Monday, April 29, 2013 

The rise of the unpopular populists.

Ah, UKIP.  There are a number of ways you can explain the rise in support for Nigel Farage's unhappy band of monomaniacs, whether it be disaffection from modern society at large, disaffection with Cameron's Conservatives, a protest aimed at the main three parties, for which there are a whole variety of reasons, complete opposition to continued immigration, or, and this is possibly the least significant factor, hatred of the European Union.

To give the typical nerdy fuller answer, the rise is in some way attributable to all these reasons, but also a couple of others.  Unlike much of the rest of Europe, we haven't seen a rise in support for the traditional far-right, somewhat to do with how the BNP have turned into a basket case and the EDL are a bunch of thugs led by a convicted violent criminal with an identity crisis, leaving those who are racist and xenophobic (decreasing numbers, it should be stressed) with having to compromise their feelings somewhat.

Far more important is that the media and indeed most politicians have given Farage almost a completely free ride. Farage has appeared on Question Time more often than any politician other than Vince Cable, regardless of the amount of support his party was up until around this time last year attracting.  When interviewed one to one, which is rare, he's also barely questioned on his party's policies beyond getting out of the European Union, which when even so much as glanced at fall apart.  A 40% increase in the defence budget, doubling the number of prison places, and spending £90bn building new nuclear plants? You can make the case for those policies individually perhaps, but all at the same time? Pull the other one.

Farage and UKIP have been most obviously helped through the completely wretched scaremongering that has surrounded the upcoming lifting of the controls on the number of Bulgarians and Romanians who can come here to work.  This hasn't just been thanks to the usual suspects at the Mail and Express, although they were in the vanguard, but also to politicians who either haven't bothered to challenge such silliness or have in fact connived in it.  One of the most basic lessons of politics is that you don't win by stealing the policies of outlier parties, as the Eastleigh by-election ought to have shown.

By doing so, you either buy completely into their myths, or give them further credence: witness Sajid Javid on QT last week talking almost solely about making Britain "a less attractive place" for Bulgarians and Romanians to come to, when there is no evidence whatsoever that the level of benefits plays a significant role when people make decisions about where to go, or indeed when all the evidence suggests recent immigrants overwhelmingly put more in than they take out.  It's a measure of just how far the debate has been shifted when Farage isn't called out on his linking of Romanians to crime; it may be just about true that 30,000 people giving their nationality as Romanian have been arrested in the past 5 years out of a population in the region of 100,000 (it's not clear whether these arrests were all made in London or not), but this is close to being a worthless statistic when it's convictions that matter, not arrests. We also quite rightly worry when black and Asian men are disproportionately stopped and searched, but not it seems when it's foreigners linked to criminality by politicians.

Another factor is that once a bandwagon's going, plenty of people jump on precisely because it's seen to be the thing to do. Some of those who've voted UKIP in recent by-elections would no doubt be aghast at the views of Godfrey Bloom, and wouldn't dream of supporting a party where he's one of the most senior figures, but as a protest at the way politics has been conducted in recent years it makes sense to climb aboard.

It is therefore just a little rich when UKIP complains that its poorly vetted candidates for the local elections on Thursday are being, err, held up to the same standards as everyone else.  You can of course quite easily portray most people who have a presence online as being unpleasant or worse by cherry-picking questionable tweets or posts and presenting them out of context, yet if UKIP wants to be considered the third or fourth force in politics in this country then it can hardly expect to be given the benefit of the doubt, as it has been up to now.

The question of how you respond to UKIP's rise is a far more difficult one.  Difficult as it is to disagree with Ken Clarke when he reprises David Cameron's old line about the party being made up of closet racists and other assorted eccentrics, just dismissing Farage out of hand is a dangerous game.  Lord Ashcroft's polling may well have suggested that a large percentage of UKIP's support comes from those who are irreconcilable, and as likely as it is that come 2015 the vast majority of those currently flirting with the party will return to one of the main three, a UKIP victory in next year's European elections isn't something to savour.

The very first thing to do then has to be stop agreeing with them: we are not going to be flooded by Romanians and Bulgarians come January, nor will those few who do come have any discernible impact on the number of jobs available for our own young people.

Second, challenge them on their policies which have nothing to do with the EU (PDF): what's their stance on the NHS? Why do we need to double the number of prison places when crime is at a historic low? Why do we need to increase the defence budget so massively if we're going to leave peacekeeping and interventions to others, especially when we face no conventional threats whatsoever? How can their proposed flat tax possibly be fair, or affordable? How can they reconcile their opposition to gay marriage or decriminalising drugs with their claim to be a libertarian party? What impact will a halt to immigration have on the economy?

Third, question their every assertion on the EU, whether it be how much it costs through to their claims on red tape and the amount of laws decided in the European parliament. Hit back at their every soundbite or statistic with one that either flat out contradicts it or disputes it.

And fourth, just wait. UKIP and Farage are still at the moment a media novelty, and one that will be quickly tired of. They will only become a true fourth force in politics if they are indulged as such, as their overall appeal to the majority as anything other than a convenient protest is slight. Populists who fail to make a true political breakthrough quickly fade away. Farage isn't close to being a Boris Johnson yet.

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4/29/2013 09:08:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, March 25, 2013 

Haven't I heard all this before?

If there's one thing you can say about David Cameron's speech on immigration today, it's that it was clever politics.  It worked on one level, and one level only: that of the tiger repelling rock.  The government knows full well that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians likely to come here next year is going to be nowhere near as high as the numbers that came after the A8 accession states, so setting out a whole range of new "restrictions" makes perfect sense.  We ended the soft touch system we inherited from Labour and look at the results!  It won't matter that the figures overall will still show net migration of hundreds of thousands rather than tens, at least there aren't many of those nasty gyppos or other assorted stereotypes here as we feared, eh?

Other than that, it was just miserable.  It wasn't so much the actual announcements, if you can even call them that, as they were all but identical to those set out by Labour's Yvette Cooper a couple of weeks back with the exception of the requirement for those wanting social housing to have lived locally for at least 2 years.  Even this is undermined by how councils also have a requirement to house those in most need, although naturally Cameron deigned not to mention this.  It was instead that it gave in to every myth, claim and lie we've come to expect from those aiming to profit from scaremongering about immigration: that we're seen as a "soft touch", that the welfare system needs to be reformed alongside immigration itself as it clearly attracts those with no intention of working, and that under Labour immigration was out of control.  All were and are untrue.

It's not that it's wrong to publicise problems with the system, as Cameron said, it's that it's wrong to not challenge the idea that immigrants are here to scrounge rather than work.  Saying that the vast majority are hard workers but then dedicating the remainder of the speech to suggesting there are huge problems rather drowns out the reality.  The emphasis on benefits also spectacularly misses the concerns of most on immigration.  Until very recently, the main concern was not that immigrants from the EU were coming here to claim benefits, it was that they were undercutting wages, stretching the resources of local public services and changing communities beyond recognition.  Cameron today didn't address either the former or the latter, only that there would a renewed emphasis on ensuring employers aren't using illegal immigrants.

Indeed, the major announcement today has been rather buried underneath all the anti-scrounger rhetoric.  The government that ensured ID cards weren't introduced (although they were never going to be after the crash anyway) for us Brits has decided that they're fine and dandy for our friends from the EU should they want to come here, as they'll be the only way of determining just what they're entitled to.  Don't then be surprised if this inevitably leads to the rest of us also needing them at some point in the future.

The problem for Cameron today has turned out that, if anything, he's gone too far even for a press that has always led the way for politicians rather than followed.  The figures we do have suggest that the number of immigrants claiming benefits is low, and that the numbers in social housing are similarly not massively increasing.  On the NHS, ministers simply don't know how much foreign nationals are costing us: it's either £20m or closer to £200m, if we're to believe Jeremy Hunt, which isn't advised.  One suspects it's closer to the £20m figure, but either way it's a drop in the ocean considering the NHS budget is almost £100bn a year, and when as we saw last week George Osborne masterminded an underspend of £2.2bn to help get his borrowing figures in line with the forecasts.

As encouraging as it is that even the Telegraph is calling for politicians to make the case for immigration rather than keep on attempting to woo the UKIP vote (which is, as has been noted, to completely misunderstand UKIP's appeal), we've gone from a situation at the last election where we had at least one party calling for an amnesty for illegal immigrants, even if they tried to kept it quiet, to that same party fully signing up to the Tories' self-defeating measures.  It seems we are as far away as ever from something approaching an informed debate, let alone an informed policy.

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3/25/2013 06:04:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, March 07, 2013 

Immigration: just the facts, Ma'am.

Panic, as even the slightest glance at recent history attests is infectious, and politicians for their part are just as susceptible as everyone else, if not more so.  Just a few weeks back it seemed as though immigration had dropped down the political agenda, or was at least not the hot button topic it had been in recent years. Cue a few scaremongering articles in the Mail and Express about the imminent flood of Romanians and Bulgarians (for which read gypsies, gangs, organised criminals and foreign scroungers) and the continuing rise in support for UKIP, and suddenly we have politicians of all stripes scrapping over who can be the harshest on the new arrivals and anyone else non-British claiming benefits. It at least makes a slight change from the seemingly constant assaults on British welfare claimants, but not much of one.

The last few weeks have been a great example of how politics often seems to work now.  Our representatives haven't been responding to public concern, as there was little in the way of complaints about immigrants claiming benefits as opposed to immigrants in general, but rather taking a non-issue, massively exaggerating it to the point at which it then does worry the public, and so demands a response.  As Jonathan Portes sets out at length, immigrants overwhelmingly put more in than they take out (they also speak English to a far greater extent than is often claimed). The only real potential problems are the NHS, where it's non-EU migrants and visitors who have been accused of taking advantage, and the issue of child benefit payments going to parents when their children have never even visited this country, and in that instance it works both ways, even if the payments in other EU countries aren't as high.

Due to this, there's not really much point in arguing with the policies outlined by Yvette Cooper today in her speech.  If making the rules on when migrants can claim Jobseeker's Allowance slightly more stringent than they already are reassures some people, then fine.  Much more useful would be a crackdown on those who exploit migrant labour, as Cooper also proposed, but just how many employers or agencies do succeed in not paying the minimum wage is debatable; it's almost certainly not as many as the public suspect and politicians make out.

Much of the attempt by Labour to get back on the front foot is though a waste of time.  Immigration has become one of those issues that regardless of how you approach it, how sensitively it's debated or how many times you repeat the facts, very few minds are changed.  The evidence for the undercutting of wages, for instance, is slight, yet it is repeatedly brought up and complained about, just as it was once a common claim that social housing being taken almost exclusively by black and Asian families.  

In part, this is the legacy of Labour's great cock-up: the failure to put in place initial controls on the 8 accession states in 2005, and the much quoted estimate that only 14,000 migrants would come a year, which was based on the belief that the other EU states would open their borders at the same time when as it turned out only ourselves, Sweden and Ireland did.  Apologising for that mistake is pointless when the effect has turned out to be so massive, as is Cooper's other comment that diversity makes us stronger when she and other politicians then say in the next sentence that immigration must now either be extremely limited or stopped altogether.  Indeed, it achieves exactly the opposite of the effect intended when, as the statistics continue to show, net migration continues to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The only way to tackle the disquiet caused by immigration is to be brutally honest.  Freedom of movement is clearly here to stay, and if anything borders are likely to become ever more open rather than closed, with a few exceptions.  It is the utter hypocrisy on the part of the Western world to say to the poor in developing countries that they must stay where they are while those lucky enough to be born in the West can essentially go wherever they please so long as they have the money to back them.  Moreover, the attempts to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands are likely to damage the economy in both the short and the long term, as we're already seeing with the numbers of foreign students wanting to come here dropping dramatically.  Closing the door to those who take almost nothing out in services whilst putting so much in isn't only phenomenally stupid, it does nothing to help those already here who have either been failed somewhere along the line or for whatever reason find themselves out of work.

This isn't a popular argument currently, it's true, and it's certainly not going to go down well initially.  When though we're still discussing immigration come 2015, when it turns out that the coalition has failed miserably to get the numbers down to the tens of thousands, and when it might well be Labour that are making the running due to that, perhaps some will come to the conclusion that it's about time they stopped treating people like fools and confronted them with the cold hard reality.  It might turn out not to be the vote loser they assume.

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3/07/2013 09:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, February 18, 2013 

Going soft? If only.

Chris asks, rhetorically, whether or not the Tories are going soft due to the move by George Osborne on tax avoidance and Tim Montgomerie's support for a mansion tax. They quite obviously aren't, not least for the reason Chris mentions, but also because they still seem to have it in their heads that portraying themselves as against immigration without actually stopping it will win them support.  You do almost suspect that all the recent scaremongering about the Bulgarians and Romanians flooding over here in a year's time is not because they are going to move here en masse, but precisely because they're not going to, with the coalition then taking the credit when they don't turn up.

This whole talking tough and then not actually doing anything process is one of those things that does undermine faith in politics.  Theresa May has no intention whatsoever of further legislating over Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, and the best that can be said for her intervention beyond the very slight impact it may have on the Eastleigh by-election is that it'll probably make judges even more determined to decide deportations on merit rather than attempt to appease the government.  Iain Duncan Smith for his part, beyond his decision to continue denigrating Cait Reilly, which says nothing whatsoever about her and absolutely everything about him, is similarly unlikely to get anywhere on "limiting" benefits to migrants, and they are most certainly not the ones putting pressure on the welfare system in the first place.

Soft simply isn't the right word for much of what government does, and this applies across the board and not just to the run by one party.  Under Labour for instance refugees from Iran who applied for asylum because they were gay were rejected as they were told they would be fine back home as long as they acted "discreetly"; since then things have moved on, with now the main reason for refusal being that the refugees aren't really gay at all, pushing some to such lengths that they've filmed themselves to demonstrate they are.  As for Sri Lanka, where some of those we've deported back to the country have since managed to return and been granted asylum after proving they were tortured on their return, today we have news of how we've sold them £2m worth of weaponry over the past year.  Meanwhile, in Libya, where it seems all the weapons we gave them to fight Gaddafi have since gone missing, we've decided we have to join in the re-arming race, and so a boat laden with the finest British defence equipment will be travelling to the country in April as a floating mini DSEI.

At least during Robin Cook's tenure as foreign secretary we pretended that we had an "ethical" foreign policy.  We didn't of course, as we carried on selling weapons to tyrannies and flogging radar systems to countries which couldn't afford them, but it was something.  Under the coalition our prime minister acts as arms dealer in chief, we urge the rich to come here while doing everything in our power to persuade the poor not to, and run ridiculous campaigns saying how great the country is regardless of the contradiction considering the former.  The best that can be said is that we haven't involved ourselves in Syria, beyond recognising the Syrian National Coalition, the opposition grouping that no one actually in Syria recognises.  And that isn't really going to figure on a list of great achievements.

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Monday, January 28, 2013 

Britain - it's shit!

There are plenty of government policies that make absolutely no sense.  Michael Gove's latest wheeze to hive off AS levels as not counting towards a full A level while also abolishing modules is spectacularly stupid and opposed by practically everyone, but then every single thing Gove has done as education secretary seems designed to annoy anyone who isn't Toby Young.  Just as dumb would be criminalising khat, although as there hasn't been any movement on that yet perhaps the Home Office is having second thoughts.  Also daft is capping benefits at one percent, which while potentially making political sense is unconscionably ignorant on an economic level.

None of the above or any of the other myriad examples of waste or foolishness quite come close though to the idea of taking out advertisements in Romania and Bulgaria telling everyone there how shit Britain is and why they shouldn't come when they gain free movement across the EU later in the year.  It's a brainfart so dense it makes the inside of your head hurt as well as stink.  What's more, even on the most basic level it falls flat on its face.  One of the oldest advertising tropes is that first off, you tell your potential customers they can't have what it is you're selling, with the obvious intention of increasing their desire for the product when you do make it available.  If we're saying they shouldn't come, they'll think, why exactly is it that they shouldn't?  Is it because Britain is in fact a land of milk and honey, benefits on tap and an atmosphere so welcoming that it resembles one of those mythical, glowingly warm pubs where everyone instantly knows your name and your pint's waiting for you?  After all, what sort of government would actively want to say their country's horrible?

Secondly, it's a tabloid idea in every sense except one.  It is the equivalent of an UP YOURS DELORS, or the Sun putting out a special French edition castigating Jacques Chirac for daring to oppose the Iraq war, or the Sun (there's a theme here) taking out an advert in the Argentinian press in revenge for President Kirchner's open letter advert to David Cameron.  Moreover, it's an idea that has been motivated by the tabloids, who've been running articles for years now scaremongering about the imminent invasion of gypsies, organised criminals and other assorted stereotypes.  Stereotypes coming over here to do battle with our stereotypes? Never!  Except, of course, actually going through with such a tabloid idea wouldn't placate the tabloids, which is presumably the intention.  Even so much as saying the idea is being thought through is the equivalent of the government saying, yep, you're right, we're about to be swamped, thereby giving them the ultimate authority to run another umpteen articles about the coming tidal wave.  Look, the government's so concerned they're taking out negative adverts!

Third, it's a mess of the government's own making.  Despite having attempted to remove targets from other parts of the public sector, whether it be the police or the NHS, with very mixed results so far, the Conservatives stupidly promised to reduce immigration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands.  Not just that they would reduce immigration, but would do so down to a round figure.  It's all well and good pledging to do something popular, as long as you know how it is you're going to achieve it.  The Conservatives haven't had a clue, and so have flailed around all over the place instead.  Hence the attacks on "bogus" colleges, which has had the effect of discouraging foreign students from coming here at all, the ever tightening rules on bringing back spouses, and the latest farce, the new citizenship test which expects applicants to imbibe the High Tory view of recent British history.  Undoubtedly it's a great advantage for immigrants to know more about their adopted country than the majority of those lucky enough to be born here, but isn't this getting things rather arse backwards?

Fourth is that it's completely inconsistent.  A couple of weeks back two of the spare parts of the monarchy drove a Mini through the Brandenburg Gate as part of some inane promotion of the best of British, and that wasn't even part of the government's "Britain is Great!" campaign. Add in the Olympics and the government's Britain is open for business rhetoric and the messages being sent are decidely mixed. Yes, they want investment and not unskilled labour, but either we're signed up to free movement within the EU or we're not.

Lastly, it's an idea motivated by the notion that we must be seen to be doing something, no matter how futile or counter-productive. There simply isn't going to be a repeat of 2004, when only Ireland and Sweden opened their borders at the same time as we did to the accession states.  Those wanting to try their luck elsewhere will be able to choose from the other 24 EU countries, and we're unlikely to come top of the bill when Germany is both nearer and has a growing economy.  Some undoubtedly will come, but the numbers are likely to be negligible.

Instead of pointing this out, the government seems to have actively set out to inflame the issue, delighting those who love to whinge on both about how awful this country is and all the bloody foreigners.  I'm quite partial myself to the odd bout of the former, but not to the point where I want those worse off to know all about it by sticking it on billboards.  In any case, the coalition is never going to be able to really capture the occasional grimness of this country in such a campaign, or showcase us properly without using a slogan along the lines of "Come to Britain - where even the dogs have neck tattoos!". Alternatively, they could just get this strip from the latest Viz blown up and plaster it everywhere.

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1/28/2013 08:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, June 11, 2012 

Drifting rightwards.

Call me naive, but I really don't think there's an intention to be specifically unpleasant to any particular group with the newly announced policy of disallowing those earning under £18,600 from bringing a foreign partner to live here. Rather, it's completely secondary that it's going to be the working classes and those born abroad who will have ensure that their love doesn't cross boundaries outside of the European Union. Sure, it's not going to be something that the UKIP tendency within the Tories are going to shed any tears over, yet it's hardly going to be a cause for celebration in the Cameron camp either.

The real reasoning behind it is two-fold: firstly, something has to be thrown towards the increasingly restive Tory grassroots, as well as the focus groups that keep reporting on the loathing for imm'igants and scroungers. Never mind that if the Euro goes down as is still possible there's likely to be an increase in both and they'll be very little we can do about it, and that the only place further cuts can be made in welfare is to pensioner's benefits, something has to be done. Second is the unrealistic promise made by the Conservatives in their manifesto, and somewhat carried into the coalition to reduce immigration from the hundreds of thousands a year to the tens of thousands, the clear implication being to return to the levels seen under the last Tory government before Labour "opened the floodgates". Numbers have instead stubbornly stuck around the 250,000 net increase level, despite the Tories repeatedly claiming that they're beginning to make progress.

To be fair to the Tories when they don't deserve it, this is a case of the cliched policy chicken of all three parties coming home to roost. At the last election all three failed to make the case for continued immigration, while at the same time defending what had gone before. No one suggested that if those who had come before had contributed so much, it was daft to say that it should now immediately cease, as that wasn't what the polls, focus groups and the tabloids were telling them. Instead of being honest, and suggesting that it was likely in the 21st century that there was little they could do to control immigration when there are 5 million Britons living abroad and the economic situation is as bad as it is, all gave the impression that the drawbridge was going to be raised. This wouldn't have been an easy thing to do, to say the least: it would have meant short-term unpopularity, and perhaps could have only been done after the election. Doing the opposite though, as all three leaders did, was to raise expectations that something would change, when they knew it was unlikely in the extreme. Disaffection, anger and unpopularity then await.

It hasn't quite ignited yet, probably because there's been so much else to quietly simmer about. All the more reason to make gestures like today's, which Theresa May made clear would do relatively little to get the numbers down. According to her Commons statement, 18% of the total is family migration, meaning that even if the entire route was closed down it wouldn't get the figures to anywhere near under 100,000. Ian Birrell makes the point that this goes dead against the Tory policy of making Britain the most family friendly country in Europe, having promised they would support families to stay together, even perhaps eventually recognising marriage in the tax system. Forcing up to 15,000 families a year to emigrate or live apart, as he writes, is "morally suspect" and even threatens the detoxification of the party.

That's a bit strong, both because the popularity of Osborne and Cameron has already slumped, and also due to how May's presentation of the measure of ensuring that the system can't be abused by scroungers rather than putting restrictions on love has mostly been swallowed whole. It does though highlight the coalition's rightwards drift: having started off with Ken Clarke's aim to reduce the prison population, we now have a new snooper's charter, secret "justice" and pointless grandstanding like "making clear" that Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is clarified, as if judges didn't already know and resent the implication that they bend over backwards to let foreign criminals stay here as long as they grow potted plants. What it does do is placate the Sun and Mail for all of a day, and at the moment, that seems to be enough.

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6/11/2012 05:05:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 15, 2011 

It never ends (or some pun involving the prime of Mr Brodie (Clark)).

One of the main reasons why politics attracts the most anally retentive of obsessives, such as people who write interminable blogs for years on the subject, is simple: it never fucking ends. Well, it sort of doesn't: most sports at least have a close season, although in football this has since been replaced by endless transfer rumours, interrupted only by the World Cup or Euro Championships every other year; politics has the times when parliament is in recess, although in principle this barely affects things. Interspersed as it has become with contemporary history, an issue is never truly settled: if declaring the End of History is about as stupid as it gets (and I do mean in the real sense that Fukuyama decided that liberal democracy had triumphed, when if there's one thing that history should teach us, all empires eventually fall), then it's equally foolish to imagine that we can't for the umpteenth time go through the case for and against in Iraq (and sadly it's now those who were against who can't shut the fuck up about how right they were, which is sad when we were right).

This is most obvious in the debate about the European Union and especially now the Euro. The new orthodoxy is that the Eurozone was always doomed to fail, and perhaps it was. The problem is that outside of those with monomania about the organisation, who for the most part are the most crushing bores in the most crushing of subjects, few consistently said so. It also ignores how even if the PIGS do eventually have to leave the Eurozone, it could eventually make it stronger, and indeed, one of the solutions being proposed is for an even more integrated fiscal union, which is not by any means a good thing in the long term.

At least the potential collapse of the entire European economic system is a pressing issue that will genuinely affect us all. Far less important is the Leveson inquiry, which it seems will now last for potentially years to come. This could be the ultimate example of being careful in what you wish for: those of us who've banged on about phone hacking and press standards for years would have always loved a judge led inquiry into the former and a royal commission into the latter; what we've got is a hodge podge in which celebrities seem determined to grab the stage for themselves. It's not perhaps surprising that Hugh Grant would like something close to French-style privacy laws when he's knocking up 31-year-olds (named Ting Ting, no less), an affair first described as "fleeting". That those who want privacy often have a lot to be private about is usually a classic misnomer, but sometimes it's also painfully close to the truth.

And so it also is on the even less life threatening issue of who authorised what when at the Home Office and UK Border Agency. Over a week on, and despite the appearances of both Theresa May and now the wonderfully named Brodie Clark before the home affairs select committee no one is any the wiser over what happened, or indeed why this should be seen as such a horrific scandal, especially when we still don't know the whole story behind Dr Fox and Mr Werritty, an issue with far greater impact on national security. May authorised a more focused scheme that according to the Tories improved detection rates (Mandy Rice-Davies etc), but didn't supposedly give Clark the go ahead to go slightly further and relax measures more widely. Some of this relaxation, it should be noted, does seem to be asking for it: not checking the passports of those on private jets for instance, always notable for being completely in line with all domestic law.

Far less ignoble is making life a little less demanding on the staff and passengers who go through our airports, especially when we're still insisting they can't take liquids on the plane over a certain size, regardless of the chances of a plane dropping out of the sky due to Islamists with exploding Fanta bottles being around 0.01%. Equally risible is the notion that going through airports is one of the main transit points for illegal migrants or potential terrorists: the former tend to come in through stowing away on trucks rather than planes, while the latter tend to be homegrown rather than foreign. We won't ever know the number of criminals or terrorists who managed to evade detection due to the relaxation, but one suspects it numbers somewhere between 0 and 0.

Rather then than putting this whole tedious affair to bed as soon as possible, it looks as though it's going to drag on till January when the official inquiry reports. As Simon Hoggart at the end of his sketch suggests, the likely explanation for the whole thing is that the UKBA has recently received a new chief executive eager to please, who swiftly discoverd something that terrified the home secretary enough to sack the old broom civil servant out of fear for her job, not caring what it meant for him. Add in the continuing hysterical attitude towards immigration, so out of kilter with reality that even David "swamping" Blunkett fears the debate is turning xenophobic, and we've got another subject to chew the fat over for weeks at a time.

You can but hope that Keith Vaz, no stranger to scandal himself, gets his way and the papers which might just clear this mess up will be released sooner than later. Until then, and this may come across as slightly hypocritical from someone who himself has proved he can't stop yabbering about inanities, we ought to shut up about it. This must cease.

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11/15/2011 11:49:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 14, 2011 

Good and bad immigration.

It isn't exactly news that politicians can at times be cynical beasts. After having campaigned fairly vigorously for that age old misnomer "controlled immigration" last year, David Cameron and the Conservatives then mostly forget they had said any such thing. The Tory policy of reducing net immigration from "hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands" (page 21 of the manifesto) didn't receive a mention in the coalition agreement, while the decent and desperately needed Liberal Democrat push for an amnesty for illegal immigrants was also thrown on the scrapheap. With the exception of Cameron's slight divergence into integration and multiculturalism during a speech on radicalisation, on the same day as the EDL marched through Luton, our dear leader hasn't so much has mentioned the topic over the past year.

What a surprise then that just three weeks before the local elections Cameron finds the time to deliver a speech on immigration to the Tory party faithful. It contains absolutely nothing he hasn't said before and mostly just emphasises what the party's long-term policy on immigration is, which is not the same thing as the coalition policy, even though he presents it as such. Call it what you want, a dog-whistle, a handy reminder to his supporters that they haven't been forgotten, something for the quietly critical tabloids to chew on, an unjustified attack on Labour, it covered all the bases.

Whether or not Vince Cable's objection to the overall tone was manufactured or not is much more difficult to ascertain. I'm certainly cynical enough about the coalition to wonder if much of the so-called divisions are purely cosmetic, playing to each party's base, determined to show that significant differences remain. Nick Clegg, as shown in his New Statesman interview last week is not very good at keeping up the pretence, and instead came off looking like a phoney with an incredibly selective memory, not to mention distinctly strange children (Do they live out the kind of existence featured in Renault car adverts? Papa? Really?). Cable's criticism of the overall tone of Cameron's speech, and "unwise comments" within which risked "inflaming extremism" wasn't exactly ferocious, especially when you consider how critical he's been in the past about the cap on migration from outside the EU. Would Cable also have so easily fell into "the trap" of being on the supposed wrong side of the debate about immigration if he wasn't just engaging in a staged fabrication of a disagreement?

If it wasn't for the highly suspicious release of a quote from Nick Clegg's office, that he had "noted rather than approved" the speech, I'd be inclined to believe that it was Cable speaking out. Instead it does look distinctly like a disagreement about nothing for the benefit of both sides' base, especially with good old Vince coming so quickly round to the "official" view, the spinning having successfully knocked Andrew Lansley's continued difficulties down the news agenda.

This is a double shame, for if even Cameron's main comments that immigration has "created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness in some neighbourhoods" were in fact relatively moderate, they were swiftly sexed up by the media into something far more brutal. The Mail had him saying it had divided Britain, a word not used once in the speech, the Express raised it to "ruined", while the Sun went with "immigration tears UK apart", about as far as from what he actually said as it was possible to imagine. Cameron notably doesn't place any blame whatsoever on the media for inflaming the debate, with their constant distortions, despicable campaigns against asylum seekers and rage-inducing insistence that you can't say anything about immigration without being called a racist, despite having done so themselves ever since the invention of the printing press regardless.

No, all of it instead goes on Labour. It was they who inflamed the debate, ministers refusing to talk about it and screaming racist, while others talked tough but did nothing. For someone aiming "to cut through the extremes of this debate and approach the subject sensibly and reasonably" this is a laughable caricature and he knows it. According to Cameron Labour's stance allowed the BNP to flourish, as if far-right politics in this country had never been in such a position before. Just as transparent is his hope for immigration to return to not being a central issue in our politics, as though at some point in the recent past it wasn't. Immigration and the arguments surrounding it have like the poor always been with us, especially so since the 60s. Labour's chief offence was that it both didn't explain what it was doing enough and that ministers repeatedly refused to defend the policy of allowing those from the eastern European accession states to come here from 2004 without restriction, which as with so much else was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, based on all other EU states opening their doors at the same time. When only Ireland and Sweden did, it wasn't exactly a shock that so many plumped to give Britain a try.

Like with any modern speech on immigration, Cameron has to praise what it's previously brought us, the all too predictable food, clothing and music, then explain exactly why we can't continue to have such nice things. Cameron and the Conservatives want "good" immigration, rather than unlimited immigration, which not only brings to mind Brass Eye, but also the deserving and undeserving. This essentially means that you're deserving if you're willing to buy your way in or if you have a rudimentary knowledge of English and the skills we need; otherwise, you can get stuffed. This applies in the cruellest of ways - Cameron is quite happy to trumpet the new requirement that those applying for a marriage visa need to demonstrate a "minimum standard of English", as if love has never been able to transcend language. And as others have pointed out, as we demand that those coming here speak English, we're cutting the courses they need in order to learn.

The worst is saved for near the end, where Cameron conflates immigration with welfare. Still it seems we have to contend with the pernicious myth that there's always been hundreds of thousands of people sitting around who could quite easily do the low-paid jobs that immigrants have taken. Like with so much else of the speech, Cameron tries to sugar the pill by stating, quite rightly, that there are never a fixed amount of jobs, and that immigrants don't just take those already available, they also create wealth and more new jobs; then he baldly claims that migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left open by the unreformed welfare state. This is nonsense, not only as Chris outlines, but also for the reason that it's ludicrous to expect those who have been on incapacity benefit (as the numbers on JSA for long periods prior to the recession were negligible) for years to move straight into such often back-breaking labour as cleaning or crop-picking, jobs that have been taken overwhelmingly by young migrants who can quickly move to where the work is, have no dependants and are often employed by agencies that control the entire process, where British workers rarely get a look in.

Even if the Tories ultimately succeed in their bid to get the overall numbers settling here each year under 100,000, we'll still it seems be able to rely on the issue being firmly grasped once campaigning is under way again. The sad thing to note is that we used to have a third party that was prepared to make the case for unpopular causes, only for it to be subsumed into a coalition which now has "disagreements" purely for their own ultimate benefit. No one could possibly want "bad immigration" though, could they?

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4/14/2011 11:21:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 

The logical conclusion of Labour's bigotry.

There's only one real consolation that Labour activists especially can take from today's unparalleled clusterfuck: that Brown didn't say something much much worse about the instantly famous Gillian Duffy, as doubtless he has about other people he's met while on the campaign trail once they've gone, and as almost certainly every politician and canvasser has. In what seemed like a real time episode of The Thick of It, except without the jokes or pathos, we went in a matter of hours from an average Labour voter being branded a "bigoted woman" to the prejudiced pensioner in question calling upon the services of a PR firm to handle the demands of the media.

Most bewildering of all was that the 5-minute long conversation Brown had with Duffy wasn't anywhere near the disaster which he felt it had been. He in fact handled her questions well, only slipping up on the immigration question which he didn't attempt to properly answer, but then Duffy's observation that

You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're... all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?

was not exactly the most eloquent of sentiments. It was, to use the horrendous political terminology for a event which isn't stage-managed, thought through and thoroughly vetted, approaching "genuine". The real poser, for me at least, is just why Brown felt it had gone so badly; if anything, it wouldn't have been used for the reason that it was well within his comfort zone. Without wanting to descend into amateur psychoanalysis, if Brown is currently that uncertain, that incapable of knowing when he's coming across well, how is he managing to keep going with the minituae of campaigning in general? Is this the real reason why he seems to be spending almost all of his time visiting schools and other "neutral" places where he's unlikely to find any views more forcefully expressed than those of Mrs Duffy's?

To judge by the completely unscientific method of the BBC's brief canvassing of views in Rochdale itself, this might not be the catastrophe that Brown, Labour and the media think it is. If Duffy's views actually had been bigoted, then who knows, Brown might even have gained some legitimacy from saying so, even if it wasn't to her face. If Blair had commented in a similar fashion about Sharon Storer, the most obvious recent comparison, then you could have also have understood it more. That was the kind of haranguing, which while cathartic for Storer, was something that Blair himself could do almost nothing personally about, and which The Thick of It satirised effectively in the episode in which Hugh Abbott was confronted by the woman demanding to know whether he'd ever had to clean up his own mother's piss. This though was just the average sentiment of an ordinary person (sorry Justin), someone you would have imagined that Brown has talked to repeatedly over the length of the campaign. He might well have felt the same afterwards, and said much the same, and it could have just been the build-up and frustration of repeating himself over and over again. He might well have felt, like Hugh Abbott, that ordinary voters are sometimes the equivalent of an alien species; the Westminster bubble can do that to a politician, especially a prime minister or minister that doesn't do much in the way of constituency work. But after three weeks?

In a way, this has been Brown and Labour's downfall in a way much more than just the obvious. While the view that you can't talk about immigration without being branded a racist or a bigot has always been nonsense, as we've talked about little else for decades as needs to be repeatedly pointed out, this has been a government that has deliberately time and again gone out of its way to appease the right-wing consensus on immigration. We've had not only David Blunkett talking of local services being "swamped", but the open equation of those seeking asylum both with criminals and with "illegal" migration, as well as open collusion with the likes of the Sun over "asylum madness" campaigns. It has to be remembered that the wave of eastern European migration that we've had since 2004 did not happen, as the tabloids would have us believe by design, but by mistake: the estimate of only 14,000 coming to work here was based on the assumption that all European countries would open their borders at the same time, only for all other EU member states apart from the UK, Ireland and Sweden to delay doing so. Why didn't Brown, instead of glibly asserting that the same number had left the country when they haven't, make the case for migration, not just in the crude economic sense, but in the terms that it has enriched both our nation and culture to such a degree that it has become completely unmeasurable? By not defending immigration Labour has connived in exactly the truly bigoted Little Englander attitude which says the country is full and that the drawbridge must be immediately slammed shut. It has reaped what it has sown.

It's not then going to about how Brown was two-faced, doing exactly what Labour have been alleging David Cameron has been doing in its adverts when the camera isn't on, but rather on how he's proved the point once and for all that you can't say anything about immigration, even something relatively mild, without a politician privately regarding you as a terrible bigot. This is going to be framed in the terms of what the "little" person thinks against the behemoth which is both the establishment and the Westminster consensus, which is laughably what that very pillar of it, the right-wing tabloid press, has always tried to set it as. It's what the chattering classes, the Guardianistas and those who will never feel the effects of it have imposed on the rest of the nation, and at last the bare truth has been exposed. It's going to result in the last seven days of the campaign doubtless being centred around the immigration question, with the Sun especially pouring that old favourite, the bucket of shit, all over Brown's head.

If the days events had ended with Brown, head in hands on Radio 2 realising what he'd done, it might just have been salvageable. Instead we have Brown emerging from Duffy's house, grinning from ear to ear, looking like a mixture of Richard Nixon and Chamberlain declaring that he had a piece of paper with Herr Hitler's signature on it that meant peace in our time, delivering only the second most insincere statement of the day (Alastair Campbell's blog sadly doesn't seem to have permalinks), about being a "penitent sinner". Making confident predictions about this election has so far proved to be a fool's game, but it's difficult to shake the feeling that Gordon Brown might just have sealed the Labour party's third place finish.

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4/28/2010 09:28:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 

The VIP treatment.

Here's one of those especially crass Sun articles written with the type of feigned ignorance so prevalent in the tabloids:

ILLEGAL immigrants are getting the VIP treatment when booted out of Britain - with personal security escorts costing almost £500 each.

Yes, you read that right - the VIP treatment. I don't know what VIP means to you, but I somehow doubt that those who considered themselves such would put up for long with what the average failed asylum seeker or illegal immigrant faces prior to their deportation, often provided by the same private security firms. The last report into Colnbrook (PDF) immigration removal centre, ran by Serco (glossy corporate, touchy-feely everything is wonderful page), where many are held prior to their deportation due to its location near to Heathrow, found that it was struggling to cope and that safety was a significant concern.

That though is nothing when compared to the true VIP treatment when those lucky enough to be leaving are taken to the flights to return them to their home country. The reason why "personal security escorts" are used is twofold - firstly because there are few officials and staff within the UK Border Agency who are authorised to use force and as result many first attempts to deport individuals are abandoned because those whose time has come dare to resist - and secondly as many within the UKBA are not prepared to actually see the policies which they implement put into effect.

In a way, you can't blame them - the horror stories from some of the chartered flights are visceral in their intensity. On one of the first chartered flights back to Iraq a detainee smuggled a blade on board and slashed his stomach, while another concussed himself after banging his head repeatedly against a window. Those were probably the ones which weren't restrained, with others either handcuffed or even wearing leg irons. Charter planes aren't always used though - there was the notable case of a British Airways flight to Lagos where the passengers in economy class mutinied after seeing the plight of a shackled detainee who wouldn't stop screaming, with the supposed "ringleader" arrested and charged only to be cleared over a year later of "behaving in a threatening, abusive, insulting or disorderly manner" towards the crew.

Then again, you wonder what the Sun expects. After all, according to them we roll out the red carpet in welcoming immigrants and asylum seekers in the first place, and the commenters on the piece certainly agree. Might as well extend the gesture when we forcibly throw them out as well then, surely? It does though also prove that simply the government can't do anything right - let too many come here in the first place and spends too much when it gets rid of them, regardless of the much higher cost of keeping them detained here before their deportation - why it bothers when there is simply no political benefit in keeping up such brutal but also ineffective policies remains a mystery. Perhaps, just for the Sun, we could think up something that would negate the need to deport them at all; there are after all many lessons which we can learn from history...

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1/26/2010 09:46:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 01, 2009 

Drop your bombs between the minarets...

Stopped clocks and all that, but I think Daniel Hannan very succinctly nailed the reasons why the Swiss vote on banning minarets was, as he put it, regrettable (ht Neil):

The decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets strikes me as regrettable on three grounds.

First, it is at odds with that other guiding Swiss principle, localism: issues of this kind ought surely to be settled town by town, or at least canton by canton, not by a national ban.

Second, it is disproportionate. There may be arguments against the erection of a particular minaret by a particular mosque – but to drag a constitutional amendment into the field of planning law is using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut.

Third, it suggests that Western democracies have a problem, not with jihadi fruitcakes, but with Muslims per se – which is, of course, precisely the argument of the jihadi fruitcakes.

Hannan could have even done without the first point entirely: he's quite right in his second that the construction of any conspicuously large structure, religious or otherwise, should be considered on a case by case basis. A blanket ban on minarets is egregiously illiberal, it goes without saying; it is, in this political era of "sending messages", the equivalent of telling Muslims not to get above themselves. This might be a free, democratic, multicultural country where freedom of worship is cherished, but don't go getting any ideas that your place of worship can have a fancy tower, that's beyond the pale.

The most troubling thing about the Swiss vote is that everyone imagined that something which was of a minority interest, Muslim-baiting, which despite the efforts of some has not yet become a spectator sport, would result in a minority turning out to support it. As it was, there wasn't an overwhelming majority in favour of the ban, with 57% on a 53% turnout supporting it, yet it was still a major surprise that it passed. Equally lacking was the intellectual case for the ban: the claim that the minaret has no scriptural basis, while accurate, is also irrelevant; there isn't, as far as I'm aware, any verses in New or Old Testament which advocate the construction of church spires, which could equally be construed as a architectural statement of religious power, but then not many of those are being built these days.

When you reduce the exact reasons for the vote down to their respective bare minimums, you're left with unpleasant choices to make about why it was passed: either that 57% aren't taken with large structures; they're openly xenophobic and are resistant to change of any sort; or they believe the scaremongering about Islamification and are worried about immigration. As it is, it's probably a bit of all three. Almost any planning applications in this country are routinely opposed by either nimbys or bananas (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything), regardless of their merit; some of those who supported it will have been openly racist and worried sick of how we're all dhimmis; while likely the vast majority just aren't convinced about the merits of immigration and believed that minarets are, as was argued, the thin end of the wedge.

Unfortunately, this reflects badly on Europe as a whole: while we've enjoyed the benefits of immigration for decades, even while complaining about it, we seem to have decided that now the drawbridge must close. Watch any political debate programme and you'll only probably hear the Liberal Democrats make the case for immigration now; the other parties will of course laud immigration in the past, but conspicuously say that now we need caps. When we're afraid, out of fear of opprobrium, to support immigration both in the past and now, we hand the likes of BNP the entire floor with which to work. The same goes for defending Muslims from those who wish to portray them all as niqab wearing militants determined to establish hand-chopping emporiums on the high street: for too long we've been prepared to shout "racist!" without backing the argument up. Then again, we also aren't helped by Sayeedi Warsi when she does the equivalent of declaring some Muslims takfir for disagreeing with her (while they did the same with her). We need to reach out to everyone, regardless of views, entrenched or otherwise. The alternative is the superficial but significant statements of intent, which was just what the Swiss vote was.

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12/01/2009 10:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, November 19, 2009 

Dumbing down Michael Gove style.

I'm not the biggest fan of Ed Balls, but anything that makes Michael Gove look like an utter tit is fine by me, via John B:



While over at Lib Con we're promised a series of articles on immigration, which look set to be essential reading.

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11/19/2009 08:55:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, April 27, 2009 

Immigration and the Gurkhas.

Causes don't come much more righteous than the campaign for retired Gurkhas to be allowed to settle in this country. Following Friday's derisory if not downright insulting decision from the Home Office that would at most allow only 100 to emigrate here, the Sun and doubtless other papers are preparing campaigns, or in the Sun's case, a rather inaptly named "crusade" for their right to live here. Even the British National Party, which only last week talked of how other immigrants could never be considered British because they are of "foreign stock", supports their cause.

As could have been expected, the Gurkhas and their rights are being compared unfavourably with those who have also settled here in recent years who have not been welcomed with such open arms. The Sun lists, variously, those who slip in here to sponge off the taxpayer (mostly a myth), students granted visas to bogus colleges, the Afghan hijackers, and those who smuggle themselves in from France. The Sun, it should be noted, seems to have been rather kinder to the eastern Europeans who have entered the country to work since 2004 than the other tabloids, mainly perhaps due to it directly appealing to them in specially published papers. Nonetheless, no one could confuse the Sun with a paper that supports fully open borders, like say, the Guardian or the Independent.

The problem with the emphasis on the Gurkhas is that it means even less attention for those already here that are suffering under the vagaries of our asylum and immigration system. Almost everyone agrees that not allowing those who are awaiting the decision over their status, as well as those who are designated to be "failed" asylum seekers to work is a ridiculous situation which impoverishes all involved while contributing to the "black" economy and so robs the exchequer of tax revenue. Then there's today's little short of horrifying, if not in the least bit surprising report from the children's commissioner regarding the detention of children at Yarl's Wood (PDF). Mark Easton provides a summary:

What sort of country sends a dozen uniformed officers to haul innocent sleeping children out of their beds; gives them just a few minutes to pack what belongings they can grab; pushes them into stinking caged vans; drives them for hours while refusing them the chance to go to the lavatory so that they wet themselves and locks them up sometimes for weeks or months without the prospect of release and without adequate health services?

It highlights how we have completely different attitudes when it comes to outsiders. Even though we have one of the highest child incarceration rates in Europe, we would still regard the locking up of those charged with or convicted of no crime as being abhorrent. Yet this does not stop us from doing it to those whom, in the vast majority of cases, were genuinely fleeing oppression and then find their families experiencing much the same in a so-called civilised country. Undoubtedly, some are out to take advantage of our hospitality, and some are simply economic migrants claiming asylum, but even then their children are not complicit in or responsible for their actions. There has to be an alternative.

To get some sense of perspective, the number of Gurkhas that might take advantage of the full right to settle here is estimated at around 36,000. The Sun uses the word "just" before that number. The number that sought asylum here in 2007, by comparison, was 23,430. You can't imagine for a moment any tabloid newspaper using "just" before reporting that figure. Indeed, the hysteria at the beginning of the decade, when asylum applications hit a high of over 100,000 a year was such that the clampdowns which are now in effect were introduced, with targets for how many "failed" asylum seekers would be deported each year the main innovation. Such targets make no allowance for the personal situations of those who are abitrarily decided to be the next to go, including the likes of Ama Sumani, who was sent back to Ghana regardless of the fact she could not receive treatment for her cancer there. She was dead within two months. The Lancet called it "atrocious barbarism", and it's hard to disagree. Not treating with respect those who fought for this country might be described similarly, but surely we also owe a debt to those who come here seeking sanctuary to at least treat them with more than an ounce of humanity.

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4/27/2009 10:15:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, February 03, 2009 

The Lindsey refinery protests and the political implications.

The general disarray over the Lindsey protests and the wildcat strikes in solidarity on the wider left is indicative of the general malaise which has fallen upon those who should, in a recession caused by allowing capitalism to run completely rampant, be reaping the benefits. Here is a cause which is clear - supporting workers who want to work, the same workers so often slandered as lazy and more content with sponging on benefits, but who are being denied jobs because of the absurd vagaries of outsourcing across continents, combined with corporations taking advantage of rulings at the European Court of Justice.

There was certainly initial cause for concern, it must be admitted. The appropriation of the xenophobic "British jobs for British workers" slogan, stolen by Gordon Brown from the far-right, itself illegal under European law, suggested that these protests might not have been to demand jobs but instead the first public rumblings of discontent over New Labour's open door immigration policy's effect on the ordinary British worker. There were indications that the protests, rather than being union organised, were the first signs that the British National Party was effectively starting to make headway amongst those more likely to be union members than members of the far-right. These, thankfully, seem to have been misplaced: the BNP were sent packing from Lindsey yesterday, despite their lies about being welcomed, and another site has quickly been exposed as a BNP front. Even more encouragingly, another site which seems to be directly linked to the protesters, bearfacts.co.uk, seems to be far more representative of the protesters' position: militant, and unrelentingly left-wing, with clear demands.

The socialist left, always divided, has been getting its ideological knickers in a twist. The Socialist Workers' Party, always wanting an idealised working class rather than the one we have in reality, quickly denounced the apparent nationalist sentiment and appealed for international working class solidarity. While there is something in this argument, considering the movement of construction workers across borders, this ignores the key facts in this dispute: that the workers in Lindsey were depending and expecting that these jobs would be available to them, when Total's outsourcing meant they didn't even get a look in. This was what sparked the protests, not that foreign workers were being employed in a fair process. The Socialist Party seems to be the only political grouping with representation on the unofficial strike committee, and unsurprisingly are fully behind the action, stressing that this is aimed at company bosses, not at foreign workers themselves.

At the other extreme, the response by the Labour party has been completely dreadful. Whether because Brown has been spooked by his ridiculous, ill-thought out slogan coming back to haunt him, or because organised labour is something which the Labour party had hoped it had cowed, his idiotic statement that the strikes were "not defensible", before going on to claim that he had meant something completely different from the words that had emanated from his mouth at the party conference in 2007 showed just how bankrupt his thinking on the recession has become. His pledges of retraining are too little too late and completely miss the point when there are jobs here that no one needs to retrain for but which they have no chance of filling. That Mandelson, the architect and espouser of completely relentless free trade with no regards whatsoever for the consequences for ordinary workers barely disguised his contempt while dismissing the protests on the grounds that there must "no return to protectionism", as if workers protesting for jobs were demanding isolation and self-sufficency, was no surprise.

Labour's woeful attitude can only be contrasted with the Conservatives' apparent rediscovery of moral or ethical capitalism. While this will always be a contradiction in terms, David Cameron's positioning of his party as being more likely to tame economic policy than Labour is welcome, however shallow the actual substance is behind it. We should be under no illusions that many Conservative policies, such as on welfare, inheritance tax and the "broken society" are inherently reactionary, but we really are starting to edge towards the time where it becomes impossible to be even slightly content with the status quo any longer. Their immediate response at the time of Brown's "British jobs for British workers" remark was to challenge it and show it up as both xenophobic, unworkable and unimplementable, and while they too denounce the strikes, they have been far more receptive than their supposed left-wing opponents have been.

Derek Simpson's proposals for resolving the protests and the solidarity strikes are a good start, but they are only that. While the unions cannot because of the anti-trade union legislation take formally part in the secondary action, they could be doing so much more to put pressure on Labour to challenge the European Court of Justice rulings at the very least. As Lenin points out, Labour's stance from the very beginning has been to provide opt-outs from European legislation which protects workers on the continent but which leaves those here as some of the most vulnerable and easy to be sacked, all to the delight of the CBI and the right-wing press. Whether it's the 48-hour working week or the chapter of fundamental rights, our politicians have long kept rights from British workers which others can take for granted. Polly Toynbee is also right to point out that unions, contrary to the myth and the way any strikes are now covered, are becoming ever weaker, with fewer strikes than ever before.

One of the main fears was that the recession would cause an already cruel country to become even harsher, more selfish and introverted, individuals left blaming each other or the entirely wrong people for their hardship. Instead, as the strikes have shown, despite initial misinterpretations, working class solidarity is still alive and well and capable of causing great political discomfort. The challenge now is to turn this solidarity into a campaign movement which fights for all workers, regardless of nationality, to be given a fair chance of employment and extended rights across the board. That will be much more difficult even than turning up at 5:30am outside a refinery in driving snow.

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2/03/2009 10:27:00 pm | | | links to this post

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