I was thinking about this shot from ten years ago the other day, so I dug it out. A little bit early for Sunday, but needs must.
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Chris Bertram
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.
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As Crooked Timber readers are probably aware, the first round of the French election ended with sitting President Emmanuel Macron in the lead, followed by crypto-Fascist Putin-fan Marine Le Pen in second place, narrowly ahead of left-wing anti-globalist Jean-Luc Mélenchon in third place. Everyone else was pretty-much nowhere, although ultra-right Pétain fan Eric Zemmour won the vote among French citizens living in Israel, which is, er, interesting. With the field down to two, the big question is whether Mélenchon voters will transfer in sufficient numbers to Macron rather than going to Le Pen or not voting at all. Mélenchon himself has called for his supporters not to vote for the far right, but has not recommended a vote for Macron instead. This is a continuation of his stance in 2017, although in the past he backed right-winger Jacques Chirac against Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The anxiety, stoked by every journalist who has a story to write (since it is really the only “angle”) is that Le Pen might win because of Mélenchon transfers and abstentions. The polling doesn’t really support it, although it is worryingly close for anyone with memories of Trump and Brexit. Many journalists think that there is a sufficient hatred of Macron on the far left for Mélenchon’s voters to abstain. Well, what’s rational and what people will do are two different things, but my view is that such a refusal would be quixotic. The revival of the left in France – if such a thing is possible – relies on the opposition to Macron coming from the left, and in terms of numbers, Mélenchon has laid a foundation for that. But if Mélenchon supporters sit on their hands and Le Pen does well in percentage terms, coming as close as, say, 48 per cent, then the effective anti-Macron opposition will be identified with the nationalist right. So, paradoxically, the best prospect for a left-leaning opposition to Macron over the next five years comes from him defeating Marine Le Pen as decisively as possible.
France is an odd place to be at the moment, because we are two weeks out from a very important Presidential election and you really wouldn’t know it on the street. The regulation posters are there, side-by-side, but otherwise postering and stickering is minimal: I’ve seen more from an obscure Marxist-Leninist sect than I have from the campaign favourite, Emmanuel Macron. And in the little town where I am, there were no campaigners at all at the Saturday market where I’ve seen people demonstrating for all kinds of political causes (most recently the anti-vaxxers) quite regularly.
The current situation is that Macron, the incumbent, is out in front and almost certain to qualify for the second round and that he is likely to joined by far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. The challenge from the ultra-right Eric Zemmour has faded badly, but it is just possible that Le Pen might be pipped by the far-left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise. The traditional parties are nowhere with Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist Party candidate, heading for a derisory single-digit score. Yannick Jadot, the Green candidate, who to my mind is the most attractive candidate politically, will also get single digits. The overwhelming victor is likely to be abstention, as apathetic voters just stay at home.
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One of the consequences of Brexit is that British people are more limited in their freedom of movement. Whereas previously they could travel, work, retire, settle in other European countries, today the default is that they can only visit the Schengen area for 90 days in any 180 day period and lack rights to work. EU citizens are similarly more limited in what they can do than before, though only with respect to the territory of the UK. (Irish citizens, being part of both the EU and a common travel areal with the UK, are uniquely privileged).
I mention these facts purely as an entrée to my main subject, which is to begin thinking about the positive value of free movement across borders, a topic that is little considered by political philosophers and theorists and is low down the agenda of many politicians, who are more concerned with keeping out the unwanted and security at the border than they are with the liberties of their own citizens to travel, settle, work elsewhere and to associate with people in other countries and of other nationalities than their own. I take it that all of these liberties are valuable to a person and enhance their autonomy for the same reason as the freedom to travel within a country’s borders is valuable.
A couple of days ago we had an online get-together of many of the Crooked Timber writers. Although we’ve been around for nearly nineteen years, this is the first time this has happened, and it probably never would have but for the pandemic and the possibilities that Zoom has opened up. Some of us were approaching our bedtime and others had to make a really early start as participants came from Brisbane, Singapore, Exeter in England, the south of France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and various parts of the US. We should do it again soon.
One thing we discussed was how to improve the volume and variety of our contributions. Things have changed a lot since 2003, not least the variety of channels of communication, including social media. Many of the people who read Crooked Timber tell us what they like and don’t like using Twitter, Facebook, email and the like. On-site comments, on the other hand, are not what they were. Though we retain a small cadre of dedicated commenters, the quality of discussion is not always that great and there are too many drive-by and borderline insulting interventions from anonymous accounts. Figuring out how and whether to respond to a misdirected comment can be a significant overhead for writers who can’t know whether the original engagement was in good faith. So we’ve decided to change our default to having comments turned off, with writers having the option to turn them on if they like. Open threads and “Twigs and Branches” will have comments enabled, but we will not tolerate people using open comments on one focused post to comment on a post where the writer decided not to open them. Long-term readers, feel free to show your appreciation (or not) via those other routes. Comments on this post are open [now timed out].
In Ukraine people, mainly women and children, are leaving their homes. This means leaving, probably forever, the private spaces in which they have constructed lives. It means leaving carefully planned gardens, or collections of books or objects, of projects of home decoration on which thought and labour was expended, of knives, sieves, pots and cookery books. For children it means leaving all those toys and books that can’t be carried. In short all the everyday things that people make from their lives. It means ruptures, perhaps permanent, in personal friendships and acquaintances, with those left behind to fight, with playmates, with cousins. It means the loss of familiar landscapes with their distinctive weather and their animals and plants. And then a trudge through danger and the possibility of instant death to put oneself at the mercy of strangers, as an object perhaps of their solidarity, but also of their pity. Paths trodden by other refugees, by Palestinians, Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Sudanese and Somalis in the recent past, by many in Ethiopia right now.
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Thousands of people, at this stage mainly women, children, and the elderly, are fleeing Ukraine and seeking safety in neighbouring countries. The European Union seems to grasp what is required and is offering them sanctuary; UK ministers are briefing the media that they are doing things but aren’t doing very much. People crossing border to neighbouring countries from conflict zones is what usually happens in circumstances like this. This is why the vast majority of the world’s refugees are in countries bordering Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. When countries like Pakistan, Iran and Turkey take in refugees from war they are partly just accepting the inevitable; they are also, to some degree, sensitive to their own populations who (at least initially) may feel an obligation to people who are like themselves in religion and culture.
The European Union (and the UK) have a pretty bad recent record when it comes to refugees. They have put in place measures to prevent people from escaping their tormentors and have paid dubious regimes such as Libya to act as buffer zones and prisons. While some European countries such as Germany and Sweden can point to things they can take pride in during the Syrian war, attempts to get others such as Poland and Hungary to accept refugees failed. Denmark has pursued a zero-refugee policy, with the goal of sending people back to places like Syria. The UK is currently introducing legislation to criminalize refugees and the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel, would like to follow the Australian model of sending them off to remote locations. Ascension Island in the Atlantic has been mooted by the pro-Tory think-tank Policy Exchange.
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