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No repeal, no vote
I’ve just noticed that this year marks a kind of grim anniversary, one that we might want to forget. Just a decade ago, in 2013, Home Secretary Theresa May devised what would become the Immigration Act 2014 and explained its purpose in the following way:
“Most people will say it can’t be fair for people who have no right to be here in the UK to continue to exist as everybody else does with bank accounts, with driving licences and with access to rented accommodation. We are going to be changing that because we don’t think that is fair.”
She wanted to “create a really hostile environment” for illegal migrants: “What we don’t want”, she said, “is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they’re able to access everything they need.”
The Act reduced migrants’ rights, including rights of appeal against deportation. It introduced a “deport first, appeal later” policy for people regarded as being at “no risk of serious irreversible harm” if returned to their country of origin: such judgments, made by caseworkers or Secretaries of State, are notoriously unreliable and dangerous. May’s legislation and her language were in line with a long-standing and nasty Tory approach to asylum and immigration. Her comments were reminiscent of a previous Home Secretary’s remarks, which referred specifically to asylum seekers: in 1995 Michael Howard had declared that the UK was seen as
“a very attractive destination because of the ease with which people can get access to jobs and to benefits. And while, for instance, the number of asylum seekers for the rest of Europe are falling the number in this country are increasing [and] only a tiny proportion of them are genuine refugees.”
Likewise, Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley told the Tory Party Conference in the same year:
“Genuine political refugees are few. The trouble is our system almost invites people to claim asylum to gain British benefits. That can’t be right – and I’m going to stop it. Britain should be a safe haven, not a soft touch.”
The hostile environment led to the Windrush scandal, in which long-standing UK citizens were told they had no such status and were deported to countries they knew nothing about. Some died as a result of the treatment they received at the hands of the woman who now, bizarrely, claims to defend the rights of smuggled children against the provisions of the latest two bits of Tory legislation to abuse, detain and deport some of the most vulnerable and desperate people in the world.
The new laws that have now been brought in by the Sunak government (the Nationality & Borders Act and the Illegal Immigration Act) are harsher and more cruel than anything even Theresa May dreamt of. The rhetoric that goes with them is nastier and more dangerous. We need to find ways of supporting victims of these policies. And the least we can do is put pressure on Labour MPs and, later, candidates in the 2024 general election, to promise to repeal the Tory Acts if Labour wins the election. Tell them: No repeal, no vote.
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Rishinomics and its discontents
Quite a neat summary here (by Elliott Chappell in today’s Labour List email) of yesterday’s spending review based on Rishinomics:
“Our health emergency is not yet over and our economic emergency has only just begun,” Rishi Sunak told us as he launched into his spending review. 2.5 million public sector workers will see their pay frozen – including 90% of police, 80% of fire service and 75% of prison officers, at least 80% of secondary school teachers and 75% of those in primary schools. This, remember, just a week after the PM unveiled the biggest investment in defence since the Cold War. The Chancellor announced a new £4bn ‘levelling up’ fund that will see MPs bid for money in what looks to be the same mechanism that led to the controversy over the Towns Fund – in which the Tories prioritised spending to marginal seats ahead of the last election. He was silent on the £20 uplift to Universal Credit – the emergency top-up grudgingly given earlier in the pandemic. Failing to extend it will slash annual incomes for 16 million households by £1,040 in April. And, of course, the Chancellor rounded off all that (and much more) by going back on the Tory manifesto promise to keep UK aid spending at 0.7% of gross national income.”
“Rishinomics“ is what I’ve called it for fun, of course. It’s neoliberalism really. And this is how it always works. It isn’t simply that capitalists hate the poor (though they often do). Capitalists need the poor. So they create poverty. An executive in a finance company housed in the World Financial Centre in New York, Craig Dinsell, explained some of it to me over lunch in the Metropolitan Museum restaurant in 2012. Low-paid workers can’t expect to be paid good wages, or even half-decent wages. That would cause inflation. Actually, low pay is good for them because it gives them an incentive to better themselves and get themselves out of poverty. It gives them ambition. Without that, they would just stay in their menial jobs for life. That’s “human nature” apparently (I’d been waiting for that). This little narrative, of course, ignores the fact that poverty more often destroys ambition and hope, it grinds people down. The truth is that low pay remains part of the system because it is essential to the pursuit of profit, although Craig didn’t quite put it like that—he was ruminating on “human nature”. So this, as far as I could tell, was the best of all possible worlds—There Is No Alternative. Tina lives.[1]
I knew Craig Dinsell in the late 1960s, when he was 20. We attended an evangelical Baptist church in North London, where he played the role of gadfly to the church establishment and sang Bob Dylan songs. Now, as I said, he moves in high circles and is himself part of a rather bigger establishment (“We were invited to a dinner for Tony Blair”, he told me. “He seemed a nice guy”). Craig is a nice liberal. He reads the New York Times and advised me not to watch Fox News. I’m sure he voted for Biden.
And in that there is a warning. We justifiably feel relief at Biden’s victory. But while Reagan was the first who decisively took the neoliberal path, it was so decisive that none of his successors or their followers ever abandoned it. Including Biden. As Brando Marcetic notes in “Yesterday’s Man: the case against Joe Biden”:
“While Clinton’s neoliberal politics alienated many voters, Biden was one of the earliest adopters of neoliberalism, successfully pushing the [Democratic] party to become more like him.”
If Marcetic is right (and I confess I have only read the introduction to the book so far, but it sounds likely to me) then while the tone, the style, and most of the politics of Biden may be very different from the horrors of the last 4 years, we should beware of wanting to “get back to normal”. For “normal” still includes neoliberalism. And Joe needs to be watched. And pushed.
As for Rishi, don’t ask.
[1] Tina was the name given by cabinet minister Norman St John Stevas to Margret Thatcher because of her frequent use of the phrase “There is no alternative” to justify her neoliberal policies. In the end he had to go.
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