Nicola Kelly
Reporter and Producer at Freelance
Reporter at The Guardian
Journalist. Used to work for the @ukhomeoffice - now report on it. 'Anywhere But Here', my book on the small boats crisis, out now.
Articles
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2 weeks ago |
notanothersnowflake.substack.com | Nicola Kelly
Late-night negotiations. Hushed conversations in corridors. Diplomats making frantic phone calls. So much of yesterday’s reset talks looked and sounded eerily familiar to me. A decade ago, I was the deputy spokesperson for the Foreign Office in Brussels, based in the multilateral embassy known as UKRep. While the city has a (hugely unfair) reputation for being a dull, cold bureaucracy full of grey-suit-wearing paper-pushers, to me it has always meant something very different.
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3 weeks ago |
notanothersnowflake.substack.com | Nicola Kelly
It has been an odd week - depressing at times - watching the Prime Minister lurch ever further to the right. Despite saying that he didn’t want to make his latest changes about politics - that he was reforming the immigration system because it was “the right thing to do” - the entire week has been dominated by nothing but that.
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3 weeks ago |
open.substack.com | Nicola Kelly
Earlier this week Keir Starmer ramped up the anti-immigration rhetoric in a way nobody could have ever predicted a Labour Prime Minister would. We risked, he said, becoming “an island of strangers”: a dog-whistle to the hard-right with echoes of Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 “rivers of blood” speech - one of the most overtly racist addresses ever made. He went on to adopt the language of Brexiteers, whose votes he hopes to win at the next election.
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3 weeks ago |
graceblakeley.substack.com | Nicola Kelly
From Grace: I’m on holiday for the next few weeks, so I’ve been working with a few brilliant writers on pieces for my Substack while I’m away. The second is this incisive article by journalist and author Nicola Kelly, who recently published an excellent new book on Britain’s broken asylum system, Anywhere But Here.
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3 weeks ago |
notanothersnowflake.substack.com | Nicola Kelly
Another day, another overhaul of the immigration rules (sigh). This time, it's more of the same: illogical, ill-advised restrictions which will harm families and communities and decimate public services and institutions. It defies all logic. Labour, like the Conservatives before them, think certain visa routes are a tap which can be turned on and off whenever the net migration figure isn’t to their liking.
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Governments have been turning the tap on and off for decades. We needed health and social care workers post-pandemic: in 2022, they expanded the route. The net migration figs got too high:they closed the doors. What this ignores is that we will NEED to recruit overseas again
I wrote this piece the last time central government messed around with social care. Nurses like Evans will now go elsewhere - US, Canada, Australia - where they are respected and recompensed for the incredible work they do. Without them, homes will close. https://t.co/6IYCfQGzC4
Universities have long courted overseas students to help balance the books...but as net migration levels rose, the Home Office saw the student route as a place to make easy cuts. This passage from 'Anywhere But Here' feels relevant amid the current Home Office maelstrom. https://t.co/qGYz0riDKI
