It is difficult to find the right word to describe the current practice of our national government. Grand announcements of virtuous intentions fall far short of expectations or are just not carried out. Much saying and promising one thing and doing another. Google’s definition of duplicity: “the belying of one’s true intentions by deceptive words or actions” fits best. Here are just two examples of our duplicitous government at work.
When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he made a commitment in 2013, a time of austerity, to annual spending of 0.7% of GDI (Gross Domestic Income) on International Development. Aid which enhanced Britain’s position in the world and brought vital help to the poorest. In November 2020 Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak reneged on that promise reducing spending “temporarily” to 0.5% of GDI. Now, within the amalgamated Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office presided over by the same David Cameron, now a peer, more than a third of that reduced international aid budget is spent inside the UK. In 2022-2023, Britain spent £3.6 billion on asylum seekers, 29% of the international aid budget, mainly the cost of hotel accommodation – currently running at £8 million a day. And, of course, there is the estimated £600 million earmarked for the crowd-pleasing plan to send some 300 people who arrived here in small boats to Rwanda. “We have seen a shocking increase in disruption and criminality...the world's most successful multi-ethnic multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined”. Anyone listening to Rishi Sunak’s 1st March podium address to the nation might have imagined the Prime Minister was reacting to something comparable to the devastating terrorist attacks of 2017. But no. Sunak was alarmed by the largely peaceful demonstrations in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since October 7th. Of course they should be taken seriously. Terrorist threats have risen. But Britain remains at the ‘substantial’ (likely) rather than severe (very likely) threat level determined by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) and MI5. On 14 March Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, appeared in Parliament in the improbable role of an Old Testament prophet preaching healing of divisions in society and warning against ‘Islamism’ as a ‘totalitarian ideology’. He offered a new definition of extremism: “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance” which aimed to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” or “undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights” and to “intentionally create a permissive environment” for others to achieve the above aims. Gove went on to suggest a short-list of organisations of concern which would henceforth be shunned by the Home Office and receive no public funding. Organisations can change over time. Gove’s list will require regular reassessment. None on his present list had ever received public funds from Government and all had been shunned by the Home Office for many years. A brazen performance. Business as usual dressed up as change, inaction sounding like a dramatic demarche. Except that we have a new definition of extremism which Church leaders and others worry could disproportionately affect Muslims and curtail freedom of speech. Whilst ‘Islamism’ was named as a threatening ideology Gove made do with Neo-Nazi for his example of right-wing extremism. So let us pass over the inconvenient thought that some of the less poisonous though more influential right-wing extremism has emerged from within the Tory Party. Just as ISIS was reaching the height of its power in 2014-2015, and we were learning about the horrors of Jihadi John and his team of executioners, I was working on the dynamics of religious extremism. Shamima Begum, aged only 15, running away with her two school friends to join the self-declared Caliphate, embodied a far greater and more mystifying threat to society than today’s largely political divisions. What on earth did these children think they were doing? What were the psychological and ideological causes? And how do you change a permissive environment which allows perverse ideas to inspire irrevocable action? In the case of the girls leading to marriage to jihadists and some degree of complicity in their brutality? Safeguarding vulnerable people, challenging the ideas behind, and countering, terrorism, reversing radicalisation are the aims of the national Prevent programme initiated some twenty years ago. The behaviour to be combatted was then defined as “vocal or active opposition to British fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. The seven dead of the 2017 London Bridge attack and the 26 who died at the hands of a suicide bomber in the Manchester Arena the same year, showed how such a mindset could – not inevitably would- trigger actual murderous jihadist violence and underlined the importance of Prevent. Prevent issues, and updates, extensive guidelines intended to help public bodies, Local Authorities, teachers and parents understand their statutory duty to be alert to and report people showing indications of extremism, and when to make a referral for further investigation which might be followed up by mentoring. Prevent has been overwhelmed by the number of referrals, only a fraction of which go forward. By 2021 more than half of referrals involved extremist right-wing behaviour and attitudes. Views about Prevent are highly politicised; it is caught between fire from both the right and from Muslim communities. In January 2021 the Government commissioned a review of Prevent headed by the former head of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross. The review was boycotted by many Muslim organisations and rejected by Amnesty International on grounds of Shawcross’s alleged bias and remarks he had made which were considered anti-Muslim. Some of the report’s 34 recommendations such as expanding the Prevent duty to immigration and job centres, and questioning the consistency between the treatment of Islamic and right-wing extremist referrals, proved contentious. Islamic values do need to be disentangled from what is called Islamist ideology. But in general, the label Islamism is far too catch-all and left undefined or refers simply to seeking an ‘Islamic state with shari’a law’. So, it can include everything from ISIS executioners to the peaceful and pious Muslim Brotherhood supporters, protesting after General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi's July 2013 coup toppled an elected Egyptian government, gunned down amongst the 900 massacred by police. Is the wish to have a government imbued with Islamic values, even if it is the result of a non-violent, incremental, democratic process, to be labelled Islamism? Currently, in a predominantly secular society, probably the answer is yes. All the recent talk about Islamism, though, was intended to cast Sunak and Gove as statesmen, responsible custodians of law and order, protectors against an extremist threat, unifying the nation, rousing the Red Wall constituencies. But it came across as a carefully contrived contribution to the culture wars. Meanwhile behind the scenes – at least until Mayor Sadiq Khan pointed it out – the Home Office was cutting the annual funding for Prevent in London by two-thirds from £6.1 million in December 2019 to £2 million after April 2025. Words do not trump reality. And what you hear is not what you get. Call it duplicity, call it deceit. It is no way to govern. See TheArticle 18/03/2024
0 Comments
“Taking preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing when needed are now not merely desirable but essential”. That was General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of General Staff since 2022, speaking at a military conference just a month ago. The British government hastened to deny any intention of introducing conscription. A week before, and only a little less disturbing, the Secretary of State for Defense, Grant Shapps, declared that we had moved “from a post-war world to a pre-war world”.
Societies preparing to put themselves on a war footing need to consider carefully what justifies both going to war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (jus in bello) to limit war’s barbarity, questions addressed for over five millennia, a quest first found in the ancient Sanskrit Mahabharata. General Sanders was educated at the Benedictine school attached to Worth Abbey and is certainly familiar with the evolving Catholic just war tradition dating from St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century. Here is the relevant text from the 1992 Catholic catechism: “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force (sic) require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time: the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition”. Heavily enough for Pope Francis to abandon the possibility of a just war in favour of Christian non-violence. Within the just war tradition self-defense, restoration of justice and resistance to an invader, are considered legitimate reasons to fight. In addition, war must be declared by a legitimate ruler. And during war, proportionality – the relative degree of harm caused by military intervention particularly, but not exclusively, to innocent civilians being a primary consideration. Correspondingly, without reasonable chance of success, a futile defense, while honourable ,would not traditionally be considered just. Today the principles of jus in bello are expressed within the tradition of humanitarian law and in terms derived from the concept of human rights. The crime of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the fate of innocent civilian casualties (the notorious ‘collateral damage’ which has immediate consequences for military targeting) all have their origins in the idea of inviolable human rights. Modern warfare has not precluded consideration of just war criteria. If anything, the wars in the 20th century stimulated their development, if not their application. After the Hamas attack of 7 October, the Israeli government appealed - plausibly - to its right to self-defense. (Mention of the longstanding conflictive quest for land, peace and freedom, out of which the atrocities committed against Israeli communities and the Nova music festival, became anathema.) Ukrainians sheltering from drones launched by the Russian invader, or investigating the murder of civilians in Bucha, or watching the destruction of Mariupol with all its people, didn’t feel any need to debate just cause. The legal category of war crimes, endorsed by the Catholic Church, has become highly relevant to the war in Ukraine and to the asymmetric Hamas-Israel war. For example, the starvation and killing of thousands of children in Gaza, the capture and killing of all ages in the Be’eri kibbutz and the youth at the Nova music festival, with civilians over 2/3rds of the total 1,169 killed, brings the wider question of proportionality into sharp focus and raises the question of war crimes. And popular perception of just cause (jus ad bellum) instinctively changes in the face of destruction of whole areas of human occupation and intolerably high numbers of civilian casualties (jus in bello). The problem in applying just war principles, with or without today’s weapons of mass destruction and reliance on air power, is that war of its very nature generates fear, anger and hatred which sweep away all considerations of proportionality. As Pope Benedict XV said presciently in 1915 “Nations do not die; humbled and oppressed, they chafe under the yoke imposed upon them, preparing a renewal of the combat, and passing down from generation to generation a mournful heritage of hatred and revenge.” Nor has the development of ‘precision guided’ weapons meant that, in densely populated areas, civilian lives are spared, least of all when drones hover, missiles rain down and bombs drop day and night for months. The development of advanced technology for killing the enemy and destroying their wherewithal to wage war has not made ‘collateral damage’ a thing of the past. Events in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza call into question whether the application of the principles of the just war has made any major advance since the Second World War. In its culmination, blanket bombing of German and Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Allied air power was deployed with no distinction between critical infrastructure, civilians and soldiers. Today, more than ever, distance protects bomber pilots and those who fire missiles remotely from seeing their victims’ pain and grief. We watch it in our living rooms. In recent conflicts civilians have been the actual targets. I remember in 2017 walking into central Sarajevo long after the war in Bosnia (1992-1995) had ended. I saw the bullet holes made by Serbian snipers shooting from the hills above the Miljacka river, picking off Bosnian women as they went out to buy bread. In July 1995 Serbian troops in Srebrenica massacred non-combatant Bosnian men and boys. In 1994 genocide was repeated in Rwanda. Between 1998-2003 in the eastern Congo millions of civilians were killed and raped. And the continuing slaughter of innocents in war in Syria and Sudan must be added. In a democratic society peaceful protest against war crimes should not be treated as a threat. Years of research into conflict resolution such as that at Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies, led by Professor Paul Rogers, should not be treated as an ivory-tower academic pastime. International efforts to contain the cruelty of war have met opposition. In 1998, I overheard inside the Foreign Office a conversation between a frantic official and his Head of Department. President Bill Clinton had just phoned Prime Minister Tony Blair to press him not to sign the Rome Stature, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Blair signed and ratified. America and Israel (along with China, Iraq, Yemen and Qatar) were amongst seven countries unwilling to submit their forces to its jurisdiction and to the international legal constraints it sought to impose. If there are to be any constraints on the waging and conduct of war, whatever the weakness of the ICC in practice, legal redress must be tried. Impartial prosecution of war crimes is one answer to the impasse of contending claims to just cause, for example, self-determination and self-defense, the clashing claims in the “two righteous victims” syndrome. The ICC is necessary but seems only able to enforce selective - victors’ - justice. A limited track record but better than nothing. General Sanders may not have just war theory on his mind, but he has much to think about not least national security. Given future threats, he clearly considers our national contribution of $67 billion on military spending as inadequate – against the staggering global expenditure of $2.25 trillion (2022-2023). Our politicians consider £28 billion each year for climate-friendly renewable energy as exorbitant, an economic and electoral hazard. This is frankly a recipe for national insecurity. Climate change is a profound national security threat. Following Biden, it is government investment in renewables as a priority that is “now not merely desirable but essential”. See TheArticle 05/03/2024 Democratic states are all alike; every autocratic state is autocratic in its own way. (Apologies to Tolstoy for rewriting the opening line of Anna Karenina about happy and unhappy families). Democracies are alike in featuring universal suffrage, striving for a body of robust accountable institutions and political practice, and sustaining a vibrant civil society. Autocracies, however, have strikingly distinctive features.
Take Iran and China. Despite common features for example, Iran like China now wants spies to harass and report back on dissidents in the UK and alternates brutal repression of dissent with reform and diplomatic activity. Putin, of course, brazenly carries out political assassinations of exiles, and opposition leaders such as Alexei Navalny. But Iran’s religious history has created its own unique political dynamics. Reformists can become President in Iran. Towards the end of Muhammad Khatami’s time as Iran’s President, 1997-2005, I used to visit Tehran for formal sessions of interfaith dialogue, a rare opportunity to observe the interaction of religion and politics. In 2003, seeking better relations with the USA, Khatami offered G.W. Bush a “grand bargain deal” signed off by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Prolonged behind-the-scenes negotiations at the UN had led the Iranians, in return for the lifting of debilitating economic sanctions, to offer to end support for Hamas and to pressure Hezbollah to stand down its military wing. A way would have been opened for Iran to join the WTO. Bush did not reply - arguably a costly lost opportunity. President Reagan went on a six-day visit to China in 1984. In comparison, after the capture of diplomat hostages during the revolutionary fervour of Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover in 1979, and after the West’s support for Iraq in the war against Iran (1980-1988), the Islamic Republic became what might be called the USA’s official enemy. Bush, who included Iran alongside North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in his “axis of evil”, was in thrall to a neo-con clique, led by his Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense). They were pushing for regime change and had destabilisation plans. Iran was not about to be visited by a US President. The Iranian State, its constitution, politics and power structures, are complex, opaque and sui generis. The Foreign Minister, for example, is appointed by the President, but the Judiciary and Supreme Court by the Supreme Leader, the name given to Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor. Ali Khamenei (84), the ultra-authoritarian Supreme Leader for 35 years since 1989, with the IRCG, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as his military base, can block Presidential initiatives. The constitution makes tension between elected and religious authority inevitable. Both President Khatami and President Hassan Rouhani 2013-2021, who had studied in Britain, were by Iranian standards reformists. They were both succeeded by hardliners. The White House was partly to thank for provoking reactionary policy change. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mayor of Tehran, who followed Khatami in 2005, was something of a religious fanatic, anti-American and anti-Israel. Ebrahim Raisi, elected President in 2021 after Rouhani, was a protégé of the Supreme Leader and a former member of a four-man prosecution committee which in 1988, according to Amnesty International, executed political prisoners in their thousands, many by hanging from cranes. Whilst President, Rouhani achieved a major diplomatic breakthrough. In 2015 The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Acton (JCPOA) limited Iran’s development of nuclear power to peaceful purposes - as had Khatami when President. Signed by China, Russia, France, Germany, UK, the EU and the USA, the agreement gave Rouhani a timetable for the lifting of sanctions which had been wrecking Iran’s economy. At a reception in London a few years ago I asked former President Khatami about Shi’a teaching on nuclear weapons. ‘Haram’ (forbidden) he said. ‘Haram for use?’ I queried. ‘Haram for use and possession’, he replied with emphasis in English. We await the day Patriarch Kirill of Moscow declares that Russia’s nuclear weapons are forbidden. A Guardian Council appointed by the Supreme Leader selects nominees for the Presidential elections. In 2017, Ibrahim Raisi, by then Chief Justice of Iran, stood against Rouhani who was seeking a second term and was trounced getting 38% of the vote against Rouhani’s 57% on a 73% voter turnout with 3% of votes invalid. But in 2021 Raisi won the presidential elections with 62% of the vote on a 48% - post-revolution lowest - turn-out with 13% of the votes invalid. What had happened in the interim? Trump had happened: providing a damaging example of American impact on Iran’s internal affairs. After only a few months in office, Trump refused certification for lifting sanctions on Iran and, on 8 May 2018, withdrew from the JPCOA. Rouhani and the reformers were discredited, the hardliners rejoiced, Raisi had a virtually clear run at the presidency, the centrifuges whirled away again seeking to produce enough weapons grade uranium for a bomb. The American neo-cons had undermined the Iranian reformers. What of Iranian civil society? The world witnessed mass protests in 2022-2023 after Mahsa Amini died from police beating. The women and men of Women, Life, Freedom, were brutally repressed by Raisi’s murderous security apparatus. The protesters’ courageous defiance and greater numbers than those facing Putin’s mafia in Russia shocked the Iranian government. Iran’s civil society has paid a high price for Bush and Trump’s policies. Iranian foreign and external security policy may have positive nationalist support and tacit approval. Iranian culture is, of course, strikingly different from that of China and Russia. I witnessed a telling little cultural clash between Iran’s governed and government in 2002. To counteract the attraction and influence of western Barbie dolls the religious authorities announced the launch of Iranian dolls, Dara and Sara, dressed in traditional fashion in keeping with Islamic values. Guided by the wife of a friend I plunged into the Tehran bazaar, crowded with women, black hijabs and chadors all around, intending to buy the new dolls to take home for the grandchildren. I discovered a silent revolt against the velayat e-faqih, the rule of the mullahs. No Dara and Sara. Lots of Barbies. Weeks after my return home a letter arrived inviting me to the Iranian embassy. I had written an article critical of Iran’s human rights record ending on a light note with my failed quest for Dara and Sara. I guessed a ban on future entry to Iran awaited me. At the Embassy I was ushered into a large hall and seated at an isolated table with a covering cloth and flowers – hiding a microphone I assumed. There, as I expected, my host upbraided me at length for my ‘negativity about Iran’. Then he lifted the tablecloth and presented me with Dara and Sara. Urbane, unexpected and sophisticated diplomacy. Today Iran is in the hands of particularly dangerous hardline characters. But in the future there may be more opportunities for liberalising change than in other autocracies. For this is not Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. There are still Khatamis and Rouhanis in the wings. Twenty years ago, the autocratic, black and traditional world of Dara and Sara could dialogue with the democratic, pink and modern world of Barbie. Let’s hope one day another opportunity for dialogue and negotiation will arise and not be thrown away - however bleak the picture is today. See TheArticle 17/02/2024 Lord (Alf) Dubs fought back tears as he spoke in the House of Lords on 2 February during the Holocaust Remembrance debate. He had been referring to One Life, the film recently in cinemas, and starring Anthony Hopkins, about the 1939 evacuation of children from the Nazi threat in Czechoslovakia. Aged six, Alf Dubs had been on one of those Kindertransport trains from Prague.
Lord Dubs had other reasons for emotion. In 2016 he had struggled to get a commitment to allow 3,000 child refugees from Europe to enter the UK. Section 67 of the 2016 Immigration Bill, known as the Dubs amendment, makes the commitment “to relocate to the United Kingdom and support a specified number of unaccompanied refugee children from other countries in Europe'. Only 350 children were allowed to enter before, in February 2017, the British government without adequate reason, unlawfully abandoned this aspect of the Bill. At the time, Local Authorities denied that there were no longer places for children available and some further 150 children were later allowed entry. Today, it is the right to family reunification, contained in the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) and guaranteed by the European Court of Human Rights ECHR, that requires pressure if it is to be honoured. Lord Dubs worked with some success to get government agreement that these family reunification provisions would be respected post-Brexit. In 2023 opposition to the - well-named - Illegal Immigration Bill was led by the Churches who championed the rights of refugee children, in opposition to a government hostile to migrants and asylum seekers. The then Minister of State for Immigration, Robert Jenrick, demonstrated this hostility – for the benefit of the Tory right-wing - by ordering the painting out of cartoon figures, intended to welcome children, on the walls of Manston refugee reception centre in Kent. Against this background of growing government legal pressure on migrants and refugees it was serendipity, rather than foresight, that brought One Life to cinema screens just as the government’s ‘stop the boats’ campaign reached obsession level generating, as Lord (Ken) Clarke (a former Conservative Home Secretary) observed, deranged forms of legislation. Directed by James Hawes, known for his television films, One Life is a co-production with BBC Films. It is a well-told unpretentious, morality story. If you were watching at home, you would feel good as you switched off the TV. So, no blockbuster this. Nor suitable for young children who would be distressed by the heartbreaking suffering of the, mainly Jewish, children being parted from their families in Prague, though the film mainly suggests, rather than shows, Nazi brutality, through the visible fear of its victims. By focusing on a few families and their children – the children’s photographs and their names play a prominent role throughout - refugees become individuals like our own children, but vulnerable, confused and in peril; they are not just numbers. Anthony Hopkins plays Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker who initiated and organised the evacuation of children from Prague. During the opening sequences viewers easily identify with Winton in his old age as his wife nags him to clear out all the old documents cluttering up his study. Papers which, of course, contain the film’s story. Hopkins remembering to camera, even if a little too lengthy, and starring in That’s Life reunited with those he had saved, gives a masterful performance portraying Winton’s humility. The cut-backs to the young Nicholas Winton – Johnny Flynn looking remarkably like the old footage of the character he portrays – come naturally. The screenplay based on daughter, Barbara Winton’s If It’s Not Impossible...: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, published in 2014, sticks closely to what is known. Through his children’s section’ of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) Winton managed to transport eight train-loads, 669 children, from Prague to London and to settle them in foster families. There are contemporary resonances, initial opposition from the UK government followed by the overwhelming documentation required for each child to obtain a visa plus an indemnity charge of £50 (£2,800 today) to cover possible future costs of repatriation. The Kindertransport: What Really Happened, Andrea Hammel, Polity Books, 2023, paints the wider picture of the fate of child refugees from Nazi rule. Here is a more critical account of what happened to the 10,000 children fleeing to Britain from Germany and Poland, between 1933-1939. (Many initially fled to the closer but soon unsafe Belgium, France and Netherlands). Hammel highlights how the long-term consequences of traumatic separation from parents remained unacknowledged and how the religious, Jewish, upbringing of the children in Christian or secular foster families was neglected. In One Life, a conversation between a Rabbi and Winton does touch on this religious and cultural problem, though at the time it was Orthodox Jews in the UK who objected most to the point of taking a group of children into their care. At the outbreak of war some children who had reached sixteen were even interned. What was treated as temporary separation, of course, proved permanent as parents died in the Holocaust. Alf Dubs was in some ways exceptionally fortunate. His father met him at Liverpool Street Station and his mother later managed to join them. But, when all is said and done, the alternative to the Kindertransport is shown in the fate of the 250 children on the ninth and last train, raided by the Nazis before it left Prague, one of the few violent and deeply upsetting scenes in One Life. Where is the moral in the Kindertransport story, a footnote to the Holocaust? What virtues did Nicholas Winton deploy to save those lives? Unusually for a banker and a stockbroker, he was on the left of the Labour Party. He decided, rather than taking a skiing holiday, to go and join a friend in the Prague BCRC. In Prague he was moved by compassion. Baptised a Christian, Winton was the middle child of a German Jewish immigrant family. He saw first-hand the plight of the Jewish and other families and did something about it revealing exceptional – often underrated - organisational abilities. Winton, his mother (played by Helena Bonham Carter) and the BCRC demonstrated not just empathy but extraordinary perseverance, hope and tenacity. “If something is not impossible, there must be a way to do it” was Winton’s motto. One Life and the story of the Czech Kindertransport have a déjà vu feeling. As I left Liverpool Street Station last week, I looked with new eyes at the familiar statue of the Kindertransport children in the half light of an early winter evening. The British government in the late 1930s, for some of the same reasons as today’s, sought to limit the number of refugees entering the UK, though it did have the excuse of being threatened by a coming World War. Then it was civil society, refugee organisations plus a strong Quaker element, who asserted and put into practice the duty to admit refugees. Today it is still the Churches with refugee NGOs who practice compassion and solidarity challenging government hostility. Then Nicholas Winton embodied these national values. Today it is Alf Dubs. See TheArticle 07/02.2023 “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 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 The BBC Reith lectures began under Atlee’s Labour Government in 1948 - alongside incidentally the National Health Service. It was a time of proud and creative post-war nationalism when the idea of public services that aimed to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation, and its health, had traction. Public sentiment was much influenced by the recent solidarity of wartime and shared expectations of a better, less class-ridden life.
This year’s Reith lectures, given by Professor Ben Ansell, a political scientist based at Nuffield College and Oxford University, takes place in a very different climate; the notion of ‘treason of the intellectuals’, for example, puts academics in the tumbrils alongside experts and urban elites. Ansell is looking at goals for future government and society: democracy, security, prosperity, and this week, ‘solidarity’. So, even if not broadcast in prime time, the series has all the ingredients for evoking current outrage at the supposed left-wing take-over of the BBC, as well as being a fitting annual tribute to Lord Reith. Especially as Ansell after several years of study in the USA has all the admirable, sometimes irritating, fluency and jargon-free presentation - give or take some flat jokes - of the American academic. But how pleasing to find the word ‘solidarity’, and the values it carries, making a comeback beyond its use by Polish trades unionists, Popes and veterans of the 1960s. Even more encouraging is listening to someone who not only diagnoses the pathology of our contemporary them-and-us nationalism and divisive politics but is making a good fist of exploring a remedial strategy. Despite plenty of evidence-based policy making – he presents surveys of attitudes and opinions of different categories and geographical populations – there is an underlying flaw. He almost touched on it with his reference to people’s feelings. He’s an academic. His arguments are based on facts not feelings. What he is hoping to remedy is based on emotions cultivated, as he clearly analyses, by powerful and manipulative forces in unaccountable social media and by canny populist politicians. The many who share those feelings will not be won over by facts. This point is made compellingly by Ash Amin in his impressive 2023 After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance Polity Press. Since populism points to a particularly potent form of belonging - he calls it nativist - what set of affective experiences might begin to replace it? Based partly on research in a very poor peri-urban community in Delhi, the book detracts from the acuity of his vision by an inexorable flow of academese. ‘Affordances’, ‘Phatic’, ‘Semiotic Associations’, and so on, evoke that retro-claim of the old Reader’s Digest: ‘It Helps to Improve your Word-Power'. This is a pity because he suggests a terrain of social relationships, conviviality, cohabitation, shared travails, in which a different nationalism based on acceptance of diversity and universal values might grow. This would be built on a recognition of the many ‘border crossings’ created by a specific history of colonialism, reaction to it and its consequences, a plural and multi-cultural society. There is so much in the UK which is the antithesis of a nativist them-and-us, the rejection of the ‘experts and the urban elite’, blaming migrants for the results of political choices beyond their control. Here, from my own experience, are two examples of the negotiation of identity and relationship in the rich, ever-changing diversity of life in Britain. Readers will recall their own. I remember some years ago the elders of the Somali community in Ealing worrying about the vulnerability of some of their children who were troublesome in school. Their initiative resulted in an expert in psychology and religion being asked to put on a course for them. It seemed a good idea to have Somali pop music playing as everyone arrived, a symbol of mutual acknowledgement. The most popular star was recorded and played. Big smiles all round except for one or two elders from the puritanical wing of Islam. Aesthetics matter. Expertise and local knowledge matter too. Then there was the Catholic school I visited where some of the Muslim girls ‘went to Confession’. They explained. “We don’t say ‘Bless me Father for I have sinned’. So he knows we are Muslim. We just like having a space where we can talk privately”. There are more ways of enriching the cultural life of a nation than conceived by Lord Reith. And they are all built on mutual trust. The texture of much of British society are networks redolent of a relational civic nationalism. Despite the partial decline of the trades unions and Churches, NGOs, large and small, volunteer associations and choirs have shown a comparative resilience. Add to their role in civil society countless sponsored individual activities, and the great urban marathons and half marathons. Yes, London’s nine million people have an average income way above the rest of the country, but Londoners show how to live with diversity as a creative force. How can this be built on elsewhere? Life during the worst of the COVID pandemic, the popular re-evaluation of the value of people’s jobs contained in the concept of ‘key workers’, the self-sacrifice of bus drivers, hospital workers, nurses, doctors, made up of many different ethnic identities, and the universal recognition of how they gave their lives for the common good, spoke of a new relational national identity. But within a couple of years, it had dissipated: business as usual again with low paid wage earners increasingly dependent on food banks, Government removing the cap on bonuses to assuage corporate greed, and the poor with zero job security in the gig economy. We are not going to regain a healthy, open, nationalism easily. The power balance is dramatically against it. But the BBC still enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation as Reith wanted. And beyond the nation as the outstanding work of the BBC World Service demonstrates daily – or nightly if you are a poor sleeper. Advent is supposed to be a time of waiting, of hope and patience. It is no time to let nativism have the last word. See TheArticle 15/12/2023 The manipulation of public anxiety about immigration has become an important element in Party politics here in Britain. With the economy flat-lining, against a background of a million job vacancies, debilitating understaffing in the NHS and social care, hostility to immigration seems odd. But at a time of economic distress, an appeal to xenophobia, subtle or open, and the stoking of anger against urban elites, (sometimes merited) brings approval and votes - as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has recently demonstrated.
Anti-immigration rhetoric offers a scapegoat for a plethora of ills including the failure of governments to provide hope, justice and a sense of wellbeing for their citizens. From an America further divided by Trump to Orban’s authoritarian Hungary democracy looks in bad shape. The reasons are varied, the problems seemingly intractable but, as Donald Tusk’s electoral victory in Poland over the Law & Justice Party (PiS) showed, the direction of travel is not always towards far-right extremism ((Denis McShane ‘Geert Wilders: far-Right bogeyman or old Dutch cheese’ 25 November 2023). And, yes, the far-Right can soften its position once in power. Worldwide, political Parties believe that if they are to have a reasonable hope of electoral success they must promise to control immigration. In Britain the fear of ‘them’ taking our jobs, our housing, places in our schools, is an understandable consequence of growing impoverishment and the accelerating erosion of the welfare state with its universal public services. Voters’ number one priority according to UK opinion polls is the cost of living. For growing numbers in the lowest income decile in the UK, the sixth largest economy in the world, this means the lack of basic material necessities, not being able to make ends meet. Some 4.2 million British children are growing up in poverty. Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown’s Business Secretary, speaking in 1998, was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich - as long as they paid their taxes”. By 2012 he had retracted these sentiments and was worried about rising inequality and failure to increase middle class disposable incomes. By 2021, the top decile in the UK owned almost half our national wealth. The bottom decile received c. 3%. Or put even more starkly, the richest 1% of the population were worth £2.8 trillion, more than the £2.4 trillion owned by 70%, some 48 million people. Mandelson warned against “business and bank bashing” yet banks make themselves targets. Money tucked away in tax havens is measured in billions while investment in the UK continues to stagnate and investment bankers get richer alongside the CEOs of public companies. The EU cap on bankers’ bonuses has been scrapped by the Government. The salaries of CEOs in energy companies, and their shareholder dividends, are eye-watering while their customers struggle with bills. You will not find the word ‘inequality’ in Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s recent Autumn Statement. Nor did he quote the words of King Lear “So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough”. Hunt’s ‘levelling up’ measures mean an aspiration to equalise growth around the country; our geographical inequality is the worst in the OECD. His updating of benefits by 10% leaves them at the lowest level since 1990. He does mention ‘poverty’ but close to the end of his speech and then only in the context of measures ‘to get people back to work’. Britain has become one of the most unequal societies in Europe, more unequal than Romania and Latvia according to the EU inequality index. Does it matter? Yes. In a new Cost of Inequality Report, the Equality Trust, a public policy think-tank, asserts that such a level of inequality “has made the UK more unhealthy, unhappy and unsafe than our more equal peers” and puts its economic cost at over £100 billion. The sense of injustice, of being ignored and looked down upon, can result in voters directing the contempt to which they feel subjected towards a political entity variously described as ‘the swamp’ ‘the blob’ ‘the chattering classes’ ‘the metropolitan elite’, and voting for the Party that best seems to express their anger. How else to explain voters’ enthusiasm for clever and dangerous, sometimes libertarian, clowns unsuited for high office who play the populist cards of immigration, Islamophobia, wresting control from the contemptuous elites: Wilders in Netherlands, Trump in the USA, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Duterte in Philippines, Meloni in Italy, Braverman in UK. All march onto the political stage to the drumbeat of a dangerous form of nationalism. The Indian academic Pankaj Mishra traces these developments back to the Enlightenment which he sees as creating the myth and expectation of progress. His Age of Anger: A history of the Present, Penguin 2017, tracks what he terms ressentiment, an amalgam of anger and resentment created by socio-economic structures experienced by people treated as ‘superfluous’. The invention of the microchip in 1971 opened a new era in the history of ressentiment. The revolution in communications technology and social media, its virtual solidarities, have enabled both the spread and intensification of ressentiment, contributing to retrograde and tribalist forms of nationalism and generating violence – see the recent anti-foreigner riots in Dublin. There can be no doubt that poverty, wars, and climate change will increase international migration. One of the great failures of Western leadership is the lack of any ‘strategic plan’ (the words used by the Archbishop of Canterbury during the debates on the Government’s illegal Rwanda policy) to stabilise vulnerable economies in Africa and Asia enabling their populations to stay at home and make a living. This requires the provision of a level of aid commensurate to the financial flows into Europe after World War II, and means debt relief, a generous Loss and Compensation Fund and more. Just as Austerity in Britain since 2010 and indifference to inequality and poverty are a national economic choice, with consequences we can see, so is refusal to face the magnitude of the problems confronting vulnerable countries around the world. This failure of vision and courage has deep roots. Mishra, a secular socialist, describes the Pope - remarkably - as the “most convincing and influential public intellectual today”. He believes that Francis’ moral stature rests on his critique of the “ostensibly autonomous and self-interested individual’, a figure emerging during the Enlightenment and now confronting “an impasse”. In the current phase of globalisation, Mishra writes, this figure has descended into ‘either angry tribalism or equally bellicose forms of antinomian individualism’, the denial of shared moral values. His is a provocative but compelling portrait of populist politics. If we are to survive the 21st century as civilised, diverse, and democratic societies recognising our obligations under international law and preserving humanitarian values, voters must keep the clowns and extremists, the libertarians and newly minted ‘anarcho-capitalists’ and recycled fascists, out of high office. It is a political imperative in this age of anger to seek leaders with a moral core of honesty, empathy, solidarity and responsibility, capable of reducing inequality. This quest must not remain a form of utopian eccentricity. See TheArticle 29/11/2023 “A completely extraordinary thing to do, to effectively overrule a decision on the facts, on the evidence, by the highest court in the land." That is Lord Sumption who served on the Supreme Court from 2012-2018 describing the Prime Minister’s proposed emergency legislation on offshoring asylum processing to Rwanda.
“With our new treaty Rwanda is safe”, Rishi Sunak declared responding to the Supreme Court’s unanimous judgement that Rwanda is unsafe and the government policy of deporting refugees to Rwanda is therefore unlawful. Sunak’s reaction to a judgement that does not please him is a demonstration of how to create Trumpian alternative facts - turn ‘magical thinking’ (Suella Braverman) into legislation. The rest of the Government’s response has been gaslighting as usual. Sunak took the lead prefacing Prime Minister’s Question Time on 15 November by declaring “the principle of removing asylum seekers to a safe third country is lawful. There are further elements that they [the Supreme Court] want additional certainty on". So things are not what they seem: everything is under control. But the Supreme Court was not deciding whether the general principle of moving asylum seekers to third countries was legal. The judges were hearing an appeal from Government against an existing decision of the Court of Appeal which had found outsourcing asylum processing to Rwanda unlawful. And the Prime Minister’s reference to mysterious ‘further elements’ relates presumably to facts about the past record of the Rwandan government including their treatment of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers offshored to Rwanda by Israel between 2013 and 2018, as well as the question of past compliance with the 1951 Refugee Convention. Rwanda’s asylum procedures are clearly inadequate and require a substantial transformation to ensure compliance with the Refugee Convention and other international norms. To seek and enjoy asylum from mistreatment and persecution in another country is a human right, Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A great safeguard for refugees is the prohibition of forced return to countries where they may be subject to ill-treatment or persecution, the principle of non-refoulement. The decision taken by the Supreme Court rested on applying this principle in the light of the Rwandan government’s rudimentary systems for the processing of refugees and its past record on asylum and other human rights. The Supreme Court judges were not going to be satisfied with assurances given by the Rwandan government as had the divisional court in the UK in which legal proceedings had begun with a preliminary finding in favour of the Government. Its ruling relied on a realistic and thoroughly researched assessment of the risk of breaches of non-refoulement involving asylum seekers sent from the UK to Rwanda. In short, the Supreme Court painstakingly undertook the due diligence we might have expected from the Government before they began herding asylum seekers onto an airplane to Kigali. The Government could have avoided lengthy and expensive legal challenges. Early in 2022, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office had advised Downing Street, on the advice of the UK High Commissioner to Burundi and Rwanda, Omar Daair OBE, not to select Rwanda as a third country. The UNHCR, with what the Supreme Court called their ‘unique and unrivalled expertise’, had aired their strong opposition. The killing by Rwandan police of 12 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a protest against poor food in 2018 should have raised serious doubts. Rishi Sunak was probably too busy in California in May 2011 to notice reports of British police warning two Rwandan dissidents of a credible threat to their lives. President Kagame’s way with political opponents was hardly a secret when the ‘Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership’ was launched by Priti Patel in April 2022 in the face of objections not just from the political Opposition but also from her Home Office civil servants, the Churches and NGOs. The Government’s reaction to this debacle foretold, and of their own making, is disturbing. There was the usual claim that only a ‘vocal minority’ were rejoicing. And the worn out refrain that the Prime Minister would courageously realise ‘the will of the British people’ against the naysayers. And where have we heard that before? According to James Cleverly, the new Home Secretary, this is “an incredible priority for the British people”. Recently Home Secretaries have changed at least once a year. The post is now so precarious poor Mr. Cleverly, sitting next to the Prime Minister last Wednesday, showed the nervous signs of nodding-dog syndrome. In interviews he was reduced to sounding like an old-fashioned colonial officer assuring the home audience that the natives will be trained in good government double-quick, an unenviable task he shares with newly ennobled David Cameron. What are we to make of all this? And of the waste of £140 million on a Rwanda Partnership known to be doomed to failure plus the £8 million a day spent on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers during the wait for a failed policy to be adjudicated. The kindest interpretation is incompetence with a touch of arrogance. But when most reasonable and compassionate people who believe in policymaking based on evidence and facts tell you the Rwanda Partnership isn’t going to fly, why keep trying to make it get off the ground? A less kind conclusion is that the Prime Minister’s determination to send a few refugees to Rwanda has more to do with votes than lives. Perhaps he believes getting his message across, standing in front of a microphone saying what he thinks people in key marginal seats want to hear, is leadership. If the Government goes ahead with concluding a previously prepared treaty with Rwanda, ‘revisiting’ “our domestic legal framework”, and introducing “emergency legislation” - a seasonal mix of Götterdämmerung and Pirates of Penzance - we are in trouble. It sounds like a grave step in the long decline of Britain, driven by the extreme Right and led first by Boris Johnson. This move away from both a human rights culture and respect for the rule of law is what in any other country we would describe as undermining the foundations of democracy. We are indeed in an emergency - one needing a General Election not emergency legislation. See TheArticle 17/11/2023 Fifty years of Cold War gave us the Soviet Union and communist States as our enemy. We learned all about repression, the horrors of one Party rule. What else did we need to know about the German Democratic Republic (GDR), indelibly imprinted as ‘Stasiland’ by Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? The question ‘what was it like living in a communist society?’ seemed redundant. Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990, published this year, gives us a full and different cultural and political history, a revealing and compelling picture of daily life on the other side of the iron curtain.
Anyone looking at today’s world from an historical perspective is drawn to asking ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions. That is part of the fun for historians, to some degree similar to the pleasures of outguessing a police procedural on TV. More taxing is exploring the past as ‘another country’, trying to get inside the heads of the natives, asking ‘what was it like living then’ and ‘how did people think’? Hilary Mantel’s portrayal of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII’s court in the early 16th century is a masterclass in doing just that. It was more than a decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Empire in 1990-1991 that film-makers began to portray life in East Germany as like - even if not quite like - life anywhere else. Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 bitter-sweet comedy Good Bye Lenin! is a mother- and-son story. The mother, Christiane Kerner, spends eight months in a coma after a heart attack. Meanwhile the Berlin wall comes down and Chancellor Helmut Köhl steers Germany towards re-unification. To avoid a sudden shock, her family goes to any length to keep from her the new political and social reality. The humour is gentle with an underlying sadness. It’s political satire - by a West German director - but you get a feel for East German society. Beyond the Wall addresses the social and political life of the GDR, a State that lasted barely forty years, providing a fascinating response to the ‘what was it like’ question. Katja Hoyer, born in East Germany and a graduate of the University of Jena, visiting research fellow at Kings College, London, writes with journalistic flair and an historian’s skills. Alongside the rewards of painstaking archival research, the book offers an attractive mix of interviews so that most chapters grow out of brief biographies of named individuals and their family life. You come away feeling you’ve learned something that you should have known before. Hoyer’s first thesis is that the post-war division of Germany was far from inevitable. It was Walter Ulbricht, an uninspiring but determined communist ideologue, who was the main architect of the GDR. After 1945, he worked his way up to the position of Chair of its State Council which he held from 1960 until his death in 1973, though he wielded considerable power as Deputy Chair of the Council of Ministers from 1950. Stalin was opposed to the creation of two Germanies. Hoyer writes that he had a genuine respect for German culture, literature and art, believed that the German people had become entranced by Hitler and were not ‘inherently warlike’. At the end of World War II in talks with Ulbricht in 1945, Stalin sought German unity: a unified, neutral, defanged Germany with its borders defined by the allies at Potsdam, a buffer between the Soviet Union and NATO. Ulbricht wanted a sovereign State with himself as President. Stalin reluctantly accepted a fait accompli in 1949 when representatives from the eleven Parliamentary Councils of the three Western Occupied Zones approved a State constitution for West Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was born. The German Democratic Republic was created from the Soviet zone. West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine, cutting off all diplomatic and economic relations with countries that recognised East Germany, forced the GDR into economic dependence on the Soviet Union (which of course had initially extracted huge reparations). Ulbricht’s regime’s survival of an early, often forgotten, uprising in 1953 was also dependent on brutal suppression by Soviet military power. Rebuilding East Germany after the War was a colossal physical and human task. It took ten years to clear all the rubble from Dresden after blanket bombing by the Allies. In the mid-1950s there was a permanent shortage of people to fill professional jobs. From 1955-1957, years of economic crisis, an average of 300,000 left for the FRG each year; such was the reaction to the pressures created by Ulbricht’s push to build socialism. By November 1989 the GDR had a population of 16 million against the FRG’s 62 million. Ulbricht was ideologically committed to, and invested in, equality between male and female workers. Average incomes doubled in the 1950s. By 1955 half the workforce were women. A third were women in the FRG and, by 1970, the gap had grown to 66% in the GDR against 27.5% in the FRG. Hoyer insists that upward mobility for workers, especially women, should not be dismissed as a cynical move: “this is not only to underestimate the drive towards gender equality...but also insulting to the women concerned”. But by 1961 three million East Germans, 7,500 doctors, 1,200 dentists, 33% of its academics and hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, had “turned their back on Ulbricht’s ‘workers and peasants state’. 80% of them via Berlin”. The brain drain had to be stopped – by force. Construction of the Berlin Wall began on 13 August 1961. Most of the deaths in No-Man's land came in the first few months after its completion. Hoyer describes the daily life of the border guards and the phenomenal growth of the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, from 1,100 staff in 1950 to 43,000 by 1970 with its own burgeoning paramilitary force, the Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. In 1971, Erich Honeker - who had spent many years in Nazi prisons - took over from Ulbricht, continuing his attempt to plough a communist furrow outside Soviet control. The GDR came out top of the communist world for consumer goods though with typically poor housing. Like a smelly old dog, the East Germans fell in love with the ‘Trabi’, the only car they could buy; the Trabant was a two cylinder, 26 horse-power ULEZ nightmare, slow and noisy. Even with a waiting list of many years, by 1988 half the GDR population had a car, making the percentage of car ownership much the same on both sides of the wall. In Beyond the Wall, Hoyer provides many more revealing statistics, telling vignettes and unexpected snapshots of daily life. But she risks being condemned as a ‘leftie historian’ rather than a worthy apprentice to Hilary Mantel’s brilliant storytelling. Dwelling on what is usually omitted makes for balance, for good history. Today, in a polarised world, we badly need her kind of historical consciousness when considering our enemies, and friends. I visited Honeker’s East Berlin in 1980. Out of the bright lights and vibrant life of the FRG into drab, empty streets, lunch in a dark wood-paneled restaurant, a surfeit of surly waiters arrayed around the walls. At her retirement ceremony in 2021, Angela Merkel asked the Bundeswehr band to play a 1970’s song by the East German singer Nina Hagen: “Du Hast den Farbfilm Vergessen (You have forgotten the colour - film), a gentle poke at the drabness of the GDR. The song ends: “You forgot to bring the colour film, good grief. All the blue and white and green will later not be true”. It brought tears to her eyes as she recalled her youth in East Germany. History is best written in technicolour, not grey, and not in black and white. See TheArticle 04/11/2023 |
Archives
March 2024
Categories |