On the subject of refugees

Over 120 economists - some very important - signed an open letter to the government about the refugee crisis.

http://economists4refugees.org.uk/

It is the first time that such a large group of economists have criticised UK government immigration policy, and follows other open letters to the prime minister from the UK’s 350 top judges and lawyers, and 27 charities and NGOs including Oxfam, Amnesty International and the Refugee Council.

David Cameron’s government has agreed to take up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years, from the camps on the borders of the war-torn country. More than 1,000 have arrived so far.

The Guardian.

My old friend Dr Brendan Burchell may have been one of the instigators ... he was certainly a signatory. Here on the BBC  today (a show on BBC 1 called The Big Questions) he iterated the economists' case.  I feel very proud of him for doing this as at the same time he is busy being Director of this and Editor of that at Cambridge University.

http://bbc.in/1SBSUiC

Another hazard for Cambridge Uni

If it's not MI5 trying to recruit you, it's the local constabulary. Apparently they are keen to find out which members of the student body are joining political groups. This was in the Guardian yesterday. It's amazing because the sort of political activity the police officer is talking about is a campaign against cuts in public spending - a perfectly legitimate political issue. On the Guardian website there are video clips of this police officer telling the student what he is to find out about his follow students, taken by the student he is trying to recruit. My friend who is a lecturer jokes that he has been a police informant for years and gets a preferential rate of £35 for his information. ha ha.

An officer monitoring political campaigners attempted to persuade an activist in his 20s to become an informant and feed him information about students and other protesters in return for money.

But instead the activist wore a hidden camera to record a meeting with the officer and expose the surveillance of undergraduates and others at the 800-year-old institution.

The officer, who is part of a covert unit, is filmed saying the police need informants like him to collect information about student protests as it is "impossible" to infiltrate their own officers into the university.

The Guardian is not disclosing the name of the Cambridgeshire officer and will call him Peter Smith. He asks the man who he is trying to recruit to target "student-union type stuff" and says that would be of interest because "the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues".

here is the link