Upping the stakes

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President Trump has been widely (and justifiably) mocked for his promise to reduce the price of medicines in the US by up to 1,500%. It’s an illustration of his somewhat shaky grasp of elementary mathematics, although I suppose it helps to explain how he managed to bankrupt casinos. By and large, UK politicians have not shown themselves to be quite so mathematically challenged as Trump, and the argument about the extent to which immigration should be allowed has largely stayed on the positive side of zero. Until last week.

Robert Jenrick has now attempted to trump Labour, Reform and his own party by calling for a ten year period in which net migration to the UK should be negative. It’s a reduction of more than 100% in the level of immigration, even if it’s not yet quite in the Trumpian league of 1,500%. Give him time. But given what we know about the falling birth rate, he is effectively demanding that the population of the UK should be cut as a deliberate act of government policy. To say that it puts him somewhat outside the normal range of political consensus is an understatement: other politicians (including both Farage and Badenoch) have recently been calling for measures to increase the birth rate to tackle the potential problems associated with a declining population (even though that rather ignores the fact that using an increased birthrate to fill gaps in the UK economy has a rather lengthy lead time). But being outside the consensus is probably what he’s after.

The consequences of a falling population would be significant, not least because those being driven, or encouraged, to leave are likely to be of working age and therefore making a positive contribution to the productive economy. Unless, of course, he wants to offer incentives – which an increasing number of us might even be willing to consider, with madmen like Jenrick and Farage in danger of leading a government – for UK pensioners to emigrate. I suspect not, however: something tells me that predominantly white UK-born people aren’t the ones he wants to get rid of. He hasn’t yet offered a solution to that economic conundrum, and probably won’t. Not only because there isn’t a simple one, but also because spelling out the consequences might somewhat undermine the blatant appeal to prejudice.

It would also be seriously at odds with the rest of his political philosophy. Actually, a reduced population would not, in itself, be an entirely bad thing, ignoring for a moment that merely moving people from one country to another doesn’t exactly achieve an overall reduction. It would reduce the demand for finite resources which is hardly a poor idea, but it would also require a significant rethink in the way the economy works to ensure that economic benefits are shared more equally rather than being increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. That, or force an increasing proportion of the population into poverty, which is not an obvious election-winning strategy, particularly if the deliberately-impoverished come from the voting demographic being wooed by his rhetoric. As they inevitably would. We shall have to see who will attempt to out-compete him, by assigning a hard number to the target for exporting residents in a government-sponsored people trafficking scheme. The way things are going, I wouldn’t put it past Labour to open the bidding.

Running out of excuses

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Despite what Marx said about tragedy and farce, history never really repeats itself. There are historical parallels, of course, but different groups of people in different contexts never fully replicate the responses of other groups in past times. Marx also asserted that human nature is not something fixed and unchanging (an assumption at the root of much conservative thought) but something which is continually changing and developing, arising more from social and economic relationships than from an innate characteristic. But when those relationships barely change over a long period human nature can appear to be more permanent.

Where the capacity for cruelty fits is open to debate. Those of us who hope for a better world cling to the idea that it isn’t an essential part of us, just waiting to be invoked, but that hope is sometimes challenged. We know from the history of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century just how easy it is for ordinary citizens, given a uniform, weapons and legal authority, to apply their cruelty against the vulnerable and weak – and not even just to ‘follow orders’, but to go beyond and add their own twists when dealing with people who they no longer see as human. The Milgram experiment showed us how easy it is to get randomly selected people to inflict pain on others when told to do so by someone in authority.

Some of the stories coming out of the US seem to indicate that little has changed. Random arrests and detentions – even of firefighters in the middle of dealing with a blaze – are becoming the Trumpian norm; and ‘disappearing’ people and moving them across the country whilst depriving them of adequate food, water and hygiene seem to be widely accepted, with far too many US citizens seemingly welcoming what is happening.

Here in the UK, we had Farage this week proposing to round up and detain at least 600,000 people in camps before deporting them to anywhere which will take them, regardless of their potential fate when they arrive. That is close to 1% of the UK’s population – one in every hundred people, and even if (after a bit of back-tracking) women and children will be ‘dealt with’ later in the programme, he’s been quite clear that they’re not exempt. There can be few of us who don’t know 100 people; even if the proportion of migrants in Wales is lower than it is in the big cities of England, many of us will know at least one person on Farage’s list, even if we don't realise it. They say it will be a ‘targeted’ program, but as we’ve seen in the US, when the target for the number removed becomes the main driver, discriminating between those here illegally and others becomes a luxury, not a necessity, and he’s already made it quite clear that there will be no right of appeal, and no right to any due process before removal.

With the immediate reaction from the Tory leader having been to try and be even harder than Farage by not excluding women and children from her immediate action plans, and Sir Starmer’s lot apparently being more concerned about whether the ‘solution’ is workable than whether it is moral, there is little room for any optimism that the ‘main’ parties will show any leadership. When deliberate cruelty stalked the European mainland nearly a century ago, news of what was happening wasn’t always readily available – people had the excuse of ‘not really knowing’. We’re no longer in that age – news spreads instantly and widely, and even if some of the stories might turn out to be exaggerations, the general drift of what is happening, and the truth of many of the specifics, is clear. What’s our excuse this time?

Badenoch's alternative suggestion is no better

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The leader of the Tory Party seems quite exercised about the idea that anyone could believe that she has only got to her current position because she’s a black woman. In fairness, the suggestion that there is a sufficiently large group of Tory MPs and members prepared to vote for her out of some desire to pursue a policy of positive discrimination really isn’t credible. That just isn’t the Tory Party as we know it. It’s much simpler to accept the obvious alternative explanation, that those MPs and members who elected her really did believe that she was the best person to be the leader of the opposition and the party’s candidate for PM. Or the even simpler explanation that she actually is the best that they have to offer. I’m happy to accept either of those explanations, but I’m not at all sure that they paint either her or her party in a better light than the suggestion that it’s a result of positive discrimination.

Statehood includes the right to choose a government

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Whether or not Palestine meets the usual requirements to recognition as a state remains in doubt, as noted last week. Israel is certainly doing its utmost to ensure that there are no enforceable boundaries nor any functioning administration with which the rest of the world could deal. That doesn’t take away the right of Palestinians to have an independent state if they so choose, even if statehood may not be exactly the thing uppermost in their minds as Gazans desperately struggle for food. And it surely can’t be right that an occupying power – wherever in the world it might be – can frustrate the right of territories it occupies to gain statehood.

Opponents of recognition claim that it would ‘reward’ terrorism and somehow legitimise the horrific attack by Hamas which sparked the latest round of fighting. It’s true if, and only if, one’s historical perspective on Gaza starts on 7 October 2023. On any longer timescale, terrorism didn’t start then and has never been restricted to one side: indeed, Israel as a state only exists as an internationally recognised state within its current recognised boundaries as a result of terrorist acts by Israeli settlers in the 1940s. And even that is choosing an artificial start date – history doesn’t start and stop neatly at any point in time that we choose. Sir Starmer and others have declared that ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’, one of those statements which is only true up until the point when negotiation becomes the only rational option, and there are numerous historical examples of that.

The leader of the Tories has come up with another obstacle to recognition, claiming that the UK shouldn’t recognise a state led by people we consider to be terrorists. Superficially, it sounds almost rational – after all, does anyone really think that Hamas are the best people to be governing any part of Palestine? It is, though, a deeply colonialist attitude, perhaps not entirely surprising from someone who has newly thrown off any suggestion that she might in any way be Nigerian, with its implicit assumption that the rest of the world can or should determine who the Palestinians might want to represent them. And is she seriously suggesting that, if Hamas stand aside now to gain recognition and the people of Palestine subsequently choose to elect a government led by Hamas, or a similar group under another name, that the UK should then de-recognise Palestine? It doesn’t look like a position to which she has given much thought.

Actually, although it’s surely inadvertent on her part, maybe there is a non-colonialist point to be made here after all. The world might indeed be a safer place for humanity as a whole if certain governments were removed from power by international action (even if we might disagree about which ones). But a world in which states were required to abide by certain globally adopted standards (such as a declaration of human rights, perhaps?) and where governments could be removed by collective action by other states if they did not would require a few things to be in place, not the least of which are a global set of rules and the will and organisation to enforce them. Something about Badenoch’s attitude towards international law tells me that that is most definitely not what she has in mind. Which just leaves opportunistic posturing.

Holding up a whole civilisation

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Perhaps it’s inevitable that a person elected to the leadership of a major political party starts to believe that the whole world is hanging on his or her every word. It’s a heady position in which to find oneself, with access to media coverage all but guaranteed. An exaggerated sense of self-importance comes with the territory. But there’s the ordinary, everyday exaggerated sense of self-importance – and then there’s Kemi Badenoch. In her case, it’s not just an inflated sense of the importance of what she has to say; she genuinely seems to believe that the whole future of Western civilisation is now hanging on her ability to renew the English Conservative and Unionist Party. ‘Renew’ is another of those ‘interesting’ words which means whatever the person using it wants it to mean, but is intended to convey some sort of revival. In her case, it seems to include the elimination of dissident thought, another of those British values which seems to have passed me by.

Uniquely, it seems, in her deluded understanding of world events, the values that make the West what it is – or at least, her interpretation of those values, which just possibly, maybe, might not be the same thing, although it would be a brave person that might try and tell her that – are now uniquely to be found amongst those in that party who think like her. And she seems not even to realise the extent to which she is carving out a minority status for herself, even amongst the dwindling ranks of her party’s membership.

The thing is, it’s actually difficult to discern from what she says what her understanding of those values is. Certainly it seems to include the right to hold and express racist or misogynistic views, to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t conform to ‘the norm’, and to believe that some entire cultures are inherently inferior to the one to which she thinks that she belongs (although, whisper it quietly, at least some of those to whom she is seeking to appeal might just harbour some doubts as to whether she can ever fit into their own definition of the superior culture). The problem with banging on about British or Western values is that they are pretty poorly defined. What the term actually means seems to depend on the perspective of the person banging on about them at the time. But to the extent that there are some underlying shared values, I had thought that they included things like the rule of law, fairness, equality, compassion and tolerance, none of which actually seem to shine through her words on the issue. Perhaps the values changed at some point and I just didn’t get the memo.

Counting the members

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The response by the leader of the English Conservative and Unionist Party to the growth of the membership of Farage’s Reform was a masterful demonstration of how to ensure that your enemy’s successes receive maximum media coverage, underlining in the process the true extent of her political acumen. Whether her claims of fakery are true or not has yet to be fully resolved, although such evidence as has been produced suggests that a party led by Farage may have broken his habit of a lifetime by actually bearing at least a passing resemblance to truth, an outcome at which few can have been as surprised as Farage himself. We are told that, if the growth in membership numbers continues at its current pace, then Reform will have double the number of members in the Tory Party by the end of January. That’s mathematically true, but it’s also mathematically true that at the current rate of growth, the entire population of the UK will be Reform members in only 38 years from now. Simplistic mathematical truth isn’t always a useful or meaningful metric.

Given the lack of clarity about what ‘membership’ actually means for a ‘party’ which still appears to be legally owned and controlled by the man himself, and the suggestion that few of those ‘members’ are actually likely to end up pounding the streets, let alone ringing the doorbells of unsuspecting voters, membership numbers in themselves, whether accurate or not, probably don’t tell us a great deal about Reform’s electoral prospects, even if they do help to reinforce the idea that Badenoch could start a fight about nothing in an empty room.

More significant are the opinion polling numbers which have been appearing recently, showing that Reform has a certain momentum at present, to which Badenoch has kindly, if rather incompetently, added. But if a week is a long time in politics, it’s a very long time indeed until the next Senedd election, let alone the next UK election, and parties led by Farage have in the past shown an uncanny ability to self-destruct, so we should be careful about over-reacting to a few opinion polls. But neither should we be overcomplacent in the face of the rise of a political movement dedicated to the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, aided and abetted enthusiastically be those who will pay the price: sometimes, it seems, turkeys really do vote for Christmas. Especially when the media seem so determined to talk up the possibility in order to give themselves something to talk about.

Much of the talking heads reaction seems to be about the policies and philosophies underpinning political debate in the UK, and whether ‘the right’ will somehow transition from Tory to Reform or come together in some sort of takeover of one by the other. That misses the point, almost as much as the comforting suggestion that Wales is somehow a ‘left-wing’ nation which will reject the even-more-extreme Toryism of Reform just as it has traditionally rejected the more mainstream Toryism of the Tory Party itself. None of that stuff about left and right is what drives Reform’s members, voters and supporters. Whilst those at the top of the party might have a clear vision about concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few by impoverishing the many, it’s not one that they’re going to share – for obvious reasons. The rest are driven more by a ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality, an appeal to outdated English jingoism (yes, even in Wales), and a good dash of racism, albeit increasingly presented in terms of a clash of cultural perspectives. None of this is amenable to pragmatic argument about the detail of policies and promises which no-one believes are going to be enacted anyway.

But if it isn’t easy to counter these attitudes, it really is extremely easy to reinforce them, and it’s something which the Labour government manages to do regularly. Every time they tell us that there is not enough money for things such as winter fuel payments, they tell us implicitly that those things on which they do spend are higher priorities. It’s no surprise that some people see every penny spent on dealing with the desperate people arriving on these shores as being money which could be used for something else, if only it weren’t for these immigrants. Ask yourselves how many times you’ve seen memes suggesting that the homeless, or veterans, or pensioners are more deserving of our support than immigrants, with a strapline along the lines of ‘we should look after our own people first’. It’s a narrative which Labour’s own words and actions reinforce daily, even if not entirely intentionally – and it’s utter nonsense. The UK is one of the world’s richest countries, and it also has one of the largest gaps between the richest and the poorest – those two facts are not unrelated. The question we should be asking is how we use the wealth which exists. It’s a question which the Labour Party used to ask, but stopped asking decades ago in its rush to follow the Tories in their adoption of a wholly false theory of economics which just happens to benefit the few.

We can’t yet know whether the momentum which Reform currently has will continue and carry them into electoral success in future contests. But we can be pretty certain that if it does happen, the current Labour government will have facilitated and enabled it with its blind adherence to self-imposed fiscal rules and an unwillingness to challenge inequality in any meaningful way.

Imperial fantasy is a weakness, not a strength

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The Institute of Economic Affairs isn’t exactly famous for being a politically-neutral organisation. It has an agenda which it vigorously promotes, based around the idea that ‘free’ markets are the answer to just about everything. Having an agenda isn’t a good enough reason to reject everything they say, but it’s a pretty good reason for reading what they say with a sceptical eye. They recently produced some research on the economics of the Empire, and it makes for interesting reading. It claims, on my reading of it, that the wealth of the UK is not to any significant degree based on its imperial past nor on the slavery which was a part of that past, but would, in general terms, have accumulated anyway, based largely on innovation and enterprise. It’s a thesis which is not universally accepted, to put it mildly. Other interpretations and analyses are available.

It's a conclusion which some on the ‘right’ of the Tory Party, such as Kemi Badenoch, have seized on, though, to validate their own interpretation of the pros and cons of Britain’s imperial past. But even if, as she wishes, we were to accept the contentious conclusion that the UK benefited only slightly if at all, even the report itself notes that that doesn’t mean that it was a good thing from the point of view of the colonised. As the author puts it, “The implication is that colonialism and slavery were not zero-sum games that benefited the colonisers at the expense of the colonised. It was more like a negative-sum game, which hurt the latter without really benefiting the former”. A shortish blog isn’t the place to develop a detailed analysis of the economic arguments; I’m more interested in the political implications for the way we remember our own history and what it means for identity. As the author himself says, “The reader will have noticed that we have avoided promoting any specific narrative about Britain’s (or any other country’s) history or expressing a view of how that history should be collectively remembered today. A cost–benefit analysis cannot tell us any of that and is not supposed to”. That hasn’t prevented Badenoch from trying to use the report to do precisely that.

For those who want to cling to the traditional British view of history, it is important to their political and historical identity that the Empire should be remembered for the ‘good things’ which it did, rather than the bad ones. For sure, the argument goes, the Empire might have destroyed communities, stolen resources, wiped out languages and cultures, and enslaved populations, but look, we gave them Christianity, democracy and the rule of law, the English language and Shakespeare. And cricket. Those who claim that taking an alternative view involves ‘rewriting history’ are themselves rewriting history because, even if it were to be accepted that those things were indeed advantages, they were never the motivation for the initial colonisation. It’s very much a post hoc rationalisation of a mindset which was based on a desire for conquest and exploitation. Even if the IEA were to be proved right about imperialism not being very cost-effective, that would merely show that the imperialists failed to achieve their aims, not that they were somehow acting charitably.

It's also a very arrogant and ethnocentric view of the world. It assumes that the colonised could not and would not have developed their own systems of law and democracy without having them imposed by the colonisers, and it assumes that the culture, values and beliefs of the colonisers were and are superior to those of the colonised. However, presenting imperialism as having been, on the whole, a good thing is absolutely key to the identity and belief systems of Anglo-British nationalists, and they feel threatened by any alternative view. Their increasingly desperate lashing out at alternative views is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Hair-splitting is just a diversionary tactic

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Maybe there’s a scholar of English nuance somewhere who can explain the enormous difference between claiming that Sadiq Khan and, in consequence, London are under the control of Islamists (© Lee Anderson) and claiming that the whole of the UK is under the control of Islamists and Keir Starmer is in hock to them (© Suella Braverman). The first is apparently so serious as to justify removing the whip, whilst the second can be ignored. Number 10 have been struggling for days to explain what exactly it was about Anderson’s statement which led to his suspension (and today’s ‘clarification’ has added little to the sum total of human knowledge), suggesting that Sunak really doesn’t understand what was wrong with both wild claims, and has merely responded to bad press.

Some, such as the Trade and Industry Secretary, have decided to try and avoid the question by getting into a semantic argument about what is or is not Islamophobia. If it weren’t for the fact that this is a blatant attempt by the hair-splitting tendency to divert attention away from the substance, she might even have half a point. ‘Phobia’ isn’t the best suffix to use, given its suggestion of fear, and ‘anti-Islamic’ might indeed be more accurate use of language. It is possible to hate something without fearing it, and to fear something without hating it, but arguing about that nuance doesn’t actually deal with the essence of the comments, which seem to display a mixture of both hate and fear.

Essentially, what both Braverman and Anderson are complaining about is that people have been ‘allowed’ to demonstrate against Israeli actions in Gaza rather than having their protests banned and the ringleaders rounded up and jailed. And whilst the subject matter in this case might be the appalling violence being deployed in Gaza, both of them are using what they assume (maybe correctly, although I’m not entirely convinced that they are really in tune with even that group) to be an unpopular cause amongst their target voters as a hook to express their dislike of any dissent from their own view of the world. And it’s not at all unreasonable to wonder whether Sunak’s half-hearted disciplinary action against one of them (make an unapologetic apology with your fingers crossed behind your back and we’ll let you back in, seems to be the message) and his reluctance to even consider action against the second is a result of him basically agreeing with them and not really understanding what the fuss is about.

If any of them understood what the traditional ‘British values’ which they all claim to espouse mean, they would also understand that the right to protest is one of those values. What their words and actions demonstrate most clearly – and not just in relation to Gaza – is that they are actually clueless about those values. It increasingly appears as though the only ‘right’ that they think anyone other than themselves and the financial interests they represent should have is the right to do as we are told. And that isn’t really a ‘right’ at all.