Nicola Kelly

3 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.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.