The sausage roll road to fascism

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One of the more absurd images to emerge over the past week was the one of the topless guy liberating a tray of sausage rolls from a Greggs shop during the riots in Hull. Whilst we cannot be completely sure that it wasn’t a carefully-planned intention to arm himself with sausage rolls to wave in the face of Muslims whose religion does not permit the consumption of pork, rather in the manner of pointing kryptonite at Superman, it seems much more probable that he was just feeling a little peckish. And we have no conclusive evidence to suggest that he’d know the difference between a pork sausage roll and a vegan one anyway.

Some politicians – and not just those of the political right – have suggested that stopping the riots depends at least in part on dealing with the so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ of the protesters about immigration. I don’t really understand what those ‘legitimate concerns’ might be, but I struggle even more to comprehend the link between a concern about immigration and a daring raid on purveyors of sausage rolls (delicious though they may be). It’s true that some services in the UK are under pressure – such as housing, education, social care and health. But the last two of those would be under even more pressure if it were not for staff who have come from elsewhere in the world to work in those sectors. And in more general terms, those pressures are more to do with underfunding by successive governments – a policy which Labour apparently intends to continue – than with such increase in demand as results from migration. Deliberately creating a shortage and then finding a convenient group to scapegoat is a divide-and-rule tactic which is as old as the hills.

It's also more than a little strange that an allegedly non-racist concern about total numbers manifests itself in the form of direct and violent action against the adherents of one particular religion. Even if the original rumour about the religion and background of the alleged assailant in Southport had been true, the leap to blaming, and then seeking to punish, all adherents of that religion surely owes more to prejudice than to logic. If I recall correctly, Marx once said something along the lines of: ‘anger in the multitude is enough – just give me six in the country who understand’. It’s not something which applies only to the political ‘left’. Those out on the streets attacking immigrants don’t need to have a worked-though political philosophy; they don’t need to be fascists themselves. They merely need to express their anger, whipped up by those who would use that anger for their own ends. And even some of those doing the fomenting don’t need any sort of ideology to underpin their actions. If the UK were to descend into fascism, it wouldn’t be the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’ who would end up as dictator, it would be one or other of those who offer ‘solutions’ to the ‘problems’ which they themselves have blown up in the minds of the many. Locking up the pawns who are ‘merely’ angry might be a necessary step in the short term, but it’s dealing with the symptom. The ones we should really beware of are those whose ‘solutions’ involve authoritarian rule and restrictions of freedom.

Identifying the real agenda

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It was announced earlier today that Elon Musk has endorsed Trump for the presidency of the USA and committed around $45 million a month to supporting his campaign. It underlines, obviously, the way in which American political campaigning is dominated by money. It’s not so much that votes are directly ‘bought’ in a way which could be defined as corrupt; more a case of the candidate with the biggest war chest being able to promote his or her message more comprehensively and effectively. In theory, one of the differences between politics in the UK and the US is that the UK has stricter rules on who can donate and how much candidates and parties can spend. In practice the rules are fairly easy to circumvent, and one of the later acts of the Tories in government was to dramatically increase the limits in an attempt to give the party generally funded by the richest in society a better chance of winning. And although it’s difficult to prove a clear and unambiguous quid pro quo, ennobling people looks to have been something of a money-spinner for the Tories.

But I digress. When people talk of the nascent fascism of Trump, they are often referring to his views on issues such as migration. It’s not clear to what extent Musk agrees with much of what Trump has to say on those issues. But then, neither is it certain how much Trump believes in that stuff either, or whether he really sees it as just his way of appealing to voters whose economic interests have little in common with his own. I find it hard to believe, for instance, that someone employing as many people as Musk does, with his strange attitudes towards employment rights, isn’t at least partially dependent on the immigrants who Trump says he wants to deport. His support for Trump is probably more about their shared belief about what the nature of economic relationships in society should be. Much of what Trump says tends to avoid that, but if we judge by his actions when he was president previously, he certainly believes that American oligarchs and authoritarians – such as Musk, for instance, to say nothing of himself and his family – should be the ones for whose benefit the economy should be run. It’s probably what makes Trump so fond of Putin as well – another authoritarian who runs his country for the benefit of the richest few, including himself, and has little patience with the idea that people should be allowed to choose their leaders.

It’s not just about Trump, Musk and Putin either (and one could add Farage, Orbán, Meloni, Le Pen, and Fico as well as a number of prominent UK Tories to the list). The common thread that runs though what has become known as ‘populism’ might superficially look as though it’s about nationalism, opposition to ‘wokery’ (to use their prejudicial terminology) and migration, but scratch the surface and it’s really more about the key economic relationships in society. In all those countries where ‘the right’ is in the ascendency, the political discourse is often about the cultural fluff because they think that’s where the votes are, but the real danger lies in the underlying tendency towards authoritarianism, oligarchy, and increased concentration of wealth, undermining the rights of ‘lesser’ individuals in the process. Persuading people to vote against their own economic interests turns out not to be a difficult task. But we should have known that after Brexit.

Neutering protest

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There is a valid debate to be had about how much notice should be given to police and other authorities about the intention to hold a large demonstration and, in principle, planning to increase the notice period from 6 days, as the Home Secretary is apparently considering, isn’t a wholly unreasonable suggestion. It does take time to plan the police presence and make any other necessary arrangements. How much notice is needed is another question again, however; and the idea is not without other problems. Firstly, some demonstrations happen as an immediate and almost spontaneous reaction to events where people wish to express their feelings immediately, and secondly – more practically – defining a ‘large’ demonstration in advance isn’t as easy as it might appear. In truth, even the organisers will rarely know how many people to expect.

Whilst being presented as a reasonable step to take in terms of practicality and planning, the real agenda here is to make it harder to organise mass protests and to constrain – yet again – the right of people to protest. The Home Secretary himself almost says as much with his comments about the protesters’ aims, telling the Times in response to protests about what’s happening in Gaza, “They have made a point and they made it very, very loudly and I’m not sure that these marches every couple of weeks add value to the argument. They’re not really saying anything new.” There is, within that, an implicit view that people should protest once, make their point, and then become silent, even whilst the actions about which the protests are being held continue unabated. It completely misses the point that those demonstrating are also seeking to influence events (whether demonstrations are the most effective way of doing that is an entirely different question, but they are one of the few ways that people actually have of expressing themselves). And, as we know from experience, once people stop protesting, the powers that be will simply assume that the issue has gone away, and that people no longer feel so strongly. Protest, almost always, needs to be sustained if it is to have any effect. But the idea that protest might actually influence events is precisely the reason why authoritarian governments want to stamp it out. Making it more difficult to hold a protest is just the first step.

Not traditional Tories at all

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There seems to be an ongoing battle in Sunak’s cabinet between those who think that feeding the population is on the whole a good idea and those who are so ideologically opposed to immigration that they think that it is better to let food rot in the fields than to allow businesses to recruit people to collect it. As has become the norm in the Tory Party, it seems that the ideologues are winning. Since Sunak has the power to override or sack the Home Secretary any time he wishes, it is reasonable to conclude that he is on the side of the ideologues, for the time being at least.

Braverman’s core argument seems to be that we should train up UK workers as HGV drivers, fruit pickers, and butchers rather than rely on attracting people from elsewhere to fill those jobs, and that’s the way to build a “high-skilled, high wage economy that is less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour”. The logic involved in that – that training people to do jobs which she obviously regards as low-skilled helps to increase skills and wages – escapes me, but let’s leave that to one side.

One of the issues raised by her apporoach is this: to what extent should people be free to choose their occupations rather than being ‘encouraged’ or even compelled to do those jobs which are available? Clearly, it cannot be a completely open choice – if 50 million of the UK’s citizens chose to become cobblers, we’d have an excess of shoes and a shortage of just about everything else. But neither do most of us want to see the type of command economy which marks people out as they leave school, allocating them to occupations according to need. In the real world, as a matter of fact, it tends to be the case that the children of the most well-off in society have rather more choice about how to earn their living than do those from poorer homes. There is another ideological component underlying that: for the political right (accepting the limitations and reservations about using such simplistic terms as left and right), the masses (but not themselves or their families, obviously) are there to serve the needs of the economy, whilst for the political left, the economy is there to enable people to achieve fulfilment as individuals. (As an aside, it’s a distinction which obviously places the modern Labour Party as one of a number of competing brands on the political right.)

In practice, things are not quite as black and white as that and, in the economy as currently constituted, we need a mechanism of some sort to decide how to fill those jobs which need filling, whilst avoiding a glut of cobblers. For the Conservative Party and Labour Party alike, the traditional answer is that ‘the markets’ should solve the problem. Shortages in one occupation should lead to increased wages, whilst surpluses in another should see pay falling behind. Looking at the actions of the current government, that begs the question: are they really traditional Tories at all? Deliberately holding wages below the rate of inflation (and thus making those receiving them poorer) in occupations where there is a clear and growing shortage is the reverse of what free market ideology suggests should happen. Their approach increasingly seems to be one of compulsion and direction in which the population does as it is told to serve those who wield economic power; but that only underlines the extent to which they have moved away from a belief in market forces towards authoritarianism. Braverman is just the most egregious example.

Will they be coming for the socialists next?

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The guidance for schools which the UK government published last week applies only to England, but that doesn’t mean that it should be of no concern to us here in Wales. Whilst the specific issue (relating to the curriculum) is a devolved matter, the current government has amply demonstrated recently that it is no respecter of such boundaries; but the even bigger concern for us should be that the attitude behind their move leaks across into other areas of policy and legislation. The inclusion of the word ‘capitalism’ when they label any “… publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair elections” as an ‘extreme political stance’ is another dangerous step towards authoritarianism. It is hard to see how any teaching of modern history, politics, or economics can exclude any mention of any alternatives to the capitalist economic model; the desire to produce students who only know about one particular ideology, and one particular type of economy, is the sort of thing we generally associate with states such as North Korea rather than a European democracy. Arguing, in the same paragraph, for the protection of free speech is also the sort of nonsense we would expect from such a regime; what they mean is that we have the freedom to say whatever we are permitted to say, a rather limited definition of the word ‘freedom’.

It’s a short step from labelling anticapitalism as an extreme view to banning those arguing for an alternative to capitalism from participating in debate or political activity. It’s another short step from banning mention of alternatives in schools to banning it in universities, or to devising programmes such as Prevent to ‘re-educate’ those who do not conform. We have already seen attempts to label supporters of Extinction Rebellion as terrorists; it’s all too easy to see how socialists might be added to the list. It is increasingly clear that those at the heart of the current government have a strong authoritarian streak, view the masses as people to be instructed and controlled rather than citizens, and want to impose their view of the world on society as a whole. One of the lessons of history is that freedoms do not usually disappear all at once, and authoritarianism doesn’t appear overnight – both things happen in a series of small steps; by the time people realise where that series of small steps has taken them, it’s already become a big leap and is too late to reverse. I’m not sure that the current PM knows or understands any of this – he seems to be ideology-free, have no patience with or interest in the details, and be a generally lazy and incompetent individual whose core belief revolves around only himself and his desire to be PM. He’s little more than a bumbling and occasionally funny (although that’s wearing very thin) front man for the real ideologues, not all of them holding elected office. But being a willing tool just makes him more, rather than less, dangerous.

Punishment or deterrence?

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All human societies need a system of rules and need to enforce those rules. But approaches to setting and enforcing rules differ. One approach is to maximise social solidarity – to ensure buy-in from all members and work largely through persuasion. An alternative is authoritarianism, where transgressors are harshly punished and where those punishments are intended to deter others from transgressing in future. In practice, the differences are not so clear-cut – real human societies operate somewhere in between those extremes and invariably contain advocates of both approaches.

The coronavirus pandemic seems to have brought out an authoritarian streak in Wales as in the rest of the UK, with even those politicians whom I would instinctively have expected to support an approach based primarily on persuasion and social solidarity apparently baying for police crackdowns and harsher penalties. In the face of hard reality, the differences between those who claim to be on the political ‘right’ and those who claim to be on the political ‘left’ turn out to be less significant than I would have expected. It’s not clear to me what the purpose of higher fines would be – acting as a deterrent is the obvious motive but the rhetoric sounds much more like a desire to punish those who don’t comply. Whether higher fines would act as a deterrent is a moot point anyway; for the scale of the punishment to discourage a particular act depends on an assumption that the person considering committing such an act carefully weighs up the pros and cons first – and to the extent that he or she does that, the calculation of the probability of getting caught is likely to be at least as significant as the amount of any potential fine. For all the publicity given to a few exceptional cases, I suspect that the probability of getting caught is quite low, and that those ignoring the rules know that.

There are those who doubt that we need the restrictions on movement at all but I am not among them. I accept that the best route to controlling the pandemic lies in placing restrictions on our lives for the short term, and I accept the concomitant necessity for some form of enforcement. But where are the traditional advocates of persuasion and social solidarity in all this? It feels as though many have simply given up and joined the lynch mobs.

Restricting liberties

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In parts of the USA, people are gathering in crowds with guns demanding an end to the lockdown, while the President encourages them in pursuit of his own re-election. Leaving aside the way in which the standard US response to most things seems to be ‘more guns’, it would be easier to understand the protests, to an extent at least, if they were because of the hardship that the lockdown is causing. One key difference which marks out the US is that it is a lot harsher on individuals who are unable to work than the UK, let alone the European mainstream. But that isn’t the protesters’ motivation – for them, this is about their inalienable right to ‘freedom’, including, apparently, the freedom to catch the virus. As one protester put it, “Even if the virus were 10 times as dangerous as it is, I still wouldn’t stay inside my home. I’d rather take the risk and be a free person”.

It raised a question in my mind, though: if they do get infected and die as a result of such gatherings, should the cause of death really be recorded as being COVID-19? Might not accidental suicide or even insanity be a better description? Or, given the way in which they’re being egged on by the man himself, maybe unlawful killing or even murder might be more appropriate? I’m not the first to suggest that charges of murder should be brought against politicians whose incompetence has increased the number of preventable deaths.

It isn’t really a matter for levity, of course, and the protesters have a point to the extent that actions being taken do indeed limit their ‘freedom’, although describing it as ‘house arrest for the healthy’ seems a bit extreme. There are those in the UK who feel the same way about the restrictions on freedom, although, fortunately, very few of them believe that the answer is more guns. Isn’t taking their own decisions about what level of risk to run at least a part of the reasoning of those who break restrictions? Putting it down to simple selfishness is a dismissive and judgemental response, which ignores and devalues alternative views.

There is always a balance when considering individual freedom; it can never be as absolute as the gun-toting protesters seem to be demanding. Extending an individual’s freedom in ways which potentially damage the lives or liberty of others crosses a line. That is, ultimately, why murder is considered a crime. Applying that principle – limiting the freedom of some to protect others – isn’t always straightforward, though; and it isn’t always obvious how one’s own behaviour might harm others. To use one recent example, if one person sunbathes in a park, it poses little risk to anyone else, but if thousands do so the risk increases rapidly. A decision which is risk-free to one individual who takes it becomes very risky if everyone else takes the same decision. The real issue isn’t the risk to those who decide to take it, even if they make that considered decision after carefully weighing up all the factors – it is the extent to which they have the right to pose a risk to others, including the health workers who would have to treat them.

I remain broadly supportive of the restrictions being imposed by governments, and that seems to be true for most people as things stand. I’m conscious, however, that there are valid concerns about the freedoms being lost – and deeply troubled about the way in which authoritarianism so readily takes root in people’s minds. Rational debate is not aided by governments – like that in the UK – which start from the assumption that weighing up arguments is too difficult for the plebs, who just need to be told what to do. Treating people like adults and explaining the choices is just one more area in which the UK could learn something from the German government. Democracy is about involvement and engagement, not just electing people to issue orders.

Shared values?

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Faced with confused and confusing statements from government ministers, many of which seem to be at variance with the detail of the laws that they have rushed through, it is no surprise that the enforcement action taken by police over the coronavirus pandemic has itself been patchy and inconsistent. Why should they be expected to understand the detail of what those responsible for designing the rules are unable to agree with each other about?

It is clear that most people are accepting of the need for exceptional rules in exceptional circumstances, and understand that the goal of protecting us all is both valid and important; a short-term interference with civil liberties is a small price to pay for the protection of the vulnerable. I’ll admit that I do have a concern that governments which take powers to themselves in a crisis tend to find it difficult to relinquish those powers later, identifying excuse after excuse for keeping legislation active.  And it doesn’t help that, in Priti Patel, we have a Home Secretary who gives a good impression of someone who’d like to lock up as many as possible of those citizens who she has not either had deported or hanged.

More worrying has been the way in which events have brought out an authoritarian streak in people. It isn’t just an occasional bit of heavy-handed policing where a quiet word might have been a better approach, it’s the way in which some people have been urging the police to come and arrest their neighbours for various perceived infringements of the unclear and inconsistent advice. I don’t want to understate the importance of us all following the guidelines as closely as we can, but there’s something very ‘un-British’, dare I say it, about some of what we’re seeing. The ‘British values’ that the government is always banging on about turn out to be rather more ‘flexible’ than even I had thought.  A crisis like the current one can provoke either a growth in social solidarity – and there have been many good examples of that – or else an outbreak of authoritarianism. Both cases require rules under which we operate and both require that those rules be enforced, but the way in which we collectively choose to enforce those rules tells us a lot about which approach we prefer and our own core values.  Not all of it is turning out to be entirely comfortable.

Changing the culture, not just the policy

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I noted yesterday that the current and previous incumbents at the Home Office (Amber Rudd and Theresa May) are those who should first and foremost be held responsible for the way in which members of the Windrush generation have been treated.  They, after all, set the rules and oversaw their implementation.  Creating a “hostile environment” in which the starting point was that individuals had to go through an onerous process to prove their right of residence, with little or no help from the state, was a deliberate act of policy. 

The state presumably has access to the tax and national insurance records of those who have lived and worked here all their lives, but instead of seeing those as evidence of legitimate and continuous residency, the Home Office chose to withdraw people’s right to work at all if they could not independently prove their residence rights.  And it wasn’t only their right to work that was withdrawn – it was also their right to hold a driving licence, their right to proper healthcare, and even their right to liberty, with some being held in detention centres.

Attempts by the ministers concerned trying to shift the blame onto officials and civil servants rather than accepting the responsibility themselves are as shameful as the Prime Minister’s mealy-mouthed apology for the effects, but not for the policy.  Having said that, we cannot, and should not, overlook the actions of the officials either.  I touched on that yesterday, referring to the fact that ‘simply following orders’ is not an adequate defence.  Should we not expect better from officials tasked with implementing a policy which, it must have been obvious to them, was trampling on the rights of people who’ve lived in the UK for all, or nearly all, their lives?

I find the inflexibility and obvious lack of empathy of the officials who were ‘processing’ the affected individuals more than a little chilling.  There they were, demanding that people produce reams of documentation which either never existed or else had long since been destroyed, and ordering the detention and/or deportation of those who failed to comply.  There seems to have been no intelligent thought or consideration given to the individuals impacted by their decisions, just a mechanistic implementation of rules and procedures.

We know from history how easy it is for a mindless bureaucracy to become inured to the impact on people of what they do, and to embark on a spiral in which they increasingly block out any idea that the subjects of their processes are people with lives and aspirations rather than simply numbers and files.  It’s the road to an unpleasant type of authoritarianism.  A government and bureaucracy which can reduce one group of people to numbers and statistics can do the same with other groups as well.  The "hostile environment" already did that in the case of illegal immigrants; what the Windrush issue has shown is that it has been extended to a group of citizens who never fell into that category at all. 

What I’m not seeing in the government’s belated attempt to respond to a situation which has been developing over some time is any sense of a need to change that culture and approach.  Instead, it seems to be about attempting to define and distinguish more clearly between different groups of people.  What history tells us is that the time to stand up against this is when they come for the first group, not the last.  There is a dehumanising culture at work at the UK level, and we need to resist that.