Chris Bertram

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.
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I had a little exchange on twitter and Mastodon yesterday on reading habits. The initial cause of the exchange was the claim that book reading is in decline, and I asked for some evidence of this, which my interlocutor duly provided in the form of a link to a survey of British readers by Booktrust from 2013. The survey documents the reported reading habits of British people, showing them to be correlated with things like age and socio-economics status, with some worrying drop-off in book reading among the young. I’m sure that the advent of TV and even the radio also brought some declines, and it is always hard to know how seriously to take such worries: young people may be reader shorter pieces of writing on the internet, they aren’t just watching TikTok videos.

However my attention was caught by another statistic: a claim that 6 per cent of respondents, “bookworms”, get through around 12 books per month (or 144 per year). Now I read a lot – as I perceive it – and I complete between 50 and 60 books most years. When I read Les Misérables, albeit in French, that took up nearly a quarter of my annual reading. Ulysses, which needed a lot of looking up, reading on the side etc, took me about a fortnight, and I think I went too fast in places. My guess is that most of these super-readers are not reading such works, or the Critique of Pure Reason, but but rather short thrillers and the like. I can get through a PG Wodehouse in a day (and what a joy that is!), so that would be a way to boost the numbers if boosting the numbers alone were something worth caring about, which it isn’t.

There’s also a question about the density and complexity of the text: how fast should you read? Many literary texts demand close attention at the level of the sentence and below, whereas some genre fiction does not. Literary texts also require digestion and contemplation, which in turn demands time away from them while your brain does the processing. Sometimes they call for re-reading in the light of later passages that draw attention to the significance of an earlier element. So, no, having flinched at my inadequacy compared to the 6 per cent of super-readers, my considered view is that my own consumption is about right, if not a little too high.

Always nice to discover something close to home that you were previously unaware of, in this case Nunney Castle, built around 1370 and destroyed nearly 300 years later during the Civil Wars.

Harry mentioned the politics of the second-best in comments to his post on higher education the other day. I guess it falls into something of the same space as non-ideal theory or realism, as opposed to moralism. The basic idea is that we shouldn’t hold out for purity if doing so gets in the way of making the lives of many people, some of them with urgent needs, better. And that makes a lot of sense. Pursuing the ideal policy, refusing to compromise, only allowing for perfect justice can seem like a form of self-indulgence that has real costs for those who can least afford to bear them. We always have to start from where we are, with the resources that we have and making progress can involve messy compromises with people that we don’t much like in order to do the good that we can.

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Apologies for the brief photo hiatus. Stuff going on. Anyway, here are some cranes.

(iPhone photo)

A few days ago, I tooted at Mastodon about a Christmas message I’d had from a Russian friend. I intended my post to convey something hopeful about peace and reconciliation, but got immediate pushback from someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war. Meanwhile, over on Elon’s death site, the theme of holding Russians collectively responsible for the war seemed to be gathering momentum with vehement assertions that this isn’t just “Putin’s war” but one backed by “the Russian people”. I think claims such as these, particularly in their maximal forms are absurd, and become all the more absurd when the alleged collective responsiblity of “the Russian people” is extended to an attitude of hostility and blaming towards individuals, simply because they hold Russian nationality. And many members of “the Russian people” are, after all, children. Yet in rejecting such absurdities, I also want to leave room for those Russians who feel their own responsbility keenly and who feel shame at the Russian government’s actions and who want to take responsibility by resisting, in great or small ways, what that government is doing.

One obvious point to make is that Russia is not a democracy and that Russian citizens have no effective means to restrain their government, even if they wanted to. Rather, they live under a tyranny, quick to mete out savage punishments to its opponents, and where public opinion is partly shaped by relentless nationalistic propaganda. In this light, one might think of ordinary Russians as being among the victims of the regime, even though there are others, most notably Ukrainians, who are suffering much more at its hands. During the Soviet era, it is worth noting, Western governments were keen to frame ordinary Soviet citizens as victims of dictatorship rather than holding them individually or collectively responsible, but this approach has been abandoned in some reponses to the war, including by Baltic politicians who refuse to accept that Russians who refuse to fight for Putin are legitimate refugees.
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When we renewed our roster of bloggers a little while ago, I mentioned that there would be more announcements to come. Today I’m very happy to say that Macarena Marey will be joining us at Crooked Timber. I met Macarena a few years ago at a workshop in Bayreuth and was immediately impressed by her combination of rigorous scholarship (there mainly on Kant’s poltical philosophy) with passionate commitment. Macarena was born in a little city by the sea in the Argentinian province of Buenos Aires. She’s been living in the city of Buenos Aires since she was 4, so one could say that she is “porteña”. She is a Researcher at CONICET (the National Scientific and Technical Research Council for Argentina) and Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires as well as being director of the Centre for Critical Studies and Philosophy of the Present at the Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, UBA. She is currently working on problems of political participation and on the work of the first American Marxist, José Carlos Mariátegui. She is the mother of Elías (10) and Galileo (3). Galileo is currently helping her learn a lot about ableism and how to fight it by unmasking autism, while Elías teaches her all about the science of engines in general and Formula 1 in particular. We look forward to reading what Macarena has to say!