Labour says it would be open to EU migrants quota – sparking Tory criticism

Published

2 years ago

September 14, 2023

admin

Labour has confirmed it could accept a quota of migrants from the EU under a returns agreement it hopes to strike with the bloc if it wins power at the next general election.

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the “objective” was to secure a returns agreement to establish “management and control of the system” as he accused the Conservatives of having “lost control of our borders”.

Mr Thomas-Symonds spoke to Sky News while Sir Keir Starmer and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper meet European officials in The Hague – and as the party unveils proposals to treat smuggling gangs “on a par” with terrorists.

The potential for a returns agreement has already attracted controversy, with Tory Party chair Greg Hands accusing Labour of a “shocking open door policy on immigration”.

The EU is currently working on a new returns agreement that would mean each member state takes a minimum annual quota of 30,000 migrants, or pay €20,000 (£17,200) for each person they do not accept.

Government pledges extra £200m for NHS – politics latest

Mr Thomas-Symonds told Sky News: “What we are looking to do as an objective is a returns agreement.

“At the moment, the government is in a position to return people already to particular countries. They are not fast-tracking that situation. They’re not doing that competently.

“What we would be looking for is management and control of the system, which is absolutely vital and not there at the moment under this government.”

When it was put to him on Sky News that the UK is 13% of Europe’s population and therefore could have to accept the same percentage of migrants under an agreement – equating to around 182,000 people per year – Mr Thomas-Symonds said he did not accept the figure.

He said the exact details would be for a potential future Labour government to negotiate with the EU.

“Our position is that net migration has been too high in the UK and we want to see that coming down. That’s our overall position and that’s something we’d obviously take into any negotiation with the EU,” he said.

Labour also wants to have more UK police officers posted with Europol for joint investigations – aiming to disrupt the gangs before they reach the coast – and work with EU partners on data and intelligence sharing, replacing access the UK lost to certain programmes after Brexit.

Rishi Sunak hit back at Labour’s assertion that the government has “lost control of the borders” and claimed Sir Keir’s plan would see the UK accept 100,000 migrants from the EU every year – although he did not say how he had calculated this figure.

Speaking to broadcasters on a visit to Devon, the prime minister said the Labour leader “spent all of this year voting against our stop the boats bill, the toughest legislation that any government has passed to tackle illegal migration”.

Will Labour regret taking the fight to the Tories on small boats?

Mhari Aurora

Politics and business correspondent

@MhariAurora

Territory usually seen as belonging to the Conservatives, Sir Keir Starmer is talking tough on immigration.

In The Netherlands with his shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, the Labour leader has announced Labour’s plans for a new security partnership with Europe to smash the business model of the people smuggling gangs bringing migrants in boats across the Channel.

Labour’s plans include giving more powers to the National Crime Agency, real-time intelligence sharing with European partners and setting up a new cross border policing unit – paid for by scrapping the Rwanda scheme.

Sir Keir also wants to make it possible to restrict the movement of and freeze the assets of those suspected of people smuggling, treating suspected smugglers more like terrorists or drug traffickers.

But it’s a potential returns agreement with the EU that is causing an almighty row.

In an interview with The Times newspaper, the leader of the opposition said accepting quotas of migrants from the EU in exchange for a returns agreement would be reserved for future negotiations with Brussels.

This has alarmed Tories who believe this to be confirmation that Labour would open up the UK’s doors to higher numbers of refugees than we currently already receive.

Shadow minister Nick Thomas-Symonds told Sky News: “A wider returns agreement with the EU – that’s of course subject to negotiation.”

He went on to say that any returns agreement would be “under new arrangements” and that the objective for his party was to reduce net migration.

But government ministers beg to differ.

Home Office minister Robert Jenrick posted on X: “Not content with voting against every one of our measures to stop the boats, Keir Starmer is now opening the door to taking over 100,000 illegal migrants from the safety of the EU. His ‘plan’ is a recipe for even more illegal migration.”

Labour insists their plans will allow the UK to take back control of its immigration system.

But government sources tell Sky News that Sir Keir has made it easier for them to argue that Labour would be soft on immigration.

Small boat crossings will be a critical topic at the next general election but it appears that both parties believe this is one fight they can win.

He added: “I don’t think it’s credible that he really wants to grip this problem.”

In August, The Times reported Mr Sunak was also attempting to secure a returns agreement with the EU, but that the negotiations stalled.

It is likely any agreement would have involved the UK taking a share of EU migration.

Downing Street today told reporters the government was open to a returns deal with the EU but would not accept a quota of migrants in exchange.

The prime minister’s official spokesman did not rule out the possibility of a funding deal which would see UK taxpayers’ money go to Brussels as part of an agreement.

“There are discussions ongoing, so I’m not going to get into whether or not we would or would not fund any further co-operation,” the spokesman said.

In his interview with The Times, the Labour leader said he would treat people smugglers like terrorists by freezing their assets and restricting their movements.

Speaking from The Hague, Sir Keir told broadcasters: “The government has lost control of our borders, and we can see that with the number of crossings there are across the Channel in small boats. We have to stop that.”

He said the “only way to do that is to smash the gangs that are running this vile trade,” and that he had been speaking to Europol today about getting a “closer agreement” to tackle it.

“That is taking control of a situation that the government has totally lost control of,” he declared.

Sir Keir rejected assertions that such a deal with Europe would be a betrayal of the 2016 Brexit referendum, and said the only way to defeat the gangs is to “operate where they’re operating”, which is in Europe and beyond.

Asked about Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s claim that his plan would make Britain Europe’s “dumping ground” for “millions” of illegal migrants, Sir Keir said it’s “embarrassing that the government is pumping out this nonsense”.

“I can only assume it’s because they’ve got nothing sensible to say on this issue,” he said.

More than 23,000 people have made the dangerous journey across the Channel in the year so far – with over 3,000 making the crossing in September alone.

Mr Sunak has made tackling the issue one of his five priorities for the year, promising to “stop the boats” with measures such as deporting some migrants to Rwanda and housing people on barges.

But both schemes have hit barriers, with Rwanda flights caught up in the courts and an outbreak of Legionella disease on the Bibby Stockholm vessel.

Mr Sunak has repeatedly defended the government’s progress, saying: “We’ve already reduced the legacy backlog by over 28,000 – nearly a third – since the start of December and we remain on track to meet our target.”

Politics

How Meta’s antitrust case could dampen AI development

Published

3 hours ago

April 17, 2025

admin

How Meta’s antitrust case could dampen AI development

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is facing antitrust proceedings that could limit its ability to develop AI amid a field of competitors.

First filed in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges that Meta’s strategy of absorbing firms — rather than competing with them — violates antitrust laws. If the court rules against Meta, it could be forced to spin out its various messenger services and social media sites into independent companies.

The loss of its stable of social media companies could harm Facebook’s competitiveness not only in the social media industry but also in its ability to train and develop its proprietary Llama AI models with data from those sites.

The trial could take anywhere from a couple of months to a year, but the outcome will have lasting consequences on Meta’s standing in the AI race.

Meta’s antitrust case and its effect on AI

The FTC first opened its complaint against Meta in 2020 when the firm was still operating as Facebook. The agency’s amended complaint a year later alleges that Meta (then Facebook) used an illegal “buy-or-bury” scheme on more creative competitors after its “failed attempts to develop innovative mobile features for its network.” This resulted in a monopoly of the “friends and family” social media market.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had the chance to address these allegations on April 14, the first day of the official FTC v. Meta trial. He testified that only 20% of user content on Facebook and some 10% on Instagram was generated by users’ friends. The nature of social media has changed, Zuckerberg claimed.

“People just kept on engaging with more and more stuff that wasn’t what their friends were doing,” he said — meaning that the nature of Meta’s social media holdings was sufficiently diverse.

At the time of the FTC’s initial complaint, Meta called the allegations “revisionist history,” a claim it repeated on April 13 when it stated the agency was “ignoring reality.” The company has argued that the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp have benefited users and that competition has appeared in the form of YouTube and TikTok.

If the District of Columbia Circuit Court rules against Meta, the global social media giant will be forced to unwind these services into independent firms. Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, told the Los Angeles Times that such a ruling could cost Meta its competitive edge in the social media market.

“Instagram really is its biggest growth driver, in the sense that it has been picking up the slack for Facebook for a long time, especially on the user front when it comes to young people,” said Enberg. “Facebook hasn’t been where the cool college kids hang out for a long time.”

Such a ruling would also affect the pool of data from which Meta can draw to train its AI models. In July 2024, Meta halted the rollout of AI models in the European Union, citing “regulatory uncertainty.”

The pause came after privacy advocacy group None of Your Business filed complaints in 11 European countries against Meta’s use of public data from its platforms to train its AI models. The Irish Data Protection Commission subsequently ordered a pause on the practice until it could conduct a review.

On April 14, Meta got the go-ahead to use public data — i.e., posts and comments from adult users across all of its platforms — to train the model. If these firms dissolved into separate companies, with their own organizational structures and data protection policies and practices, Meta would be cut off from an ocean of data and human communication with which its AI could be improved.

Andrew Rossow, a cyberspace attorney with Minc Law and CEO of AR Media Consulting, told Cointelegraph that in such an event, “companies would most likely control their own user data, and Meta would be restricted from using it unless new data-sharing agreements were negotiated, which would be subject to regulatory scrutiny and user/consumer privacy laws.”

However, Rossow noted that it wouldn’t be a total loss for Meta. Zuckerberg’s firm would retain the wealth of data from Facebook and Messenger. It could continue to use “opt-in” data from consumers who allow their posts to be used for AI training, and it could also employ synthetic data sets as well as third-party and open data.

Meta, the AI race and data protections

The race to unseat OpenAI and its ChatGPT model from AI dominance has grown more competitive in the last year as DeepSeek joined the fray and Meta launched the fourth iteration of its open-source Llama model.

In addition to training new models, major AI development firms are investing billions in new data centers to accommodate new iterations. In January 2025, Meta announced the construction of a 2-gigawatt data center with more than 1.3 million Nvidia AI graphics processing units.

Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads, “This will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people […] To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”

His announcement followed the $500-billion Stargate project, which would see massive investment in AI development led by OpenAI and SoftBank, with Microsoft and Oracle as equity partners.

Amid this competition, AI firms are looking for broader and more varied sources of data to train their AI models — and have turned to dubious practices in order to get the data they need. In order to stay competitive with OpenAI when developing its Llama 3 model, Meta harvested thousands of pirated books from the site LibGen. According to court documents in a case pending against Meta, Llama developers harvested data from pirated books because licensing them from sources like Scribd seemed “unreasonably expensive.”

Time was another perceived motivator for using pirated works. “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data,” one engineer wrote about services through which they could purchase book licenses.

The practice is not limited to Meta. OpenAI has also been accused of mining data from pirated work hosted on LibGen.

Rossow suggested that, “to ensure lasting impact — beyond short-term profit,” Meta would do well to “prioritize investment in advanced data collection, rigorous auditing and the implementation of privacy-preserving and encryption-based technologies.”

By focusing on transparency and responsible practices, “Meta can continue to genuinely advance AI capabilities, rebuild and nurture long-term user trust, and adapt to evolving legal and ethical standards, regardless of changes to its platform portfolio.”

What a ruling for the FTC would mean

Litigation is now hitting tech firms from all sides as they face allegations of privacy violations, copyright law infringement and stifling competition. Major cases like those facing Google, Amazon and Meta that have yet to play out will decide how and whether these firms can proceed as they have, defining the guardrails for AI development as well.

Rossow said that the current antitrust case against Meta could decide how courts interpret antitrust law for tech firms, spanning tech mergers, data usage and market competition. It would also signal that courts are “willing to break up tech conglomerates” when issues of smothering competition are involved, while at the same time, “taking current precedent a step further in harmonizing it with the laws of cyberspace.”

Magazine: Memecoin degeneracy is funding groundbreaking anti-aging research

Politics

NHS must change policy on allowing trans people on single-sex wards, head of equalities watchdog says

Published

5 hours ago

April 17, 2025

admin

NHS must change policy on allowing trans people on single-sex wards, head of equalities watchdog says

The NHS must change its policy of allowing transgender people to be on single-sex wards aligned with their gender identity following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a “woman”, the head of Britain’s equalities watchdog said.

On Wednesday, judges at the UK’s highest court unanimously ruled that the definition of a “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to “a biological woman and biological sex”.

Baroness Kishwer Falkner, chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the ruling was “enormously consequential” and ensured clarity.

Politics latest: Supreme Court ruling should ‘draw a line’ under debate

She vowed to pursue organisations that do not update their policies, saying they should be “taking care” to look at the “very readable judgment”.

On single-sex hospital wards, Baroness Falkner told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the NHS will “have to change” their 2019 policy, which says transgender patients are entitled to be accommodated on single-sex wards matching how they identify.

She said the court ruling means there is now “no confusion” and the NHS “can start to implement the new legal reasoning and produce their exceptions forthwith”.

Women’s sport and changing rooms

The baroness also said trans women can no longer take part in women’s sport, while single-sex places, such as changing rooms, “must be based on biological sex”.

However, she said there is no law against organisations providing a “third space”, such as unisex toilets, and suggested trans rights organisations “should be using their powers of advocacy to ask for those third spaces”.

In 2021, Baroness Falkner came under criticism from trans and other LGBTIQ+ organisations after she said women had the right to question transgender identity without fear of abuse, stigmatisation or loss of employment.

Some EHRC staff resigned in protest of the body’s “descent into transphobia”, while others defended her, saying she was depoliticising the organisation. Her four-year term was extended for a further 12 months in November by the Labour government.

Public bodies must look at equality laws

Health minister Karin Smyth said public bodies have been told to look at how equality laws are implemented following the ruling.

She told Anna Jones on Sky News Breakfast: “Obviously, public bodies have been asked to look at their own guidance.

“And we will do that very, very carefully.”

She said the court’s ruling was “very clear” about women’s rights being defined by sex, which she said “will give clarity to companies”.

But she warned against public bodies making statements “that may alarm people”, telling them to take their time to look at their guidance.

The ruling marked the culmination of a long battle between campaign group For Women Scotland and the Scottish government after the group brought a case arguing sex-based protections should only apply to people born female.

Not a triumph of one group over another

Judge Lord Hodge said the ruling should not be read as “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another”.

He said the Equality Act 2010 “gives transgender people protection, not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender”.

Ms Smyth said those who identify as transgender “will feel concerned” after the ruling but said the Gender Recognition Act still stands and gives people who identify differently to the sex they were born in “the dignity and privacy of presenting differently”.

She said NHS policy of having same sex wards remains, but did not mention the 2019 transgender policy, and said the NHS has been looking at how to support both transgender men and women.

Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish government “accepts” the judgment and said the ruling “gives clarity”.

Trina Budge, director of For Women Scotland, said it was a “victory for women’s rights” and said the case was “never about trans rights” as transgender people are “fully protected in law”.

“It means there’s absolute clarity in law regarding what a woman is. We know for sure now that we are referring to the biological sex class of women,” she told Sky News.

“And that when we see a women-only space, it means exactly that. Just women. No men. Not even if they have a gender recognition certificate.”

Transgender woman and Scottish Greens activist Ellie Gomersall said the ruling “represents yet another attack on the rights of trans people to live our lives in peace”.

Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman added: “This is a deeply concerning ruling for human rights and a huge blow to some of the most marginalised people in our society.”

LGBT charity Stonewall said there was “deep concern” around the consequences of the ruling.

Politics

Polygon’s Nailwal: Jio partnership to drive real-world Web3 adoption for 450M users

Published

6 hours ago

April 17, 2025

admin

Polygon’s Nailwal: Jio partnership to drive real-world Web3 adoption for 450M users

As Polygon lays the groundwork for mainstream Web3 adoption in India by bringing blockchain access to over 450 million Reliance Jio users, it remains focused on balancing speed, scalability and affordability, without compromising on decentralization.

Polygon is working with Jio, a telecom giant owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to find ways to infuse blockchain technology into its existing services. The duo is currently adding blockchain-based capabilities to the JioSphere web browser, which would have been expensive, cumbersome and time-consuming via traditional methods.

“We’re building at an insane pace, onboarding massive partners, and pushing blockchain into the mainstream, but with that growth comes the responsibility to make sure we’re doing it the right way,” Polygon’s co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, said while discussing Polygon’s India-focused initiatives with Cointelegraph.

Preserving decentralization while ensuring system scalability

“Scalability and decentralization don’t have to be either-or, and that’s exactly the balance we’re focused on at Polygon,” Nailwal said as he underscored the importance of keeping the core values of blockchain intact: security, transparency and decentralization.

At the same time, Nailwal revealed that Polygon is investing heavily in zero-knowledge technology to make scaling more seamless across the ecosystem. “The goal is to give developers and users the best of both worlds: faster, cheaper transactions without compromising trust or decentralization,” he added.

As a result of delivering the combination of low fees, fast transactions and decentralized security, Polygon is already powering some of the most active use cases in Web3, from stablecoin payments on Polygon PoS to real-world tokenization with major institutions:

“The key challenge is making blockchain as seamless and accessible as Web2 without compromising what makes it special. That’s why we’re all-in on ZK technology and Agglayer, which let us scale while keeping the ecosystem trustless and interoperable.”

Bringing blockchain tech to millions of users

According to Nailwal, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work when onboarding 450 million users from India’s diverse population. “We’ll be working closely with Jio to develop use cases that truly resonate with their users, and gradually onboard them onto the chain based on these real-world applications,” he added.

Nailwal said that developers never have to compromise on the fundamentals, as Polygon’s infrastructure can scale without sacrificing what makes blockchain powerful in the first place:

“What excites me most is that we’re moving beyond technical discussions about blockchain to solving real problems for real people. These are the use cases that will drive the next wave of adoption.”

“At the end of the day, it’s about more than just technology. We’re here to create a decentralized future that billions of people can actually use. And while that’s a massive challenge, it’s also what excites me the most,” Nailwal said.

Real-world problem solving will drive the next wave of adoption

Rising threats driven by artificial intelligence tools, including deepfakes and other misinformation campaigns, are another use case blockchain technology can help solve. Nailwal said that the escalating threat of misinformation and growing consumer insistence on trusted sources will eventually result in an uptick of blockchain-based verification tools.

Additionally, Nailwal highlighted the growing relevance of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, in mainstream finance and reporting. “Polymarket’s success is exactly what we’ve been working toward,” he said, adding:

“Prediction markets are proving to be incredibly valuable tools for finance, risk assessment, journalism and even governance. They pull in insights from a wide range of sources, often making them more reliable than traditional polling.”

Nailwal is placing his full bet on blockchain’s immutable nature to transform economic forecasting, policy-making and journalism, among others.

Magazine: Your AI ‘digital twin’ can take meetings and comfort your loved ones