“An excoriating picture of a shamefully dysfunctional political culture”. Not a comment on the recent ITV series Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office. This is Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, on the back cover of Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within Jonathan Cape 2023. Yet the book exposes the profound weaknesses in governance that enabled the Post Office scandal.
Stewart’s book focuses on the story of his decade in Tory politics and government from 2009-2019. Peter Hennessy, crossbench peer and constitutional historian, described it as ‘a study in pain and disillusionment.’ Michael Ignatieff, former Liberal Party leader of the Opposition in Canada and distinguished academic, spoke of its portrayal of ‘lying, incompetence and treachery’. These three reviewers are all accomplished authors. Two bring exceptional political experience to their writing. Stewart’s account carries conviction with those who ought to know. The book provides an explanation for how government can speak of appointing 150 additional judges to speed up the deportation of asylum seekers and migrants to Rwanda, judged an unsafe country by our Courts, whilst, allegedly through lack of staff, taking many years to process compensation for unsafe convictions of sub postmasters and mistresses, pillars of the community. Rory Stewart shares many of his reviewers’ writing skills keeping the reader turning the pages as he talks about his epic walks in Asia and the Middle East and his professional life as a soldier before entering politics. There are insights from his different roles in Afghanistan, the group think and disastrous levels of conviction bias that ended in the bungled evacuation from Kabul in August 2021. Maybe he is one of those “unpatriotic, Britain-belittling doom-mongers". This is from a recent Lancaster House speech by our Secretary of State for Defense, Grant Shapps, rated as one of the government’s best communicators, who in the past communicated using four different names and whose political career recently included, within two years, four different Ministries. Or put in another way, Stewart tries to tell the truth about politicians like Shapps and knows what he's talking about. Politics on the Edge is not just a litany of lying and dysfunction. There are witty descriptions of the humiliations involved in getting selected for a parliamentary constituency while failing to present always the Party line. Then follows the main story of the rocky road he walked as a Member of Parliament. His first boss, David Cameron, gets few praise-notes. Despite practical steps to increase diversity in the Party, the members of Cameron’s inner circle were Etonians (like Stewart himself), so policy was decided by ‘an unimaginably narrow social group’. Stewart shows considerable self-awareness acknowledging the greasy pole Cameron had to climb to become Prime Minister. But he and Cameron were chalk and cheese. A common criticism of Rory Stewart is that he was, and remains, ‘naive’. At first, he lacked knowledge and experience of the snakes and ladders of political life, but he brought to the job the wisdom and judgement he had developed in different contexts. At times acting out of conscience without being, Corbyn-style, a professionally disloyal parliamentarian he risks defying the Tory Whips. By the time Boris Johnson pushed him out of Conservative politics in 2019 he had become a national figure. In contrast to Yes Minister’s portrayal some may even find his treatment of top civil servants to be too understanding and benign. They keep things going while Ministers come and go but they can be stubborn and evasive – at times successfully resisting policy change. Stewart found the power relations in the Department for International Development, as both Minister and as Secretary of State, particularly trying. While acknowledging the important role of aid in the global projection of the UK and giving Cameron credit for his commitment to 0.7% GDP, he encourages the suspicion that the department with an annual budget of “£13 billion more than ten times the core budget of the British Foreign Office” was a little too big for its boots. Yes, but the Foreign Office is not a Ministry funding projects globally. And DFID and FCO were of course later amalgamated by Johnson with hostile intent Stewart got on well with Theresa May who made him a rather reluctant Minister of State for prisons in the Ministry of Justice. This is where his passion for practical action best shines out. Prisoners are grabbing drugs delivered by drones hovering outside broken windows – mend the broken windows, do a few simple reforms. Reading Stewart’s account of prison conditions and their neglect by government is deeply shaming. It raises questions about our claim to be a civilised society. And in parenthesis, the absence of any mention of conversations with prison chaplains by such an advocate of ‘listening’ is some measure of his – admitted - general distaste for religion. The least interesting chapters of Politics on the Edge are those about the quagmire of Brexit negotiations though, as did many others, Stewart soon spots Boris Johnson for the charlatan he is. After the resignation of Theresa May, his blow-by-blow account of the live TV debate in June 2019 trying to come through an experienced field of four other Tory leadership contenders - Johnson didn’t take part – and detailing his own miserable performance, is a painful study in hubris. What, as Lenin said, is to be done? Stewart doesn’t offer any coherent plan for reforming politics. Nor is there an obvious solution to offer. But he is clearly right that Ministers need time to understand the complexities of the issues they face, even what issues they must face. Successive Ministers responsible for the Post Office failed or were unable to challenge the Post Office’s entrenched hierarchy. Appointing Secretaries of State for a three-year term, barring incompetence, would be helpful. Party leaderships also perhaps need to allow more unwhipped votes. Differences can be creative. All Parties need to join in countering manufactured public opinion that disagreement always indicates a divided Party not fit for government. Politics as a conscience-free, value-free zone of human endeavour isn’t desirable, hasn’t worked and doesn’t work. It lies behind our worst national scandals. Fortunately not all politicians practice it. Does Rory Stewart provide a necessary prophetic voice or an irritatingly arrogant one? It hardly matters how he comes across as a person. Our politics is on the edge. Not yet teetering over it as in the USA. There are two ways to travel when approaching the edge: away from it or over it. And not moving, paralysed by disillusion, or providing ever new descriptions and analyses of the problems rather than doing something about them, as Tony Blair once put it, leaves you dangerously near the edge. I hope Politics on the Edge is not Stewart’s political swansong. We need alternative voices. Having shed his illusions, perhaps he should try again, this time in the Labour Party. See TheArticle 22/01.2024
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Immigration, like a high-scoring Scrabble letter, has become the ‘Q’ stuck in the Prime Minister’s hand as his opponents play their last letters to end the game. Sunak’s promises to control immigration, made ever more forcefully but never kept, have become a liability, a pledge too far. His government’s anti-immigration policies don’t acknowledge the realities of international migration. This is the conclusion to be drawn from Professor Hein de Haas’ article in the 29th December Guardian, itself a potted summary of his informative recent book How Migration Really Works: A Factual Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics, Penguin/Viking 2023.
De Haas is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Maastricht. Drawing on three decades of scholarly research into immigration and integration around the world, his book is a sobering myth-buster. We have been conducting the wrong arguments. Much of what is popularly believed about immigration – I confess to a measure of gullibility myself – is just plain wrong, misguided or exaggerated. The world is not facing an unprecedented refugee crisis, South-North migration is more a rational economic decision than ‘a desperate flight from poverty, hunger and conflict’. Immigration’s impact on the wages of indigenous workers is negligible. We need migrant labour. We don’t have enough UK-born trained staff in the NHS, social care and a range of vital occupations. Neither development nor border restrictions will stop migration. De Haas’ starting point is to view the movement of people as an integral part of global economies. The great dynamo of migrancy is the demand for labour. Most migrants abide by the requirements set for their entry. Governments and businesses in prosperous countries attract migrant labour, unostentatiously for the most part, and for a variety of reasons: aging populations, a workforce unwilling to undertake the more unpleasant and onerous jobs and citizens unable or unwilling to do their own domestic work. When you think about who is capable of responding to labour demand in Europe, USA and the Gulf States, the answer is obvious: not the poorest unable to save enough for the journey or pay recruitment agents rather people from middle-income countries such as Mexico, Philippines, Pakistan and many Indian states. Threaten to tighten control of borders and the numbers increase as migrants fear it will be their last chance to cross them. Those who might have returned home after a period of work remain because they are worried about getting back again (much migrancy is of course cyclical and temporary but who counts those returning home?). The wealth generated and sent home by migrants is prodigious. In 2020 it came to 2.6 times overseas aid from governments, $193 billion, to their countries of origin. Unlike official aid, remittances go straight into the pockets of recipients who use it to build sturdy houses, educate children, pay for health care and improve their diet. And the amount of cash moving this way is increasing. Between 1990 –2020 total estimated remittances grew from $29 billion to $502 billion. The impact on economic development in the global South should not be underestimated. De Haas argues that we imagine the numbers of economic migrants today are at an unprecedented crisis level. But, according to the United Nations Population Division, the rate of migrancy has remained stable at around 3% of the world’s population. In 1960 the global population of 3 billion generated 93 million international migrants; in 2000, 6.1 billion produced 170 million migrants and, in 2017, 247 million came from a population of 7.6 billion. Even the number of undocumented immigrants in the UK estimated at between 674,000 and 800,000 amounts to only 1% of the country’s population. In the USA the figure is 3.2%. 97% of humanity have always lived and still do live in their country of birth. Why the panic and resentment now? The numbers don’t warrant it. Britain – usually at first grumpily - has hosted and integrated wave after wave of immigrants in the past and could do so now. Though localised pressures are real, the present sense of widespread crisis is manufactured, aided by pictures of small boats crossing the Channel and their tragic victims. Successfully counter one means of transportation, and sadly the people smugglers will open up another. And what about refugees? They compose only a small fraction of people crossing international borders. Between 1985-2021 only 7-12% of migrants were refugees, estimated as between 9 and 21 million, about 0.3% of the world’s population. The numbers fluctuate according to levels of conflict. The Russian intervention in the war in Syria in 2015 caused a notable spike with Angela Merkel famously admitting one million to Germany where they are now mostly settled and productively employed (what Germans call one of her decisions of the heart not the head). But most refugees move to neighbouring countries, or become ‘displaced people’ within their own. In 2018 there were 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 4.4% of the population, a million in Lebanon in a population of 6 million. African countries hosted 5.5 million refugees almost all from other African countries, with Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia the main hosts. Such numbers might lead us to question our attitudes and assumptions. Once immigration is framed as an aspect of economic life, as De Haas does, it should be game-over for governments whose rhetoric plants immigrants at the heart of a divisive problem. It becomes obvious that it is government policies leading to inequality, low wages, job insecurity, and failing public services, which are the real problem. The next to no checks on ‘illegal’ workers in hospitality, food processing and other low-paid employment taken by migrants is a tacit admission of economic reality. Underpay childcare or care of the elderly and large numbers of foreign workers will be drawn in. Likewise, underfund universities and they will have to rely on high-fee paying foreign students who - guess what - sometimes want to settle here and bring their families. De Haan at times pushes the conclusions from his data too far but he is to be thanked for reminding us that a few facts and evidence-based policy-making might be a good idea. And, it should be added, would free us to tackle the social, economic and political problems that have become ever more pressing. The debate should not be anti-versus- pro-immigration but a discussion about what kind of society we want to live in, the values required to sustain it, and how migrants can be successfully integrated in such a society. We should be focusing on what needs to be done, the economic reforms needed to reduce inequality removing social divisions and resentment at reduced life opportunities. See TheArticle 04/01/2024 |
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