British Politics

When journalists write articles about whether countries are free or not, as with this piece in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf about India, they often rely on the ratings from Freedom House. Reading Wolf’s article, my interest was piqued concerning what Freedom House says about the post-Brexit UK, and specifically for the freedoms that it classes as “civil liberties”. Given that one recent major study — Chandran Kukathas’s Immigration and Freedom — makes a compelling argument that immigration restrictions involve extensive restrictions on everyone’s liberty, I was interested to see how this would be reflected both in Freedom House’s criteria and in its use of those criteria in country reports.

First of all then, Freedom House’s methodology. There would seem to be several relevant parts:

F4. Do laws, policies, and practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population?

Do members of such groups face legal and/or de facto discrimination in areas including employment, education, and housing because of their identification with a particular group?

As I’ve discussed before on Crooked Timber, and as is extensively documented by Amelia Gentleman in her book The Windrush Betrayal, the UK’s hostile environment legislation, pioneered by then Home Secretary Theresa May, had the effect of denying to many people, particularly of Caribbean origin, employment, housing and health. Many children born to immigrants in the UK are denied access to higher education because of restrictive nationality laws.

[click to continue…]

In a democracy one might, naively, imagine that political deliberation would involve the presentation of the arguments that people think bear on the question at hand. That is, if someone is in favour of a policy they would present the arguments that they believe support it and if someone is against it they they would do the opposite. One of the surreal aspects of British parliamentary debate on refugees and asylum is that neither the government nor the opposition do anything of the kind, and nor, for that matter do the media do much to improve things.

Consider, that everybody knows that Rishi Sunak’s harsh denial of the right to claim asylum of those who arrive “illegally” is motivated by the fact that the base of the Tory party and a sizeable chunk of “red wall” voters are strongly anti-immigration and that Tory strategists are concerned about the “small boats” issue, both because they are worried that a lack of border control gives off a sign of incompetence and because they want to expose Labour as “weak” on “illegal immigration”. In the Tory press, refugees and asylum seekers are constantly demonized as freeloaders, economic migrants, and young male invaders who pose a threat both of sexual predation and terrorism. (The European far-right, including Italy’s Salvini, France’s Zemmour, and the German AfD, in praising the British policy, do so explicitly as keeping the brown hordes at bay.) Labour, on the other hand, while they have a poor record of support for refugee rights, at least stand for maintaining the current human rights framework and upholding the right to claim asylum as set out in the 1951 Convention.
[click to continue…]

The UK is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, along with a number of other international instruments providing for humanitarian protection. The Convention provides that someone who is a refugee – a status that they have on the basis of their objective circumstances, having a well-founded fear of persecution on specific grounds and being outside their country of citizenship or habitual residence – must be granted certain protections by signatory countries. The most important of these is that they not be sent back to a place where they are at risk of persecution. The weakness of the Convention is that people cannot usually secure recognition as refugees by a country unless they claim asylum on its territory. Accordingly, wealthy nations seek to make it the case that those wanting protection cannot physically or legally get onto the territory to make a claim. That way, states can both vaunt their status as human rights defenders (“we support the Convention”) and nullify its effect in practice.

Today, ostensibly as a response to the “small boats” crisis, which has seen tens of thousands of people from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran arrive in the south of England after crossing the channel, the Conservative government has announced new plans to deter refugees. Those arriving will no longer be able to claim asylum in the UK, as the government will not try to find out whether they are refugees or not, they will be detained, and then they will be removed to their country of origin or to a third country (potentially breaching the non-refoulement provision of the Convention). The plan has been to send them to Rwanda, although because of legal challenges nobody has actually been sent and, anyway, Rwanda lacks the capacity. Even the plan to detain arrivals in the UK runs up against the problem that the UK lacks the accommodation to do so. In addition, people who cross in small boats are to be denied the possibility of ever settling in the UK or of securing citizenship. So as well as being a stain on the UK’s human rights record and a measure of great cruelty, the plans appear to be practically unworkable.

The government, echoed by the Labour opposition, blames “evil smuggling gangs” as the “root cause” of the small boats crisis. But, of course, the real root cause of the crisis are the measures the UK takes to evade its obligations under the Refugee Conventions, measures that make it necessary for anyone wanting to claim asylum on the territory to enter without the authorization of the UK government. People at risk of persecution, whether Iranian women protesting against the veil, or Afghan translators who worked with the British government, are not granted regular visas to hop on a flight, nor will they be able to get to the UK by road or rail. The UK has sealed these routes, making those who want to cross turn to the boats as a solution.
[click to continue…]

In any society, certain needs have to be catered for, either socially or privately. At a minumum, those unable to work, because they are too young, too old, or too sick have to be cared for. Of course, they can be cared for in ways that are better or worse for them, but caring there must be, and that is going to take someone’s time, labour, and money.

I’ve been thinking about these rather obvious facts over the past few days partly because a report came out showing how many people – mainly women – are being driven out of the the UK workforce by the need to care for relatives, given that the social care system is broken. At present, there are also a lot of people out of the UK labour market either because they can’t work due to COVID and its after-effects, or because the underfunded National Health Service has been shattered by the pandemic and they can’t get the treatment they need in a timely fashion for other health problems they have. If left languishing, the skills these people have will atrophy. Many of them will never work again.

At the same time, our soon-to-be-former Prime Minister has been pushing her “pro-growth” agenda, which largely consisted of tax cuts, and her now-former Home Secretary mocked the anti-growth coalition of “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati”, of which I am proud to consider myself a member.

Their central assumption is that growth is best served by a low-tax economy and that public spending needs radical reduction, with the fat-cutting exercise of the last twelve years now to be extended to the bones. Well, I hope readers can see the problem. You don’t get growth by pursuing policies that effectively force people to give up productive work either through their own sickness, or in order to care for other people. If these needs are not met socially, they will be met privately, and, again, because it bears repeating, in ways that are disproportionately damaging to women.
[click to continue…]

Yesterday was a terrible day for anyone seeking refuge in the United Kingdom, a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Obsessed by a small number of people arriving on its south coast from France, the UK government has signed a memorandum of association with Rwanda under which people deemed inadmissible to have their claim for asylum assessed by the UK will be transferred to Rwanda to be dealt with under the Rwandan refugee system. Boris Johnson, for whom this announcement conveniently deflects attention from a finding of criminality against him, expects that tens of thousands of people will be sent to Rwanda. One of the claims made in support of the deal is that Britain’s capacity is not unlimited, but the proposed solution is to dump people in a much smaller and poorer country.

As usual ministers are trumpeting the lie that the UK has a “proud record” of refugee protection, whereas in fact the UK takes a very small number of refugees compared to neighbouring countries such as France and Germany. The UK recently set up bespoke schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Hong Kong Chinese. Hardly any Ukrainians have arrived and many have faced formidable bureaucratic obstacles in getting a visa; Afghans cannot apply from Afghanistan and those that arrived in the evacuation following the fall of Kabul are now languishing in poor conditions in overcrowded hotels. As a performative measure to show how much he cared about Ukrainians, Johnson apppointed a new minister for refugees, whom he then neglected to inform about the deal with Rwanda.
[click to continue…]

Lately, I find I’ve been spending more and more time looking at Facebook groups of old photographs of Bristol, the city where I live. I particularly enjoy the aerial photographs of the interwar period, often colorized. There are lots of reasons for this: I like photographs, I like history, I like cities. But it isn’t just Bristol, I can also spend hours on the Shorpy site, sometimes going to Google Street View for a modern take, and I own several books comparing the Parises of Marville and Atget and the New York of Berenice Abbott to the same scenes today, as well as multiple volumes of Reece Winstone’s collection of historic Bristol pictures. So what’s the attraction, indeed the compulsion? What is drawing me and others to these scenes? And does this attraction also have a problematic side to it?

One common response to the images is a sense of thwarted possibility. You see a functioning, bustling city, full of life, and full of beatiful surviving buildings, densely packed. The train is everywhere, with bridges, tracks, sidings, sheds to match. Sometimes a locomotive is in view. The rail infrastructure criss-crosses with the water, canal and harbours. Factories with their chimneys sit adjacent to medieval churches with their towers and spires. The technology often looks amazing, as with the Ashton Avenue Bridge (1905)(covered for photoblogging a while back), which in its day was a double-decker swing structure, with road on the top deck and rail running below. These days it has but one functioning level – the old rail deck is for pedestrians and cyclists – and it hasn’t swung since 1951. The “then” pictures give us the romance of industrial modernity combined with the charm of the medieval.
[click to continue…]

I’ve been listening to longform radio documentaries ever since I started listening to Radio 4/The Home Service more than 50 years ago. I can’t remember anything better than this series about the Brixton Riot of 1981, hosted by a chap called Big Narstie (of whom I had never heard, but who my somewhat-cooler-than-me son-in-law assures me is a generally good chap). The combination of careful historical analysis, eyewitness testimony, dramatic recreation (of which I am generally skeptical, but is done, here, carefully and sparingly) is brilliant. Mr Narstie himself is charming. He seems genuinely moved by some of the stories within the story, and manages to convey his enthusiasm about just how much progress has been made while insisting that much is left to do. It’s not until episode 7 (of 8) that we get to the riot itself. What the series does is explain why the riot (and the riots that followed in the summer of 81) happened, and to do that it traces the history of police/community relations in south London from the mid-1960’s. It’s not perfect. There’s no real discussion of the St. Paul’s riot from the previous year. And the thread about the New Cross house fire loses steam a little bit: it is not made clear to the listener that forensics eventually established that the fire began inside the house, which is a pity, because the relevance of the New Cross fire is that however it was started no reasonable person in that community could believe anything that the police told them.

Two police officers from the time tell their stories. One is frank and straightforward – the police force he joined was populated substantially by racist criminals, and almost entirely, otherwise, by people who were either implicated in, or happy to turn a blind eye to, the lawlessness of their colleagues. (Political scientists can correct me here, but from casual observation there does seems to be a pretty general rule: when you’re trying to explain rioting during peacetime in liberal democracies a good starting point is police/community relations, and it’s not unusual to find a long history of criminality toward the rioting community on the part of the police). The other officer is much more defensive, tarring the young men who were regularly stopped and searched under the Sus laws, beaten up, arrested, and “fitted up”, as criminals. But there is one amusing moment, in which he says, probably with at least an element of truth, something to the effect of “People say we were racist. But Blacks had moved into that area, and we treated them the way that we treated the people who had lived there before”.

Many of the stories of individual encounters with police officers that are told in the first few episodes are shocking and should be very hard to believe. I think it is worth dwelling a little, as the podcast doesn’t, on just why so many people not directly affected by the way Brixton and other Black communities were policed, did not understand the problem. To understand it you had to be willing to believe that (often violent) lawbreaking was the norm in the Metropolitan Police. Think of your own workplace. Imagine that you violently assaulted a someone you had just grabbed off the pavement/sidewalk in front of 10 of your colleague. How much push back would you get? Wouldn’t somebody get a little nervous that you, or they, would get into trouble? Now imagine that you do it again the next day. Now imagine that several of your colleagues do the same thing in the next few weeks. And then boast about it in the cafeteria. Most people in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations did not inhabit workplaces where that was normal, and, I think, found it very hard to take seriously the idea that the police, in particular, were like that. Especially if they lived in part of the country (and there were some) which was relatively well policed. [1]

Unless, of course, you had some direct experience of the Met yourself.

[click to continue…]

A Brexit deal has finally happened, so I’m reposting these thoughts, originally from 2016 , which seems like a thousand years ago, and previously edited and reposted in 2019.

Since the collapse of faith in neoliberalism following the Global Financial Crisis, the political right has been increasingly dominated by Trumpism. But in most cases, including the US, this has so far amounted to little more than Trilling’s irritable mental gestures. To the extent that there is any policy program, it is little more than crony capitalism. Of all the Trumpist groups that have achieved political power the only ones that have anything amounting to a political program are the Brexiteers.

The sustainability of Trumpism as a political force will depend, in large measure, on the perceived success or failure of Brexit. So, what will the day after Brexit look like, and more importantly, feel like? I’ll rule out the so-called “soft Brexit” where Britain stays in the EU for all practical purposes, gaining some minor concessions on immigration restrictions. It seems unlikely and would be even more of an anti-climax than the case I want to think about.

It’s easy to imagine a disaster, and maybe that will happen. But suppose everything goes relatively smoothly. That is, Britain leaves the EU and the single market, but gets deals in place that keep trade flowing smoothly, retains visa-free travel for visitors and so on.

What will the day after feel like?

[click to continue…]

These are unpleasant times to be British, if you also happen to be of cosmopolitan disposition, if you value good governance, and if you think that government ought to be restrained by the law. Boris Johnson’s government has announce its intention to break international law “in limited and specific ways” as the UK’s negotiations with the EU over a future trade deal founder and we slide towards no-deal and international isolation. Henry explores some of the background to this in the “Northern Ireland backstop” over at The Monkey Cage. Johnson proposes to tear up parts of an international treaty, which he hailed as a good deal as recently as January and which was the basis on which he campaigned in the last general election. It was put into UK law by this Parliament, only a few months back, on a tight timetable with restricted opportunity for scrutiny. Various Tory politicians, including Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May, are unhappy with the prospect of breaking international law, arguing that nobody will have reason to trust the word of the British government ever again. The government’s senior legal civil servant has resigned over the issue and its implications for the rule of law. Critics point out that it weakens the UK’s ability to complain when other states, such as China, break their international agreements at will. (I assume that assurances will be given and any rebel Tories will back off, as they have done repeatedly over the past four years.) Johnson’s more extreme supporters, in places like Spiked,¹ are already engaging in the familiar rhetoric of treachery to defame anyone who is critical of the UK’s “negotiating position”. Presumably Johnson is banking on Trump’s re-election, a further trashing of international norms and a friendly US government, because without that complete isolation beckons.

Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, a member of the Cabinet that is happy to disobey the law, has characterized climate protestors as “criminals” and suggested that Extinction Rebellion could be classified as an organized crime group. She’s also been active around a confected “refugee crisis” concerning a few people who have crossed the Channel in dinghies (most of whom, it turns out are bona fide refugees) and the government is making noises about changing the law to make it easier to deport people, raising the possibility in the minds of observers that the UK could walk away from its obligations under the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. It is almost as an afterthought that I mention that because of the Johnson government’s mismanagement, the UK has one of the highest death rates in the world and a strategy for fighting the disease that seems to consist mainly of announcing “world beating” measures that fail to materialize. Meanwhile, because of COVID-19, rights to political protest have been severely curtailed,² and organizers of gatherings face financial penalties of £10,000 each. If COVID doesn’t go away soon, then restrictions on our ability to resist the policies of the Johnson government will be in place when no-deal Brexit comes in January and the economic hit from COVID is compounded by food shortages and further mass job losses. Will the UK even survive all this? Pro-EU Scotland will want to secede as soon as it can, which might mean a hard border at Berwick-on-Tweed and a united Ireland would be one solution to the problems caused by the Conservative and Unionist Party’s Brexit outcome. I’d say “Hungary here we come”, but at least Hungary, as an EU member, continues to enjoy access to European markets.

Yesterday, one of those reports was released purporting to reveal some things about British political attitudes. The take-home was that the public were closer to Labour than the Tories on the economic dimension but that things were reversed when it came to social attitudes, with voters being more authoritarian and traditional than their representatives and more closely aligned with the Tories. This, coupled with the claim that the social values dimension is gaining in importance compared to the economic one, looms large in some “political science” explanations of Brexit and Tory success.

Looking at the report, I noticed an odd thing: one of the questions was about “traditional British values” and whether respondents thought young people should respect them more. I imagined, naively that there must be a list somewhere of what these values are, given that they are purportedly what voters have opinions about. But no. Respondents are expected to interpret the question for themselves, so if a person thinks Britain is traditionally open and tolerant and thinks this has gone into reverse in recent years and says “yes”, their response will nevertheless count as a score for authoritarianism. I don’t know how likely my hypothetical case is, but it is at least possible, particularly, perhaps, from a disappointed immigrant who had been sold on a particular image of Britain.

There is, by the way, an official list of British values. It occurs in the case of the British goverment’s “Prevent” strategy, which is supposed to combat extremism. According to that policy, the British values are “democracy”, “the rule of law”, “individual liberty and mutual respect”, and “Tolerance of different faith and beliefs”. If you run an educational establishment, you have specific duties to encourage these. (A nursery for under-5s I’m acquainted with had a little official explainer on the wall, telling its charges that the “rule of law” is about “following the rules”.) I suppose, hypothetically, that a respondent with these values in mind, and thinking of the Brexiteer and Johnson record on them – plans for voter suppression, illegal prorogation of Parliament, frequent abuse of executive power in immigration, racist and Islamophobic diatribes by the man at the top – might regret their demise and say “yes” but be coded as “authoritarian”. Perhaps not so likely, I admit.
[click to continue…]

At a time when coronavirus dominates the headlines, other news struggles to get out. Yet one piece of news deserves to get a much wider hearing, namely, the story of how Labour full-time officials opposed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party to a degree where they preferred the party do do badly in elections. The same party officials were responsibly for feeding contacts in the media a constant drip of anti-Corbyn leaks, particularly around anti-semitism and Corbyn’s alleged failure to deal properly with complaints. Now a leaked internal party report, commissioned during Corbyn’s time in office, has revealed some of what went on and much about the attitudes and behaviour of senior Labour staffers, particularly during the 2017 general election when Labour did better than expected and denied the Tories a majority. Reports: Aaron Bastani at Novara Media, The Morning Star (1, 2, 3), The Independent.

The details revealed are very shocking although perhaps not surprising to anyone who had encountered these individuals or others like them in student politics in earlier decades. Essentially, they regarded themselves as the true guardians of legitimate mainstream Labour, understood as being very right-wing social democratic indeed (probably well to the right of former leader Ed Miliband and possibly his predecessor Gordon Brown) and believed that the elected leadership of the party and the majority of the membership were illegitimate. The epithet frequently used is “trots”. They devoted their time to rooting out from the party those on its left by trawling social media for statements that could justify exclusion (perhaps someone just “liked” a tweet by the Green Party). In communications (including to a private WhatsApp group) they gave full rein to their attitudes and even violent fantasies about those they hated, expressed hostility towards Muslims and solidarity with journalists who promoted an Islamophobic agenda. During the 2017 election campaign, they diverted resources from marginal seats towards candidates they approved of, expressed dismay at any good polling results, and when the actual results started to come in were angry and disappointed that the party had done well. Following that election they redoubled efforts to destroy Corbyn’s leadership.
[click to continue…]

I have a [new piece up at the LRB blog on the UK’s post-Brexit immigration plans](https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/february/who-will-pick-the-turnips). I argue that at the core of the plans is an intention to treat EU migrants and others as a vulnerable and exploitable workforce and that the logic of denying a long-term working visa route to the low paid leads to three possibilities: either the businesses that rely upon them will go bust, technology will substitute for labour, or the UK will have to start denying education to young Britons so that they become willing to be the underpaid workforce that picks turnips and cleans the elderly in social care.

I’ve refrained from blogging much about Brexit and the political situation in the UK because, to be honest, I find it all too painful. But the latest move by British PM Boris Johnson seems worthy of comment. Johnson has “prorogued” (translation: suspended) Parliament in order to make it as hard as possible for MPs to shape the Brexit process and to prevent the extremely damaging disorderly crash-out from EU that he seems determined to impose on us on the 31st October. It is worth remembering that Johnson has no mandate of his own, commands the loyalty of less than half the MPs in the Commons, and was selected by the Tory Party membership alone (a tiny group in which elderly racists are more common than they are even in the average golf-club bar). Prorogation has been saluted by the Telegraph with the headline: “The Prime Minister must give effect to the will of the people.” Thus does the Caudillo claim to incarnate the people’s will more than their Parliamentary representatives do. This is not a move that was unforeseen. It was much-discussed during that Tory leadership contest. Johnson said he did not find it attractive. Others who now sit in his Cabinet, unresigned, such as Morgan, Rudd, Hancock, even Javid and Gove, rejected it as an odious attack on democracy only weeks ago. Yet now is is both a brilliant tactical masterstroke but simultaneously “nothing to see here” business as usual.
[click to continue…]

The criminal shitshow that is British politics continues, with a Tory leaderships contest, ultimately to be decided by a handful of elderly misanthropes, following Theresa May’s resignation. Currently, the bookie’s favourite is serial liar and buffoon Boris Johnson, a man who makes Donald Trump look like a model of virtue and who is now holding out the prospect renegotiation with the European Union, in violation of the agreed terms of the recent extension, followed by the no-deal exit which the Tory undead wish to foist on the country’s youth. In between we have the prospect of European Parliament results, where the largest share of the vote will probably go to Nigel Farage’s alliance between the right-wing Christian evangelism of Anne Widdecome and the paedophile-excusing ex-Revolutionary Communist Party.

Still, as an hors d’oeuvre, Theresa May’s resignation speech wasn’t bad. She appealed to the spirit of Nicholas Winton, who saved thousands of children from the Nazis just before the Second World War by organizing the Kinderstransport, which necessitated, among other things, the falsification of papers. Under Theresa May’s regime, Winton would have faced prosecution and a lengthy stretch inside for people smuggling and those he saved would have been left to their fate. As Home Secretary and Prime Minister she has presided over the most refugee-hostile government of recent times, with child refugees stranded and separated from their families and those refugees who make it to the UK forced to subsist on £5 a day. Many other migrants have had their lives destroyed under May’s “hostile environment” regime that has split families, increased racial discrimination in housing, and has seen foreign students falsely accused of cheating and removed in their thousands with the loss of all their money and reputations. And the system of indefinite detention for thousands of migrants continues. These are, of course, just the charges that come to mind, there are many others. But she cried from self-pity and tried to wrap herself in the mantle of a modern saint.