News Junkie

(noun) the forced removal of immigrants, regardless of their citizenship status

Stephen Bush’s short article on remigration is all the better for not taking sides.

For genuine antiracism you have to swim elsewhere.

The FT generally platforms the basic ideas – and lets the readers do the rest.

But the comments have not been enabled for a reason – the usually relaxed FT editorial team obviously doesn’t want its moderators to police the paper’s readers’s racism.

There was a time when they just didn’t care. When the ratio of comments per page was unpredictable but active.

Thankfully comments are still generally enabled but some risk aversion crept in a while ago.

Has the rise of social media meant that newspapers are happy for the real action to occur elsewhere?

They surely want engagement on their sites, but with limits.

Funnily enough, the last I checked, the online safety bill doesn’t affect newspapers – whose comment sections are exempt. 

As for Remigration, even Enoch Powell advocated it.

So although Trump has emboldened racists, the talk is nothing new.

The only new bit is the normalisation.