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Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, spoke in the Commons of an ‘invasion on our southern coast’ by migrants in small boats. ‘Let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress,’ she said. ‘The whole country knows that is not true.’ She was reacting to a crisis at a migrant processing centre in Manston, Kent, built for 1,600 but housing 4,000. David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, called it ‘really dangerous’. He said an Afghan family had lived in a marquee there for 32 days. It was made more crowded after migrants were moved following an attack with three petrol bombs on a Border Force migrant centre in Dover by a man in a car who then killed himself. On Saturday alone, 990 migrants crossed the Channel. Of the 39,898 who had followed the route this year, about 10,000 were adult men from Albania, the Home Office said. The National Union of Students dismissed its president, Shaima Dallali, after claims of anti-Semitism were investigated.
New elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly were announced by the Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, after the parties at Stormont could not agree to restore power-sharing government. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary found that recruits to the police were badly vetted, letting in some with criminal records or family links to organised crime. Matt Hancock had the Tory whip removed after he decided to go to Australia to take part in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! The number of people testing positive for Covid was steady at one in 30 in England on 17 October and in Scotland at one in 35, according to the Office for National Statistics. All kept birds were ordered to be moved indoors under regulations designed to counter the worst outbreak of avian influenza ever seen.
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