can’t prove anything.”

The five-storey house opposite owns the section of the terrace with the bench. Sue Wells, 77, a writer who lives in one of its flats, has no objection to the plaque: “It’s hilarious. I think it is clever.”

Crowds have been coming to look at the bench, she says. “It is amazing how word spreads. I’ve been trying to have a kip … and there have been loads and loads of people outside.”

Her husband, Martin Wells, 73, a writer and psychotherapist, is one of the few prepared to indulge the idea it might be genuine: “If it’s real, [his spouse] has put up with this for years and only when he has died did they feel able to tell the truth … a very passive person.” The plaque appears to be fixed with tacks, jogging his memory: “Two or three nights ago there was some banging and I thought that’s late for builders to be banging.”

Make a change from the usual memorials.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Whither Rwanda?

The Guardian reports that new figures show that sending ministers and officials to Rwanda has cost the government more than £400,000 before a single deportation flight has taken off.

The paper has calculated that ministers have spent a total of £413,541 on travel in the two years since the policy to send asylum seekers to Kigali started to be developed. The total is based on government transparency releases. It includes trips by senior government officials and a succession of ministers and home secretaries including James Cleverly, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel.

They add that this week it emerged that Cleverly spent £165,561 on chartering a private jet for a one-day trip to sign a new treaty with Rwanda in December. The cost of the flight was published in a transparency document on Thursday:

Cleverly’s flight to Rwanda in December was to sign a new treaty that established a new appeal body, to be made up of judges with asylum expertise from a range of countries, to hear individual cases.

The flights alone of the home secretary’s 24-hour trip cost more than four times the total cost of Braverman’s last visit in March 2023. Her trip cost just over £40,000, with flights at £35,041, hotels £4,301, transport £248 and “engagement” £2,056, the Daily Mirror reported last year.

The government said Rwanda’s asylum system would be monitored by an independent committee, whose powers to enforce the treaty would be beefed up. The committee would develop a system to enable relocated people and their lawyers to lodge complaints.

The government was criticised earlier this month for planning to spend £1.8m on each of the first 300 asylum seekers it plans to send to Rwanda. The overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half a billion pounds, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office.

Perhaps they should spend this money instead on processing claims and putting in place an effective and humane immigration system.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Growing up in poverty

The Mirror reports that damning figures from the Department of Work and Pensions have revealed that 30% of all UK children were living in relative poverty in the year to March 2023.

The paper says that a record 4.3 million children are growing up in poverty as cost of living pressures pushed another 100,000 kids into hardship last year:

In a bleak picture of the state of the UK, the number of people living in absolute poverty rose for a second year to hit a 30-year high after energy bills rocketed in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Another 600,000 people - including 300,000 children - have been plunged into absolute poverty, meaning 12 million people fall 60% below the median income. Charities said the grim statistics must act as an "urgent wake up call" to the Tory Government, which has failed to protect the poorest people from hardship.

Food insecurity has also risen dramatically. Last year, 7.2million people struggled to get enough to eat, compared to 4.7million in 2021/22. Some 826,000 children live in households that have been forced to rely on food banks in the last year.

And the number of pensioners living in deprivation has risen to 8% - the highest level since 2016 and a 2% increase since before the pandemic. Real terms median household income also dropped by 1.5% last year to £545-a-week after housing costs.

These figures are a damning indictment of this government. I await the opposition's proposals to deal with the crisis.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Wake-up call for Welsh Education

There is a new First Minister in the Welsh Senedd and it looks like his first test will be how prepared he is to change direction in a major policy area where his government is failing badly.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published a damning report which concludes that education policy in Wales faces major challenges including low outcomes across a range of measures and high levels of inequality.

Amongst their conclusions are that PISA scores declined by more in Wales than in most other countries in 2022, with scores declining by about 20 points (equivalent to about 20% of a standard deviation, which is a big decline). This brought scores in Wales to their lowest ever level, significantly below the average across OECD countries and significantly below those seen across the rest of the UK. Scotland and Northern Ireland also saw declines in PISA scores in 2022, whilst scores were relatively stable in England.

They say that these lower scores cannot be explained by higher levels of poverty. In PISA, disadvantaged children in England score about 30 points higher, on average, than disadvantaged children in Wales. This is a large gap and equivalent to about 30% of a standard deviation. Even more remarkably, the performance of disadvantaged children in England is either above or similar to the average for all children in Wales. These differences extend to GCSE results.

Furthermore, the differences in educational performance between England and Wales are unlikely to be explained by differences in resources and spending. Spending per pupil is similar in the two countries, in terms of current levels, recent cuts and recent trends over time. And there are worse post-16 educational outcomes in Wales, with a higher share of young people not in education, employment or training than in the rest of the UK.

They conclude that the explanation for lower educational performance is much more likely to reflect longstanding differences in policy and approach, such as lower levels of external accountability and less use of data.

This is a highly critical report on two decades of failure in education policy Wales and cannot be easily ignored. THe IFS make some significant recommendations that policymakers and educators in Wales pause, and in some cases rethink, past and ongoing reforms in the following areas:

* The new Curriculum for Wales should place greater emphasis on specific knowledge.

* Reforms to GCSEs should be delayed to give proper time to consider their effects on long-term outcomes, teacher workload and inequalities.

* More data on pupil skill levels and the degree of inequality in attainment are needed and should be published regularly.

* A move towards school report cards, alongside existing school inspections, could be an effective way to provide greater information for parents without a return to league tables.

This report should be at the top of the new First Minister's in-tray. The least we can expect is that he takes the recommendations seriously and implements them.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

More money down the drain

The Mirror reports that half a million pounds was wasted on barges that couldn’t be used to house migrants as there were no ports to put them:

Bungling officials also spent £3million on refurbishing an RAF based before plans to use it as accommodation were dropped. Tory ministers claimed they would save money by moving migrants out of hotels and into alternatives such as barges, military bases and former student accommodation.

But overall the National Audit Office found it had worked out at £46million more expensive. The Home Office had hoped it would cost £5million each to refurbish RAF Wethersfield and RAF Scampton.

But the true costs were £49million and £27million respectively. By the end of last year the Government hoped to have 25,000 asylum seekers living on disused military bases, ports, holiday camps, converted office buildings and "hard-sided tents".

But by January it managed just 900 across four sites - Scampton and Wethersfield, the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset and old student accommodation in Huddersfield. The NAO report said £2.9million was spent on abandoned plans to move people to a former RAF base in Linton-on-Ouse. The document went on: "It (the Home Office) also paid around £0.5million to reserve vessels it had earmarked as asylum accommodation but was unable to use as it could not secure a suitable port."

Weren't the Tories the party that used to advocate value for money? Whatever happened to them?

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Brexit failing on crime

We did warn them. Over and over again those of us opposed to Brexit warned that severing links with the continent would make it more difficult to police international crime. Here is just one of the many blogs I wrote on the subject. But government didn't listen.

Now, the Mirror reports on the conclusion of Dr Mohammed Rahman, senior lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University, that Brexit's policy to tighten our borders hasn't - and won't - reduce serious crime in the UK:

Organised crime groups (OCGs) have continued to exploit people - including through human trafficking - desperately trying to enter the UK since the Brexit vote. Although the Government states in official documents that "the Brexit deal will give the people of the United Kingdom back control of their borders", academics assert people haven't been deterred from attempting to reach the UK.

Dr Mohammed Rahman, senior lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University, told the Mirror Brexit has made it easier for OCGs in the UK to operate and expand their enterprises. He added: "There is no significant evidence to suggest that the tightening of borders in the UK as a result of Brexit has reduced serious and organised crime. The problem still remains in the sense that transnational organised crime is prevalent in the UK.

"While Brexit has made it increasingly difficult for people to freely travel into the UK from abroad, it hasn't necessarily deterred people from doing so. This is something that criminal groups have picked up on and subsequently exploited."

Less than three years after some 17 million voted to leave the European Union (EU), the bodies of the migrants - 28 men, eight women and three children aged between 15 and 44 - were found "closely packed" inside a sealed HGV container as steam poured from the back of it in Grays, Essex.

The migrants had been trafficked by an organised gang, the leader of which, Vo Van Hong, was jailed for 15 years in 2022. A court heard he was responsible for running a criminal organisation that had smuggled at least 115 people across the Channel between September 2018 and May 2020. The latter month was nearly four years after the Brexit vote. The four people-smugglers, including Gheorghe Nica and Ronan Hughes, were jailed for 78 years for the killings in 2021.

And Dr Rahman, who has had books and peer-reviewed articles published internationally on OCGs, believes this case is just one example of the human trafficking challenge, which still remains despite Brexit. The academic added: "The problem still remains in the sense that transnational organised crime is prevalent in the UK. We still have an issue of human trafficking, and an extreme example of this is the 2019 Essex lorry deaths.

"Dealing with organised crime in the UK has become more challenging due to limited information sharing between UK agencies and their EU counterparts. It’s a direct consequence of Brexit, which has had numerous negative impacts."

.....

The lecturer continued: "I clearly remember the narrative presented by central government during the Brexit process regarding organised crime. It was portrayed as a foreign problem, largely attributed to relaxed immigration policies, which led to the emphasis on tightening our borders. I found this perspective problematic because the UK has a long history of domestic organised crime.

"There is evidence to suggest according to the National Crime Agency that burglaries, car thefts and robberies have accelerated as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. These crimes tend to take place at a local level, often by groups on a habitual basis. In most cases, they are high risk and low reward in contrast to traditional modes of organised crime."

The Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC), set up in 2013 in Switzerland, seeks new and innovative strategies and responses to organised crime. Dr Rahman provided data on criminal activities in the UK for a recent GITOC report on organised crime, which will allow policymakers and agencies to establish where vulnerabilities lie.

The report shows the UK has jumped from 99th to 61st in a league table of organised crime - the OC Index . In 2021, the OC Index gave the UK a criminality score of 4.89 but this year, the UK's score is 5.45. Dr Rahman added: "Fortunately, GITOC can serve as a valuable resource for understanding the current global organised crime landscape, its connections to the UK, and strategies for addressing it."

The only way to deal with international crime such as people trafficking and drug smugggling is to work with international agencies. Pulling up the drawbridge just doesn't cut it.

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