Finding allies in strange places

Tweet

When the House of Lords amends legislation presented by a Labour government, certain sectors of the media are keen to present the institution as a bulwark for freedom and democracy against the evils of socialism; when they amend legislation presented by a Tory government, they become traitors and fifth columnists.  That’s how it appears to me anyway.  I’ll admit to a deep sense of unease that the UK’s system of democracy is so badly broken that the defence of parliament’s right to take the decisions rather than be simply railroaded by the government is only being defended and promoted by a bunch of hereditaries, appointees and bishops.  Some might argue that it demonstrates the value of having a second chamber which can take a less partisan approach to whatever subject is being debated.  I think it demonstrates the need for a parliament which has more distance between it and the government with more room and time for proper debate and scrutiny, rather than one where MPs are simply whipped either for or against the government of the day.  (At a more mundane level, it does demonstrate why at least some of us independentistas believe that – for as long as such an undemocratic and unaccountable body as the House of Lords exists – it is better to have a voice there than not.)

It remains to be seen whether the government will attempt to reverse all the defeats being inflicted upon it when the legislation returns to the Commons.  It’s hard to see at the moment how May can afford not to try, with the extremists on her own side demanding that she do so; but it’s equally hard to see how she can get a majority in the Commons on all of the issues on which she’s been defeated.  When members of her own party are describing the compromise towards which both parliamentary arithmetic and economic reality are pushing the government as ‘cretinous’, it is clear that the underlying tensions over Europe which brought down so many of her predecessors are getting stronger rather than weaker.  There is only a limited period during which the government can continue to stick its fingers in its ears and claim that the EU’s categorical statements are merely an ‘opening negotiating position’.  Meanwhile, other Brexiteers seem to believe that all be well if only the Prime Minister would sack her chief negotiator.  The problem, apparently, is simply that the UK is not being forceful enough in demanding that the EU dismantle itself in order to accommodate the UK.

I don’t know how all this will end, but I suspect that the only thing left which gives the government and the Tory party any chance of surviving in power until Brexit day next year – let alone until the end of the transition period – is the abject failure of the main opposition party to seize the opportunity in front of it.  Public opinion seems to me to be moving, albeit slowly, and even if it’s not yet clear that opinion has turned against Brexit itself, there is increasing evidence that majority opinion would tend to favour remaining in the single market and customs union if given the choice.  For sure, I’d agree that that is Brexit-in-name-only, but a determined and united opposition party prepared to show some leadership on the issue could probably gain a majority around such a proposal.  It would be in line with what their voters and members are saying as well, but they seem no more able to unite on a clear line than the governing party.

There’s something strange and uncomfortable about a position where those doing most to mitigate the effects of Brexit are the unelected peers, whilst the main opposition party is effectively aiding and abetting the extremists through a lack of resolve, clarity and leadership.

The wrong reason for resigning.

Tweet

The Home Secretary has finally bowed to the inevitable and departed, although the real architect of the ‘hostile environment’ policy remains in Downing Street, for the time being at least.  It seems more likely at present that she will be brought down by bowing to another inevitable – accepting that the simplistic Brexit desired by her own party’s extremists is simply not a viable proposition.

It seems clear that the ‘hostile environment’ policy was discriminatory in its effect: it had more impact on those immigrants of a different skin colour.  I’m not convinced that that necessarily means that it was intended as a racist policy, or that those devising and implementing it were racist.  I think it’s actually worse than that – they were blind to the colour of those being deported because they were blind to their humanity.  Reducing them to numbers in a spreadsheet isn’t racially motivated, even if its effect turns out to be discriminatory.  Their real sin was that act of reducing people to numbers for the sake of pandering to an anti-immigrant culture in order to win votes.

In the same way, I’ve never been entirely convinced that the leading Brexiteers, who fought the referendum campaign largely on an anti-immigration platform, are actually either racist or xenophobic.  Again, it’s worse than that: they are people who were willing to leverage racism and xenophobia in others to achieve a result which they didn’t think they could bring about by honest argument and debate.

The common thread between the two is that element of dishonesty and the willingness to appease sentiments which they don’t share themselves.  In the process, rather than attempting to address the fears and concerns which many people clearly have about immigration, they have succeeded in reinforcing and legitimising even more extreme viewpoints.  That, rather than simply misleading parliament, whether intentionally or otherwise, is the real sin, but it’s one that they show no sign of even recognising.

Windrush merely a symptom

Tweet

Many years ago, on some management course or other, I remember the lecturer stressing that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  As a general rule, it has considerable merit – how can you ever know whether you’re progressing towards a goal if you can’t somehow quantify that progress?  And as anyone subject to any sort of annual performance review will know, all targets are supposed to be SMART, where the M stands for measurable.  It struck me at the time, however, that there was something missing from this simplistic formulation, because the route selected to arrive at the goal is as important – and sometimes more important – than the goal itself.  Concentration on the measurability of progress leads to a target-chasing culture which can, and frequently does, ignore the wider needs of the organisation, its clients, and the people who work within it.

I found myself wondering yesterday whether those senior officials in the Home Office or its agencies who created the local targets of which their bosses were completely unaware (allegedly) for deportations had been on a similar course, but without applying any critical reasoning to the bald statement about the need for measurability.  What they seem to have done, in effect, is to take the overall policy handed down by their political masters (we must get immigration down, and we must deport illegals, and we will do so by creating a hostile environment for them) and turned that into performance targets for staff, following the standard SMART rules.  And, with their annual reviews decided on the basis of achieving the targets they were given, those staff have chased the targets relentlessly.  The staff have attempted to do what they were told was expected of them, and left wider considerations about the impact on those being pursued for deportation and the image and perception of their department to those on higher pay grades.

Now, as it happens, I disagree with the overall policy in principle, but even assuming that the policy itself was a sensible and desirable one, those who promoted it – basically May and Rudd – cannot simply absolve themselves of all responsibility, even it is entirely true that it was the senior officials who turned that policy into cold impersonal targets; not least because those at the very top are, and must always be, held responsible for the culture under which the organisation operates.  And what is clear, surely, by now is that they didn’t really care about the culture; they were completely obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes.  I will, though, also repeat a point made previously: those senior officials who took it upon themselves to implement a system of targets as a means of implementing the policy handed down to them cannot simply be absolved of their responsibility for dehumanising people by turning them into numbers.

There is also a wider political issue as well, which goes way beyond May and Rudd.  I can’t help but wonder whether the unfolding debacle around the Home Office’s attempts to deport more people, using an approach which appals many of us, might nevertheless be playing well amongst one of the Tories’ key target audiences.  All of this has, after all, come about because politicians have been keen to chase the votes of those opposed to immigration by being tough on immigrants.  An anti-immigrant culture has developed and spread, actively encouraged by politicians (and Labour have been as bad – just remember Ed Miliband’s famous mug)  in which it is perfectly possible that many will see the efforts of May and Rudd to be praiseworthy rather than contemptible.  Decades of anti-immigration rhetoric will not be overturned by a few cosmetic changes to policy, nor even by the resignations of May, Rudd, and the top officials involved.  The required cultural shift in political debate is much greater than that.

The label on the tin is perfectly clear

Tweet

Clearly, many people will be disappointed by the way in which the Welsh Labour government has simply rolled over in relation to the so-called ‘Brexit power-grab’ by London.  Whatever excuses they come up with, and however they attempt to present it, they have unquestionably conceded the key principle that London has been demanding from the outset, which is that the way to devise common frameworks in certain areas post-Brexit is for London to do it.  Insofar as London has conceded anything in return, it is an acknowledgement that they will have to seek legislative consent from Cardiff before imposing their framework, but they retain the right to impose that framework even without consent.

For what it’s worth, I never for one moment believed that they would agree to the demand from the devolved administrations that new frameworks should be devised by discussion and agreement rather than decided in London.  After all, to the extent that there’s any logic in Brexit at all, it is that the UK Government would be able to make its own rules rather than have to consult with anyone else first and would never need to compromise with all those horrid Europeans.  Why on earth would they ever want to break free of the need to consult with one group of governments only to accept a constraint that they need to negotiate with another set of governments?

The Scottish Government is showing rather more spine on the issue – but the strange thing is not that the apparent unity between a Labour Government in Wales and an SNP Government in Scotland has now been shattered, but that the unity lasted so long in the first place.  It was always an unlikely pairing.  Perhaps the Scottish Government will be able to wring further concessions out of London; perhaps not.  I suspect that London will be more willing to simply ignore Scotland now it stands alone than it would have been had Cardiff also held its nerve.  It’s not only Wales that Labour have let down.

The bottom line, though, remains where it has been from the outset: power devolved is power retained.  ‘Devolution’ does not – and never can – bestow equality of status on the devolved parliaments.  Whilst London, as they have shown, would very much prefer to have the consent and compliance of the administrations in Cardiff and Edinburgh (who wouldn’t prefer an easy life if it’s an attainable option?), they don’t really need that because they can – and always could – simply legislate anyway.  The ‘concession’ obtained by the Welsh Labour government doesn’t change that, and is close to worthless.

What the whole affair underlines, yet again, is the underlying weakness of the devolution model and the inherent fragility of a set of powers which are only ever on loan to Wales and which can be over-ruled at any time.  If we don’t want a government in Cardiff which is beholden to Westminster, we need to do more than simply whinge when they do exactly what the devolution model entitles them to do.

More of the same

Tweet

Under the curious hotchpotch which passes for a constitution in the UK, we do not elect the leader of the executive branch of government; we only elect members of the legislative branch, despite the increasingly presidential nature of the election campaigns themselves.  But at least when it comes to an election, we all know who the leaders of the parties are, and we all know that the leader of whichever party can put together a majority of seats in the legislature will become head of the executive branch.  From that perspective, it really is entirely a matter for the individual parties to decide who to elect as their leader and how to run that election, because the electorate decide on the basis of knowing the consequences of their votes.

There is a problem, though, when that leader falls by the wayside, for whatever reason, during the term of office of the legislature.  At that point, the leader being elected by the members of a party also becomes the leader of the executive, and who and how that leader is selected becomes a proper matter for debate by the wider electorate, especially given the constitutional fact that there is no requirement for the newly-appointed leader to face a general election.  In that context, the Labour Party’s electoral college system for selecting its leader in Wales is an entirely legitimate subject for debate.

The Western Mail reported on Saturday that “…critics of a change within Welsh Labour fear that moving to one member, one vote could increase the likelihood of a more radical, left-wing candidate winning the leadership”.  Stop and think about that for just a moment: the argument here is that the party needs a complex three part electoral college in order to place a deliberate constraint on who can be elected.  And underpinning that is an assumption that the trade unions and affiliated bodies and the party’s elected MPs, AMs, and MEPs will always and necessarily be more ‘conservative’ in outlook than the ordinary members.

It’s hard to know whether or not that’s true of trade union members, given that their leaders often support nominations on behalf of the members without consulting them, and then give them a very strong steer on who they should support.  What we do know is that many of those who are members of trade unions and/or affiliated bodies effectively get to vote more than once in a leadership election, since if they are also individual members of the party, they also vote in the membership section of the college.  Giving multiple votes in the same election to selected electors is a strange definition of democracy.

What we also know is that the assessment of elected members (i.e. that they are more ‘conservative’ than the rank and file membership) is broadly correct.  There is an argument that allowing the election of a leader who does not enjoy the full confidence of his or her fellow elected members can create problems, and that is a reason for giving those elected members more influence in the process.  That is part of the problem being faced by Corbyn – and I know that he isn’t the first or only party leader to find the wider membership more supportive than the parliamentary group.  The question that the Labour Party should be asking, though, is not ‘how do we ensure that the membership can’t elect a leader who does not enjoy the confidence of the group?’, but ‘why is there such a disconnect between the views of the elected members and those of the wider party membership?’

And actually, that isn’t only a question for Labour.  When I look at other parties I see a similar trend; those party members elected to legislatures, at Welsh and UK level, often seem to be more ‘establishment’ and ‘centrist’ than the wider membership.  Whether it’s the result of being elected and getting sucked into the system, or whether it tells us something about the selection processes being used is an unanswered question.  In a large enough elected body, such as the UK House of Commons, there are some who somehow get through both of those processes whilst retaining a bit more of an edge to their politics; people like Corbyn.  In a small legislature such as the National Assembly, however, the scope for that is more limited, and we see fewer ‘wild cards’.

The result, to answer those anonymous Labour critics referred to by the Western Mail, is that the Labour Party has generally managed to weed out the “more radical, left-wing” candidates before they even get to the Assembly.  It doesn’t matter which method they use to elect their new leader; the future looks like more of the same in any event.

More than a Liddle ignorant

Tweet

I didn’t find the original piece by Rod Liddle about the renaming of the Second Severn Crossing particularly offensive or insulting – just plain ignorant.  And, as he promised that he would in response to the complaints made against him, he repeated his assault on what he sees as the tendency of Welsh words to be vowel-free again this week.  But the idea that because English has only 5 vowels, other languages can also only have five vowels is a very anglo-centric view of the issue, showing an ignorance not just of the Welsh language but of the way in which languages can and do vary - and, incidentally, of the English language as well.

Welsh words, given that we have seven vowels available to us, may well look strange to one steeped in the traditional English definition of a vowel, but there is a real problem from his perspective.  Whilst I can think of no Welsh words which are actually vowel-free based on the Welsh definition of a vowel, I can think of a huge range of English words which don’t have a vowel to share between them (think: try, fly, myth, hymn, my, flyby…), based on his narrow primary-school definition of a vowel.  How on earth does he manage to pronounce them?

A simple choice - alignment or borders

Tweet

The Irish border issue is at heart a very simple one, albeit often clouded and complicated by the recent past.  That’s not to say that the Good Friday agreement and the long period of violence before it aren’t important, nor that they do not make the situation in Ireland unique; it’s more about saying that they can obscure what is at base a very simple and straightforward question of more general application.  And that is this: where there is a border between two countries, there are only two options – the first is that the two are part of a single customs/regulatory regime, and the other is that there are border controls.  It’s possible, of course, to be part of the same customs/regulatory regime and still maintain border controls, and some countries within the EU choose to do that.  But what is not possible is to have different customs/regulatory regimes and no controls, because in such a scenario it becomes impossible to maintain the integrity of either of the customs/regulatory regimes.  And all of this is as true for a sea border as a land border; land borders are just naturally more ‘porous’.

From that point of view, there is nothing particularly unique about the situation in Ireland; the unique part is the strength of the drivers for seeking to avoid a border with controls.  The Brexiteers know all this, and know that their demand for a different customs/regulatory regime has the inevitable consequence of creating a border with controls.  All the talk about ‘smart’ systems to facilitate border crossings is about minimising the impact of those controls, not about avoiding them.  Their preferred solution, albeit one that only a few of them are prepared to advocate openly, is that the Republic accompanies the UK to the exit door; it’s the only way in which they can both maintain their red lines about regulatory divergence and at the same time avoid border controls completely.  After all, the two countries entered the EU together, and it was that simple fact which enabled the ‘Common Travel Area’ to continue after accession, even if it took the Good Friday agreement to abolish the physical controls at the border.

This is relevant in the context of yesterday’s post about the future of the UK after Brexit.  What is true for the border between the two parts of Ireland is also true for the border between Wales and England.  Ultimately, Wales can either be part of the same customs/regulatory regime as England, or we can have border controls along the Dyke.  As long as both countries are part of the EU’s Customs/regulatory regime, it’s not an issue.  Outside the EU, as long as both countries remain locked in alignment, again, it’s not an issue.  But if Wales were to become ‘independent’, our ability to choose to seek membership of either the EU or the closely-aligned EFTA/EEA would be effectively ruled out by the need to remain in alignment with England - unless we were willing to implement border controls between the two countries.  I can’t foresee a situation in which border controls make any sense for Wales, and given the relative size of England in any conceivable reconfiguration of the UK, that means that we will be ‘rule-takers’ most of the time.

It isn’t that which concerns me most, however; after all, as an advocate of continuing membership of the EU I have to accept that rules are made collectively and that there are some that we might not like (although we’d at least have an input before they were made, unlike at present).  The bigger concern is that if England decides to increasingly cut itself off from mainstream Europe, and try and pretend that the UK is still a great power ruling the waves, then we are going to be part of that, regardless of any nominal ‘independence’, or the precise way in which the UK is reconfigured.  That isn't the sort of 'independence' which I want for Wales.

Making the best of it?

Tweet

Yesterday’s Western Mail carried a report based on an interview of Cynog Dafis by Martin Shipton.  I haven’t been able to find the report on-line, but the podcast is available here.  One of the key points which Cynog made was that independentistas need to think more about how the UK is reformed rather than scrapped, in the context of Brexit.  Whilst I might wish it were otherwise, I see no real alternative to that as an approach, and it’s something about which I’ve blogged on more than one occasion previously. 

Within the EU, I see no obstacle in principle to Wales becoming a full member state in its own right (there are practical and political obstacles, but no fundamental reason why they can’t be overcome).  That wouldn’t quite give us equality of status with England – larger EU members have more influence than smaller ones – but it would move us into a context in which there are a number of other nation states of similar size, and no one state has complete dominance.  It's closer to equal status with England than anything imaginable within a continuing UK.  We would have a voice directly in the decision-making process.  And in such a scenario, the links between Wales and England would remain strong, with complete freedom of travel and trade between the two, and no real need to ‘institutionalize’ that relationship in the formality which the UK level of government represents.

Outside the EU, and given that I can see no scenario in which it makes any sense at all to implement border controls along Offa’s Dyke, we will inevitably be bound more tightly to England, not least in economic terms, and that constrains the degree of independence to which we can aspire; the meaning of the word ‘independence’ changes significantly.  In such a scenario, the approach outlined by Cynog – effectively a move to a more federal UK, with measures to try and lessen the dominance of the largest member state – is probably the best we can realistically hope for.  The problem is that, whilst sharing the aspiration, I find it hard to share Cynog’s apparent optimism about the willingness of England to accept such constraints upon its dominance.

Cynog refers to “the English at their best” as being likely to respond to the idea.  Maybe; I doubt, though, that we’ll be dealing with “the English at their best” in either the short or medium term.  We will, rather, have to deal with the political representatives of those who still believe that Britannia can and should rule the waves and stand alone against the rest of the world.  I hope that, if Brexit happens, it will be the shock that traditionalists in the UK need to shake them out of their delusions about the UK’s place in the world, but at the moment, it seems likelier to me that they will choose to interpret the situation as one in which the rest of the world is trying to punish them and will simply double down on their delusional rhetoric, demanding unity and conformity 'at home'.

So, reforming the UK is a realistic assessment of the best we can hope for, and something for which we will have no alternative but to work – but I don’t find it particularly attractive or inspiring.

Changing the culture, not just the policy

Tweet

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need more than words

Tweet

Yesterday’s climb-down by the Home Secretary over the Windrush generation was sudden and dramatic.  It is a welcome change of direction, as is the agreement by the Prime Minister to meet representatives of the Caribbean countries to discuss the issue, given that, as recently as last week, she was absolutely refusing to do so.  A lot of credit is due to the Guardian, in particular, for exposing details of some of the worst cases.

If it weren’t so tragic, and hadn’t had so much impact on the lives of ordinary citizens who had every right to be in the UK, some of the revelations would be comic.  The Home Office advice produced during the current Prime Minister’s tenancy of that office advising those being returned to Jamaica to ‘put on a Jamaican accent’; the fact that the government admit that they’ve probably deported people who had every right to be here, but can’t be certain about how many; and the way in which the government of the time failed to keep any documentation relating to those invited here - this is the material of farce.  It shows a deeply dysfunctional approach to the issue, but there’s also something more there.

During the tenure of Theresa May at the Home Office a policy was deliberately introduced of creating a “really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, as she herself put it in 2012.  Of course, they will argue, this was aimed at ‘illegal’ immigrants rather than at those with a right to be here, but it also effectively placed the onus on anyone living in the UK to prove that they have a right to be here rather than on the authorities to prove that they do not.  It’s not quite a case of ‘guilty until proved innocent’, but it’s not far short of that (in another instance of those great British values being more about fine words than deeds). 

The implementation was then placed in the hands of officials who seem to have been told simply to implement the rules rather than question them or use any initiative, whilst ministers took a hands-off approach and let them get on with it.  It is that combination which led to a situation where officials were unsympathetic, rule-driven and inflexible; deporting – or attempting to deport – anyone who couldn’t produce the required reams of documentation, despite decades of contribution to the economy and society in which they lived.  The officials, of course, were ‘just following orders’.  Whilst that’s not a defence which they should be able to rely on – there should surely have been at least some of them understanding that what they were doing was wrong morally, as well as legally wrong in the case of those who had a right to be here but simply couldn’t prove it – the real target has to be those who gave the orders in the first place.  And guess who that brings us back to?

Yesterday’s apologies and U-turns are a welcome start, but unless they lead to a change, not only in the rules being applied, but also in the culture of those tasked with applying those rules, then the apology will be no more than a form of words, satisfying the news agenda of the day whilst leaving the basic processes in place.