What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Pollokshields – These are our neighbours

    It was impossible not to be moved by people standing around an immigration enforcement van in Pollokshields yesterday chanting “These are our neighbours, let them go”. Many people today are proud of those in this city who stopped this enforcement action.

    Every country needs to have an immigration system and every immigration system needs to be enforced in some way. Every such system needs to be fair and just. However the immigration system in this country has ceased to be fair and has ceased to be just. Any government that actively seeks to be hostile to those seeking asylum has already failed the test of being fair and just. The immigration system in this country has not only become hostile to refugees but the government has recently announced plans to make it even more hostile and to limit the possibility of appealing to the Supreme Court in asylum cases.

    Every asylum seeker needs access to justice in order that the system itself can be seen to be fair.

    Yesterday, the people of Pollokshields came out onto the streets because they believed that what was being done in their name was not fair. With an aggresively hostile system in place as a policy, it is impossible to be sure that any asylum decision is fair.

    The police made a wise call yesterday not to try to clear the street and the two men detailed were set free into the community.

    We need a fair asylum system.  Without a fair asylum system, there will increasingly be successful protests by citizens who will prevent the authorities from being able to act.

    If the government believes it can appeal to voters by making an already hostile asylum system even more hostile, the people in the streets of Pollokshields showed yesterday that at least in some places, that policy will fail.

    ,

5 responses to “The Christian Year and Social Media”

  1. Jaye Richards-Hill Avatar
    Jaye Richards-Hill

    I certainly agree with passive learning… I have called it ‘knowledge Grazing’ in a book I’m working on at the moment…. There’s a bit about this here… http://www.agent4change.net/grapevine/platform/2050-hungry-for-learning-knowledge-grazing-fits-the-bill.html

    And for the church, well, maybe the passive learning paradigm is good. You already post the vid of the sermon for folks to watch again and digest – the number of questions people ask you or points they raise with you about the sermon after watching it again would perhaps be an indication as to how much passive church-type learning is taking place?

    Reply
  2. Margaret of the Sea of Galilee Avatar
    Margaret of the Sea of Galilee

    More especially the internet provides access to the 0.001% (probably less) of the population whose lives – like one’s own – revolve around these things. And exactly which stole who wore last Sunday to reduce everything to such an absurdity which of course is a Christian/liturgical idiosyncracy in itself. “It just encourages them!” as my mother would have said…

    Reply
  3. Kelvin Avatar
    Kelvin

    I’m not sure what you mean, Margaret.

    But you sound sniffy.

    Reply
    1. Margaret of the Sea of Galilee Avatar
      Margaret of the Sea of Galilee

      That you can find people interested in your own Very Specific Areas of Interest…a good thing but of course encourages you in your idiosyncracies which is less good

      Reply
      1. Kelvin Holdsworth Avatar
        Kelvin Holdsworth

        Ah. I see why I didn’t understand at first Margaret. What I was suggesting was precisely the opposite of what you are saying. I think I learn about all kinds of things (spiritual and otherwise) that I never expected to learn through following interesting people online who have quite different interests to my own.

        Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Posts

  • The kind of political party I’d like to see

    I’m not a member of a political party at the moment, though obviously I have been in the past. Here’s the policies that would be to the fore in the kind of political party that I would like to see and which would get me back into making a more active engagement in politics: A…

  • The Winners and the Losers

    Well, the first thing to say to loyal readers who have been with me for a while is that there were no great surprises from last night’s election results, were there? After all, my New Year predictions relating to the election were not that far wide of the mark. In relation to the election, I…

  • 10 Things I learned from being a General Election Candidate

    Ten years ago today there was a General Election in the United Kingdom and 10 years ago today I was a candidate in it. Indeed, 10 years ago as I write this I was wearily standing at the polling station for the last 20 minutes of polling, thanking a few final voters for turning out.…