Chris Bertram

The UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission has just published a report into the Windrush scandal. The report shows that policy makers ignored warnings about the likely impacts of the “hostile environment” policy on groups such as the Windrush generation. As a result of the policy, many people who had difficulty in proving their right to reside in the UK, often because the Home Office imposed a ludicrous evidential burden on them, lost their jobs, their homes, were denied access to vital health care, were detained in prison-like immigration detention centres or were deported and excluded from a country they had lived in all their lives.

The report makes grim reading, but what emerges clearly from it is that ministers and their civil servants, seeking to display a “get tough” message on immigration, were not disposed to listen to the people telling them about how things would turn out. They were already set on the policy and were going to stick to it whatever. Critics were to be ignored and rebutted and the UK government were not interested in finding evidence that would get in the way. Legal duties to promote equality and non-discrimination were not seen as goals that ought to inform policy but, at best, as obstacles to circumvented.

After the Windrush scandal broke in 2018, thanks to the work of activists and journalists, including Amelia Gentleman who wrote an excellent book about this, the Home Office pledged to put things right. But the compensation scheme for victims that the Home Office was forced to put in place has paid out a pittance to a very few of the victims, and a senior civil servant has resigned suggesting that racism is an important part of the explanation. Almost weekly new absurdities come to light, such as the case of a man who the Home Office illegally excluded from the country who has now applied for British citizenship, which the Home Office is denying him on the basis that he spent too long out of the country.

The British press, with the exception of the Guardian, has given little prominence to this story. Another report from the EHCR into anti-semitism in the Labour Party was all over the front pages, but one into the impact of immigration policy on the lives of thousands of people is, well, not. Too late to affect this report but ominously for the future, the UK government has now appointed David Goodhart, a prominent advocate of the hostile environment (who now says he was always against “abuses”), as one of the commissioners for the EHRC. As US Republicans have learnt from the experience of the Supreme Court, the answer to the problem of referees giving decisions against you is to appoint new, more pliant, referees.

I have a piece in today’s Guardian, arguing that a combination of demographic changes and the political interests of the right risk creating a growing democratic deficit, in which more and more people on the territory of states have no democratic voice despite living, working and paying taxes there. I didn’t write the headline, which refers to Britain only, but in the text I also discuss cases like the DREAMers in the US.

Today, for the first time for over thirty years, I don’t have an employer. This is because I decided to retire rather than to face the unwelcome choice between online teaching and exposing myself to COVID in the classroom. I think, in fact, that I didn’t have enough “points” to get an exemption from face-to-face, despite being nearly 62 and having high blood pressure. Oh well, the issue is now moot. I shall miss being around students, chatting to them, helping them and getting the buzz that you get from a good classroom discussion. I won’t miss reading and marking student essays and exams though. Not one bit. I hope I’ve done a good job over the years, even though I feel I only learnt to teach well in the past decade (thanks to the direct and indirect influence of Harry).

There’s another reason to stop now though, which gives me a slight sense of vertigo, to be honest, and it involves “owning your own bullshit”. I’ll have a lot less income but I’ll have a lot more time. I’ve long believed that we, as a society (swap in your own society if you too live in a wealthy one) consume too much, engage in too much burdensome toil, and have too little leisure time to enjoy and indeed work on freely chosen goals. Capitalism has a built-in tendency to promote burdensome toil in the pursuit of consumption, but now I have a choice. Can I live with it? And will I make the most of it without the external discipline provided by the expectations of employers, colleagues and students? That’s a big test. But I hope to continue writing and publishing on many of the same topics I worked on up to now, and chiefly on migration and justice. I’m also happy to stand up on my hind-legs and talk to people about political philosophy and related matters, most of the time for nothing (invitations welcome!).

One thing I haven’t made my mind up on though: mode of publishing. People read books and people read blogs, so if you want to communicate your ideas then both are good formats (among others). But is there any point in continuing to send papers to academic journals? On the plus side, the peer review process induces a kind of discipline and quality control. On the other hand, many of the things that reviewers insist upon are pointless and detract from what you’re trying to say. And then there’s the small matter of the fact that nobody reads such papers. It is a source of lasting frustration that political philosophy as practised in academic journals is an activity that is almost entirely disconnected from the social and political life of the societies that surround it. I don’t mean that we ought to be getting down and dirty with Donald Trump or Brexit, but that we need to find ways of making the things we write about (should foreigners, or expatriates, have voting rights?, for example) cut through to public discourse. Making that argument in the pages of Philosophy and Public Affairs may not make enough of a difference, however good it is for an academic’s promotion prospects. But then, cutting through was one of the hopes I always had for Crooked Timber.

(For those who don’t have the French. “Tousse ensemble/crève générale” (cough together, general death) is a play on “Tous ensemble/grève générale” (all together, general strike.)