United Kingdom

A friend of mine was getting married last weekend in England, so I had to pay it a visit. I am amazed at how illegal it ended up being.

The opportunity arose to go there on a small sail boat crossing the English channel, so I of course opted for that as my way of entry. That caused a pretty major problem in its own right, but more about that later. First I had to get the fucking £20 ETA – Electronic Travel Authorisation.

To get the ETA you need to fill in this pretty basic but overall dumb online form. It went pretty smoothly until the end, where I'm confronted the dumbest most open ended question imaginable: "Do you have extremist opinions". Yes/no. No definitions, no nothing.

Of course I'll say no. By my own standards I do not hold extreme opinions - I consider my opinions to be perfectly sane. You'd honestly be somewhat extreme to disagree with me. I do however also know that if I told an English policeman that I support Palestine Action they would throw me in jail. So I guess I am forced to start off the entire trip by, in the eyes of the government, lying about not being an extremist in order to enter. So far so good.

Then comes the actual sail across the channel. Smooth sailing, except for the near misses with French fishing boats fishing more or less legally with or without radios on in the middle of the night. Arriving in England we seek to announce our arrival, only to learn that they have created some fucking beta website in which you need to announce your journey ahead of time. It is not advertised anywhere, and it is impossible to announce one's arrival into the UK retroactively or in any other way than through this form in advance.

Basically the only way to legally register our arrival at this point was to sail back to France, fill in the form, and then come sailing back to England again with our newly filled forms. We of course sailed with a yellow flag and all that jazz, but none of that seems to matter without having filled in this new and completely unknown web form. So I of course said fuck it and skipped border controls.

There is a customs house in the port where we arrived, but after many years of irrelevance it has been turned into a (rather nice) pub.

For good measure I spent most of the days leading up to the wedding illegally wild camping.

I'm not sure I'll be coming back soon.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/51770777

https://archive.md/HBLb5

The latest court hearing in the ‘terrorism’ case against singer Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh of Irish rap band Kneecap has once again thrown the spotlight on the British government’s efforts to smear and imprison the politically active.

The British government on Friday extended the deadline until October to decide on whether to approve China's plans to build the largest embassy in Europe in London after Beijing refused to fully explain why the plans contained blacked out areas.

China's plans to build a new embassy on the site of a two-century-old building near the Tower of London have stalled for the past three years because of opposition from local residents, lawmakers, and Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners in Britain.

[...]

DP9, the planning consultancy working for the Chinese government, said its client felt it would be inappropriate to provide full internal layout plans, saying additional drawings provided an acceptable level of detail, after the government asked why several areas were blacked out in drawings.

"The Applicant considers the level of detail shown on the unredacted plans is sufficient to identify the main uses," DP9 said in a letter to the government.

"In these circumstances, we consider it is neither necessary nor appropriate to provide additional more detailed internal layout plans or details."

The British government's department of housing said in reply it would now rule on whether the project can go ahead by October 21 rather than by September 9 because it needed more time to consider the responses.

Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group with ties to an international network of politicians critical of China which revealed the letter, said: "These explanations are far from satisfactory."

De Pulford, a long-standing critic of plans for the embassy, said the "assurances amount to 'trust me bro'".

[...]

The Chinese government has been seeking to turn the former Royal Mint in London and into a new mega-embassy in London, replacing the far smaller premises it has occupied since 1877. But the move has sparked concerns China would use this the 'mega-embassy' covering some 20,000 square metres as an Chinese espionage hub.

Carmen Lau, a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist who fled to the UK and is now one of dozens id exiled dissidents for whom Beijing offered bounties, argues that the UK should not allow China's "authoritarian regime" to have its new embassy in such a symbolic location. One of her fears is that China, with such a huge embassy, could harass political opponents and could even hold them in the building.

[...]