Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh has warned her Peckham constituents that Shabana Mahmood’s plan to extend the wait for settlement from five to fifteen years risks undermining ‘cohesion’. She’s not a Fahn…
Her September update to constituents reads:
“The political debate around immigration has become increasingly depressing and toxic […] we need a more compassionate immigration system. The asylum process is broken and needs reform. Ultimately, I want to see a system based on control and compassion, with a much stronger focus on integration.
[…] If we continually prolong the time people have to wait for settlement, we can also prolong the process of building cohesion.
We need to raise the level of the debate, challenge divisive political rhetoric and make the case for communities like the one we have in Peckham.
That means talking about immigration with care, control and compassion.”
After the Telegraph spotted it, her ‘allies’ said her team had ‘poorly paraphrased’ what she’d said at a town hall meeting, and the post will be rewritten with ‘clearer language’. As Guido has previously written in Whispers, Fanbulleh is rumoured in Labour circles to refuse to do anything that might put her in a position where she has to comment on these reforms…
Robert Jenrick on the Today programme:
“Can you now give a guarantee to your listeners this morning that no BBC presenter in the future will be exposed as a paedophile, as a number have been in the recent past? No, of course you can’t…”