To strive, not to succeed

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A political strategy which depends on appealing to a certain section of the electorate by demonising and persecuting an identifiable group of people faces a serious problem should the stated objective ever be achieved: it would need to find another identifiable group to persecute instead. Far better to demonstrate the effort being made to tackle the problem without ever actually succeeding. The Tories may shout “Stop the Boats”, but in reality that is the last thing they want. Take away that slogan and what do they stand for; what is their appeal to that particular section of the electorate? It might be argued that they could then claim the credit for the success, but that’s not likely to be a very long-lived benefit. No, the Tories need the boats to keep coming in order to demonstrate their strength and resolve in tackling the problem.

Whilst some of their more extreme members haven’t worked out yet that the objective is not to succeed but merely to strive and are demanding that the UK withdraw from any conventions which might stand in the way, the PM himself realises that the political advantage which he seeks lies in the battle, not the victory. Tough rhetoric coupled with draconian-sounding laws which can never be effective is the starting point, but he actually needs the international courts to stand in his way and obstruct the government. That’s an essential part of the performance. Paying Rwanda to take a few asylum-seekers (maybe, sometime, perhaps) whilst turning a blind eye to Rwandan actions which drive more people into becoming refugees is another. And then we have the ‘revelation’ that the UK is diverting money from overseas aid to pay for dealing with the refugees once they arrive in the UK. Few things could do more to ensure that the flow of refugees continues than diverting money from addressing poverty, famine, and natural disasters in the poorest countries and spending it in one of the richest.

The success of the strategy depends not on achieving the stated objective, but on being seen to forever tweak it and find others to blame for its failure. And, of course, on the gullibility of the relevant electors, aided and abetted by those sections of the media which actually give it credence. Perversely, the best hope of defeating it might be the enemy within the Tory Party, in the shape of a certain Boris Johnson. No, not in the sense of changing anything the government does; more in the sense of diverting attention away from the perpetual war against immigrants and reminding people of other aspects of modern conservatism, such as sleaze, dishonesty, entitlement and self-enrichment. If there’s one person willing to serve up a never-ending dose of diversionary news, we probably couldn’t hope for better than Johnson. I find myself almost hoping that a by-election is called and that he wins it. Second best is no by-election and the thorn remains very firmly in the side, ensuring that Sunak continues to limp along, frustrated at every turn by the latest news from the deluded inhabitants of Borisworld. Fun though it might be to watch, sadly none of it helps refugees or potential refugees, and worst of all, there are no signs that the potential alternative UK government will be any more sympathetic, or even try to be; it will merely seek to be more ‘efficient’ at dealing with the perceived ‘problem’. As ever, the poorest and most vulnerable are bit actors, whose fate is of no concern. It should be.

Echoes of the past

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In purely factual terms, the allegation by Gary Lineker that the language being used by Tory ministers in relation to asylum seekers and refugees “…is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s” is demonstrably true, and it takes very little digging through the things said at the time to establish that (although it might perhaps have been fairer to refer to ‘the German government’ or ‘some German politicians’ rather than ‘Germany’ as a whole). The response by Braverman (“Equating our measures – which are lawful, necessary and fundamentally compassionate – to 1930s Germany is irresponsible and I disagree with that characterisation”) is similar to the answer that the Nazis would have given – they would have described their policies as lawful, necessary and compassionate, too. It would have been no more true in their case than it is in Braverman's. It isn’t just the words which evoke the past, it’s also the actions. Detaining tens of thousands of people – probably in urgently established camps of some sort – without trial pending their expulsion also carries echoes of the same past, even if expulsion is considerably less extreme than the historical precedent which the proposal evokes.

Unfortunately, however, Lineker has effectively proved the underlying truth of Godwin’s Law, and that endangers the argument he was making. The debate then turns around whether the comparison was fair or not, or whether he should have drawn the comparison or not, rather than the substance of the comments he made – which were that “This is beyond awful” and “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people”. His comments need no comparison with any historical precedent; they stand on their own terms. Whilst there is a good argument that BBC newsreaders and current affairs presenters should not express an opinion on the events they are covering (although, in practice, there is always something of a pro-establishment bias in the way news is presented, whoever forms the establishment at the time) it is far from clear that that rule of political impartiality needs to apply to those presenting sports programmes. And I very much doubt that he would have received the same criticism had he supported the government’s proposals.

On the substance of the issue – the detention and expulsion of tens of thousands of people without any legal process – the usual double standards and lies continue to apply. In defending his decision not to step down whilst he is investigated for bullying, Dominic Raab came out with this gem yesterday: “We believe in innocent till proven guilty in this country”. For cabinet ministers, obviously; for desperate and vulnerable people, rather less so. It is argued that they have broken the law by the very act of traversing the channel; but according to the principle enunciated by Raab, the determination of whether the law has been broken or not in the UK is a matter for due legal process, not ministerial dictat. Instead, detention and deportation with no trial or legal process is considered entirely adequate for refugees and asylum-seekers. Like most of the ‘British values’ to which ministers are forever referring, the application of the principle to which Raab refers is limited to the chosen ones. And that's another unfortunate echo of the past.

Who's next?

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When it comes to the misdeeds of important people like Tory Cabinet Ministers, the PM is keen for us all to know that he is firmly committed to the idea of due process and giving people a fair hearing. That, it seems, means that it is entirely acceptable to keep the miscreants in the Cabinet until an ‘independent’ investigator appointed by, answerable to, and only allowed to investigate according to rules set by, the PM reports at which point ‘due process’ means that the PM can decide whether to ignore the report or not. Because, when push comes to shove, the PM is judge, jury and executioner. ‘Due process’ also means that investigations into even quite minor matters can take weeks or months but it is important, according to the PM, to properly establish the facts.

When it comes to lesser mortals the same principles don’t apply, for apparently obvious reasons which somehow escape me. Yesterday, he announced that ‘illegal migrants’ would be detained on arrival and deported within days or weeks. Since there is no such thing, in law, as an ‘illegal migrant’, it might not actually be that difficult to round up all none of them and put them on an imaginary aeroplane: that wouldn’t take days, or even hours, to accomplish. That isn’t what he means, though – he’s using the phrase ‘illegal migrants’ to play to prejudices and bigotry rather than as a precise term which any decent lawyer would rebut. Whatever the nomenclature, his intention is clear. Desperate people, taking huge risks to get to the UK, will be rounded up and held in detention camps until they can be sent somewhere – anywhere – before any lawyers have any chance to talk to them and put their case before the courts in any sort of legal process. In order to facilitate this speeding up of the process, he is planning to recruit more people into the Home Office to fast-track the automatic refusal of asylum. Despite the alleged 'lack of money' there's always enough available to implement inhumane policies. Rather than speed up the process of giving people a proper hearing in a court of law, the plan is to deport them before their cases ever get anywhere near a court. ‘Due process’ and a ‘fair hearing’ mean two very different things to Sunak, depending on who the individual is. Top of his list for circumventing any sort of 'due process', apparently, are people without proper documentation. Some of us might feel that that is almost a classic definition of ‘refugee’.

He clearly thinks that the idea of rounding up thousands of people and holding them in detention camps for as many days or weeks as might be required will appeal to the sector of the electorate whose votes he needs and wants. That’s the only basis on which the policy makes any sense. Whilst detaining thousands of people arbitrarily without trial is the thin end of a very large wedge, history teaches us that many people are willing to ignore what happens to ‘others’ because they never believe that they might be next. But history also teaches us that if treating one group inhumanely and ignoring their rights doesn’t do the trick, the perpetrators will inevitably move on to the next target group. And people who so obviously think that ‘they’ have the right to govern as they choose and the rest of us must simply do as we are told can always find another target group.

Defining a crisis

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James Callaghan never actually said “Crisis? What crisis?” as he returned from a trip abroad during the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979, but that well-known comic, ‘Thesun’ turned it into a highly memorable and effective headline. Like the phrase ‘Winter of Discontent’ itself, it underlined the extent to which newspaper headlines can set a tone or an agenda, a power which they continue to abuse on a regular basis. People in the UK are facing a deliberate attack on their living standards which is almost unprecedented, certainly since the 1930s; the biggest war to be fought on European soil since 1945 is raging in Ukraine and driving millions from their homes; and the NHS is close to collapse after 12 years of intentional government policy. Yet the biggest crisis facing the UK, according to a host of newspapers, is a few thousand desperate people taking a perilous boat-trip from France to Kent; people fleeing war, oppression, disease, or simply abject poverty seeking a better life in one of the world’s richest countries.

The numbers, in relation to the UK’s population, are tiny. They are very much lower than the numbers of those seeking refuge in other countries such as Germany. Yet the Little Englanders who set the news agenda have decided (not without some justification, it must be said) that playing to the racist and xenophobic element of their readership sells papers. It also helps their political allies amongst the Tories to push an agenda which seeks to scapegoat migrants for inadequacies in the Health Service, housing, and education rather than allowing people to understand that those inadequacies are a result of sustained government policy rather than migration. Divide and conquer has always worked for them, and it’s working now, unfortunately. Getting some of the least well-off to blame those even worse off than themselves rather than those who’ve hoarded all the resources to themselves is their standard operating procedure.

The result is a government which announces ever more extreme measures to tackle the non-crisis, in an attempt to divert attention from the real crises. Sections of the media actively egg them on, and the official ‘opposition’ seems more interested in criticising them for the inefficiency of their implementation of their policies than for the policies themselves. If international law decrees that the government’s policies are illegal, the answer, apparently, is not to change the policies to comply with the law, but to disapply the law, and the last PM but one has today joined the ranks of those calling for the UK to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights. His Brexit deal seriously wounded the Good Friday Agreement; the fact that his latest proposal would finish it off seems to be as trivial a concern to him as his own breaches of domestic law.

Crossing the Channel in a small boat is certainly a crisis for those in the boats, even if not for the rest of us. The cost of living is certainly a crisis for most of us. But perhaps the biggest crisis of all is the gullibility of those who believe that the former is a bigger problem than the latter, and the ruthless way in which that gullibility is being exploited. And it might be the hardest one to solve.

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.

Shame, not pride, is the only response

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

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

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

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

Can dancing solve Johnson's problems?

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In 1976, the UK suffered a severe and prolonged period of drought. Eventually, things got so bad that the PM at the time, James Callaghan, appointed a Minister for Drought, Denis Howell, who apparently, amongst other things, was ordered by Number 10 to do a rain dance on behalf of the whole UK. Three days later, it started raining, the UK suffered widespread flooding – and he rapidly found himself ‘promoted’ to Minister of Floods. I’m sure that I’m far from being alone in suspecting that neither his appointment nor his rain dance (if he ever did it) had much to do with the change in the weather. (In three days, the civil service had probably not even managed to find him an office or staff, let alone research the detailed etiquette of a rain dance.) However, appointing a minister to take specific responsibility for a problem area on behalf of the government has become something of a fall back position ever since. Apart from anything else, it gives the PM someone to blame instead of having to take the flak himself.

In the light of the appalling mismanagement, confusion, and downright lies surrounding the handling of the Ukrainian refugee crisis, Boris Johnson has this week resorted to the same sleight of hand. Despite the headline, he hasn’t created a new minister at all, merely appointed one; whatever his own wishes on the matter, creation isn’t part of his powers even under the royal prerogative. It’s come at a heavy price to him – by choosing someone outside parliament to take on the role of Minister for Refugees, he’s been forced to ennoble yet another of his mates, further expanding the unelected house of parliament. No doubt the new minister will need time to settle in, be found an office, desk, and a few staff, and determine his terms of reference as a new sub-department is carved out at Westminster, and all that before getting down to the job in hand. Somehow, I doubt that he will turn out to be quite as lucky as Denis Howell; with or without a ministerial dancing act, this is not a problem which is going to resolve itself in three days. Still, things could be worse – Johnson could have appointed an existing peer, such as Baron Lebedev of Siberia, to take on the role. Now that would have shown Putin that he means business. Whose business is a whole other question.

A Great British welcome

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

Aberration or just extreme example?

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A few days ago, the press carried a picture of a small child in tears wearing a lifejacket wading ashore from a small boat in the Channel. It was graphic, but different people will have seen different things as they interpreted the picture to fit their own views. I saw a small and vulnerable human who was absolutely terrified and in desperate need of care and protection. I don’t know what horrors that child had suffered or witnessed, and struggle to imagine the desperation that parents must have felt to have undertaken such a perilous journey with children. I know, though, that others will have seen something quite different. They will have seen a threat to ‘our’ way of life; potential future competition for housing, jobs or health services; someone who is not ‘one of us’ and should be immediately returned to the country of origin; or even maybe a potential future terrorist.

The gulf between those two views is enormous, and it cannot be bridged by rational argument or mere fact, because it is based, ultimately, on deep-seated prejudices and attitudes. To be fair, there is a natural human tendency to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and none of us are immune from it; trying to pretend that it is not so is futile. The best we can hope for is to reduce it to a question of which team to support on the field of play, rather than a basis for treating large groups of our fellow humans. Over time, the group considered to be ‘us’ has grown in size: from tribe to town to nation. There is a sense in which the EU can be seen as part of that process – an attempt to create a common feeling of being ‘European’ whilst continuing to host and nurture a diversity of cultures and languages. It’s an aspect of the EU from which the UK has always been semi-detached, and which it has noticeably tried to reverse over the past five years, retreating to a smaller and more insular definition of ‘us’. But even the EU’s best efforts still leave plenty of scope for the rest of the world to be considered as ‘not us’.

However, all the world’s really big challenges can only be solved when we start to recognise that ‘us’ is the whole of humanity; that it is only by working together that we can address climate change, war, hunger and poverty. It’s no coincidence that that list matches pretty well the list of causes which lead to people becoming migrants and refugees. If we choose instead to keep part of the world in poverty so that the other part can enjoy an unfair share of wealth or, to put it another way, to look after ‘us’ and leave ‘not us’ to their own devices, those problems will never be resolved. And for the remainder of the shortened lifespan of humanity which will result from such a decision, all of those problems will still be with us.

Taking a wider view of ‘us’ doesn’t mean an end to diversity or difference, but it is the key to our collective future. Whether it’s achievable or not is an open question. If the UK can’t even manage to accommodate a few desperate refugees, I doubt that it can adapt sufficiently in the time available. When I see the sort of hatred of ‘not us’ which is evidenced by the recent incident in which people attempted to prevent the launch of a lifeboat, and the PM doubling down on his unlawful and immoral plan to push boats back into French waters, I can only take a pessimistic view. Our best hope is that the UK under its current regime is simply an aberration. Whether the UK is indeed just an aberration, rather than a particularly egregious example, only time will tell.

Following the headlines

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Apparently, Boris Johnson is so exasperated with the continued flow of migrants across the channel from France that addressing the issue has been elevated to his top priority, eclipsing the Covid pandemic. Many might think that the arrival of a few thousand refugees is actually a fairly minor problem for a rich country, particularly when the government is actively pursuing policies which are leading to 1,000 premature deaths every week. The reaction, however, is driven by headlines and the pursuit of votes, not by logic and certainly not by compassion.

His ministers and backbenchers are coming up with ever more drastic ‘solutions’ to the problem, including exporting all new arrivals to Albania for processing. It seems no-one actually bothered to seek permission from the Albanians before leaking the proposal, but then they probably just assumed that, as a small country, Albania should know its place and do as it is told. Others have floated the idea of sending refugees to the Falklands for processing, presumably in the belief that being sent to an internment camp on a cold small island with inadequate facilities will act as a deterrent. There is, of course, a question as to whether any of this is allowed under international law, but post-Brexit, international law no longer applies to the UK, or so the government seem to believe.

The Home Secretary is blaming the EU (of course – we all know that everything is the fault of the EU); in this case for not having internal borders between countries, and allowing people within the EU to travel freely across the continent. How dare they! I can’t help thinking that this is a woman who, if she thought she could get away with it, would be demanding controls on movement at county level across the UK in order to stop migrants arriving in Kent from getting to London, let alone further afield.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party – this ‘progressive’ party which wants all non-Tories to unite behind it – can only manage to criticise the government for not doing more to stop migrants from arriving. That’s right – faced with a vicious government doing everything it can to prevent refugees from fleeing persecution, war, and hunger, and risking their lives and those of their children in the process, the ‘opposition’ can only demand even tougher action. Shameful is an inadequate word to describe Labour’s response. Labour, like the Tories, are being driven by headline stories in the mass media which the supporters of both consume on a daily basis. Neither is interested in what’s right or wrong; neither has any concern for the human tragedies involved. They both believe that being seen to be tough on refugees will gain support, or at least bolster their support, amongst their target groups of electors. The most depressing part of all is that they may well be right.

Unaffordability is a myth

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One of the standard objections to allowing refugees access to the UK is that the UK is unable to look after ‘its own people’. It’s usually expressed in terms of questioning why refugees should have priority over homeless people / unemployed people / poor people / military veterans* (*select disfavoured group according to preference). Superficially, it’s not a wholly unreasonable question to ask. It is, though, completely the wrong question, and is based on a series of invalid premises. The invalid premises are that the UK is unable to support those living here who currently need support; that that inability is due to a lack of resources; and that using limited resources to help one group therefore necessarily means that other groups cannot be helped. Take away those premises, and the right question to ask is why, in one of the world’s richest countries, there is so much poverty and homelessness, whether amongst long-standing residents or new arrivals.

In global terms, the UK is a rich – very rich – country. Domestic poverty and hunger aren’t a result of any lack of resources, they’re a result of the way those resources are distributed. And that distribution is a result of a deliberate political choice – which means that it could be changed by making a different political choice. It does, though, suit the ruling classes in the UK to pretend that eliminating poverty, hunger, and homelessness are ‘unaffordable’, and it suits them even more to allow justifiable anger about those issues to be directed at immigrants and refugees rather than at themselves. ‘Divide and rule’ has long been the preferred approach of ruling classes everywhere, and the UK is no exception. Persuading the less well-off that the ‘problem’ is caused by those even poorer than themselves is just the current manifestation of that approach. The saddest part is seeing so many swept along by the big lie that ‘we can’t afford’ to help refugees fleeing a situation that our own government did so much to create.

Beyond hope or redemption

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In a manner which uses a rather curious definition of ‘honouring commitments made’, the UK Government has agreed to take an arbitrary number, bearing no relation to either need or the criteria on which it is claimed to be based, of refugees from the catastrophe which it has helped to create in Afghanistan. But not all at once; the numbers accepted will be spread over a five year period. To qualify for this largesse on the part of the UK, refugees need to find their own way out of their country, and travel to the UK without passing through any other country which the UK Government deems safe (because if they do, they will be regarded as having passed up on the chance to be accepted in that other country), and spend potentially 4 or 5 years in a refugee camp somewhere while the UK gets around to processing their applications. Whether by action of the new Afghan government, disease or taking risks in the process, a fair number of those who might otherwise qualify will clearly never make it.

Still, never let it be said that the UK government is unable to be imaginative or innovative in its approach: holding out the possibility of posthumous refugee status is a world first. It’s also a new low for the conscience-free regime currently running the UK. Apparently, according to the PM in his speech to parliament yesterday, instead of feeling an entirely natural degree of shame at what has been done in our name, we must all take great pride in the huge strides made for women’s rights in those parts of Afghanistan which were briefly occupied by Western forces, even while we watch those rights being stripped away as the country returns to fundamentalist misogyny. It’s delusional, of course; but the participation of the UK in the original invasion was born out of the same basic delusion, which is that the UK is some sort of great player righting the world’s wrongs across the globe rather than an increasingly insignificant offshore European island. It sometimes seems as if there is no event or circumstance sufficiently powerful to shatter the delusion. Even after the UK is split asunder, and the writ of Westminster is reduced to the English rump of the UK, I suspect that those ruling England will continue to cling to their strange notions of greatness and exceptionalism. There truly is no hope for them.

The values that unite us

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Those ‘great British values’ which apparently unite all of us who live on this island and distinguish us from the rest of the world have been on display again in recent days.

Yesterday, the PM praised ‘greed’ as a motivating factor before realising that he might have gone a bit too far and desperately asking people to allow him to unsay it. It was a rare moment of honesty from an inveterate liar (the saying of it, that is, not the attempt to unsay it) and an insight into the way the Tory mind works. It isn’t actually true, of course – not everyone, and not even every capitalist, is motivated solely by personal greed; if it were true, then capitalism would have collapsed a long time ago. And in the specific context of the vaccination programme, whilst Johnson may see their role as secondary to that of the pharmaceutical companies developing the vaccines, the role of volunteers and underpaid and dedicated NHS staff has been crucial. If greed were their only motive, there wouldn’t have been much of a programme. It is, though, part of the mindset of people like Johnson that the ‘little people’ don’t really count and contribute little – ‘success’ is measured by the ability of the ‘winners’ to extract great personal wealth from the economy at the expense of the rest of us, who are seen as ‘losers’.

Also yesterday, the Home Secretary made further announcements on the proposed new regime for handling asylum-seekers. Fresh from the news that she was planning to ship them elsewhere (it doesn’t matter where and neither does it matter whether the places to which they are to be shipped are happy to take them or not), she is proposing that even some of those granted asylum will remain liable to deportation indefinitely. This is the same Home Secretary who is behind the plans to outlaw many expressions of dissent.

Meanwhile, a few days ago, we had a Tory MP suggesting that anyone who does not love the hereditary monarch and the union flag should be encouraged to go and live elsewhere, and another Tory MP decided to use a parliamentary examination of the BBC to complain about the lack of union flags in the BBC’s annual report and demand that there should be more next year.

Veneration of greed, contempt for any display of altruism, inhumane treatment of refugees, outlawing dissent, unconditional support for heredity as a means of choosing the head of state, and a demand that a cloth symbol hanging from a pole be the object of love and admiration if we want to stay in the country of our birth – these are the ‘great British values’ on display this week. These are the values which they claim as unifying factors. They really are their own worst enemies.

Finding a way back

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

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

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

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

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

I agree with Dave (well, sort of...)

Tweet The fact that Cameron has received so much positive coverage for proposing such a small change in response to the refugee crisis, and that the other parties all seem to be talking about broadly similar numbers, says a lot about the prevailing climate of opinion in the UK towards the troubles of others.  It’s hard to disagree with Cameron’s statement that the UK should take its ‘fair share’ of refugees, but the word ‘fair’ is not one which is amenable to a simple and straightforward definition.  800,000 to Germany and some 10,000 – 15,000 for the UK doesn’t chime with any definition of the word ‘fair’ that I can devise.

It’s also worth noting that, despite the positive coverage being given to the Prime Minister, the gesture by the UK government, directed as it is at those who have not yet started migrating from refugee camps in the Middle East rather than at those already in transit, does absolutely nothing to assist our fellow Europeans in handling the immediate problems that they are facing.  (I suppose, though, one might argue that it speaks to one of those great British values that he’s always banging on about – after all, we all hate queue jumpers, don’t we?  But it’s not much of an excuse.)

Something else that Cameron said with which I agree is that the problem really needs to be solved in the countries from which the refugees are migrating.  I agree with the principle; it’s just that we have a different view about what that actually means.  I think it means helping those countries at war to achieve peace, and those countries whose ‘only’ problem is poverty and hunger by sharing the world’s resources more fairly.  He seems to think that it means dropping more bombs.

And there’s yet a third thing on which I agree with Cameron.  One of the better decisions that his government has taken was to protect the foreign aid budget, and to promise to give 0.7% of GNI as aid.  As with my other points of agreement, the problem is not with the principle, but with the practice.  The proposal to channel part of the foreign aid budget to local authorities in the UK to help with the cost of resettling refugees doesn’t fit with any reasonable person’s definition of overseas aid.  That’s not to say that the councils don’t need financial assistance – merely that it cannot honestly be called foreign aid.

The crises which have led so many people to risk so much to seek out a better future are not ones for which there are any simple or quick solutions.  They require a long term commitment of resources and effort.  But the UK government does not only not have a coherent and viable response to the long term problem – it isn’t even willing to do very much to respond to the immediate needs of those affected.  And it’s being aided and abetted by opposition parties whose response is little better – high on critical rhetoric, but short on willingness to talk about the significantly higher numbers of people who need safe havens now.