Why the emphasis on colour?

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If you start out with the ‘right’ assumptions and definitions, then you can ‘prove’ absolutely anything, but that ‘proof’ is, at best, only ever going to be as accurate as those assumptions and definitions. Sadly, when it comes to reporting on ‘research’ papers, the point that the media often miss out is to tell us what those assumptions and definitions are. And when it comes to politicians, they far too frequently rely on the media reports rather than even bothering to read the original report, especially if the conclusions just happen to reflect their own biases and prejudices. It’s a phenomenon which we’ve seen often enough in relation to the economics of an independent Wales: whether it would be a basket-case or a land of milk and honey depends entirely on the, usually unreported, underlying assumptions.

Sometimes, it can lead those who jump onto conclusions without understanding the way they’ve been reached into effectively supporting ridiculous non sequiturs, and thus it was with Rupert Lowe last week. In a bizarre section of an interview with Nick Robinson, he found himself unable to confirm that the King of England is, in fact, a White Briton. Lowe had been using a curious report (produced by the failed Reform Ltd candidate against the victorious Green Party candidate in Gorton and Denton) in which he argued that ‘White Britons’ were destined to become a minority in the UK by 2063. But the definition of ‘White Briton’ used included a stipulation that both parents were born in the UK – a stipulation that the current monarch is unable to meet, his father having been born in Corfu. On that definition, it is very clear that Charles is not a White Briton, a conclusion which Lowe was strangely unwilling to admit.

For most of thus, such a patently absurd conclusion would be enough to cast considerable doubt on some of the report’s other assertions, let alone the definitions on which they are based. What, for instance, does it even mean to be ‘white’? The definition seems to be based on what people say when they fill in the census form, which makes it largely based on self-classification. Some might argue that asking what does ‘white’ mean is a silly question, because it’s ‘obvious’. But is it really – and how far do we need to go back?

But the bigger question is whether it matters. Lowe was seeking to present a sensational conclusion as though it is somehow civilisation-threatening, and clearly, to his intended audience, it might well appear to be so. But if the institution at the very summit of the UK state has been able to accept and absorb successive waves of foreign influence – whether Greek, German, Norman, or Dutch – without becoming less ‘British’ in the process (or maybe changing what 'British' itself means in the process), why should that be so hard for the rest of society? And why the emphasis on skin colour – why assume that a person of foreign descent who happens to look different is more of a threat than one who looks the same? There is a valid debate to be had around assimilation and cultural change, but physical appearance is an irrelevance. Except to racists and those who encourage them.

There are limits to what can be controlled democratically

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If Knut had been Swiss rather than Danish, he could have called a referendum instead of having his courtiers carry his throne to the water’s edge. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome, but at least he wouldn’t have got his feet wet demonstrating the limits of his authority. Some things are susceptible to human control, others less so; the difference isn’t always clear, especially when it comes to politics. On Sunday, the Swiss voted on a proposal to cap the country’s population at 10 million, a proposition which was defeated, but with a surprisingly high level of support (the result was 45%-55% on a 60% turnout). The proposition had nothing to do with the reproductive practices of the Swiss people, of course: it was really about immigration. Had the proposal been passed, the government would have found itself obliged to comply, primarily by limiting immigration. What they would have had to do if the Swiss started breeding at a rate which took the Swiss population not counting foreigners over the limit seems not to have been determined, although King Herod’s approach is the historical example which leaps to mind. Too unlikely a scenario to worry about, perhaps.

The figure of 10 million is entirely arbitrary, but the proposition was based on a fear that population growth would increase the pressure on housing etc. It’s a familiar refrain. When it comes to issues like housing, it’s inevitable that a larger population requires greater provision, and that’s true whether the growth is ‘natural’ or the result of immigration. The logical response to an increased demand for housing as a result of a growing population is to increase the housing stock. However, it seems that there are some who would prefer to evict ‘foreigners’ and deport them in order to allocate their homes to ‘natives’, even if they don’t always put it in those terms.

But ‘not always’ isn’t the same as ‘never’, and that brings us to Farage, who, at the weekend, announced his company’s new policy of evicting all foreign nationals from social housing, and deporting them if they can’t find private accommodation within three months. Evicting the unwanted from their homes and re-allocating those homes to others is not without historical precedent, as I’m sure Farage will be aware, although whether deportation is better or worse than being forced into formally demarcated ghettos is a question one might have hoped that we never had to debate. It was ‘interesting’ that, in his rant posing as an essay, Farage chose to make a simplistic distinction between ‘white British’ and ‘foreigners’. The implicit racism is both casual and revealing, and something which the use of language seeks to normalise.

Whether the UK has enough housing overall to serve all its population is a question which isn’t easy to answer; what is certain, though, is that there is a significant mismatch between the available type, location, and price of housing on the one hand and the needs of the current population on the other. I suspect the same is true in Switzerland. In either case, there’s something deeply irrational about setting out to adjust the demand (by controlling population numbers) rather than the supply (by building more homes). But then, rationality and racism have never made for good bedfellows.

Reform Ltd are using a curious form of logic

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Maybe, as some have suggested, the proposal by Reform Ltd to site internment camps for migrants in constituencies which vote for the Green Party is just a wind-up, an attempt to provoke outrage. Maybe, maybe not. There’s certainly something very Trumpian about it, aping the way violent immigration enforcement is used differentially in the US depending on whether a particular state did or did not vote for Trump. Some have suggested that it might be illegal, but if the UK ever got to the stage of electing a majority Reform Ltd government, such a government would have no trouble legislating to remove any legal obstacles. There is certainly something very ‘un-British’ about it, curiously enough from an overtly British/English nationalist party.

Perhaps we’ll never get there. After all, the ability of Reform UK to actually implement such a policy depends on a party led by Farage not imploding for another three years, and then winning a majority of seats in the Westminster parliament. History suggests that the former is unlikely, and the latter depends on the former, but we shouldn’t be complacent. I suspect that they actually mean what they say. Whether they would be able, as they claim, to hold detainees for only a short time before deporting them is an open question. It sounds simple, but in practical terms I suspect that people would need to be held for months rather than weeks, and the total number of detainees at any one time would be very much higher than they are claiming as a result.

Leaving aside the questions of both practicality and probability, the logic, even on their own terms, is a little ‘fuzzy’ to say the least. Setting up the camps is presented as a consequence of voting for open borders, and therefore something which those who vote for open borders should welcome, but that’s a complete logical reversal. Setting up camps is actually a consequence of voting for closed borders and a mass deportation policy; those who should welcome the camps are those who vote to set them up (Reform Ltd voters), not those who vote against them. On the other hand, and they probably haven’t worked this through themselves yet, they’ve actually given us a clear way of stopping their deportation policy in its tracks. They have guaranteed that no Reform Ltd-voting constituency will get a camp, so if every constituency elects a Reform Ltd MP, there would be nowhere to site a single camp. It’s not an action I’d encourage, of course – but ‘Vote Reform to stop Reform’ has a certain ring to it. Logic, like arithmetic, isn't exactly one of their strengths.

A new influx of refugees?

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There was a story yesterday suggesting that some Americans are so unhappy or even fearful following the election of Trump that they’re planning to emigrate to the UK. It’s a bit like the one about rich people talking about leaving the UK because Starmer is going to make them pay taxes – overblown, based on a small number of anecdotal instances. No doubt there will be a few, but the extent to which people root up their lives and move elsewhere as a result of a particular election result, or tax change, is greatly exaggerated. The objective of such stories is to try and pressurise governments into giving them special treatment. I can’t see it working in the case of Trump; a few discontented individuals leaving the US won’t make him change course. Sadly, however, it seems that Starmer and Reeves are much more susceptible to such pressures and will bow down to the over-privileged wanting to protect their privileges, as we also saw yesterday.

Leaving aside the fact that such migratory responses are actually much rarer than reports-with-an-agenda might suggest, it’s interesting to consider what treatment such refugees (which is surely what they should be called) from the US will receive. The probability that they will be detained on arrival, or at the expiry of their visitors’ visas, awaiting deportation is close to zero. It’s tempting to suggest that being white and English-speaking might be behind the difference in attitude, but I suspect that it’s more to do with money. They have some, whereas other refugees don’t. There is nothing in any of the relevant international laws which suggests that granting refugee status to someone should depend on how wealthy they are; indeed, the expectation is, rather, that it should be about assessing how much danger they are in. That isn’t, though, the way the UK government operates. And it doesn’t matter which party forms that government.

And then what?

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Many of Trump’s early Executive Orders have been to do with the rounding up and deportation of undocumented immigrants. He and his supporters claim that it will be the biggest round up and deportation in history. If they actually succeed in deporting people in the numbers being suggested, it will indeed be the biggest deportation in history. Whether it’s the biggest round up is more questionable: it may well be the biggest in terms of absolute numbers, but maybe not in terms of the ratio of those rounded up to the total population. My recollection of history tells me that there was a very big round up of people carried out on the European mainland towards the end of the first half of the last century, and, although I haven’t done a detailed calculation of the numbers, I suspect that it was proportionately larger in relation to the total population within the parts of Europe concerned.

That same recollection of history also tells me that forcing people to register (another of Trump’s proposals) and then detaining them were the comparatively straightforward part of the exercise; the difficulty came in knowing what to do with them once detained. It’s a matter of historical fact that Hitler’s proposal to rid the European mainland of Jews was initially about ‘encouraging’ people to leave, and was then followed up by proposals for mass deportation, including a scheme to transport 4 million Jews to Madagascar. It was a tall order, even in the days when imperial powers could and did simply transfer territories and their population between each other (although, as Trump reminded us recently, those days have not entirely been relegated to history, in the minds of some at least), and the scheme was eventually abandoned as being too difficult to implement. Short term, the only option was the building of detention camps where those arrested could be isolated from the rest of society, and in a not-at-all-strange parallel, Trump has already ordered the military to start building detention camps.

Actually deporting people is not as easy as it sounds, let alone as easy as Trump’s rhetoric suggests. There has to be some sort of agreement with the governments of the countries designated to receive the deportees; they can’t simply be dumped on the tarmac of an airport, or driven over the border at gunpoint, especially if the border patrols on the other side are telling them to stay put at gunpoint. And ‘undocumented’ covers a wide range of possibilities – being of obvious Hispanic origin, for instance, isn’t the same as being provably Mexican, and even if Mexico agreed to take its own citizens back, that leaves an awful lot of other people whose nationality remains unestablished. And then there are the legal processes to be gone through; American justice grinds extremely slowly at the best of times, and even attempts to remove all legal protection will themselves be subject to legal challenges.

In the meantime, many people – perhaps millions, in Trump’s wildest dreams – will find themselves in a sort of limbo in detention camps, and the US Government will find itself paying for food, clothing, security, and what passes for ‘housing’ for an indefinite period, whilst the absence of people who were making a contribution to the economy causes problems of its own outside the camps. What would the government do with them? In the historical parallel which I mentioned earlier, those responsible for detaining people alighted on alternative ‘solutions’ involving either forced labour or physical annihilation. I can’t bring myself to believe that even Trump would opt for the second of those, but I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out some sort of system of forced labour, even if only to fill some of the gaps in the economy which the detentions create. He’s more likely to follow the Putin model than the Hitler one, and if he manages to grab Canada and/or Greenland, he would even find it easier to mimic Siberian conditions. And cheap, non-unionised labour isn’t something that many of his billionaire friends are likely to refuse in a hurry.

No doubt many of his MAGA supporters will cheer him on whatever he does – and the crueller the better. For those detained, it’s a nightmare. Optimistically, it would end in four years’ time with a new president. But if Trump succeeds in extending his reign – or ensuring that there is an anointed successor (maybe even turning the presidency, effectively, into a hereditary position), there is no obvious way out for them. I somehow doubt that Trump has thought this through at all; most of what he does seems to be based on very short timescales. As always, it will be the most vulnerable who suffer.

The brightest and the best

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One of the developing fault lines in the Trump world is over the question of selective issue of visas for certain individuals regarded as being exceptional – the usual term used is ‘the brightest and the best’. The billionaires funding Trump, including the official First Buddy, Elon Musk, want to continue issuing such visas, whilst the MAGA purists want a complete halt to immigration and see every such visa as denying a job to an existing US citizen. At the moment, Trump seems to be siding with the billionaires (‘billionaire supports billionaires’ would hardly be a surprising headline), although history shows that he eventually falls out with everyone, and sooner rather than later in the case of anyone who might distract attention from himself.

There’s a similar, albeit not exactly parallel, debate here in the UK. By and large, businesses want more visas whilst politicians believe that the public wants fewer. Talk about attracting ‘the brightest and the best’ is the compromise adopted by those politicians who want to try and appeal to both sides of that debate, although they generally end up satisfying neither. But whether in the US or the UK that term, ‘brightest and best’, could do with more detailed scrutiny than it’s getting. Why are some people considered ‘brighter and better’ than others?

In the case of Musk and Trump, their position is clear and public – they genuinely believe that ability is first and foremost genetically determined. It’s a core belief which underpins what they believe is their inherent right to rule over the rest of us. Trump even seems to believe that his uncle’s career as a professor somehow shows that Trump himself is a genius. A stable one, of course. That belief in genetic pre-determination is less obvious in the UK, but it still underpins the argument. It’s a convenient – and ultimately lazy – belief, which saves its adherents from having to explain why one of the richest countries in the world, with one of the historically most well-regarded systems of higher education, is incapable of producing the same people, and needs, in effect, to outsource their production to others. Reluctant as I am to agree with the MAGA purists on anything, they may have a point here.

I’m not arguing that the people concerned should not be allowed to migrate to the UK (or the US, for that matter); on the contrary, at the level of principle, I believe that people should be able to choose freely where to pursue their lives and careers. But there’s something dishonest about an advanced country like the UK with its 67 million inhabitants (and even more so the US with its 335 million people) claiming that it is unable to train and educate people to the highest level and needs to attract them from elsewhere instead – unless they truly believe that nature (genetics) plays the key role and that nurture (environment, education etc.) is always secondary. The evidence to support such a categoric belief is noticeable primarily by its absence.

"We're not racist, but..."

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One of the threads running through some reporting of the disorder in English towns and cities in recent days has been the strong denial by some of the participants that they are in any way racist or far-right in their views. Sometimes there’s a ‘but’ though, and in one case reported in yesterday’s Sunday Times, the ‘but’ was that in his town (Holyhead, for those who might be thinking Wales is somehow immune to what we have seen in England) “seven out of eight corner shops are owned by Muslims”. Now it is, of course, entirely possible that the person in question is an expert and well-schooled theologian, who has questioned all the shopkeepers concerned about their religious beliefs, and whose deep study of religious teachings has led him to the conclusion that buying his milk or newspapers from a Muslim is a serious threat to his own religion and culture which can only be countered by travelling to Liverpool to join an anti-Islam protest. It does seem rather more likely, however, that he has made a judgement about their religion from their appearance.

That does, though, leave unanswered the question of why anyone might see Muslims running shops as such a bad thing that it requires people to attack the most convenient mosque. Let us take it as read that at least some of those involved really do believe that there is nothing racist or right-wing about attacking anyone who happens to ‘look like’ a Muslim, along with their places of worship, their businesses, and places where they might be living, because to do so is actually defending Britishness, or what they assume Britishness to be, from the threat posed by ‘outsiders’. Where could such a belief possibly have come from? A major part of the answer to that question must surely turn around the way in which certain politicians have normalised terms like ‘invasion’ and ‘swamping’ in relation to migration. When the propositions that immigrants do not share ‘our’ values, and that immigration threatens ‘our’ way of life become part of mainstream political debate, why would anyone expect that those whose prejudices are thus validated would see such positions as being politically extreme? It would be unfair to accuse such politicians of egging on those participating in the violence, even if their ritualistic condemnations of it are invariably accompanied by a ’but’ of their own, in this case about failing to be sufficiently harsh with refugees. But not actively encouraging the riots doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t see the potential value to themselves in the ensuing disorder. There is, apparently, no evidence to support the widespread belief that Lenin coined the term ‘useful idiots’, but somebody did, and from the point of view of the far right the rioters fit the definition.

It isn’t only the rioters who are useful to the far right – immigrants also serve a similar function, albeit even less consciously. I’m not convinced that the far right themselves are always or necessarily racists. A belief that society should be run by authoritarians in the interests of the few does not in itself require the othering of any particular group. But ‘vote for me so that I can impose my will on you and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of myself and my friends’ isn’t exactly an election-winning slogan. Identifying and promoting conflict between groups in society, blaming some of those groups for the fact that others feel relatively poor or dispossessed, and then offering to resolve the situation in favour of one of those groups is a much more powerful way of achieving the same objective. Persecution of those who have been othered is more of a means to an end than an end in itself.

An authoritarian response to rioters looks and sounds like firm action, but also serves to strengthen the belief that authoritarianism provides solutions. Resolving the artificially induced conflicts is more about getting people to understand that the interests of the ‘useful idiots’ and the othered groups have more in common with each other than they do with the right wing authoritarians who are pulling the strings.

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.

Identifying hostile states

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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.

Why concentrate only on one side of the equation?

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The government claims that its proposed changes to the rules for legal migration into the UK will reduce the net total by around 300,000 per year. If they fully implement what they have announced, that may well turn out to be an underestimate; their numbers are based on the English exceptionalist belief that people are so keen to come to the UK that people will leave their families behind and come to take up low-paid jobs as carers, and that the brightest and best post-graduate researchers will similarly abandon their families and come to the UK alone, at least until their salary crosses an arbitrary threshold. It’s a big ‘if’ though; and the chances of the Tories fully implementing the plans are vanishingly small, not least because it will take time to draw up the detailed rules and procedures and process all those applications already in the system whilst the clock is already ticking down to the next election.

However, that isn’t the only reason for doubting whether they will ever do more than talk about the plans. Assuming that potential immigrants will happily leave their families behind as well as paying increased fees for the privilege of coming to the UK is only one of the silly assumptions that they’re making. They are also assuming that the electors whose votes they are chasing would either prefer to see the social care system go into meltdown than have immigrants working in it or else don’t understand the degree of dependency on those immigrants. The reality will become obvious at some point. It’s not a crisis which would hit social care overnight, of course – but like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it’s something which will happen in two ways: slowly, and then suddenly. Perhaps there are some people who really would be happy with that – but it’s unlikely that those whose relatives are dependent on that care will agree. And as things slowly get worse, the government will inevitably be tempted to reverse its policy, albeit as quietly as possible. Hopefully before the collapse enters the sudden phase.

Labour’s response has been little better. Equally convinced that the population are demanding an immediate halt to immigration, they have come up with an entirely arbitrary proposal to cap net migration at 200,000. Why 200,000? Why not 250,000? Why not 150,000? These are not questions to which they have any sort of rational answer; they’ve simply produced a figure from thin air which they think might be acceptable to the racists and xenophobes whose votes they seek, with no real thought given to the implications. Yet still they are likely to win the next election. Suella Braverman has said this week that the Tories face “electoral oblivion” if the government’s Rwanda legislation fails. In a rare moment of consensus, I agree. But then I’d also agree if she’d said that the Tories face “electoral oblivion” if the government’s Rwanda legislation succeeds. Saying that the Tories face electoral oblivion is one of those sentences which currently works perfectly well without any qualifying clause.

There is one policy change that they could make which might actually get the net migration figure down without the performative cruelty which they both seem to think is essential politics. Mathematically, in any ‘net’ figure there are two factors involved – so increasing emigration would have the same effect on the net numbers as decreasing immigration. It’s unfortunate that they shot themselves in both feet by removing freedom of movement, but if the financial incentives were good enough, there might be quite a few people willing to help the government out of its troubles by emigrating. It’s not a solution that’s ever likely to occur to them though: from their exceptionalist position, they would never understand why anyone would ever want to escape the dysfunctional rogue state which the UK has become.

Identifying the right hero

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Whether Christmas is the religious celebration as some wish to see it, or some sort of re-purposed celebration of the winter solstice as others choose to see it, is a matter of opinion, albeit often strongly-held. As a question of historical fact, since no-one really knows exactly when Christ was born, choosing an existing pre-Christian feast as the time to celebrate that birth was a shrewd piece of marketing for those seeking to convert the population to the new religion.

In practice, most of us are happy to adopt a ‘live and let live’ philosophy rather than demand that others must accept our definition of the nature of the event, whichever definition we choose. That said, for historical and cultural reasons, even in an increasingly secular society, most of us are also aware of, and tend to support, the seasonal concept of ‘peace on earth and goodwill to all men’. It's an idea which is strongly associated with the Christian take on Christmas (although some of us might wish that the sentiment wasn’t confined to such a short period of the year). It’s also generally seen as a time for families to take a break and be together.

Unless, of course, we are talking about the Home Secretary. It has been revealed this week that she has cancelled all Border Force leave over Christmas, in the expectation that the Supreme Court judgement due in early December will give the green light to start flying people to Rwanda. If that is indeed the outcome, the staff will be needed to implement the decision before and during the Christmas break. It’s a strange sort of ‘goodwill to all men’ which doesn’t even apply to her staff, let alone those who they will be expected to strap forcibly into aircraft seats if her dream comes to pass.

Many of their previous statements have led me to wonder whether members of the current government really understand the ‘British’ values which they claim to espouse, because they have a curious way of showing it. In this case, I can’t help but wonder whether Braverman has read the traditional story of Christmas through her own distorted lens and somehow concluded that Herod was actually the hero.

Values are reflected in actions, not words

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The news that the Home Secretary’s response to critical inspection reports at immigration detention centres was to stop the inspections ought to be shocking, but in the case of Suella Braverman it is entirely in line with her general approach. The decision, taken after the last report in September 2022, and accompanied by a decision not to extend the term of office of the ‘independent’ inspector, does not augur well for the implementation of the report of the latest inquiry into conditions at one centre. Apparently Home Office officials were reported as saying that the reports were “excessively critical”. From their perspective, it seems, the purpose of an ‘independent’ report is to tell the government what a wonderful job it is doing, not to report on actual conditions.

The inquiry report, along with the undercover Panorama programme which provoked it, tells a dismal story of inhumane and degrading treatment being meted out to vulnerable people as though it were an entirely normal way to behave. The overall culture, of course, starts from the top: even if she didn’t intend (and that’s giving her an awful lot of benefit of the doubt) people to behave quite so brutally, the Home Secretary’s language and rhetoric has repeatedly suggested a degree of contempt and disregard for those people detained on her orders. And culture set from the top filters down through the ranks, and gets reflected in appalling behaviour at the level of those in direct contact with those whom she clearly regards as people without rights.

Yet there is something about this which worries me more. Those doing the degrading and the insulting are, outside of their work, probably indistinguishable ordinary citizens. People with families and friends; people who shop and socialise in the same places as the rest of us. However normal they may appear when out and about in society, in the workplace they have become brutalised and desensitized to the needs of other human beings, whom they have come to see as somehow less than human. It’s not the first time in history that it’s happened and nor is it the worst example, but here, close at hand, we can see how easy it is for inhumanity to express itself through apparently ordinary individuals. Once a culture sets in, it spreads. Most of us would like to think that we’re immune, but a famous psychology experiment in the past has shown how easy it is for people to become cruel when ‘authority’ tells them to.

‘I was only obeying orders’ (even if, in the specific case of the detention centre, it isn’t direct ‘orders’ as such, merely a question of falling in with the general culture) has always been a poor excuse. Fear of the consequences of failing to follow orders is easier to understand, although the effect is the same. But the evident and proven facility with which people can fall into cruel patterns of behaviour when encouraged to do so by those in authority places even more responsibility on those setting the culture, as well as those managing an organisation at all levels, to take care with their words and actions. It’s a responsibility which Braverman cannot even begin to comprehend. And knowing what she’s doing whilst doing nothing to stop it makes Sunak every bit as complicit. When we want to know what are those great British values which allegedly unite us, the actions, or inactions, of the government tell us a great deal more than their words.

Proudly un-British

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One of the least attractive tendencies of some nationalists is their attempt to define what national identity is and what belonging to a nation means. We see it at times in Wales when some people insist that it is impossible to be both Welsh and British, and that people must make a definitive choice between the two, with the implication that not choosing to be exclusively Welsh is effectively opting for Britishness. Given that, in practice, large numbers of people in Wales are quite happily living under the impression that they can indeed be both Welsh and British, it doesn’t strike me as the most useful or productive of approaches, and is part of my own reason for favouring the term independentista as a description of those seeking independence for Wales. Strangely, many of those demanding that their compatriots make the choice are quite happy to regard their own identity as being both Welsh and European.

The phenomenon is far from being restricted to nationalists of the Welsh persuasion however. The Anglo-British nationalists whose defining characteristic is their deluded belief that they’re not nationalists at all are just as bad, if not worse. ‘Keith’ Starmer is at it today, declaring that it is ‘un-British’ to disagree with Labour’s policy on immigration. It’s a counter-productive approach which serves only to make me, and I’m sure many others as well, feel even less British. And proud of being un-British. Just like the Tories, Labour see the problem as entirely one of policing – stopping people from getting into boats and smashing the smuggling rings – rather than about understanding the reasons for mass movements of people and addressing those causes. I can agree with Keith that people traffickers are vile and the trade needs to be stamped out, but one of the reasons that some people live in rich countries (and oppose immigration) whilst others (those getting into the boats) live in poor countries is the actions of the people traffickers of the past, many of whom grew rich on the trade and were feted and honoured in their home countries. Inequality between different parts of the world didn’t happen by accident, fate, or act of god; it is the direct result of a process of colonialisation and exploitation which systematically stripped wealth from some parts of the world and shipped it to others. We can’t undo that past, and whilst ‘reparations’ sounds like an attractive idea, it’s not clear to what extent it would solve the underlying problem.

That underlying problem is global inequality (exacerbated, of course, by war, famine, and repressive regimes, all of which are ultimately caused, armed, and sustained by the richer countries of the world), and with no plan to tackle that – and Labour clearly has no more of a plan to do so than the Tories – then ‘policing’ the symptoms is the only remaining option. It’s not a ‘solution’ though, merely a way of seeking to ‘manage’ the problem into the long term. And because it’s not a solution, those who claim that it is are forced into ever more repressive and draconian measures in order to demonstrate that they are ‘dealing with’ an issue which they themselves have chosen to exaggerate for political gain. It’s a long way removed from the ‘brotherhood of man’ espoused by Labour’s pioneers. Unless and until we are prepared to treat the Earth’s resources as being held in common for the benefit of all, rich countries are going to have to spend an awful lot of time and effort on reinforcing the wall to keep the dispossessed out.

Swallows, chickens and an occasional cuckoo

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One swallow, or so they say, does not a summer make. Unless you are a Prime Minister desperate to see success wherever you look, in which case even half a swallow will do. Yesterday, Sunak was busily proclaiming the success of his attempts to ‘stop the boats’, by drawing attention to the drop in the number of crossings that we know about so far this year compared with the same period last year. Some unkind souls have pointed out that last year’s numbers were at a record high, and that other factors, such as the weather, or people finding other routes, may just have had a little influence. Time will tell whether rushing to claim ‘success’ on the basis of a snapshot will turn out to be like greeting a false dawn.

It wasn’t the only dodgy use of numbers in his speech. He also drew attention to the fact that the French authorities prevented 33,000 crossings last year. The wording is important – it’s ‘crossings’ that they’ve prevented, not ‘migrants’. One of the things we know is that those prevented from crossing once will make multiple efforts to cross, which raises the question – if a single migrant makes 10 attempts to cross and is ‘prevented’ on the first 9, how many times is he counted in that 33,000 total? I rather suspect that the answer is that 9 ‘crossings’ have been prevented, but that 0 migrants have been stopped, making that number of 33,000 a rather meaningless statistic. Except for the purposes of Prime Ministerial speeches determined to count chickens whilst they are still inside their shells.

The PM’s desperation stems from the obvious fact that his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ by the end of this year is unachievable. He knows it, and everybody else knows it. A more sensible and humane policy would be to create proper legal routes, and to start trying to explain why migration isn’t such a bad thing anyway for an economy short of labour in a number of key sectors. Some might see that as showing leadership rather than following prejudice, but he’s trapped in a net which his party has made for itself, and where their success in ensnaring the Labour Party alongside themselves is more important than getting themselves out.

So we get ever stronger rhetoric, daft and meaningless statistics, and increased efforts to make life as undignified and unpleasant as possible for some of the world’s most desperate people. Whether it is reasonable or not to expect migrants to sleep four to a room in a hotel depends on a lot of factors, not least whether they are related or at least known to one another, how many beds are in the room, and for how long the arrangement will last. Demanding that people share with complete strangers in a cramped room for an indefinite period just because they are migrants who have arrived by an unapproved route doesn’t meet the criteria which a civilised society would use; saying that it’s reasonable (as Jenrick did) is deliberately dehumanising those involved. The history of dehumanising identifiable groups of people is not exactly a happy one.

Whether migration is a good thing or a bad thing is ultimately a matter of opinion. The economic impact is clearly positive, but the social and community impact is rather harder to assess and is ultimately highly objective. But to the extent that anyone would wish to control it, the problem isn’t about controlling borders to keep people out, it’s about the reasons why people decide to leave their homeland in the fist place. War, disease, oppression – and above all poverty – these are the problems which need to be tackled. Desperate people in small boats is just a very obvious symptom of the failure to tackle the causes. When I hear Sunak and his rhetoric, the bird that comes to mind is neither a swallow not a chicken; just a cuckoo. Sadly, it isn’t the first this spring.

Plans, plans, and more plans

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In response to yesterday’s publication of the latest figures for net immigration, the PM said simply that the numbers are “too high”. Without knowing why he thinks they’re too high or having any indication of the criteria he’s using to arrive at that assessment, it’s impossible to validate his claim, although the suspicion must surely be that ‘the right number is whatever number will buy the most votes’ rather than a thought-through assessment of the UK’s needs and interests. It’s not true however, as some have claimed, that the Tories have no plan to deal with the situation. They actually have lots of plans, even if some of them are mutually contradictory and incoherent.

It is, apparently, the ‘net’ number which is most important; the difference between those arriving and those leaving (although I have a suspicion that if 1,000,000 UK-born white people left each year to be replace by 1,000,000 entering the UK from Asia or Africa they would quickly find that the net number isn’t what those target voters are interested in at all). However, if we assume that they mean what they say about wanting to reduce the net number, then reducing immigration isn’t the only potential solution; we could also increase the number leaving. On this score, we can look to the lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, aka the deputy chair of the party, for part of the Tory solution: encourage republicans to go and live elsewhere. Strictly speaking, of course – and considering only quantitative issues rather than qualitative ones – it doesn’t matter whether those who leave are republicans or not, it just matters that people leave. Unkind souls might wish to point out that abolishing freedom of movement didn’t exactly help them achieve this objective – indeed, there is some evidence that Brexit and accompanying regulation has forced some of those who previously left to return to the UK, which is one of the factors leading to an increase in the net difference. But then coherence and consistency are not requirements for Tory policy.

Another two Tory plans revolve around reducing the number of jobs which migrant workers can do. The same fringe element at Tory HQ has in the past suggested forcing council tenants guilty of anti-social behaviour to live in tents in the fields, get up at six, pick fruit and veg all day, followed by a cold shower and lights out at six in the evening. It helped him get promoted to deputy chair. And moving people out of houses into tents might help to ‘solve’ the housing shortage as well, I suppose. Another Tory, a former cabinet minister, once proposed obliging pensioners to pick fruit and veg, but paying them less than the minimum wage because they’d be a bit slower collecting the produce. Oddly, that wasn’t the thing for which he ended up disgraced.

Yet other Tory plans turn on the idea of reducing what they like to call the ‘pull’ factor; reducing the reasons why people choose to come to the UK. One of those, obviously, is that English is so widely taught – when considering which European country might be a good place to live, knowing English helps to make the UK an attractive proposition. Reducing the funding for the British Council, the body charged with promoting the English language, is a small step, and will take time to have an impact, but, as a certain supermarket regularly reminds us, ‘every little helps’. Another pull factor is the perceived quality of teaching and research in UK universities. Opting out of European funding programmes, leading to researchers leaving in droves, is one small step in addressing that issue; restricting foreign students to those prepared to come without their families is another. Faced with a choice between allowing immigrants in and destroying the university sector, it is apparently preferable to encourage the brightest and best foreign students to go and study in those countries perceived as competitors to the UK. The reasons escape me but are obvious to those obsessed with migration. If the result helps bring about a financial crisis for tertiary education, well, having fewer universities offering fewer courses all helps to deter foreigners from coming here to study.

But the biggest pull factor of all is the persistent perception, despite all the government’s efforts to date, that the UK economy is one of the world’s richest and most successful. Not to worry – they have a plan to deal with that as well. Holding wages below inflation so that people, particularly in the lowest-paid jobs, become poorer each year, ensuring the weakest growth rate in the G7, forcing up interest rates – these will all help to deter people from coming here to seek a better life. (They might also, incidentally, help to encourage UK citizens to seek a better life elsewhere, bearing in mind the importance of that net number.)

Those who argue that the Tories have no plan to reduce net immigration are being utterly unfair. They have loads of plans, most of which they are busily implementing. It’s just that they have chosen not to explain them very well. It’s a bit like with Brexit: spelling out the implications for the UK is something best avoided if you want people to vote for you on the back of an anti-immigrant viewpoint. But, and this is also like Brexit, implications a-plenty there will be, and guess on which parts of the population they will mostly fall?

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.

Just a minor problem, not a crisis

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In the scale of things, the arrival of a few tens of thousands of people a year in small boats is a minor problem to one of the world’s richest countries. It’s only as high as it is because the UK Government has spent years trying to close down other, less obviously visible, routes for refugees to reach the UK, and the numbers coming here are smaller than those going to most of our major European neighbours. Yet, to hear the government talking and to read some of the more lurid stories in the tabloids, it would be easy to see how people could come to believe that it's actually a major crisis. The main factor that turns it into a ‘crisis’ is government rhetoric, past and present, using the issue to divert attention from more pressing questions such as the rising cost of living, and to blame refugees and immigrants for the manifest failings of government.

And so we are to be presented with yet another attempt at legislation to ‘stop the boats’; legislation which is as likely to be effective as anything else they’ve done so far (i.e. hardly at all), setting themselves up for another failure on the ground which can nevertheless be presented to that racist and xenophobic section of the electorate to which the Tory Party now seeks to appeal as being ‘tough’ action. Whether the new law is entirely in line with the UK’s international obligations under treaties to which the UK is a signatory is currently an unresolved question – the Telegraph (paywall) is reporting that, “…it will be stated in the Bill that the new laws may not be compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights”. The willingness of the Tory Party – which long prided itself on being the party of law and order – to break international law whenever it feels like doing so didn’t go away with the last-but-one Prime Minister.

The Bill is likely, according to the Guardian, “…to place a legal duty on the home secretary to detain and remove nearly all asylum seekers who arrive “irregularly””. Given the limited capacity of the Rwanda scheme (around 200 per year) and the fact that the UK government has very few agreements in place with other countries to return immigrants either to their own country or to the last country they were in before reaching the UK (having effectively torn up the latter as part of Brexit), this will lead to a need to detain large numbers of people, indefinitely, with no legal redress available to them. The Times reports that, “…there will be new powers to enable the mass detention of tens of thousands of people every year before their removal.” The idea that the government can give itself the power to round up and detain tens of thousands of people every year with no court process is one which should frighten all of us. The idea that there is a majority in parliament in favour of such draconian action ought to be provoking much more reaction than it is. The UK is a failing state. The belief that the new law will somehow act as a deterrent and stop people attempting the journey shows a failure to understand how desperate people are. Quite apart from anything else, the refugees and those despicable people who make money by trafficking them are as capable as anyone of seeing that the UK is simply incapable of removing such numbers of people, and that building or requisitioning places to hold tens of thousands more people every year is not going to be sustainable for long.

It's not about controlling borders or reducing immigration at all (the UK economy has a major need for the labour which could be provided with a more humane approach), it’s about seeking votes on the back of treating people inhumanely. Depressingly, it might even work to some extent. We should never forget, though, that a government which demonises and mistreats one group of people one day to serve its own narrow electoral ends is perfectly capable of picking on another group the next day. There are those who look at what the UK government is doing and say ‘this is not who we are’. In truth, if we allow it to happen, this is exactly who we are.

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.