“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
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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 We have become accustomed to warnings that TV news reports from war zones may be disturbing. They usually are distressing. But so are reports on the consequences of climate change. And they come without such warnings despite the dire implications of further global warming.
On 4 October, St. Francis of Assisi’s feast day, Pope Francis published Laudato Deum “Praise God.... for all his creatures” - words taken from the song St. Francis composed in 1224 celebrating the unity of creation and his place in it. Eight years had passed since Pope Francis published his encyclical Laudato Si, (Praise Be) addressed to ‘every person living on this planet’ about “care for our common home”. Laudato Deum is addressed to “all the people of Good Will”. It is brief and, avoiding Vaticanese, employs relatively accessible language about the climate crisis. It is itself a warning and, unlike a formal encyclical, explicitly a call to action. “I have realised that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing breaking point”, the Pope writes, citing the irreversible nature of changes such as the melting of polar ice which could not be reversed for hundreds of years. “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time”. This is the Pope’s forthright verdict. He pointedly mentions that the USA has double the amount of carbon emissions per head of China. Francis establishes the link between fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes and the accelerating increase in greenhouse gas emissions, refuting the evidence-deniers. Unusually for a papal document he draws on authoritative scientific sources, notably the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to prove that their increased incidence and severity is caused by human actions. But he also takes his analysis much deeper. The Pope sees our current predicament growing out of what he calls the ‘technocratic paradigm’, doubling-down on his critique of this mindset in Laudato Si. “Deep down it consists in thinking as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such”. When human beings behave as if they are “autonomous, omnipotent and limitless” and “claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies”. Hugely increased power, enabled by technological developments, lies in hands which ‘cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint". The ‘ethical decadence of real power’, Francis believes, disguises itself by clever marketing and fake information. The world has become “an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition”. Instead, he explains, “we are part of nature, included in it, and thus in constant interaction with it”, a perception he acknowledges still cherished by many indigenous peoples. Francis shares the traditional Judaeo-Christian belief in the unique and central value of the human being; but he recognises the need today for what he calls a “situated anthropocentrism” in an “integral ecology” (Laudato Si) meaning that “human life is incomprehensible and unsustainable without other creatures”. All well and good the liberal secular world might say but what is the practical application of these ideas and insights? How might they be brought down to earth and take shape in Governments’ plans? These questions, which are also often strictures, to a great degree misunderstand the nature of religious discourse. The Pope is using his position and authority as head of a global Church with 1.3 billion members to sound an alarm, to arouse people to expect, to demand, effective action from governments, and to change themselves. We are a very long way from the world of Rishi Sunak’s seven bins for sorting rubbish - though Francis is not squeamish about condemning the way our rubbish is dumped in the developing world. His discussion of obstacles in the way of coordinated international action, like his intention to attend COP28 in Dubai this November, just announced this week, demonstrates his goal of provoking urgent action in the world of practical politics. For a papal communication Laudato Deum is detailed and crystal clear. There are sections on the progress and failures arising from the COP series and even what to expect from COP28. The Pope also writes about the need for some means of enforcing multilateral agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the general weakness of international politics in problem-solving. He will certainly be promoting a Loss and Damage Fund to mitigate the ravages of climate change on the vulnerable countries of the global South. Francis’ vision, shaped by his experience in Latin America of effective change coming from below upwards, may seem utopian. He holds up the international treaty on antipersonnel mines as one example of effective NGO advocacy. But this is much honoured in the breach. Today a global civil society as an equal, benign and responsible player in international relations, curbing the prevarication and corruption of governments, seems like an ever-receding mirage. Governments’ - tragic - nationalism and short-sighted version of national interest, their de facto rejection of the global common good – which Francis has written about elsewhere - is no less damaging than the ‘technocratic paradigm’ which accompanies it. A few days ago, Greta Thunberg was dragged away from a peaceful demonstration in London outside a meeting between fossil-fuel executives and government ministers. Her arrest highlights both the power, cynicism and irresponsibility of governments and the responsibility, idealism and weakness of young people’s peaceful protest. They are deeply anxious about their future - anxiety caused, at least, in part by the pusillanimity and inaction of governments. Religious bodies and organisations are doing their best to broadcast Francis’ writings on social media, and their best has got better in recent years. But we want to be diverted from frightening news. In the face of the horrific massacre in Israel of more than 1,400 Jews and the abduction of some 200 hostages, precipitating a grave crisis in the Middle East, anger was directed at the BBC. What word should have been used to describe the perpetrators of these horrors? We seem unable to hold the big picture in mind for long, whether the causes of violent extremism and war, and how to counter them, or the causes of climate change and how to mitigate them. And if in pain and anger we give up on universal values, justice and human dignity, what ethical resources remain to solve our greatest problems of global scope? When a much-loved religious leader in Rome, with an old man’s sense of time running out, made his alarm call on 4 October, we most probably didn’t hear his message either from the pulpit or from the mass media. So neither were we likely to be disturbed by it. We were free to concentrate instead on how to get home during the railway drivers’ strike. See TheArticle 25/10/2023 Sometimes a seemingly minor story speaks reams about this Government. Last week, The House, Parliament’s in-house magazine, reported ‘a former senior adviser to the [Church of England’s] bishops in the House of Lords’ as saying that bishops were coming away from encounters with junior Home Office staff ‘feeling like lepers’. Relations with the Home Office had become ‘toxic’ and ‘unfixable’. Might then Christianity be one of those ‘luxury beliefs’ shared with the ‘woke elite’ which Home Secretary Suella Braverman, during her 3 October Conservative Party Conference speech, positioned herself as opposing?
During the Lords debates on the Illegal Migration Act of July 2023, the Archbishop of Canterbury described its key measures as ‘morally unacceptable and politically impractical’. His forthright condemnation seems to be the reason why, when he ‘reached out’ to the Home Secretary – Americanisms seem to have reached into Lambeth Palace – he was rebuffed. Radio 4’s 1st October Sunday Programme ran the story with comment from Dominic Grieve, a practising Anglican and former Conservative Attorney General purged from the Party for incorrect views on BREXIT. Grieve’s view was that Suella Braverman’s refusal to discuss immigration with the head of the established Church flew in the face of constitutional conventions and was ‘inexcusable’ and ‘extraordinarily rude’. Chris Loder, an Anglican and Conservative MP for West Dorset responded that the Lords Spiritual, all 26 of them, were politically biased: they took a left-wing approach, acted as ‘campaigners and commentators’, and 96% of their votes - where are you More or Less when we need you? - had been cast against the Government. If Loder’s voting figures for the bishops were to stand up to examination, they would be open to interpretation as a reflection on the tenor of government legislation as well as the bishops’ ‘luxury belief’ that strangers should be welcomed and the needs of the poor prioritised. Not just a storm in a tea-cup. More revealing and important. The strong Church-State disagreement about migrancy reveals a fundamental, possibly irresolvable, conflict between values. And there lies the question for Government about both domestic and foreign policy which cannot be resolved even by the best legal minds in the Supreme Court. Put simply should policy contribute to a global common good and to the common life of domestic Society? Or should policy enhance freedom of individuals and support the aspirations of individual citizens? In the rosy glow of Tony Blair’s landslide victory, pre-millennials may remember the late Robin Cook’s inaugural speech as Foreign Secretary in May 1997 and Cook’s careful branding of future policy, as having an ‘ethical dimension’. Despite avoiding promising an ‘ethical foreign policy’, nevertheless he was treated with derision. Nor did the policy last the course under Blair’s leadership. Cook himself resigned in March 2003 over the Iraq war. The promotion of peace, human rights, environmentalism, democracy and prosperity were the key values lying behind Cook’s goals: security for nations, arms control and disarmament, abolition of landmines, protection of the environment, promotion of exports, diplomacy seeking peace and democracy globally. They still add up to a desirable programme embodying ethical values even if difficult to implement. So what might foreign and domestic policy with an ethical dimension look like today? Is such an aspiration naïve utopianism? At home, the Prime Minister’s policy decisions presented in his Conference speech appear to be based on hopes of clawing back votes lost in the BREXIT/Johnson/Truss debacle rather than a clear set of values. The Uxbridge by-election is won by opposing Mayor Sadiq Khan’s attempt to clean up Greater London’s air. The Conservative Party discovers it is pro-car. Voters don’t like windfarms on their doorstep. License new drilling for oil and politicise measures to combat climate change. The “growing role of parental wealth transfers in driving differences in life outcomes...” widens inequality (Will Hutton Observer 1 October). Float the possibility of abolishing inheritance tax. Fears of cultural ‘swamping’ and the increasing pressure on public services debilitated by 13 years of Tory rule, certainly some votes there. Attack and override the human rights of migrants and asylum seekers. A negligible number of votes in foreign policy apart, perhaps, from Ukraine? So, no electoral harm in Foreign Minister, James Cleverly, raising human rights issues abroad, for example, with China, or Saudi Arabia - whilst courting them for access to their lucrative markets. But how concerned about promoting human rights is a government that floats the possibility of leaving the European Convention of Human Rights, a Convention which a former British Government played a significant part in creating? Or how committed to human rights is a Home Secretary who derides the 1998 UK Human Rights Act as ‘The Criminals Rights Act’, and in New York calls in question the UN 1951 Refugee Convention? Church leaders make choices different from governments. Both Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury share a ‘luxury belief’ in a just society and its values derived from a two thousand year-old tradition rooted in the Gospels. They wish to see the common good flourish. Some of their beliefs and the demands of the common good will be costly and inconvenient to implement. Some will be contentious. But what is most contentious is a government that promotes the views and values of an extreme-right wing minority at worst like Suella Braverman who dismisses compassion as squeamishness. This is a government that rejects dialogue over matters of national importance, including Britain’s global standing. See TheArticle 06/10/2023 It all began on a Sunday at Stansted airport. The Ryanair flight, full of people, like me, who had said they would never fly Ryanair again, was on time. The arrivals e-gate accepted my passport. Our two pieces of luggage bumped speedily onto the conveyor. Stansted Express announced a departure in four minutes. Down the ramps as fast as we could. Train marked Stansted doors still open. On we got, luggage into overhead racks, congratulating ourselves. Hubris. The conductor announced the train was going to Norwich via Cambridge.
We, and some others, struggled off with our luggage as fast as we could. On the opposite platform a train really going to London Liverpool Street in 20 minutes. But where was the green knapsack with our laptop and house keys? On its way to Norwich via Cambridge. Human beings still survive as station employees though in many ticket offices staff have already been sent their redundancy notices. A real woman, what luck, behind a desk marked Stansted Express was kind and concerned. I hope she keeps her job. She ushered me into a Greater Anglia holy of holies, the station manager’s office. Nice man. He phoned Cambridge and asked for a conductor to find and hand in the knapsack there. Fingers crossed. On towards London, four scheduled stops, one longish delay – this was nobody's idea of an express - and a dead stop far from our destination at Harlow Town. And then a chirpy driver on the intercom to inform us of fire on the overhead wires ahead and “we’ll be here for hours” and “you all will have to make your own way home”. Could he really have said that? He spoke the exact truth. In Harlow Town station a lone railway worker at the ticket gate. Neither he nor the driver allowed the magic words “replacement buses” to pass their lips. And none appeared. Hundreds of heavily laden travellers decanted into a Sunday-quiet, broiling, empty, station concourse. Eventually a handful of local cabs and an uber or two summoned by born survivors arrived. And after some forty minutes the first London-style taxis pulled up at the head of a vast queue. Fierce defence of our £10 places in a six-seater before we could set off to Epping. Epping is one of those exotic end stations on the Tube, like Mill Hill East and Morden, known to battle-hardened commuters. On hot or overcrowded days, lacking air conditioning, the Central Line temperatures are life-threatening. And it was hot. But joy - a text from the Stansted Airport station manager - the knapsack had been handed in at Cambridge. A granddaughter fills in a form online and says she will pick it up next day. To avoid a wasted journey for her, I phone Greater Anglia Customer Services to ask how long lost items are held. A voice at the other end monotonously repeats that lost property is handled by another company with which they can’t communicate. Eventually I extract the words “two weeks”. More joy, more hubris Next day at Cambridge station we are told the knapsack is not there. I decide to make a formal complaint and call Customer Services again. Foolish move. But, I get myself bumped up to management - almost certainly in the Philippines - a triumph of the will. The helpful call-centre manager, offers to put me through to a UK Greater Anglia number that I already know is automated. It has eight options. There should be a ninth: despair. So a dead end. Emotionally exhausted, I hear myself insisting “No, I need to speak to a human being”. Three days later a text arrived saying the knapsack was on its way. It turned up, all contents in order. And so ended my attempt at getting long-suffering Tagalog-speakers to join an international endeavour to discover what had happened to a green knapsack mistakenly left on a train to Cambridge. Lost Property used by Greater Anglia should be renamed the Silent Service. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for believing the Lost Property Service does not involve any human beings. Or they are carefully hidden. At least you can’t speak to them. I imagine a Wallace and Gromit contraption grabbing the green knapsack, like Wallace pulled into his trousers, then dropping it into a pool of lost knapsacks somewhere in East Anglia. Finally, the deus ex machina, or AI, texts the equivalent of ‘trousers are secured’, automated procedures extract your knapsack from the pool and send it to you. But, several days of unarmed struggle with automation has not been a pleasant daydream, more a nightmare. No-one escapes these impersonal labyrinths set up by business, labyrinths built on redundancy notices and corporate profits. If we do encounter people on our confused phone and on-line wanderings, they are people with fixed protocols trained to act as robots, fearful of losing the jobs which support their families, and so can’t hear what we say, whose replies, which are mostly not replies to our questions and pleadings, reduce us to helpless frustration. Even though they may make mistakes, experienced human beings are our best bet for sorting out most problems. But because of difficulties with my own website, I’ve discovered that payment for the privilege of talking to a human being, rather than struggling with an automated system, is fast coming in. We may sooner rather than later be obliged to pay a premium to speak to an actual person when we are dealing with most corporations, banks and mobile phone companies. It’s called progress. See TheArticle 26/09/2023 ‘Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages’. That’s Samuel Johnson in November 1758 writing in his The Idler essays for the London Weekly about the growing role of journalists - ‘news-writers’. You wonder what he might have made of Putin’s news media.
‘The first casualty of war is truth’, our terse twentieth century version of Johnson. The aphorism applies to the coverage of the war in Ukraine both through what is generally omitted, what is told and untold. The ethical principles underlying journalism are accuracy, impartiality, independence, accountability, humanity and truth. They are notoriously difficult to abide by - sometimes career-threatening - in the face of strong public opinion, particularly during war when a degree of self-censorship is prudent. Take just two examples of Western reporting. The Russians claimed they were promised in the 1990s that NATO would not expand eastwards. Denials were reported uncritically. But US National Security Archives opened in December 2017 reveal Gorbachev was indeed assured in 1990-1991, not only by US Secretary of State, James Baker, but by Thatcher, Kohl, Mitterrand, Major and Bush senior that there would be no NATO expansion. This litany of assurances – Baker's “not one inch east” - came as quid pro quo for Gorbachev’s consenting to German unification within NATO. Promises to Russia were reneged on in response to understandable pressures from Central and Eastern European countries plus lobbying by the six major US armaments corporations led by Lockheed Martin. In 1996, Congress passed legislation enabling expansion, the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act. The former ambassador to the Soviet Union and doyen of foreign policy within the State Department, George Kennan wrote in the 29 June 1997 New York Times with extraordinary prescience: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking”. As Putin was consolidating his power between 1999-2004, ten countries, four bordering Russia, joined NATO. NATO’s expansion does not justify Putin’s criminal invasions of Ukraine nor his war crimes, nor his tyrannical rule. But it does provide him with a public rationale for attacks on his southern, sovereign neighbour (his imperial fantasies seem to have taken over now). As long as acknowledging the truth of what Kennan wrote back in 1997 about NATO expansion incurs strident media accusations of supporting Russian aggression, we are not going to learn from history - though perhaps we never do. The second example of constrained reporting has profound implications for ending the war through a peace agreement and ceasefire. Russia’s fantasy of blitzkrieg and swift overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-western government failed. In March 2022, a month after the invasion, as a result of Turkish mediation, Russia and Ukraine appeared on the verge of finding a negotiated end to the fighting. Key elements were Russia's withdrawal to its pre-24 February positions in exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality, that is excluding any foreign bases or troops from its territory – even on joint exercises. The US, UK and other countries were to provide joint security guarantees promising to intervene in the event of Ukraine being attacked again. Crimea would be left on the back burner with an understanding that within the next fifteen-year years, while seeking a resolution, neither party would use military means to change the territory’s current status. The disputed Donbass area would also be the subject of separate negotiations. According to Milan Rai writing in Peace News 2 April 2023 Ukraine abruptly withdrew from the negotiations because of the mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war by Russian troops in Bucha, a town just 25 kms west of Kyiv, and as a result of pressure from the US and UK (Boris Johnson made a special visit to Kviv on 9 April and refused to sign the proposed special guarantees). A few days later Russia pushed into the territories it had recognized as independent in eastern Ukraine. Maybe events simply made steps to reach a just peace impossible. Maybe Putin was negotiating in good faith. The Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett who was engaged in the negotiations believed so and thought there was a 50/50 chance of success. We just don’t know. The point is that the two parties were at the negotiating table once discussing a plan that might have worked, but talk of negotiations now gets treated as, at worst, a betrayal of Ukraine or, at best, naiveté. Yet the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, not known for his naiveté, was talking openly of negotiations in November 2022. He compared the trench warfare in eastern Ukraine and its appalling casualties with those of the First World War and received a customary backlash for not promoting outright victory for Ukraine. In a comparable way, Pope Francis has been widely criticised for maintaining the neutral position required for promoting dialogue, and very recently for praising the cultural wealth of ‘great Mother Russia’. Yet on 2 August 2022 the Vatican had fiercely denounced the Russian invasion: “the interventions of the Holy Father Pope Francis are clear and unequivocal in condemning it as morally unjust, unacceptable, barbaric, senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious”. Both Pope and President Volodymyr Zelensky find themselves caught between contending expectations and demands. On the Pope’s side, taking up a clear moral, so partisan, position versus a traditional papal role as neutral peacemaker. On Zelensky’s, the burden of rising Ukrainian casualties and openness to negotiation versus retaining his international and national support by a position of nothing- but- outright- victory and maintaining his decree banning negotiation. To pursue the former, with a consistent 90% approval rating for pursuing the latter, would be political suicide. The intensity of the ground artillery war is prodigious. Both sides are beginning to run out of ammunition. Stockpiles of 155 mm shells held in the West are very low. The UK has resorted to sending Ukraine depleted uranium tank-busting shells believed to have caused illness amongst civilians and troops in Afghanistan. The US is supplying cluster bombs known to mutilate children and to take years of clearance post-war. The Russians are reduced to seeking ordinance and weaponry from North Korea. On 12 September this year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke of Zelensky needing to lift his decree banning talks with Russia as a first step towards negotiations, saying that, if Ukraine was unwilling, it was for the USA to make it happen. Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, a leading member of the Sant Egidio community based in Rome, which successfully mediated the civil war in Mozambique, has just returned from Beijing. His mandate from the Pope is to "support humanitarian initiatives and the search for ways that can lead to a just peace" in Ukraine. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, indicated his willingness to have him come to Moscow on Friday. Are we approaching another March 2022 moment of mutually felt weakness that might make steps towards dialogue, negotiation, a ceasefire and an agreed peace possible? For the sake of the Ukrainian and Russian people dying in Putin’s war let’s hope against hope we are. See TheArticle 16/09/2023 After the USA, Turkey with its 775,000 strong armed forces is militarily the most important member of NATO. It is also the NATO member most strategically located sharing extended land borders with Syria, with hostile Kurdish militias, notably the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and with Iran all the way from Azerbaijan to Iraq, as well as having sea borders in common with Russia and Ukraine. Sales of natural gas, oil, grain and arms mean Russia has a moderate but significant dependency on export revenue from Turkey. Not surprisingly Putin has been wooing Erdoğan for many years.
Following its annexation of Crimea in early 2014, Russia’s military intervention in Syria from September 2015 added to the complexity of Turkey’s foreign relations. On the one hand, the USA was supporting Kurdish anti-Assad militias seen by Obama as the most effective force against ISIS in the region, but by Erdogan as a major threat as the PKK conducted separatist attacks in south-east Turkey with heavy casualties. On the other, the Crimea for Turks evoked the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. The local remnant of its indigenous Turkic ethnic group, the Tatars, persecuted and deported by Stalin, opposed the annexation and were suffering as a result. Erdoğan felt obliged to speak out against Russia’s annexation but avoided denouncing Putin, refused to join sanctions being imposed by most of NATO’s members and supported Turkish government officials whose shady deals with Iran had been breaking US sanctions against the Islamic Republic. But if Russia and Turkey are in a marriage of convenience today, the failed 16 July 2016 military coup - which caught Erdoğan on holiday in the resort of Marmaris - should count as the moment Putin slipped on the engagement ring. Erdoğan narrowly missed being seized and overthrown but emerged from the crisis stronger than ever. He took advantage of enhanced public support to brand Hizmet, the Gülen movement, an extraordinarily successful and moderate Muslim organisation, as coup planners and terrorists, the perfect opportunity to destroy a powerful internal Islamic competitor with whom Erdoğan had once been allied (See ‘Erdogan’s Victory: The Decline of Democracy’ 30/05/2023). Hizmet is generally seen as pro-American and anti-Iranian. Fetullah Gülen, founder and inspiration of the movement, lived, and still lives, in exile in the Pocono Mountains near Saylorburg in Pennsylvania. The US refused Turkish requests to extradite him. The USA was also a little slow to forthrightly condemn the coup. Russia wasn’t. Erdoğan’s first foreign visit after the coup failed was to Moscow. Putin proceeded with his courtship in October 2016 by returning Erdoğan’s visit coming away with an agreement to provide Turkey with natural gas courtesy of GAZPROM, the Russian majority state-owned giant gas corporation. A new pipeline costing some $11.4 billion dollars, would cross the Black Sea from Russia’s Krasnador region to Kiyiköy north of Istanbul. TurkStream was subsequently extended into the Balkans to sell Bulgaria and North Macedonia gas bypassing Ukraine and Romania. Erdoğan and Putin inaugurated flows in January 2020 in good time for anticipated US sanctions after Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Weapons play no small part in cementing Russia’s relationship with Turkey. American Patriot missiles deployed at Turkey’s Gaziantep 5th Armoured Brigade Command to protect the Turkish-Syrian border were withdrawn in October 2015 amidst rising US-Turkish tensions over US training and arming Kurdish guerrilla forces. In 2017, a year after the coup against Erdoğan, and after protracted and failed negotiations with Washington to supply the Raytheon Patriot missile system, Erdoğan stunned NATO by signing an agreement with Russia to buy its S-400 air-defence system. According to Maximilian Hess in Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West, Hurst 2023, by way of response the US dropped Turkey from ‘participation in its programme to develop the F-35 fifth generation fighter jet’, on the grounds that Russian missile technicians would get access to the technology in the state-of-the art plane. President Trump initially blocked additional retaliatory sanctions under the US 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) but then implemented them in December 2020, during his last chaotic days. A better offer of Patriot missiles was made. The game continued with Turkey seeking more S-400 batteries from Russia. As Economic War says: “Russia had successfully developed its partnership with Turkey to increase its energy leverage over Europe through the TurkStream pipeline, and the West’s sanctions had failed to halt closer Russian-Turkish cooperation”. During April this year the foundations were laid on the Turkish coast north of Cyprus for the Akkuyu nuclear power station, costing some $20 billion and comprised of four units of a Russian designed nuclear reactor. A joint enterprise between a subsidiary of the Russian State corporation, Rosatom, and a Turkish company, when finally constructed the reactors will provide 10% of Turkey’s energy needs. Talks on the building of another nuclear power station are taking place between Turkey, Russia and South Korea. These snapshots of the relationship between Russia and Turkey, taken partly from Hess’ scholarly book (almost 40% of it made up of footnotes, bibliography and index), give some idea of the intense economic war that accompanies the fighting in Ukraine. As a new multi-polar global configuration of states comes to birth with the formation of new trading blocs, the hegemony of the US-led ‘West’ wanes. And as it does, the limited effectiveness of sanctions becomes more apparent. The US Treasury hasn’t even been able to grab Graceful in Germany, a yacht in which ‘Putin had an interest’. It was spirited back to Russia two weeks before the invasion of Ukraine and appropriately renamed Killer Whale. The dollar retains its global power, but few surpass Erdoğan’s ability to manoeuvre between shifting alliances playing one side against the other. Visitors to Turkey, lured by promises of accessible dental treatment – a remarkable advertisement on London Overground trains – cheap holidays and expensive Catholic pilgrimages to Ephesus, might ponder Erdoğan’s choice of strategic partner on the world stage. At the least he is giving pragmatism a bad name. See TheArticle 29.08.2023 What has gone wrong with Democracy and with our democracy here in Britain? Line up Trump and his followers, Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, Poland’s Law & Justice Party, the Brothers of Italy as well as Johnson’s popularity, rise and fall, and you can detect a certain commonality, a plausible story about the decline of democracy and the spread of authoritarian populism. That’s why Anne Applebaum’s slim Penguin volume “Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and The Parting of Friends”, first published in 2020, received rave reviews and an immediate reprint.
A savvy journalist - liberal in the US sense - Applebaum weaves friends’ political choices, and their subsequent changed relationships with her, into a wider analysis of the populist drift in Europe and the USA. And she does it very well. Twilight of Democracy provides an analysis of the fragmentation in the last decade of Centre-Right politics and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. We have become accustomed to some of the proposed causes: the polarising role of social media, its deliberate manipulation to promote anger and resentment – and so more clicks - the ‘cascades of falsehood’, the conspiracy theories, ‘the desire to belong to a superior community’. Applebaum explores such explanations. But there is a further ‘why?’ lurking unexplored behind these factors. Applebaum’s focus is inevitably on widespread generic causes given the great differences between the recent history of the different countries featured in her book. There is very little about the role of specific changes in countries’ political economy, the impact - both social and personal - of striking inequality giving rise to emotions and a mindset attracted to radical authoritarian change. Sometimes, as in the distinction she makes between ‘reflective’ and ‘restorative’ nostalgia – those who miss the past but don’t really want it back and those whose ‘cultural despair’ drives them to radical action to restore it - there are ideas that demand more consideration. A broad-brush approach can hide more than it reveals. In Britain where a minority live very well, according to the Joseph Rowntree Association 4.1 million children, one in three in 2022, were living in poverty. Some 17% of households currently say they cannot afford any food at least one day a month whilst others are extraordinarily rich. Many must skip meals. But the coming years promise steady growth in fine dining restaurants. Such inequality generates anger and resentment that can be manipulated. Those so disadvantaged are offered scapegoats: immigrants, the EU, the ‘woke’ elite. Some nine years ago, Fraser Nelson in the Spectator made telling comparisons between living standards in Britain and in the different US states. We came in at 49th out of 50 just ahead of the poorest state in the Union, Mississippi which has the lowest health, education, development and GDP per capita in the USA. Will Hutton in a sobering opinion piece in the 13 August Observer writes about the consequences of persistent low productivity and low growth having become the norm. “Regions like the West Midlands, particularly economically linked to the EU, have been disproportionately badly hit”. National debt has trebled in the last twenty years with 10% of government tax revenue now going on debt servicing. And Hutton cites John Burn Murdoch (Financial Times 11 August) that if you remove London from average British per capita GDP, it falls by 14-15% to below that of Mississippi. By way of comparison removing the economic hub of Munich from German figures produces only a 1% overall drop. Britain has entrenched poverty, geographical as well as class-based, and outside London is, according to Will Hutton, “scarcely better off than middle-income developing countries.” Unlike many accused of gloom-mongering – and I must sometimes include myself – Hutton seeks to tell the truth however gloomy but also to suggest remedies, in this instance enabling government to think beyond balancing the national books. He recommends splitting the Treasury into an Office for the Budget and an Economic Strategy Ministry, strengthening the UK Infrastructure Bank and British Business Bank and pushing our national £3.5 pension pot into supporting enterprise and risk. Net Zero and Levelling Up, he argues should form a central part of a national strategy for ‘leveraging’ new industry and technology. In the past we could ride out financial crises thanks to established trading relationships, first in the Empire and then in the EU. But now, Hutton writes, we do not have an “empire or the EU anchoring our trade. We are alone”. Our particular “twilight of democracy” has its distinctive shadows. I remember years ago the then Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, Patrick Kelly, saying to me: “I can’t see how democracy can work with a Press that misinforms. How are people to take informed decisions?” His point is even more pertinent when people are trapped within social media silos. Applebaum is right to devote several pages to Johnson’s and Cummings’ malign works and pomps. We do share aspects of a common political pathology with other countries. But many of our institutions - most notably our legal system, our universities, the BBC and structures of local government - have held up despite attempts to undermine them and turn the public against them. Government erosion of our NHS, threatening now to crumble into a second-rate service for those unable to afford insurance or fees for private care, has not diminished the public’s attachment to the idea of health care and treatment free at the point of delivery. But we have not dodged the bullet. The wounds to our society and economy, at least to date, are severe but not lethal. See TheArticle 17/08/2023 Dear Mr. Sunak,
Now you are taking a well-earned holiday in California I hope you will use the time and space to think about your legacy. Legacy thoughts normally come at the end of a Prime Minister’s period in office but, to be realistic, the polls consistently point to your exit next year. The unfolding debacle since the BREXIT vote is unprecedented – much exacerbated by the pandemic and Putin’s war - and most voters have suffered. Less than a year after being elected as an MP you wrote in February 2016 to your Richmond, Yorkshire, constituents: “It has been by the far [sic] the toughest decision I have had to make since becoming an MP, but on June 23 I will vote to leave the European Union”. In the game of political snakes and ladders over the last seven plus years, it proved a good career decision. From Parliamentary Private Secretary in 2017 to junior minister in 2018, you began a rapid climb up the political ladder that led to 10 Downing Street. You were one step away in 2020 as Boris Johnson’s Chancellor. And in 2022 you got there. But your BREXIT gamble no longer seems quite so rewarding. The voices that preceded and promoted BREXIT, abandoning any attempt at truthful communication with the public about what really faced us on leaving, set the trend for politics. Now, with the greatest crisis ever facing the world, uncontrolled climate change, threatening human civilization, neither Conservative nor Labour leader dares describe the gravity of the situation, its consequences, and tell us what must urgently be done. The nub of the problem is the way our interconnected challenges are presented. The diverse channels of information, notably the right-wing Press and social media, and our complex demographic divisions, the unsaid ‘well, we’ll not be alive to see it’ versus ‘why are you sacrificing our future for electoral gain?’ lie behind today’s gas-lighting and irrationality. What better example than the 28 July Daily Mail editorial framing political conflict as “the concerns of ordinary people” versus “the virtue signalling obsessions and orthodoxies of the woke elite”. According to Britain’s most read newspaper this inglorious binary is the way we should interpret the dilemmas we face. Are the forty or so backbench Tory extremist MPs, notably the anti-Net Zero group led by Craig Williams MP who breathe down your neck, ‘ordinary’? OK, perhaps more ‘ordinary’ than you, a multi-millionaire - that of course is a vulnerability for you. Is worrying aloud by grandparents about the world they and governments are bequeathing to their children and grandchildren a ‘virtue signaling obsession’? Or is it a rational and moral human response to an avoidable global catastrophe, an awareness that Government must wake up and act urgently? ‘Woke’ was originally African-American slang to describe waking up to the need to do something about racial prejudice and discrimination. It now extends to virtually any view that discomforts the comfortable. Combating climate change is very discomforting. The changes required to mitigate its consequences are even more discomforting. So, hey, how about politicising the whole thing and perhaps saving some Conservative seats. A Labour Mayor is doing something effective about improving air quality? Time to speak out on behalf of polluting vehicle-owners. Or should that be ‘ordinary’ polluters? It worked in Uxbridge. The Labour Party is committed to a serious level of investment in solar, wind and wave renewable energy. So let’s sign off on a hundred or so licenses for coal and gas drilling in and around Britain, but not let on that we currently export 80% of our production. Tell the public it's about avoiding costly imports in the future, though keep quiet that wherever the source – and that includes the remaining North Sea oil and gas – the energy companies will be selling on international markets at an internationally determined price. And boosting their prodigious profits. Clear blue water between the Parties. As the Tories in Uxbridge kept saying the least well off will suffer the most from measures to protect the environment, not adding that only if such measures are accompanied by effective poverty alleviation will necessary changes in the way we live become acceptable to the ‘ordinary’ voter. The truth is that transition to net zero could be made far less painful if an unprecedented priority were given to renewables; we see this beginning to happen in the USA where significant state spending and focused scientific endeavour to stop global warming are supported by government. Your modest beginnings funding carbon capture have been applauded but they do not fit into a vision of necessary and beneficial economic change, rather a fantasy vision in which the need for radical change is eliminated. When BBC News leads on Nigel Farage’s Coutts bank account with apocalyptic warnings from leading climate scientists and the UN secretary-general coming second, something has gone very wrong with our national priorities. We had intimations with Michael Gove’s dismissing experts who foretold tears before bedtime if voters chose BREXIT: “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. Then came the Covid anti-vaxxers peddling conspiracy theories about the medical profession. Now we have climate scientists dropped into the ‘woke elite’ bag. Is it too difficult for you, Mr Sunak, to tell the public we face a global and therefore a national emergency, and then talk to the other Party leaders with the aim of agreeing a joint position on the way forward?Your legacy, as a Prime Minister without a personal electoral mandate, could be that of a man who read the signs of the times, rose to the occasion, and by acting decisively on climate change defeated the current national helplessness. Get rid of those advisors who, given their head, would turn you into Trump-lite. Or history will see you as the man who frittered away the vital, fast-vanishing time left to rescue the planet, leaving you a trivial footnote to thirteen deplorable years of Tory rule. See TheArticle 04/08/2023 The Court of Appeal ruled on 29 June that Rwanda was not a ‘safe third country’ and deporting asylum seekers there was unlawful. Given this judgement the drafters of the Illegal Migration Act might be complimented on their foresight in the wording of the bill’s title. The Act has been called unworkable, ‘morally unacceptable’ (Bishop Paul McAlennan) and ‘amounting to an asylum ban’ (the UNHCR). Its contents in their lack of human empathy could have been generated by AI. In the words of the Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, Sarah Teather, to “deny sanctuary to people who need it based on their mode of arrival is grotesquely cruel”.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has declared he will achieve what he calls his five ‘people’s priorities’. The fifth reads: “We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed”. Last year some 90% of the boat people who reached the UK sought asylum. By the beginning of this year only 3% of them have received an initial decision from the Home Office. More than 135,000 asylum applicants were awaiting a decision, many of them in hotels paid for out of the UK aid budget; 89,000 of them had been waiting for more than six months. This is the context within which the Prime Minister has chosen to back this bad bill. Is he serious? Sunak excuses the draconian contents of the Illegal Migration Act on grounds of compassion. 56 people, 11 of them children, are known to have drowned trying to cross the Channel since 2018. He argues that the people smugglers’ business model will collapse if would-be migrants believe they will be sent to Rwanda. If there were a well-funded special unit in the National Criminal Agency (NCA) dedicated to the arrest of these criminal gangs, if there were adequate accessible safe and legal routes for asylum seekers to get here, his compassion argument might carry conviction. If migration policy is compassion driven, why has the Conservative Party in the Commons voted down Lords amendments to the bill containing such provisions? The Conservatives believe that their bill is a direct response to the democratic will, or, at least, the will of voters in the Red Wall constituencies who want to see an end to small boat crossings. And Kent County Council as well as Dover genuinely are overwhelmed because so few councils around the country are willing to ‘burden-share’ (and most of these are Labour Councils) - a microcosm of the European Union’s predicament. But just how popular is the Illegal Migration Act? How many people are thinking this harsh action is not our idea of British values? In the House of Lords we were hearing voices speaking for another, kinder Britain: Lord Dubs, who before the Second World War was brought to Britain on the kindertransport, concerned for the needs and protection of unaccompanied children. Then there was Baroness Mobarik, who aged six accompanied her family from Pakistan to Glascow, speaking alongside David Walker, the Anglican Bishop of Manchester against government attempts to weaken limits on the detention of immigrant children and pregnant women. Isn’t the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees, in which we take pride, more in keeping with what we want Britain to be? The under-appreciated Upper House of Parliament - without veto power - is doing its job, holding government to account, scrutinising its legislation and trying to make the bill less bad. Between 27 April and 10 July, peers worked on 20 pertinent, important and compassionate amendments. A large cross-Party group outvoted the Conservative peers on each of the amendments and sent the bill back to the Commons. (There had also been also 16 Conservatives in the Commons who denounced aspects of the bill and abstained during its initial readings – including former Home Secretary and Prime Minister, Theresa May). In the Commons, the Government rejected the Lords’ amendments but did make small concessions agreeing not to weaken limits on the length of detention and removing retrospective provisions which would have made the bill operative from its introduction by the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, on 7 March 2023. The bill was sent back to the House of Lords, and on July 12 they accepted the rejection of their amendments. After deliberations the Lords returned the bill to the Commons with nine revised amendments - including two proposed by Tory peers. These sophisticated strokes in the Palace of Westminster ‘ping-pong’ were immediately and casually dismissed by the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, who said the Government did not plan to make any further concessions. The Government, with only a few days left, badly wants to get its legislation through Parliament before the summer recess. For this reason, the House of Lords has a small amount of leverage though it is improbable the Government will change the Act in any meaningful way. Parliamentary Acts of 1911 and 1949, together with unwritten constitutional convention, dictate that the unelected House of Lords should not block legislation by the elected House of Commons – especially measures promised in an Election Manifesto. No such pledge on migration was in the 2019 Tory manifesto. Sunak persists in alleging that he is fulfilling a ‘people’s pledge’ responding to public opinion. The peers have done all they are entitled to do within constitutional convention to make this bill humane. The Conservative majority in the Commons means we will be saddled with this deeply unpleasant legislation. The Act enables the Government to interpret international human rights treaties and refugee conventions in ways not consistent with the UK’s obligations. The Government’s excuse for this shabby populism is a variation on Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’, alleging that the Act’s many critics do not offer any alternative. Consistent with our current politics of empty promises and brazen untruths, this is a lie. There is a broad consensus amongst Churches and religious communities, NGOs, refugee organisations, as well as in the House of Lords on what needs to be done, starting with the creation of new safe and legal routes and serious investment in putting the criminal gangs behind bars. One of the Lords’ amendments - proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and garnering not a single Tory vote - was a call for a UK-led strategic ten-year multi-lateral plan for handling immigration compassionately whilst countering the impact of conflict and climate change on sender countries. The Labour Party acting as a government-in-waiting has produced a strategic package of proposals consonant with the Archbishop’s call. His amendment was amongst those voted down in the Commons. The boat people who pay the people smugglers are desperate and aware of the risks. Nothing is quickly going to stop the small boats. Nor will the Rwanda threat, least of all if the Supreme Court agrees with the Court of Appeal’s judgement. Opinion polls suggest many voters now believe only a new Government, a new and competent Home Secretary and a reformed Home Office can reduce the number of small boats and deal humanely with refugees entitled to this country’s protection. See TheArticle 17/07/2023 |
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