Alex
alexsz.bsky.social
Alex
@alexsz.bsky.social
320 followers 240 following 2K posts
Cycling, urbanism, politics, housing, London, sometimes dogs
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Reposted by Alex
Yesterday I helped give a presentation on immigration law options to a room full of people trapped by the Health and Care Visa.

Promised work, paid £££, unable to work and can't find new sponsors.

This crisis i wrote a thread on 5 months ago isn't going away.
The debate around care visas in the political space boils down to people saying stuff like this - we desperately need people.

It's a good soundbite but...

A significant surge in care visas were issued since 2020 in response to sector demand and yet the problem of shortage has persisted.

Why?
BREAKING: “We will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment” - Home Secretary Yvette Cooper

Don’t we have a desperate shortage of care workers?
by one part of the state, than after this fact we spend crazy amount of money to support them using the other part of the state.
What was the plan here?!?
4. Make the Home Office work with local authorities to prepare asylum seekers for the housing crisis, give them more time to find accommodation.
Simply allowing them to work would have been enough 10 years ago, now they need more help.
We are making hundreds of refugees homeless a _day_
The long term solution is direct route for LAs to build housing for themselves, but even in the medium term a lot of people going to die living on the streets before the spring comes without radical changes.
The strategy does not mean much, unless
-local authorities get more money for TAs
-refugees get more support to find accommodation after receiving status (including more time to do that)
-local housing allowance rates not get raised, at least the shared allowance rate.
Why did @theguardian.com journalists went back there? The UK media and political elite is so used to kowtowing to right-wing media owners, they just don't see the difference or is there something else there?
Then why is the British government still on X?
Elon Musk is boosting the British right - and this shows how
Reposted by Alex
The haters said they couldn't do it. And they were right. Honestly, great call from the haters.
NEW: The End of the Line: the centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Neom gigaproject - a 500m tall, 170km long wall-like building intended ultimately to house 9 million people - can’t get out of the ground, say more than 20 former Neom architects, engineers and senior executives.
ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...
End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled
Mohammed bin Salman’s utopian city was undone by the laws of physics and finance
ig.ft.com
(*folk might not be a great translation, their name means folk as in folk music and people, as in "the people of England")
As it is so often the case, Hungarian politics is a premonition of what awaits the West.
Fidesz, Orbán and its policies are in large part a result of the backlash against the urban elites, while the Hungarian hoch culture mostly remained urban, e.g. the Hungarian literature Nobel prize and Oscar winners, all of them are urban. Merging govt. propaganda with "folk" art doesn't help.
also the Communists oppressing the traditonal Hungarian elites there was an uneasy compromise between the remainder of the two groups. Most of the folks elite was forced to stay in the countryside. This changed with the fall of Communism and the urban elite was forced into defensive position.
"urban" authors. This was also a divide in left-wing movements. Anti-semitism was never too concealed in these debates, as Jewish people were overwhelmingly in the urban camp, whatever the scene was. Then the Holocaust wiping out most of the Hungarian Jewish population outside Budapest, but
most government positions. This competition had a large role in the first anti-Jewish laws in the 20th century, (Numerus Clausus, 1922) and caused a very interesting schism in literature for example. There were the "folks"* representing the countryside and ethnic Hungarians and the more diverse
There is an interesting example in Hungary, starting from the second half of the 19th century, when land owners and industrialists competed for the leading roles in economic decision making. The industrialists were mostly in cities and had their own newspapers and influence,while landowners occupied
Nah, just the Hungarian experience(tm)
to transport deprived places is providing them with safe bike infrastructure.
Just draw an 700 meter line around a station, and then a 3km line. The first shows the comfortable distance by walk the second is by bike. Where I live I have access to one overground line with the first option and at least 7 with the second. The easiest way to provide access to public transport
Public transport often treats bikes as a luxury—or worse a competitor—but without them leaves revenue on the table.

For 25 years, the Dutch have extended the reach of their railways through investments in (300,000) parking spaces and (25,000) shared bikes. The result? A doubling of train ridership.
I love these Shelter ads, I hope they won't have it that easy to find inspiration next year, but I am not optimistic.
Every 12 minutes, a family in England becomes homeless. And for families stuck in temporary accommodation, life feels like it's on hold.

This winter, Shelter’s advisers are there to answer every urgent call, giving someone to turn to and helping families fight for a safe home.
GB News career should have prevented his hiring, by any decent company, instead I am sure it had the opposite effect on the good old boys at the BBC.
Fishier and fishier. And in broad daylight too. New Director of Programmes for BBC News John McAndrew spent a year as Editorial Director and Director of News and Programmes at GB News.Unconscionable. @bbcnewsnight.bsky.social
@bbcnewsuk.bsky.social @hzeffman.bsky.social @bbcmarcosilva.bsky.social
WTF
Fishier and fishier. And in broad daylight too. New Director of Programmes for BBC News John McAndrew spent a year as Editorial Director and Director of News and Programmes at GB News.Unconscionable. @bbcnewsnight.bsky.social
@bbcnewsuk.bsky.social @hzeffman.bsky.social @bbcmarcosilva.bsky.social
Getting a more detailed profile will lead to criminalization and patologisation of the patterns shown by these people before they start to kill and there will be more detailed examination of environmental/social factors involved too.
"Just likes violence" is not a good endpoint of analysis. We will need to get a more detailed profile. I wonder for example where this overlaps with serial killers profile. It seems like there are a lot less serial killers than in the 90s paralelly with the rise of this kind of violence. Accidental?
SNAP is a terrible program, that is built in a way to create a constant reminder of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, stigmatize people receiving it and it is a lot more expensive compared to giving $ as a less cruel govt would do. Still is a lot better than letting people starve.