Month: April 2018

Medical Data Point of the Day

No Comments

It turns out that the average American birth costs more than the recent delivery of Prince William and Princess Catherine’s 3rd child at a luxury private hospital in London.

That hospital serves champagne and has an extensive wine list, and it still costs about the same as an average delivery in the USA:

………

Yet the price of delivering the new prince, who is fifth in line to the British throne, was probably slightly less than that of an average American baby. In 2015, the Lindo Wing charged £5,670 ($8,900) for 24 hours in a deluxe room and a non-Caesarean delivery. A survey in the same year by the International Federation of Health Plans found that the average fee for such a delivery in the United States was $10,808. ………

God bless our market driven health care system.

A Noun, a Verb, and Vladimir Putin

No Comments
The Democrats in the so-called Heartland, the ones that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, are losing patience with the DC party establishment’s fixation on Russia:

In battleground states in the middle of the country, some Democrats watched with frustration as their party grabbed headlines last week with a splashy new lawsuit alleging a vast conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Russia.

The Democratic National Committee’s drumbeat of messaging on Trump and his relationship with Russia is wearing thin with some Democrats in purple states — particularly in the Midwest, where people on the ground say voters are uninterested and even turned off by the issue. The suit exposes a gap, they say, between the party’s strategy nationally and what Midwest Democrats believe will win elections in their state.

“The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,” said David Betras, the Democratic county party chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, home to Youngstown. “I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that were just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?”

Trump and Russia, Betras said, is the “only piece they’ve been doing since 2016. [Trump] keeps talking about jobs and the economy, and we talk about Russia.”

For some people working to elect Democrats in Midwestern swing states, the suit — which threads evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign, WikiLeaks, Russia, and Trump family members — prompted something akin to an eyeroll.

Same for me.

They aren’t talking real issues, Nancy Pelosi has gone full in on this, saying that it’s OK for the Dems to back anti-abortion candidates, they aren’t talking jobs, or trade, or racism, the corruption of high finance, or apologizing for their own incompetence and telling us how they might fix this, they are talking Russia, .

There is an internal logic to all of this: Admitting your incompetence can get you fired, going after high finance would turn off big dollar donors, which allow for big dollar consultancy fees, etc.

It’s simply too lucrative to actually address the real problems of people.

Special Election Tonight

No Comments

The Republicans won the race for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District:

Republicans won a closely watched special election in Arizona Tuesday, turning back a spirited challenge from a first-time Democratic candidate to keep a U.S. House seat in GOP hands.

 The Associated Press called the race on the basis of the Republican’s lead in early voting. Debbie Lesko, a former state lawmaker, had the edge over Hiral Tipirneni, a Democratic physician making her first run for office, by 52.9 percent to 47.1 percent.

It’s not an unreasonable showing by the Democrat, Trump won this district by 21%, and the Republicans significantly outspent the Democrats, but you don’t get the brass ring for a close 2nd place finish.

Great Googly Moogly

No Comments

White House Doctor, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, has been accused of being an abusive manager, over-prescribing drugs, and being drunk at work:

President Trump acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, his nominee to lead the Veterans Affairs Department, is in serious trouble amid accusations that as the White House doctor he oversaw a hostile work environment, improperly dispensed prescription drugs and possibly drank on the job.

………

Members of Mr. Tester’s staff said that they had been given several credible accounts of Dr. Jackson being intoxicated during official White House travel. In several cases, they said, he had apparently grabbed his medical bag and was “attempting to assert himself,” to show he was in charge.

On one trip during Barack Obama’s presidency, White House staff needed to reach Dr. Jackson for medical reasons and found him passed out in his hotel room after a night of drinking, Tester aides said. The staff members took the medical supplies they were looking for without waking Dr. Jackson.

The frightening thing is that this would make him one of Donald Trump’s more qualified nominees.

About F%$#ing Time

No Comments

For three years, International Standards Organization has been wrangling over which cryptographic algorithms will be incorporated into a standard for interoperability in “Internet of Things” gadgets; at issue has been the NSA’s insistence that “Simon” and “Speck” would be the standard block cipher algorithms in these devices.

The NSA has a history of sabotaging cryptographic standards; most famously, documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that the NSA had sabotaged NIST security standards, but the story goes farther back than that: I have been told by numerous wireless networking exercises that the weaknesses in the now-obsolete Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) were deliberately introduced by NSA meddling. And of course, the NSA once classified working cryptography as a munition and denied civilians access to it, until EFF got a court to declare code to be a form of protected speech under the First Amendment.

Now, the NSA has been defeated at ISO, with its chosen ciphers firmly rejected by the committee members, who were pretty frank about their reason for rejecting Simon and Speck: they don’t trust the NSA.

Good.  I don’t trust the NSA either, and I do not want them in my home appliances.

Patent Trolls Lose Before Supreme Court

No Comments
The 2012 America Invents Act created the inter partes review process which allowed for challenges to patents in an administrative, rather than a lawsuit, making challenges to patents faster and cheaper.

The patent trolls took it to court, saying that Congress could not delegate the court’s patent authority in this way, and the Supreme Court just shot them down in well-deserved flames:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of a process for challenging low-quality patents. Since its creation in 2011, this “inter partes review” (IPR) process has dramatically lowered the cost of defending against frivolous patent litigation.

The process allows an executive branch agency—not the courts—to revoke a patent after it has been granted. Critics claim that runs afoul of the Constitution’s requirement that only the courts can deprive people of their property.

But the Supreme Court didn’t buy it. In a 7-2 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the nation’s highest court ruled that patent rights were fundamentally a government-granted privilege that could properly come with strings attached. One such condition is the risk that the patent office might change its mind and invalidate a patent that it had previously approved.

The ruling preserves one of defendants’ most potent weapons against patent trolls. Challenging a patent in court can cost millions of dollars. As a result, prior to 2011, it often made sense for defendants to settle a patent case even if they believed that the patent wouldn’t stand up in court.

But then Congress passed the America Invents Act, which created a new administrative process called inter partes review. That process cuts the cost of challenging a patent down to the low six figures. It has shifted the playing field for patent litigation, allowing the targets of frivolous patent lawsuits to fight back without going broke in the process. The new Supreme Court ruling puts that process on a firm constitutional footing, which should make life difficult for patent trolls for years to come.

………

But Oil States sued, arguing that the Constitution requires an IPR-like process to occur in the judicial branch—not in an executive branch agency like the patent office. Executive branch agencies do not have the independence of judges, and they don’t necessarily offer all of the due-process protections provided to litigants by the judicial system.

While the argument was officially over the difference between the executive and judicial branch, this was really a dispute about the nature of patent rights. Are patents fundamentally a government-granted monopoly (a “public right,” in legal jargon), or are they a form of private property akin to a home or car?

The Constitution provides robust legal protections, including a guarantee of due process through the judicial branch, to private property: a law allowing a federal agency to take someone’s home or business without the approval of the courts would be unconstitutional.

But it doesn’t make sense to extend that same level of protection to government-granted monopolies. After all, the public interest may require curtailing or eliminating these kinds of monopolies in the future.

“Congress can grant a franchise that permits a company to erect a toll bridge but qualify the grant by reserving its authority to revoke or amend the franchise,” the court’s majority wrote, citing a 101-year-old precedent on the topic. “The same is true for franchises that permit companies to build railroads or telegraph lines.”

This is why the case is important: It is a refutation of the entire idea of “Intellectual Property”, that has come to the fore recently:

None of these rulings was explicitly about whether patents are monopolies or property rights. But the question implicitly shapes how courts think about these kinds of questions. Monopolies are generally viewed with skepticism; property rights are not. “Allowing petitioners to patent risk hedging would preempt use of this approach in all fields and would effectively grant a monopoly over an abstract idea,” the Supreme Court wrote in its 2010 ruling on patenting abstract ideas.

Tuesday’s ruling is important in its own right, as it preserves a process that has had a real impact on the patent-litigation problem. But it’s also a barometer of how the Supreme Court’s justices are thinking about the patent system more generally. The fact that seven of the nine justices continue to view patents as a government-granted franchise, not a form of property rights, suggests that the high court’s more-than-decade-long smackdown of pro-patent jurisprudence could continue for years to come.

The Federal Circuit, aka the “Patent Court” has been mishandling, and expanding, patents for years, and the Supreme Court has been pushing back for about a decade against the excesses of the Federal Circuit.

This one is significant, because it throws a brick through the “Intellectual Property” window.

This Guy Needs to Burn

No Comments

I am referring to Jeffrey Reinking, father of semi-naked shooter Travis Jeffrey Reinking, who gave his son his guns back because ……… 2nd Amendment.

There is no excuse for this sh%$. You guaranteed that you would keep your guns out of your crazy son’s hands, and at the first opportunity, you gave them back to him.

Prosecutors, please take note, and nail him to the wall:

You probably know this about the man suspected of shooting up a Tennessee Waffle House and killing four people:

Months before the man suspected of killing four people at a Tennessee Waffle House on Sunday became the target of a manhunt, authorities arrested him for trying to breach a barrier near the White House and later seized his guns.
Among the four weapons they took from Travis Reinking was the AR-15 semi­automatic rifle that police say he used in the Waffle House on Sunday. Two of the other weapons — a long gun and a handgun — are missing from Reinking’s apartment, and as of Sunday evening, Reinking was still at large.

And you probably know this:

… Reinking’s father was present when … deputies came to confiscate the guns, [Tazewell County sheriff Robert M.] Huston said. The father had a valid state authorization card and asked the police if he could keep the weapons. Deputies gave Reinking’s father the weapons, Huston said.
“He was allowed to do that after he assured deputies he would keep them secure and away from Travis,” Huston said, referring to Reinking’s father.

Huston and Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson said they believe Reinking’s father returned the weapons to Reinking.

It’s bad enough that Jeffrey Reinking, the father of Travis, returned the guns to him after that White House incident. But it wasn’t the only troubling incident that should have concerned Jeffrey Reinking. There was this:

In June 2017, police records state Reinking threatened someone with an AR-15 while wearing a pink dress. After threatening the man, Reinking drove to a public pool and dove in before exposing himself to others at the pool, according to the reports.

And this, in May 2017:

You see how this proceeds.

If you support responsible behavior with firearms, then you need to penalize people who engage in irresponsible behavior with guns.

This is just like breathing into someone’s ignition interlock breathalyzer, and then the driver kills someone, Jeffrey Reinking needs to be prosecuted for anything, and everything you can possibly find.

I am talking, “Pretend that his name is “Mahoud Ibrahim crap.”

Tweet of the Day

No Comments
Remember, Social Security and Medicare began as small, pilot programs that eventually evolved to provide guaranteed coverage. Oh, wait, no.

— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) April 23, 2018

A very good point is being made here: The people who want a pilot roll-out of something like single payer actually trying to kill it.

Single payer, and things like the jobs guarantee, CANNOT not work unless they are universal in nature, and pilot programs are, by the very nature of their being pilot programs, are likely to fail.

This is Rich

No Comments

When Sean Hannity was named in court this week as a client of Donald Trump’s embattled legal fixer Michael Cohen, the Fox News host insisted their discussions had been limited to the subject of buying property.

“I’ve said many times on my radio show: I hate the stock market, I prefer real estate. Michael knows real estate,” Hannity said on television, a few hours after the dramatic hearing in Manhattan, where Cohen is under criminal investigation.

Hannity’s chosen investment strategy is confirmed by thousands of pages of public records reviewed by the Guardian, which detail a real estate portfolio of remarkable scale that has not previously been reported.

The records link Hannity to a group of shell companies that spent at least $90m on more than 870 homes in seven states over the past decade. The properties range from luxurious mansions to rentals for low-income families. Hannity is the hidden owner behind some of the shell companies and his attorney did not dispute that he owns all of them.

Dozens of the properties were bought at a discount in 2013, after banks foreclosed on their previous owners for defaulting on mortgages. Before and after then, Hannity sharply criticised Barack Obama for the US foreclosure rate. In January 2016, Hannity said there were “millions more Americans suffering under this president” partly because of foreclosures.

Hannity, 56, also amassed part of his property collection with support from the US Department for Housing and Urban Development (Hud), a fact he did not disclose when praising Ben Carson

, the Hud secretary, on his television show last year.

………

Among the most valuable are two large apartment complexes in Georgia that Hannity bought in 2014 for $22.7m. The developments are in the cities of Perry and Brunswick, which have higher poverty rates and lower median incomes than the US averages. One- and two-bedroom units in Hannity‍‍‍’s apartment complexes are available to rent for $735 to $1,065 per month, according to brochures.

The Georgia purchases were funded with mortgages for $17.9m that Hannity obtained with help from Hud, which insured the loans under a program created as part of the National Housing Act. The loans, first guaranteed under the Obama administration, were recently increased by $5m with renewed support from Carson’s department.Also, Carson could approve condo conversions for him next year.

Ka-ching.

Not a Surprise

No Comments

It turns out that the United States Border Patrol has taken the opportunity granted by Trump’s rhetoric on immigration to feed blatantly false statistics to the public:

Last November, reports that a pair of U.S. Border Patrol agents had been attacked with rocks at a desolate spot in West Texas made news around the country. The agents were found injured and unconscious at the bottom of a culvert off Interstate 10. Agent Rogelio Martinez soon died from his injuries. Early reports in right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart suggested that the perpetrators were undocumented immigrants, and President Donald Trump quickly embraced the narrative to bolster his campaign for a border wall.

………

It was four months before the FBI concluded its investigation and determined that the most likely cause of Martinez’s death was an accidental fall. Meanwhile, media outlets across the political spectrum repeated statistics showing a sharp upward trend in the number of assaults against Border Patrol agents even as the number of undocumented immigrants apprehended while crossing the southern border has dropped.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, assaults on Border Patrol officers increased dramatically in fiscal year 2016, reversing a long downward trend. That year, CBP claims, there were 454 assaults on agents nationwide, compared with 378 in fiscal year 2015, a 20 percent increase. The increase from 2016 to 2017 was even more surprising. In 2017, according to CBP, there were 786 assaults, a spike of 73 percent, even as apprehensions fell from 415,816 to 310,532.

Almost the entire increase — 271 purported assaults — was said to have occurred in one sector, the Rio Grande Valley, in South Texas. A large number of the assaults supposedly occurred on a single day, according to charts and details provided by Christiana Coleman, a CBP public affairs spokesperson. In response to questions from The Intercept, Coleman explained in an email that “an incident in the Rio Grande Valley Sector on February 14, 2017, involved seven U.S. Border Patrol Agents assaulted by six subjects utilizing three different types of projectiles (rocks, bottles, and tree branches), totaling 126 assaults.”

According to conventional law enforcement accounting, this single incident should have been tallied as seven agents assaulted — not seven agents times six perpetrators times three projectiles. Subtracting the seven agents from 126 leaves 119 extra “assaults” that falsely and grossly inflate the data, making it appear to the public that far more agents were assaulted.

………

According to James Tomsheck, former director of internal affairs at CBP, the agency’s method of counting assaults is highly unusual.

During a phone interview with The Intercept, Tomsheck said law enforcement agencies count the number of people assaulted, not the discrete acts of violence that occur during an incident. And that’s how it was done when he worked at CBP (he left in 2014). “Five rocks [thrown at] an agent would have been considered one assault,” Tomsheck said.

Tomsheck said that during his more than three decades of police work, he has never heard of any law enforcement agency multiplying assaulted officers by the perpetrators and the weapons. When I asked Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “When Police Kill,” if he’d ever heard of such a method, he burst out laughing. “No,” he said, laughing again. “I haven’t.”

………

Rather than a picture of increasing violence against Border Patrol agents, what emerges from the FBI’s data is that the Border Patrol’s job has never been safer. The decrease was so significant that by 2016, according to FBI statistics, Border Patrol agents were about five times less likely to be assaulted than officers in local police departments — and only half as likely to be killed on the job by homicide or by accident. As the Cato Institute observed in November, “Regular Americans are more than twice as likely to be murdered in any year from 2003 through 2017 than Border Patrol agents were.” But even as Border Patrol work was getting safer, the agency began manipulating its data to claim increasing danger and advance a political agenda.

(emphasis mine)

Gee, you think?

CBP already operates with more impunity that most law enforcement, and they are just getting worse.

End Stage Looting by an Ayn Rand Fan

No Comments

About a year and a half ago, I observed how the hedge fund operator who is running Sears according to the principles of Ayn Rand is running the venerable retail institution into the ground.

After many years of mismanagement and looting, he is now looking to buy its remaining assets at a cut-rate price.

To use Ayn Rand’s language, he is a looter, not a creator:

Edward S. Lampert, the chief executive of Sears, offered on Monday to buy real estate assets and the Kenmore brand from the troubled retailer in what would be his latest attempt to save it.

In a letter to the Sears board, Mr. Lampert, whose ESL Investments hedge fund owns a controlling stake in the company, said ESL would be also be willing to buy the retailer’s home-services and its appliance-parts units.

Any deal involving Sears and Mr. Lampert is complicated by his dual roles running both the retailer and the hedge fund, which is also a major Sears lender.

………

In his letter to the board, Mr. Lampert offered to pay Sears $500 million for the home-services and appliance-parts units, but did not mention a price for the Kenmore brand or the real estate. He noted that the company had been trying to sell the assets for nearly two years, but had failed to find other buyers.

He failed to find another buyer because he has completely destroyed the company.

I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this is because he indented to drive its value down so that he could snap up its parts for a song all along, which is a fairly typical hedge fund behavior, or if he was simply wedded to a philosophy (Objectivism) which is completely antithetical to a business that actually makes, or does, something of value.

Linkage

No Comments

World’s best cover of “The Wheels on the Bus”

Tory Government in a Nut Shell

No Comments

The UK Government refused to cooperate with a French money laundering investigation because the company being investigated was a major donor to the Conservative Party:

The British government refused to assist a French investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud by the UK telecoms giant Lycamobile – citing the fact that the company is the “biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party” and gives money to a trust founded by Prince Charles.

French prosecutors launched a major probe into the firm and arrested 19 people accused of using its accounts to launder money from organised criminal networks two years ago, after BuzzFeed News revealed its suspicious financial activities in the UK. But the Conservatives continued taking Lycamobile’s money – and it can now be revealed that the British authorities stonewalled a formal request from French prosecutors to carry out raids in London as part of the ongoing investigation.

Confidential correspondence between British government officials and their French counterparts, shown to BuzzFeed News by a source in the UK, reveals that the French wanted British authorities to raid Lycamobile’s London headquarters last year and seize evidence as part of their investigation into money laundering and tax fraud by the company.

In an official response dated 30 March 2017, a government official noted that Lycamobile is “a large multinational company” with “vast assets at their disposal” and would be “extremely unlikely to agree to having their premises searched”.

The letter, from the team at HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) that handles law enforcement requests from foreign governments, continued: “It is of note that they are the biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party led by Prime Minister Theresa May and donated 1.25m Euros to the Prince Charles Trust in 2012.” The email referred to Lycamobile’s donations to the British Asian Trust, which was founded by the Prince of Wales to tackle poverty in South Asia, not to his youth foundation The Prince’s Trust which has never received any money from Lycamobile.

………

When BuzzFeed News first approached HMRC to ask about its response to the French request, the agency’s senior press officer strongly denied that Lycamobile’s donations would ever be cited as a reason not to conduct criminal raids. “No HMRC official would ever write such a letter,” he said. “This is the United Kingdom for God’s sake, not some third world banana republic where the organs of state are in hock to some sort of kleptocracy.”

However, after verifying the contents of the email seen by BuzzFeed News, another HMRC spokesman said that it was “regrettable”.

Translation, we regret that we have been caught.

Lord (Ken) Macdonald, England’s former director of public prosecutions, said the government’s response to the French request for assistance represented “a descent into banana republic law enforcement” – and called on the UK authorities to cooperate fully with the investigation. “It would be beyond worrying if HMRC were to regard the payment of political donations as a shield against criminal investigation,” he said. “Obviously the fact that a company may have the resources to challenge HMRC’s actions in court is not a reason for authorities to back off. Otherwise, wealthy organisations would be beyond the reach of the law.”

Gee, you think?

This is not a surprise.  The Tories and the Blairite New Labour have made financial corruption and money laundering the center (or centre) of their economic plans, and this is the inevitable result.

The Judges Give a 9.6 for Snark

No Comments

Alexandr Petri opens up a major can of whup ass on pundits who think that they have the right to be published no matter how contemptible they are.

It is, of course, an allegory about the case of Kevin Williamson, whose very short tenure at The Atlantic was a result of his extremist views, has been on a major whining tour about how his call for hanging women who have abortions led him to be persecuted.

Just read the article.

Sing It, Brother

No Comments
I wholeheartedly agree that the world of deceptive user agreements used to arbitrarily punish customers 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag:

Mark Zuckerberg says it doesn’t matter how creepy and terrible his company is, because you agreed to let him comprehensively f%$# you over from asshole to appetite by clicking “I agree” to a tens of thousands of words’ worth of “agreements” spread out across multiple webpages; when questioned about this in Congress, Zuck grudgingly admitted that “I don’t think the average person likely reads that whole document.” But as far as Zuck is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve read it, whether you understand it, whether it can be understood — you still “agreed.”

Facebook is far from the worst offender: Paypal has been cutting off the accounts of users who signed up before they were 18, which violated their 50,000+ word ToS (spread across 21 web-pages!); it doesn’t matter if those users are now well over the age of consent, more than a decade later, their failure to read all those terms is a hanging offense.

The self-replicating plague of bullsh%$ “agreements” is finally getting a reckoning, as users wake up to the fact that companies were actually serious when they said that they expected hold us to these absurd legal documents. What’s more, the looming spectre of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, with its mandate for plain language agreements that users have to understand, is calling into question whether it’s possible to even have a business that can only exist if users agree to terms that put the US tax-code to shame.

That is to say, businesses are being told that they are obliged to obtain detailed, informed consent to every single term in their contracts before they can start interacting with their users. The businesses say that undertaking such a process could take hours and that no one would ever use their services if a precondition for their usage is to actually understand what they’re giving away.

To which the EU answers: exactly.

The EU is doing the right thing here.  (I cannot believe that I just said that)

Seriously, the ecology of the commercial internet resembles nothing so much as a petty bunco operation.

I am Sure that Theresa May Does Not Think of Herself as a Racist

No Comments
But the so-called “Windrush scandal”, where Theresa May, then Home Secretary, systematically destroyed evidence that would be required of  legal immigrants from the Caribbean to prove their legal entry into the country:

The Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK, despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties.

A former Home Office employee said the records, stored in the basement of a government tower block, were a vital resource for case workers when they were asked to find information about someone’s arrival date in the UK from the West Indies – usually when the individual was struggling to resolve immigration status problems.

Although the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has promised to make it easier for Windrush-generation residents to regularise their status, the destruction of the database is likely to make the process harder, even with the support of the new taskforce announced this week.

The former employee (who has asked for his name not to be printed) said it was decided in 2010 to destroy the disembarkation cards, which dated back to the 1950s and 60s, when the Home Office’s Whitgift Centre in Croydon was closed and the staff were moved to another site. Employees in his department told their managers it was a bad idea, because these papers were often the last remaining record of a person’s arrival date, in the event of uncertainty or lost documents. The files were destroyed in October that year, when Theresa May was home secretary.

A person’s arrival date is crucial to a citizenship application, because the 1971 Immigration Act gave people who had already moved to Britain indefinite leave to remain.

She then followed up with her hostile environment policy, which, much like Donald Trump’s, “Self-Deportation,” rhetoric was a policy of deliberately terrorizing immigrants.

The inevitable conclusion was that this was a deliberate series of actions:

Theresa May was two years into her job as home secretary when she made her strategy explicit, telling the Telegraph in 2012 her aim “was to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration”.

The outcry over the treatment of the Windrush generation of migrants in Britain legally, but sometimes without the paperwork to prove it, has exposed the scale of that strategy.

The hostile environment created by new legislation and regulation has meant migrants do not face border officials only when they enter the country for the first time, but as a constant part of daily life. They must prove their immigration status whenever they try to rent a property, open a bank account or access the health services. Landlords and employers become immigration enforcers – or risk hefty fines.

At the Home Office, May was tasked with delivering David Cameron’s election promise that immigration would be reduced to the tens of thousands, a pledge that has still yet to be realised.

………

Teather, who is now the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, said: “Theresa May was determined to transform things. She was proud of wanting to generate a really hostile environment.

“The Home Office has a culture of enforcement and disbelief which runs deep into the walls, but it is politically led. It’s a culture from the top, and it has been a bit rich for the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to blame civil servants. When you’ve had a Conservative home secretary that long, you cannot moan when civil servants deliver those policies.”

Before this metastasized into a political catastrophe for the Tories, Theresa May, and her hand picked successor at the home office, were congratulating themselves over their mindless brutality.

The fact that this happened to an immigrant population that is almost entirely black is no accident.

They are a bunch of racist rat-f%$#s, period, full stop.