OpEd: UK politics 04-03-15

The commentators 04-03-15

...on UK politics

Last year, 30,000 people were held in 11 immigration removal centres. Many had committed no crime and had experienced severe trauma in their home countries prior to being detained. A tough immigration policy may be considered a vote winner by all the major political parties, but the human suffering and the moral and ethical cost to our society of this mass incarceration needs to be addressed urgently.
- Diane Taylor, Guardian

We need new talent from abroad but we also need to ensure that the British keep up. We must stop blaming immigrants for wanting to come here, as most of our ancestors once did, and start emulating them, filling the skills shortages and being flexible and creative. Then immigration will be seen as a great benefit, stopping us stagnating while helping to create a rich and diverse country.
- Alice Thomson, The Times

Both main party leaders have calculated that their best hope is to pass themselves off as gods of small things. They are wrong. Voters are fed up not with mainstream parties per se but with the utter paucity of their ambition. With only weeks left before the election, Britain is crying out for a leader who thinks big. The signs are that it will not find one.
- Mary Riddell, Daily Telegraph

Up until five or ten years ago, it would not be unusual for editorial to throw out or move an ad if it sat uncomfortably with the news on a given page. That tended to be in everybody's interests: BA no more wants its ad on a page devoted to an air crash than the journalist placing the story. This may still be the case, although I suspect that these days pressure would be on editorial to reposition the story rather than the other way about.
If so, that is an example of fissures starting to appear in that dividing wall. If a story, however insignificant, has to move from its optimum position in the paper because of advertising considerations, a line has been crossed.
A layman's guide to the relationship between editorial and advertising