Philippe Legrain

This year’s Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of the European league for surveillance and civil intrusion. In his last column for the Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins urges us all to fight to defend freedom against government encroachment: Never was the adage of Louis Brandeis, the US justice, more relevant: free men are naturally alert [...]

A section of the border fence around the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa has been torn down by a violent storm. Perhaps the elements don’t look favourably on this unnatural barrier.

Undocumented immigrants in the US can no longer get mortgages – even though their default rates are low. Previously, established migrants could get mortgages with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, but now they need a US Social Security number. "If you want to buy a house and you’re here without papers, now you can forget [...]

Banks would normally be wary of lending to someone whose liabilities were 50 times their net assets, but they happily lent to each other on that basis – until, one day, they stopped. If you want a one sentence explanation of the present crisis, that is it. From the FT.

ICE Air provides one-way flights home for immigrants that the US is deporting. Story at the WSJ. More photos here. Absurd comment of the day:"For a lot of these immigrants, it has been a long journey to the U.S.," said Michael J. Pitts, chief of flight operations for deportations and removals at ICE. "This is [...]

The FT reports. Let’s hope the financial crisis doesn’t spur a wider outbreak of protectionism

JCWI Bulletin, Summer/Autumn 2008. The latest Government initiatives on citizenship mean
that prospective British citizens from outside the EU
must clear several hurdles before they can apply

I’ve written an article for the latest JCWI Bulletin on the government’s proposals that UK citizenship should be earned. Read it here

It is well known that the money that immigrants send home is the biggest – and best-targeted – source of development aid to poor countries. But immigration can also spur an increase in official government aid – in a bid to improve conditions in poor countries and thus deter their citizens from migrating. El Pais [...]

It is bad enough that governments conspire to keep foreigners out. It is even worse when governments conspire to keep their own citizens from leaving. Violating Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that every one has the right to leave a country, including their own, the Cuban and Mexican governments [...]

Phil Woolas, Britain’s new immigration minister, is already making his mark. He told The Times that: This Government isn’t going to allow the population to go up to 70 million. There has to be a balance between the number of people coming in and the number of people leaving. It would appear that Woolas has [...]

spiked has launched a new range of cool political T-shirts. They cost £13. Buy the immigration one here

The Guardian, 9 October 2008. The UK government’s measures will stave off economic collapse and get banks moving, but calling them a bail-out is misleading

The Guardian, 7 October 2008. If the government is bold and recapitalises the banks, Gordon Brown will reap a political dividend. Only ruin awaits indecision

Allowing Lloyds TSB to take over HBOS was an act of desperation: even though the merged entity would dominate the UK banking market, the government signalled that it would approve the merger in order to stop HBOS going under. But now that the government has stepped in with its bank recapitalisation and funding plan, wouldn’t [...]

Tony Blair once said that the government was best when it was boldest. Gordon Brown is – finally – heeding that advice. The government’s three-pronged plan to shore up Britain’s banking system is bold and right. It is our best hope of pacifying the financial panic, getting credit flowing through the economy again and thus [...]

What bank investors need from authorities is clarity. A concerted, pan-European drive to inject capital might provide it. As US fund manager John Hussman has suggested, that injection could be achieved via a “super-bond”, countable as capital and subordinate to customer deposits, but ranking ahead of both shareholders and even senior bondholders in the event [...]

The time for half-measures is over. Britain is no longer in the grips of a credit crunch or even a financial crisis, it is suffering a full-on financial heart attack. Markets have seized up. Banks will no longer lend to each other. Credit to companies and individuals is drying up. Unless credit starts flowing again [...]

Gordon Brown’s reshuffle has certainly captured headlines. But what does it mean for the trade and immigration debates? That Peter Mandelson jumped at the chance to leave his job as EU trade commissioner for a non-job as UK business secretary (which has been stripped of the energy and enterprise portfolios) provides further confirmation that the [...]