Identifying hostile states

Tweet

 

During an apparently well-received speech at the weekend at a neo-Fascist Festival in Italy, the Prime Minister claimed that “hostile states” will increasingly “drive people to our shores” to destabilise Western nations unless leaders crack down on illegal migration and revamp asylum conventions. In the generic sense that most migration is provoked by the actions of hostile governments across the world (few people wake up one morning and think: ‘things are OK here, so let’s cross half a continent and then cross a dangerous waterway in a small boat to get to somewhere else'), he may be right. Getting him to correctly identify which those hostile states are is another matter.

We could start with Russia. Few would disagree that this is what a ‘hostile state’ looks like, and its war against Ukraine has certainly driven many millions to seek refuge in countries further west.

Then, rather more controversially, there’s Rwanda, which has been aiding and abetting the M23 rebels in Congo to drive people from their homes and seek refuge elsewhere.

More recently, there’s Israel, which has driven millions from their homes. It would be surprising indeed if at least some of these didn’t end up seeking refuge in Western Europe.

Then there are the traditional colonialist countries who invaded much of the world, stole their riches, exploited their people and then moved on. We cannot overlook the impact of that history on modern trends in migration.

Finally, neither can we overlook the two biggest miscreants of all; two states whose repeated military adventures over a decades-long period have done much to create what Sunak likes to call the ‘crisis’ of immigration into the UK and Western Europe more generally. I refer, of course, to the US and the UK, and the list of countries blighted includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Having the UK government declare the UK to be a hostile state might seem strange to some, but it’s not a lot stranger than declaring an unsafe place to be safe, and the glorious flexibility of the English constitution would surely find a way through the resulting paradox. It could also give us a new enemy to hate: imagine the Tory Party going into an election declaring the Tory Government to be hostile to the UK and claiming that the only way to counter this would be to elect a Tory Government. It would probably be easier for them to unite people in hatred of the Tories than in hatred of the Labour Party. And it really isn’t a long way away from Sunak’s pitch at his party conference that he was the candidate of change who was going to overturn all those horrid things done by recent governments. It would make for an ‘interesting’ election campaign, although it might give the BBC some difficulty when it came to the rules around impartiality. Every time they interview Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister, they’d have to interview Rishi Sunak, Leader of the Opposition, as well so that he could refute what the first one had said.

There is a universe somewhere where this all makes sense: it just isn’t this one.