Not criminal enough. Yet.

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With the elimination of Priti Patel from the Tory leadership race, the party has lost what, on the face of it, appeared to be one of their best chances of continuing the run of selecting only the naughtiest of candidates for the top post. Being sacked for conducting her own foreign policy and being found to have bullied civil servants (even if let off by her then boss) are the sort of misdeeds which ought to have elevated her to the top of the list given her party’s recent predilection for rogues and rule-breakers. She might have been pretty nasty in her period as Home Secretary and rather too fond of Farage, but amongst the Tory Party membership those were supposed to be assets.

Whilst May’s naughty doings – or at least the ones she owned up to – were limited to running through a farmer’s wheatfield, her successor set the bar high for those who would follow. And Johnson, of course, did indeed set a really high bar. Being sacked for lying – twice – being involved in a (failed) plot to beat up a journalist, making up stories for newspapers, to say nothing of being fined for breaches of his own Covid regulations: it was a tough act to follow. Whilst his successor, Liz Truss, had what has subsequently been revealed to be a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of a weird obsession with cheese, she really couldn’t compete. That was probably one of the factors in the brevity of her tenure in the role. Sunak did rather better, being fined for both breaching the Covid regulations and the seat belt law, even if his household benefitting from non-dom tax rules didn’t amount to a crime in the eyes of the law (I wonder who made, or failed to change, the law?).

Given Jenrick’s past record in relation to the Covid regulations (even if he somehow escaped a prosecution or fine) and granting what some might think was dodgy planning consent to a Tory donor, he is justifiably leading the field after the first round of voting. It’s not exactly on the Johnsonian scale, and may owe more to the so-far apparently clean character of the competition. But if any of the other four are serious about wanting the job, they need to either come clean about any past misdeeds, or get out there and start committing some. They can hardly expect the diminishing Tory membership to vote for someone who might turn out to be a fine upstanding citizen after all. Any expectation that they can win on that basis is showing a colossal misunderstanding of the values of the party they seek to lead.

Pressing the self-destruct button?

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There was a story back in the 1960s about a CofE vicar preparing the service for the Sunday after an election before he knew the result. In something of a quandary about which hymn to sing, he eventually settled on three alternatives, so that he covered all bases. If the Tories won, the congregation would sign “Now thank we all our God”, substituted by “Oh Lord our help in ages past” in the event of a Labour victory. Just in case the Liberal Party (as they called themselves back then) were to win, the fall-back option would be “The Lord moves in a mysterious way”.

The CofE was then – and still is in some circles even today – regarded as being ‘the Tory Party at prayer’, and the old joke plays on that view. It’s an association which some in the Tory Party seem determined to end once and for all, with bishops and archbishops now added to the list of dangerous enemies of the people, along with judges, lawyers, the BBC, the Civil Service, foreigners in general and the EU in particular. Liz Truss and Sirjake seem to have added quite a few more enemies of the people to the list at their little jamboree a couple of days ago. The ‘crime’ being committed by clerics in this case is to actively welcome converts from other religions, and Islam in particular. Some may have laboured under the delusion that proselytizing is a core activity for any religion, but it seems that the CofE has been converting the wrong people, at least as far as Braverman and Patel are concerned. For truly traditional English conservatives, the job of the English state religion is to support the establishment, and especially the Tories, not to go off and recruit people who are ‘not quite like us’. The bishops are, apparently, not looking deeply enough into the souls of the new converts to establish the degree to which the conversion is genuine.

There is half a valid point behind all this. Given that apostasy is a capital offence in some countries, the attraction of converting to Christianity for an asylum-seeker who cannot then be returned, under UK law, to a country where he or she might face the death penalty is clear enough. Thus it’s perfectly possible that some of those converting are less than entirely genuine. Whether it’s happening on the scale alleged by the less-than-dynamic duo of former Home Secretaries, and whether it’s the job of bishops to interrogate would-be converts to establish the depth and sincerity of an enthusiastically-expressed new faith is another question. How could the bishops even do what is being asked of them if they wanted to? Maybe the duo think that we should return to the methods of the Spanish Inquisition which, with a little bit of torture, managed to extract confessions of heresy (not all of which would have been entirely genuine) from most of its victims. The duo both strike me as the sort of people who would be not exactly averse to the odd torture session and might even find it pleasurable, as long as it was being applied to someone else. Especially foreigners.

There is something else that strikes me about this particular duo. I’m sure that both of them have been quite vocal in demanding that those who move to the UK should do more to integrate with the local culture and values. Some might see conversion to England’s official (even if, by now, minority) state religion as a good example of doing that. That does not, however, fit the political agenda of the English Conservative Party, which would sooner see it as almost a terrorist act in itself. As the Truss event showed, they are increasingly in danger of allowing themselves to be destroyed by their own paranoia.

Outsourcing morality

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An unwelcome trend in recent decades has been for politicians (among others: there is a wider problem here as well) to ‘outsource’ their moral responsibility to those who make the rules. The result is that anything not specifically banned by the relevant rules or laws is considered to be acceptable. (Johnson and his party have taken this a stage further; they don’t even pretend to adhere to rules, even those they’ve written themselves.) The decision by the courts this week that there is nothing illegal about the policy of deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda is a case in point, with the Home Secretary for the time being declaring it a huge victory, which will enable her to implement the policy, as though neither she nor he colleagues have any responsibility to consider the moral acceptability of dumping desperate people in a country with which they have no previous connection.

It's not quite the victory as which she presents it, though. Although the court ruled that the policy itself is not illegal (subject to possible appeal), it also ruled that the way in which the government had attempted to apply it was unlawful in every one of the cases it considered. In practice, that means that the process of getting to the point where any single individual can actually be sent to Rwanda will be long and complex; the chances of having a whole planeful of candidates any time soon are extremely low. They may decide, for propaganda purposes, to send a plane to Kigali with just a handful of people on it, but as publicity goes, that has a huge potential to backfire.

In any event, her pledge to operate the policy ‘at scale’ is pretty meaningless in the context of a deal which can, apparently, only handle around 200 refugees a year in its current form. That’s one planeful, which I suppose might encourage them to send lots of planes with just a few people on each rather than just get one annual headline. The Home Office, like much of the rest of government, seems to consider itself exempt from climate change policies, as well as any responsibility for morality. The theory is that sending people to Rwanda will make the desperate people think twice about making the crossing, and thus bust the people-smugglers’ business model. That, though, depends on them both knowing about the policy and believing that it will be applied to them. Doing the maths says that deporting 200 to Rwanda of the 40,000 who’ve arrived so far this year means that each individual has a 1 in 200 chance of being deported. And only then after a lengthy process. Given the degree of desperation which many feel, that doesn’t look like an effective deterrent to me; the policy fails even on its own stated terms.

The point is, of course, that the stated reasons for the policy aren’t the real ones, and never have been. The numbers involved are a drop in the ocean. The policy isn’t really about migration or asylum at all – it’s about electoral politics. People like Braverman, Patel and Sunak really do believe that being seen to be heartless and ruthless in dealing with small numbers of desperate people will buy them votes. And the worst part of all is that they might even be right.

Lexicographical crime

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Yesterday, the new empathy-challenged Home Secretary, chosen for the job on the basis that her predecessor, Priti Patel, was simply not nasty enough, claimed that those Tory MPs who had ‘forced’ the government to abandon part of its proposed largesse towards the richest, had staged some sort of ‘coup’ against the elected government of the UK. Her definition of a ‘coup’, which is that MPs had threatened not to vote for a policy which they did not support and which formed no part of their manifesto at the last election probably constitutes some sort of crime against lexicography, but using a different dictionary than the rest of us, and defining words to mean exactly what they want them to mean (well, perhaps not exactly; exactitude is another missing attribute amongst the current government) is far from being the biggest problem with her statement. Within the normal meaning of the word coup, the overthrow of one government and its replacement by another, there has indeed been a coup, but it’s the one which took place a few months ago under which the Tory Party deposed one clueless leader in order to give itself free rein to find someone even more clueless, which is, I suppose, at least one task they’ve managed to complete successfully.

The bigger problem is that, under the UK’s unwritten constitution, and despite the way the media cover and present elections, we do not elect (and never have elected) governments, parties, or Prime Ministers. The only thing we are allowed to elect is a member of parliament for the constituency in which we live; once elected, he or she is free to support whatever policies, parties, or leaders he or she might choose, regardless of any pledges which might have mistakenly appeared on his or her election material. The result is that we now have a government whose leader was chosen by a vanishingly small proportion of the electorate as a whole which is following a programme which is significantly different from what the same people promised in 2019. And it’s all entirely legal and above board. There may be a few deranged members of the governing party who inexplicably consider that they might have some sort of duty to stand by what they said only three years ago – the ones who Braverman accuses of being coupists – but seen from the bunker in Downing Street, these people are little better than traitors, reneging on the only responsibility they have, which is to do as they are told.

What the rest of us need to remember is that this ability to replace a government with a wholly different one, committed to a completely different political direction, isn’t a bug in the UK’s constitution, it’s a feature of it. There has been an entirely legal coup; this is the way things are supposed to work. The PM is appointed by the monarch, not elected by the people, and once appointed is free to do almost anything he or she wishes, subject only to having a sufficiently servile bunch of MPs for those changes which require legislation, which is far from being all of them. The ‘solution’ is not just to hold a new election. That might defer the problem until halfway through the next parliament, or the one after that, but it doesn’t solve it. And since the only solution for the UK as a whole involves persuading turkeys to vote for Christmas, the only way out is to escape from the turkey farm and ensure that independent states in Wales and Scotland start life with proper written constitutions, fair electoral systems, and a recognition that sovereignty belongs to the people not the monarch. We could call it something novel and exciting, like perhaps ‘democracy’.

Height, gender, and tyranny

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According to the latest despatches from the fantasy world inhabited by the UK’s Prime Criminal, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is all down to the gender of the president, Vladimir Putin. If only he’d been a woman all this unpleasantness could have been avoided. We don’t know much else about this imaginary female Russian president, although we might be better able to guess at Johnson’s assessment of her physical appearance if we knew whether she also had an imaginary husband who voted Conservative. We do know that, assuming Ms Putin turned out to be roughly the same size as Mr Putin, a shorter than average man would have become a taller than average woman, a fact which grows in importance when we learn from the Defence Secretary that Putin suffers from something called ‘small man syndrome’. It's a diagnosis which his former experience as a ski instructor and army officer clearly leave him entirely qualified to make. On the other hand, it could be his personal experience as a man only a few inches taller than Putin which gives him this amazing insight into Putin’s character; we can only guess. There is, of course, nothing new about disseminating derogatory information about the physical attributes of opponents; it can surely only be a matter of time before allegations about the imagined deficiencies of Putin’s assets in the genital department begin to circulate.

Exactly what the observations of Johnson (another not exactly giant of a man) and Wallace add to the sum total of human knowledge remains to be determined. There is an outside chance that ridiculing men who happen to be on the short size may rebound on its perpetrators which might bring some benefit in the form of light relief to observers of the UK political scene, although it could easily come at the expense of harm and hurt to innocent bystanders who also happen to be vertically challenged. And that is surely the danger in making overgeneralizations, whether they be about height or gender. 

There’s also a question about their accuracy. History tells us that some dictators and tyrants were short – we tend to think of Napoleon or Hitler – but it also tells us that some were tall. Peter the Great – one of Putin’s heroes, apparently – was 6 foot 4 inches; Syria’s al-Assad is 6 foot 2, and Saddam Hussein was 6 foot 1. And history can be misleading – most of those dictators who we tend to think of as being short were actually very close to male average height (5 foot 7) – a statement which applies to Hitler, Putin and Napoleon for instance. In truth, there is no correlation between height and propensity to tyranny observable in the world’s historical records, it’s all in the fevered imaginations of those who want to belittle (pun intended) their opponents.

So, returning to Johnson, does his suggestion that the problem is Putin’s gender bear any greater relationship with the truth? It’s certainly true that there have been fewer female tyrants than male ones, but any objective analysis ought to start by recognising that females have largely been excluded from leadership roles in most of the world for most of human history. A lack of opportunity to produce their fair share of dictators does not, in itself, prove a lack of propensity. It is, though, probably true that certain attributes are more common in males than in females – and vice versa. It is quite possible that the desire for war and conquest is more predominant amongst males than females, but greater prevalence isn’t at all the same thing as gender being an absolute determinant. It depends on the individual rather than simply on gender. To choose just two examples on daily display, being a woman doesn’t stop Liz Truss being one of the Cabinet's biggest warmongers, and being female doesn’t stop Priti Patel being probably the nastiest person ever to hold the office of Home Secretary. Whilst Johnson may be clutching at the germ of a sensible point, his innate misogyny and inability to apply any sort of subtlety to his analysis make it, ultimately, next to worthless. If Johnson had been female, would he still have become Prime Criminal - and would he still have performed even more badly than a reincarnated olive? It's one of those things which are unknowable.

Scoring own goals

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When presented with an open goal, the usual response of a footballer is to kick the ball into it. Politics doesn’t work that way, especially for Labour leader Keir Starmer. With large swathes of the establishment, including the heir to the throne and the established church, lining up to criticise the scheme to send refugees to Rwanda as unjust, immoral and illegal, and with a number of Labour MPs leading the charge in the House of Commons, the office of the leader of the opposition manages to kick the ball towards his own net instead, by declining to say whether Labour would reverse the policy if it were in government, or even whether Starmer believes it to be morally wrong. Ultimately, it seems that fear of being seen by racist voters to be ‘soft on immigration’ ends up trumping any sense of principled policy making.

It also ends up helping to enable the disingenuous argument, as put forward by Johnson and Patel, that anyone opposing the policy of sending refugees to Rwanda is aiding and abetting the people smugglers who are placing so many vulnerable and desperate people in small boats and sending them on a risky journey across the world’s busiest shipping lane. According to their interpretation, the only way to stop people smugglers is to deter their potential ‘customers’ by convincing them that taking the risk will leave them in an even worse situation than staying where they are (although attempting to implement the policy without first jumping through all the necessary legal hoops might actually have the opposite effect when those ‘customers’ see that no-one really gets sent anywhere). The possibility of doing more to intercept and catch the smugglers themselves doesn’t seem to have even crossed their minds, probably because it might mean having to work with the French, which might amount to a tacit and very un-Brexity admission that co-operation with neighbours could be more effective than confrontation.

Patel’s claim that there is no other way of dealing with the problem than acting illegally sounds a bit like someone telling a court, “I was broke and couldn’t think of another way of getting any money, so I robbed the bank”. Whether there are practical alternatives or not depends on how the problem is defined. If the problem is defined – and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that this is the working definition being used by Patel and Johnson – as ‘how do we get massive headlines and appeal to the basest instincts of our core electors?’, then there is a degree of truth in their claim that opponents are not coming up with alternative solutions. Opponents simply aren’t defining the problem in the same way. Defining the problem as ‘what can we do about a situation where so many people are rendered so desperate by war, famine, oppression and economic inequality that they are prepared to risk their own and their children’s lives by travelling thousand of miles to a place where they can escape those things?’, would lead absolutely no-one, ever, to suggest putting some of those people on a plane and flying them from one of the world’s richest countries to one of the poorest. And that means, according to Patel, that they are not offering any alternative solutions. In the remaining neuron which serves as her logic circuit, she even has some claim to be right.

What’s unclear is which definition ‘Keith’ Starmer is using. Some of the language used by some Labour people suggests that they might actually be looking at the plight of the individuals, but Starmer’s reticence to state, straight out, that the policy is utterly unacceptable in any civilised society and would be immediately scrapped by an incoming Labour government suggests that he, too, might be more fixated on the headlines than on the people involved. Allowing the Mail and the Express to determine Labour policy shows just how far that party has fallen.

Following orders

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The top civil servant in the Home Office has apparently found it necessary to tell the department’s staff that they will not be breaking the law nor be guilty of racism if they implement the Home Secretary’s plan to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda. The claim that the plan does not break any laws is a bold one for a civil servant to make; ultimately it is for the courts to decide whether the plan is legal or not, and we can be certain that there will be legal challenges aplenty. The question as to whether it is racist or not is more complex. It is arguably not directly racist in the sense that race will not be a factor in the criteria for deciding which of those migrants who arrive by one particular mode of entry will be sent; but since the overwhelming majority of those arriving by that route are of African or Middle Eastern origin (Europeans generally having safer routes available to them, as well as less need to seek sanctuary - current circumstances notwithstanding), there is every probability that it will be indirectly racist.

But perhaps the most significant part of the mandarin’s lecture to staff was the bit where he said that staff were obliged to implement ministers’ decisions. That sounded a lot like telling them that they must always follow orders, an approach to government which many will have thought to have been seriously discredited at Nuremburg. There are lots of things in human history which have been entirely legal under the laws in force at the time – including, of course, slavery – but being ‘legal’ doesn’t make them right, and it doesn’t absolve those implementing them of all moral responsibility for their actions. Where to draw the line is far from being an easy question: a situation in which different civil servants draw the line in different places depending on their own consciences would clearly cause untold difficulties. But the precedents for a government which falls back on instructing its servants to do as they are told regardless of any reservations about legality or morality – which is where we seem to be headed – are not exactly good. The Civil Service is, quite rightly, expected to be neutral rather than partisan in implementing the policy of the elected government of the day. But acting in a neutral fashion isn’t – and should not be allowed to become – the same thing as acting without any sense of morality. The fact that the head honcho at the Home Office doesn’t seem to understand the nuance here is something that should worry us all.

The issue is defining the problem, not the solution

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The criticism of the UK government’s policy of sending people involuntarily to Rwanda has been fierce, and has provoked the response from the Foreign Secretary that the critics “fail to offer their own solutions”. Disingenuous doesn’t begin to describe this response – because the issue is not about alternative solutions but about the definition of the problem, which she presents as being the “deadly trade” of people trafficking and also the “deeply unfair” current situation that “advantages those with the means to pay people traffickers over vulnerable people who cannot”. From that perspective, any ‘solution’ which doesn’t accept her definition of the ‘problem’ can easily be dismissed as failing to be a ‘solution’ at all.

The real problem is the desperate conditions in which many people in many parts of the world are living; conditions which are usually caused, or at least exacerbated, by the actions of rich countries like the UK, which have for centuries extracted the wealth of poorer countries, supported oppressive and corrupt regimes, and supplied weapons and armaments (sometimes to both sides) in even those wars in which they have not themselves been directly engaged. The problem is not that desperate people are prepared to take enormous risks to come to the UK, it is that war, oppression, hunger and poverty drive them to leave their homes and communities in search of a better life in the first place. The UK is only one country (and far from being even the favourite country) to which they seek to migrate. It’s a problem to which the UK’s ‘solution’ has been to cut the aid budget, and pretend that the issues aren’t linked.

People trafficking is, of course, a problem which needs to be eliminated; but people selling illegal routes to the UK can only thrive because all the legal routes have been closed to those who use their services. And deporting some of their ‘customers’ is punishing the victims, not the perpetrators. We don’t lock up those who’ve been burgled because we can neither identify nor catch the burglars. Flying people to Rwanda is itself a bit like a dark form of officially-sanctioned people trafficking, except that the Government doesn’t make them pay and doesn’t take them where they want to go, but merely dumps them in a country to which they have even less connection.

I’m not even convinced that Patel has been entirely honest about her own definition of the ‘problem’ which she’s trying to solve – I suspect that her real issue is either concern that the sort of people who vote Tory don’t want immigrants of any sort coming to the UK or her wish to bolster her own credentials with the equally unpleasant elements who now control her own party. Expecting those who think that what she’s doing is morally repugnant to propose an alternative solution to achieve the same ends is even less realistic in either case. The real ‘problem’ which needs solving is that we have a deeply corrupt, immoral, uncaring, and dishonest government, which according to their own words (albeit not their actions) is behaving in a wholly un-British fashion. It’s a problem to which there is no solution which leaves the current structures and constitution in place.

Failure is a feature of the UK, not a bug

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As a general rule, I support the UK being generous towards those who come to these shores fleeing war and oppression, and even those who are fleeing poverty (who some prefer to call economic migrants), especially given the UK’s historical role in creating the poverty which they are trying to escape. I’ll admit though that when I read yesterday’s news, the uncharitable thought crossed my mind that the UK today might be an altogether kinder and gentler place if Mr & Mrs Patel, Mr & Mrs Sunak, and Mr & Mrs Javid had been detained at the border and flown to a detention centre in Rwanda, and if Mr & Mrs Johnson had been prevented from bringing any US-born offspring into the UK. (People criticising Sunak for being a permanent US resident whilst also being Chancellor of the Exchequer tend to forget that until he renounced his US citizenship in 2016 – and only then to avoid a tax bill – the current PM was himself both a member of parliament and a US citizen obliged to pay tax under US rules on all his earnings. Even if Sunak had told his boss about the Green Card issue, it’s unlikely that someone who saw no significant problem in a full US citizen becoming Foreign Secretary would object to a Chancellor holding the much lower status of mere permanent resident of the US.)

Whether the policy will ever be implemented or is just a very cruel gimmick to try and get racist voters to back the Tories in local elections next month, or even an attempt to divert attention from the government’s other misdeeds by appealing to that sense of racism, is an open question. I don’t doubt that money will change hands and Rwanda will receive some much-needed cash (although I wouldn’t put it past the current government to take the money out of the overseas aid budget), but that doesn’t mean anyone will actually be sent there. There are more than a few legal issues to overcome (in domestic law as well as in international law), which is why Johnson himself is already firing warning shots at the lawyers who might be tempted to use the courts to prevent any flights from taking place (or to enforce the actual law of the UK rather than what Johnson and Patel think the law should be, to describe it more accurately). He and Patel like to refer to lawyers as ‘politically-motivated lefty activists’, although a more accurate description would be ‘people who believe that following the rule of law is, on the whole, rather a good thing’. The rule of law is, however, an increasingly strange concept to the corrupt lawbreakers who staged a coup within the Tory Party and are now doing the same to the UK as a whole. I’m still waiting for the defence that it’s only breaking the law in a “very specific and limited way” (just like committing a murder or two, really).

Both nationally and internationally, the move has generated a great deal of condemnation, including from the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. The UK ought to be sanctioned for its actions, including expulsion from the Council or Europe and all international human rights organisations. The problem with that is that those behind this policy would see that as a positive, not a punishment. Our own Mark Drakeford has, in fairness and as one would expect, condemned the policy unreservedly, but what he and others like him need to realise is that this sort of thing isn’t a bug in the UK system which can be put right by a change of government in England (even if that looked like a remotely conceivable possibility, and even if English Labour wasn’t trying to present itself as being as keen as the Tories to enforce border controls), it’s a feature with which we will have to put up until Wales decides to opt out of the failed state which the UK is rapidly becoming.

The Ministry of Silly Questions?

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The process for allowing Ukrainian refugees into the UK has been much-criticised, entirely justifiably, at a time when urgent action is needed to help those displaced by the war. Uniquely in Europe, the UK government is still insisting on people completing complex visa application forms before being allowed entry. The government insist that this is necessary for ‘security’ purposes, but have failed to provide any sort of explanation as to why that is a great concern here, but not important for any member state of the EU. It's probably just another example of English (and it is English in this case – both the Welsh and Scottish governments have called for a more flexible approach) exceptionalism – they probably do genuinely believe that England needs to be more careful than anyone else. Perhaps they even think that the ‘hostile environment’ which they’ve spent so much time and effort creating somehow makes the UK uniquely attractive.

It has certainly been made clear – even if it was not so previously – that the UK’s process, even in the case of people in desperate need, starts from the assumption that people (with the possible exception of corrupt billionaires) must be kept out. It’s not an admission process, it’s an exclusion process. The pathetically slow UK approach has, however, thrown a little bit of light on the standard process, which involves completing a 51 page form for each individual. When I first read about how long the form is, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could actually devise 51 pages of questions in the first place. Part of the answer has emerged in recent days: one of the questions asked is, apparently, “Are you a war criminal?”. Whilst it’s easy enough to understand why any country might want to think twice before admitting war criminals, I can’t even begin to imagine the thought processes of the civil servant who decided that the way to find out was to include the question on an application form. The one thing of which we can be certain is that any war criminal seeking entry to the UK who gets to that question is not going to answer in the positive, a rather obvious fact which makes the question completely pointless.

It made me wonder anew what other silly questions might be included in the form, the very length of which is clearly intended as a deterrent in itself. We are supposed to accept that government efforts to ‘simplify’ the form for dealing with Ukrainian applicants (reducing it, apparently, to a mere 30 pages) is a demonstration of the government being flexible and accommodating. It’s actually more a demonstration of how the whole UK immigration process is about building the biggest possible barriers to entry (barriers which would have excluded the parents of the current Home Secretary as well as those of a number of other government MPs and ministers) and resisting any and all attempts to lower those barriers.

Shame, not pride, is the only response

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Whenever things get to the point where I begin to think that the current government could not go any lower, there is one minister who is always willing to step forward to prove me wrong. Just about the only thing that the UK government could have done to top its abysmal and disgraceful performance to date in handling the Ukrainian refugee crisis was to turn on European neighbours and criticise them for being too generous. So, with a certain inevitability, that is exactly what the ever-dependable Priti Patel has done, with her expression of concern to the Irish government that Ireland’s decision to allow refugees in without visas, in line with the humanitarian policy of all EU states, threatens the UK’s vicious and inhumane policy by creating a potential ‘back door’ for desperate people.

I suppose one could argue that it demonstrates that she at least understands the basic principle underlying the whole war – the right of large countries to expect that smaller neighbours will know their place, do as they’re told, and never implement any policy which might annoy their larger and more powerful neighbour. It’s just that nobody seems to have told her that she’s supposed to at least pretend to be on the side of the victims of the bullying, not behave like the bully.

Her Kafkaesque decision to set up a visa processing centre in Lille, which will neither accept appointments nor walk-ins and whose location is being kept secret somehow reminds me of the scene from the old radio programme, The Men from the Ministry, where a request from another department to borrow the ‘Permission Refused’ stamp was greeted with the response “Stamp it Permission Refused and tell them we haven’t got one”. Except that was a parody of the way government works, with refusal always the first option, and was funny. There is nothing in the least bit amusing about Patel’s refusal (backed by the PM and the other pathetic apologies for ministers) to help desperate and vulnerable people at their time of greatest need.

And all the while, the government bang on about how proud we should be of the UK’s leading role in the world, freed of the constraints of EU membership, and claim that it is demonstrating the unity of the realm. Pride – real, genuine pride in a leading humanitarian role – might actually help to achieve that if they could give us any reason for feeling such pride. The increasing feeling of shame which so many are instead feeling will do quite the opposite. The Irish can and should feel proud of their efforts to date; not for the first time, their outward-looking, European perspective puts the narrow insularity of the Anglo-British nationalists to shame.

A Great British welcome

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Following the announcement by the Home Secretary that she had ‘surged’ the UK’s presence in Calais to deal with the exodus of Ukrainians (when did ‘surge’ become a transitive verb?), the BBC went in search of it, in the wake of a family seeking help. They eventually found “…three men at a trestle table in a deserted departure hall at the port, with bags of ready salted crisps and Kit Kats”. The way in which government ministers lie so casually and blatantly, even when they know that minimal research will expose those lies, ought to be surprising. Ought to be, but isn’t – it’s become the new normal. I guess they’re assuming that their supporters won’t care about the lies, as long as foreigners are kept out. Sadly, they’re probably right. Worse still, I have a depressing suspicion that the people to whom Patel, Johnson et al are seeking to appeal will probably  be more outraged at the excessive generosity of the crisps and Kit Kats.

Maybe it will be the little things that get him

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The response by the Metropolitan Police to the reports of parties at Downing Street during last year’s lockdown was clumsy at best. Saying that they do not routinely probe "retrospective breaches" of Covid rules was a pretty silly thing to say – as many others have pointed out, the nature of any crime investigation is that it is retrospective, because crime can only ever be investigated after it has occurred. It might be true that most prosecutions for breaches of Covid regulations have resulted from police action taken at the time of the breach rather than from a “retrospective” investigation, but it isn’t universally true, and there was nothing in the regulations themselves which suggested that people would only be prosecuted if they were caught red-handed. But whilst the words used were badly chosen, the basic point is one which many victims of car crime, burglary etc will be only too familiar: under-resourced police forces do indeed pick and choose which crimes they investigate and which they ignore.

The question which deserves more scrutiny than it gets is about how the police come to a decision about which crimes they should investigate and which do not deserve their time and attention. Whatever the answer to that should be, it most definitely should not resolve entirely around how long ago the offence was committed. Telling would-be offenders that they’ll get away with the offence if they can only keep it secret for long enough is a poor approach to law enforcement, and an even worse one to crime prevention. And in the specific case of Covid breaches, telling those who were fined for holding parties which were raided and broken up by the police that the difference between them and the offenders at Number 10 was that nobody reported the Downing Street parties at the time they were happening is not much of a justification for differential treatment before the law.

In the grand scheme of things, and all other things being equal, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable for an overstretched police force to say that it really doesn’t feel investigating the details of a party held twelve months ago is a sensible investment of officer time, despite the fact that during last year’s lockdowns, the Home Secretary, no less, was urging people to report their neighbours for holding parties. (Perhaps she should be reporting Rishi Sunak for failing to report his neighbour.) However, all other things aren’t equal. Any decision on whether or not to investigate is inevitably an intensely political one – whichever way the decision goes. Of course the opposition parties want to expose and punish the repeated and continuous lies and evasions at the heart of the current government, and a decision to investigate will inevitably be seen as supporting that. On the other hand, a decision to let the matter drop will, equally inevitably, be seen as allowing ‘them’ to get away with what ‘we’ would be punished for.

The government really does seem incapable of helping itself. A government with any sense of honour or shame would simply announce that after an internal investigation any of the organisers still employed at Downing Street had been disciplined and that nothing similar would ever happen again. Instead of which, a government which is incapable of ever admitting doing anything wrong ties itself up in knots by arguing that only a ‘formal’ party would have been against the rules. (I don’t even know what that means: does it mean white tie events, or events to which embossed invitations were issued? If that’s what the rules really meant, the police were surely wrongly applying them to events held by others.) The PM’s spokesperson has consistently both failed to deny that parties were held and argued that no rules were broken – two things which in no conceivable universe could both be true.

There is a sense in which whether a party was or was not held is small beer in the scale of things. To date the media have generally gone fairly easy on Johnson; he has learned that if he just ignores a bad story or doubles down on the lie, the media eventually get fed up of the story and move on. There would be a certain poetic justice if it turned out that it was something fairly small which eventually did for him. We should never forget that it was, eventually, tax evasion which placed Al Capone in prison.

Which crisis is the most important?

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During the Cold War, the boundary across Germany between East and West was heavily policed on both sides, nowhere more so than in Berlin itself. Border police regularly detained people trying to cross into their respective zones. As far as I’m aware, though, only on one side of the border were people regularly shot for trying to get out rather than in. Most borders, and the policing of them, are about keeping people out; borders which have the equal objective of keeping people in are comparatively rare. They are generally associated with authoritarian regimes, fearful that – given the opportunity – their people would seek to move elsewhere en masse.

Listening to Patel and Johnson, it appears that they want the French to police their borders much as the East Germans used to do, ensuring not only that no-one can get in without permission, but also that no-one can leave without consent. One even has the impression that they wouldn’t mind a great deal if the French border police went further and emulated the East German practice of shooting people. They probably think it would win them votes, and they might, sadly, even be right about that. But it isn’t the way modern European states work. Most European states – a paranoid UK being the most obvious exception – have spent decades trying to improve freedom of movement and remove barriers, not erect them. French border controls – just like those in the UK, as it happens – are designed to prevent entry rather than exit. And whilst people smuggling is illegal in France, as it is in the UK, no-one should be at all surprised if the reality on the ground isn’t quite as simple as Patel says it is (very little is as she says it is). Not all the people are being smuggled, some desperate families are simply clubbing together to buy boats. There is, ultimately, nothing illegal about a group of people setting off in a boat from a French beach; adding British border force agents to those patrolling the beaches would do nothing to alter that, even if the suggestion were not a gross insult to France. Unlike the UK government, the French government still seems to have at least a vestigial grip on the idea of applying the rule of law rather than acting out of prejudice, malice and self-interest.

Last week, in the wake of a mass drowning which was inevitably going to happen at some point, the PM convened a crisis meeting of Cobra. It was, though, addressing the wrong crisis. Many of us would have thought that the real crisis here is the desperation (just how desperate does a parent have to be to take small children on such a perilous crossing?) of so many people fleeing war, oppression, hunger and poverty in search of a better life. For Johnson, the crisis is that the drownings aren’t acting as a sufficient deterrent, and that the extremists in his party, egged on by a vicious and callous media, are demanding further action to stop refugees from arriving on these shores, even if that means taking deliberate action, of dubious legality, which will lead to more deaths.

As Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, many of those seeking to come to the UK in dinghies have the training, skills and experience which the UK economy desperately needs. There is an obvious insanity about spending so much time and effort in turning away people who could be filling the gaps, simply in order to play to prejudice about ‘others’. It’s the result of a desire to gain and retain power by whipping up and then appealing to people’s darkest instincts, even if it means tanking the economy in the process. And that, perhaps, is the biggest crisis of all that we face: we have a government incapable of feeling, let alone displaying, empathy or humanity and no immediate way of changing it. Worse still, the English electorate is, apparently, happy to go along with this.

Finding a way back

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When I first saw the story about Priti Patel having considered putting a wave machine in the English Channel to drive dinghies back to France, my instinctive reaction was to check the date, forgetting that under the present UK government April Fool’s Day has become, to coin a phrase, more of a long drawn-out process than an event. The proposal runs against international law, of course. (There are no international waters in the channel; all boats are either in French territory or in UK territory. Attacking them in the former constitutes an act of war, and once they cross into the latter, the UK is legally responsible for their safety.) But, as we have seen, mere legality is no longer an important factor for a rogue state like the UK. It’s one of a number of bizarre proposals to have been considered, including shipping asylum seekers to an island in the South Atlantic, or to Morocco, Moldova, or Papua New Guinea. Why spend a small amount of money on providing people with the basics whilst their asylum applications are processed when we can spend a vast amount of additional money building new facilities and shipping people to far distant places as well as providing those basics? Johnson has always had a bit of a penchant for grands projets (see garden bridges, Boris Island, and implausible bridges) which never come to anything. It’s more to do with image than substance; in this case being seen to be tough on immigrants.

And that brings me to the use of an old army camp at Penally to house asylum seekers. I know Penally reasonably well (during three election campaigns, I reckon to have knocked just about every door in the village), and it is not well-served with facilities able to cope with a sudden unplanned increment in the population. On the other hand, the wider area does cope with a large seasonal increase in population every summer (with the obvious exception of 2020), so it should not be as large a problem as it’s been painted as long as it is properly planned and executed (a wholly unrealistic expectation of Patel and Johnson in itself, of course). I don’t know enough about the conditions at the camp to know whether they’re suitable for the purpose, but reports suggest that they really are not. The bigger question is whether it is, in any event, appropriate to treat people like “cattle in a holding pen” as Nicola Sturgeon put it in response to a suggestion that remote Scottish Islands were also on the list of possible sites for an offshore processing facility. She thinks not, and I entirely agree. It’s dehumanising and inhumane.

Whatever, even if the conditions and facilities were entirely suitable, I suspect that many of those objecting would still do so. And lest anyone think that I’m being unkind to the good citizens of Penally here, I believe that that statement would probably apply to any and every town and village across the UK; people will object to having refugees in their patch and would find other ‘valid reasons’ to oppose it. I’d like to believe that it’s not a majority view, but I have little choice but to accept that it’s the view of a substantial minority at the least. It’s easy enough to blame the politicians who have planted the idea that we should reject refugees (and I do blame them) or the tabloids for stoking anti-immigrant feelings (and, yes, I do blame them as well), but we cannot merely shrug off the fact that a substantial number of our fellow citizens harbour some very dark views when it comes to refugees. They are content, and in some cases even enthusiastic, to see refugees go without the basics, be sent ‘back’ without due process, be separated from society, be demonised, and even, as Sturgeon characterised it, ‘treated like cattle’. That doesn’t reflect well on any of us.

Those dark views, I suspect, are what lies behind the wild proposals floated by Downing Street and the Home Office. And they certainly explain why some of the Tories’ top advisers are delighted about the leak. From their perspective, it gives the impression that the government are serious about ‘cracking down’ on immigration. For their target audience, it’s not something that makes the government look positively deranged, but something which plays to their prejudices. When the ideas are eventually rejected, it won’t be because they are downright silly, impractical, or horrendously costly, it will be because the mythical ‘metropolitan elite’ is frustrating the government’s wish to take firm action and putting obstacles in their way. I don’t know how large the substantial minority to which I referred above actually is, but given that the UK’s distorted electoral system only requires that a party receive the support of 30-35% of the electorate to obtain a clear majority in parliament, we should not underestimate the electoral value to Johnson’s Tories of appealing to that minority.

Deliberately treating a particular group as somehow less than human and undeserving of the same rights as the rest of us carries very unfortunate echoes of the past. That it is being normalised, and that so many of our fellow citizens support it enthusiastically, shows how easily a society can slip into inhumanity, just in case we’d forgotten that lesson from history. We are being led into a very dark place, and the route out is far from clear to me.

Gotcha!

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If there was one aspect of the UK Government’s handling of the pandemic which they got totally right – up until last Saturday at least – it was keeping the Home Secretary off the airwaves.  The extent to which that was the right decision only became fully clear when they finally let her loose. Perhaps their objective in changing the policy was to make the rest of them look half-competent by comparison, but I suspect it failed even in that limited aim. Incompetence comes in many forms – and one of those is allowing someone even less competent to take a lead role.

I can’t imagine that the government’s media advisers didn’t anticipate the demand for an apology for the lack of PPE for front-line staff but if they did anticipate it and briefed her on how to answer, she either forgot or ignored the advice she was given and ended up using the forbidden ‘s’ word to apologise for the stupidity of the public at large in choosing to believe the people working without PPE rather than the government’s spin doctors who insist that there is plenty.  It’s not far short of Trump’s claim that doctors are only complaining about lack of PPE so that they can get on tv. It didn’t work too well for him either.

That said, I’m not a big fan of the ‘demand an apology’ style of journalism. It sometimes seems that some journalists are playing some sort of game of ‘Gotcha’ rather than trying to get at the truth.  It’s true that getting ministers to admit that any mistakes at all have been made is hard (for some reason they seem to need us to believe that they’re as infallible as they believe themselves to be – always a dangerous position from anyone in authority), and a forced apology is an admission of failure, of sorts; but apologies don’t really move things forward.  There’s even a danger that, once an apology has been given, lines will be drawn under events and the important analysis of how and why it happened and what we do to get out of the problem and/or avoid it in future goes undone.

Perhaps, though, for reporters who have failed to get straight answers to straight questions for weeks on end and have instead been subjected to a torrent of demonstrable untruths, ‘Gotcha’ is all that they have left in their armoury.

Hold back the popcorn, for the time being

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The constructive dismissal hearing for the former Permanent Secretary at the Home Office looks like being a spectator event not to be missed, if it actually goes ahead.  I’m assuming that the grieved party has lots of juicy evidence about the way the Home Secretary has behaved; the sort of stuff which would embarrass any normal Prime Minister in ordinary times but which, in this case, is likely only (in his own eyes at least) to confirm his good judgement in appointing Patel to the role.  It’s a big ‘if’ though.

At the moment, he’s clearly very angry and looking forward to his day in court but the intensity of anger fades over time, and pragmatic considerations usually kick in eventually.  It was reported that he’s already been in negotiations over a payoff but that those negotiations have foundered – apparently over the lack of an assurance from Johnson and Patel that they would issue a supportive statement if he were to be the subject of further negative briefings.  Unless he can demonstrate that the situation has arisen as a result of discrimination against him on the grounds of one of the ‘protected characteristics’ (race, gender, etc), the amount of money he could win at any tribunal is capped – and that cap is probably significantly lower than any amount he’s already been offered, let alone any new offer which may now be forthcoming.  It is a misconception that UK law protects people against unfair dismissal – it does not.  It allows any employer to sack people at random, with only two provisos – that they avoid doing so on the basis of the protected characteristics (when damages can be unlimited), and that they are willing to open their cheque books and pay a sum significantly in excess of what the sacked employee could ever win at a tribunal.  Faced with the stress and uncertainty of a tribunal in which the employee might not win, or at best win only a smaller uncertain sum of money, the attraction of settling for the certainty of a larger sum usually proves too strong to resist. 

I’m surprised that Johnson and Patel have been unwilling to give him the assurance that he seeks.  After all, giving cast-iron assurances is almost a Johnson specialism – it’s keeping them, rather than giving them, which always seems to cause him a problem.  I’m even more surprised that Rutnam has asked for such an assurance; on the basis of his own personal experience he’d have to be out of his mind to trust one, even if it were given.  If negotiations to arrive at a settlement fail as a result, and the case does indeed get to be heard before a tribunal, there would be a delicious irony if that were to be the direct result of the PM’s serial untrustworthiness.  But it’s too early to break out the popcorn for this particular spectacle yet.