Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill, banning sales to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, is passing through Parliament. Cake Tsarina Prue Leith proved herself again, on BBC’s Today programme last week, as a popular champion of government intervention to protect – young - consumers from forming bad habits. ‘Government intervention’, though, is a weak substitute for that highly charged slogan ‘the Nanny State’. Words lose or gather power in politics. The Nanny State has become shorthand for Big Government, thus the enemy for all true libertarians.
Libertarians are good at inventing slogans used to ridicule policy or practice especially of active government. Remember ‘Health & Safety gone mad’: ha, ha, ha. That one worked well until the Grenfell Tower tragedy. But combatting morbidity due to unhealthy food has yet to have its seat-belt moment. The Nanny State taunt is now working against the creation of an effective national food strategy. Former Cabinet Minister, IaIn Macleod, coined the term writing in The Spectator, 3 December 1965. “In my occasional appearances as a poor man's Peter Simple I fire salvos in the direction of what I call the Nanny State. Mr. Fraser is, although you wouldn't think it, the Minister of Transport [in Harold Wilson’s first government]. He has come forward with the perishing nonsense of a plan for a 70 mph speed limit even on motorways [sic]”. This controversy over motorway limits is forgotten but Nanny State is now wheeled out for food regulation. But why does it resonate so well? The old-fashioned nanny, traditionally a disciplinarian, supervised children’s meals. The understood message is that the Big State treats us as children. Maybe also a covert swipe at the hated ‘metropolitan elites’, with their modern nannies and leanings towards vegetarianism. But given the libertarian ideology of choice, how much is healthy eating a matter of genuine choice? The individual is battling against the influence of the food companies who control the food business, led by the Swiss-based Nestle SA - whose 2022 revenue was $99 billion. Health messages are understood but consumers contend with clever advertising and packaging of food containing too much fat, sugar and salt, all designed by experts to tempt our taste buds. Parents sheep-doggedly try to manoeuvre their offspring past enticing arrays of sweeties and chocolates to reach the supermarket check-out. And responding partly to the changed role of women, the big food companies offer a fast and relatively cheap substitute for home cooking after an exhausting day’s work. How free does that make free choice? A 2023 study by Cancer Research UK produced some frightening figures. Body Mass Index (BMI) is calculated by weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared. Using this measure, by 2040, 71% of British people are predicted to be overweight (compared to 64% today). And of these 36% - 21 million people – will suffer from the complex, chronic disease of obesity defined as a BMI over 30. The consequences of this for future prevalence of cancers and diabetes are disturbing. Currently the NHS spends £10 billion, 10% of its budget, on treating diabetes. There is no chance that the National Health Service will be able to cope with millions moe diabetics. And in the words of the respected social welfare expert, Baroness Louise Casey, “the less well-off you are the more likely you are to be prey to unhealthy food”. Healthy politics – healthy in all senses - is about working for the common good. Catholic social teaching has a definition: “the totality of social conditions allowing persons to achieve their communal and individual fulfilment”. The concept of subsidiarity entered Catholic social thinking in the 19th century as a feature of the common good. As the former EU Commission President Jacques Delors, a devout Catholic, pointed out in a 2009 interview, the term subsidiarity came originally from a Calvinist principle of Church order in the 17th century: the lower Church unit of association took precedence over the higher. Subsidiarity took on new relevance supporting resistance from civil society against the all-controlling totalitarian and military dictatorships of the 20th. century. The Nanny State slogan might garner some support from a crude understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ championed by the UK in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which established the EU. During the internal debates of the EU, the principle of subsidiarity became used to define the - contested - roles of member states in relation to the EU ‘central government’, the European Commission. Today it best expresses support for the life of local communities, particularly ‘in case of need’, implying approval of ‘enabling government’. The higher units of subsidiarity now include not just governments but multi-national corporations and supermarket chains. The creation of a strategy prioritising health and the environment must consider the interacting dynamics of all. In a situation of intense competition, lest their competitors undercut them, none of the food giants can risk unilaterally eliminating or radically reducing unhealthy ingredients. Government taxation of the content of unhealthy foods and drinks provides an - enforced - level playing field open to change. A sugar tax on soft drinks introduced in 2018, called the Soft Drinks Industrial Levy (SDIL), has reduced children’s sugar intake but not enough. Commissioned by the Department of Education, in 2013, restauranteurs Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent produced a pioneering School Food Plan. Initially its vision of ‘flavourful, fresh food served by friendly fulfilled cooks in financially sound school kitchens’ caused widespread excitement. The vision faded under government austerity. Dimbleby’s 2021 National Food Strategy: The Plan, also commissioned by government, sets out a reasoned and well-researched way forward for food and farming. He proposes, for example, a ‘Sugar and Salt Reformulation Tax’, £3 per kilogram of sugar and £6 per kilogram of salt ‘for use in processed foods or in restaurants and businesses’. But taxation remains a toxic word even within the context of preventative action acceptable to food companies. Sir Keir Starmer has promised not to introduce further sugar or salt taxes while saying he would ban junk food advertising before the watershed. Government promised to respond to The Plan with a White Paper. Instead, they produced a 13 June 2022 policy paper widely criticised not least by Dimbleby himself. The paper gives the impression of providing a comprehensive national strategy while largely avoiding significant interventions - such as taxing offending ingredients. An advertising watershed for children will only be implemented after 1 October 2025 and non-removal of sweetie chicanes in supermarkets is disregarded without penalty. Often when confronting contemporary problems, the defensive political response to criticism is what’s the alternative? But there is an alternative. Implement more of Dimbleby’s strategy. In the words of Prue Leith in 2022: "There is so much to celebrate about our food, but we do need to act urgently to protect our health and that of the environment. The Plan is compelling and overdue. If the Government adopts it, we will, at last, be putting our food system on the right path to health and prosperity” - and saving our NHS. We are still waiting. Can today’s right-wing back benchers really imagine that government interventions to help people stop harming themselves and their children lead us towards Xi Jinping’s dystopian State? From their entrenched opposition to banning advertising unhealthy food and drinks directed at children, you might think so. The libertarian Right using their clever slogans and ideology are endangering our health and environment. They should be seen for what they are: dangerous ideologues. See TheArticle 25/04/2024
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Joan Girling grew up near the Suffolk coast with its little terns, barn owls, harebells, ladies bedstraw, sedums, blue butterflies and acid grassland. There was no nuclear power station. “It was perfect, a nature lover’s paradise”, she told me.
In 1959, Joan’s father faced with compulsory purchase was forced to sell off a corner of their front garden with its large pond full of water lilies and wildlife. It was to make way for workers’ traffic to the site of Sizewell A, a nuclear power station, today a great, ugly, Stalinist-looking excrescence looming above the sea-shore. Her grandmother who lived next door watched as they filled in the pond. “The worst part was to hear my grandma crying. I remember it as if it was yesterday”. In the late 1980s it all happened again: Sizewell B. This time Joan moved house with her family to escape construction traffic. From 1993-2005 she served on Suffolk County Council. Fifteen years ago, Joan Girling became a founding and deeply dedicated member of Community against Nuclear Expansion later renamed Together Against Sizewell C (TASC). The human and environmental costs ought not be underestimated. The disruption and destruction accompanying years of building accounts for the level and persistence of local protest. Stop Sizewell C, originally a parish of Theberton and Eastbridge action group, alongside the local Friends of the Earth, joined TASC in a long-running legal campaign. Crowd financing helped fund three rounds of court action seeking judicial review of the Sizewell C project. The last challenged the Business Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng’s, 2022 Development Consent Order giving the green light to start construction. Kwateng rejected the Planning Inspectorate’s conclusion (part of the process required by the 2008 Planning Act) that in the absence of an assessed, permanent, potable water supply for the project, “the case for the grant of development consent is not yet made”. Sizewell C will be forced to use a desalination plant during construction. The Court of Appeal found for the government in December 2023. The construction of Sizewell C means heavy truck traffic. New roads, a large park and ride facility, as well as a railway branch line, will have a major impact over a large area much of it designated by Natural England - sponsored incidentally by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) - as a Suffolk Coast and Heaths National Landscape (formerly Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). A small bite comes out of reed beds and marsh land declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The new reactors will lie right next to Minsmere, a popular RSPB reserve where the drain-pipe boom of the bittern can be heard. Building Sizewell B will blight tourism for two decades but boost other aspects of the local economy. But before dismissing protest as Nimby-ism (Not in My Back Yard) it is as well to evaluate what lies in the backyard. Sizewell C planning first saw the light of day under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 2007-2010, when coastal Suffolk was selected alongside other sites with existing nuclear reactors The initial choice of investors, EDF (Electricité de France) and a Chinese Company CGN, was almost as contentious as the choice of site. In 2009 EDF, 85% French government owned, bought British Energy, the UK’s largest electricity energy-generating company. By 2019 EDF was over 50 billion Euros in debt and its share price had dropped from 42 to 10 Euros. The company was re-nationalised in 2023. EDF’s track-record building two reactors at Hinkley Point, Somerset, does not inspire confidence that all manner of things will be well at Sizewell C. Building of the EDF’s first Hinkley Point reactor began in March 2017 but is unlikely to be completed before 2030 at a cost of possibly £47 billion (the initial estimate in 2016 was £18 billion). Actual construction of a reactor starts usually after three years of preparatory work once a Final Investment Decision (FID) is issued indicating that financing for the entire project looks assured. FID for Sizewell C remains ‘expected’ by the end of this year. Professor Stephen Thomas of Greenwich University Business School estimates the length of time from inception to first commercial power production of nuclear power stations worldwide at between 15-20 years. Given the pace of climate change, that is too long to wait. Geopolitics put paid to Chinese part ownership in Sizewell C; CGN’s stake was bought out by the UK government in 2022. Nuclear power is costly. Government, now the majority shareholder in the project, turned to what is called the Regulated Asset-based (RAB) model, an array of investors, in a bid to attract pension funds. But this has not been successful. It is now wooing investors such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the UK electricity company Centrica. Professor Thomas’ optimistic estimate of cost for 13 years of Sizewell C construction is £26.3 billion and his pessimistic, some would say realistic, estimate for 17 years, £43.8 billion. Just too costly. No-one knows what international energy prices will be when the reactors start up - thus creating a very wide margin of risk. RAB offers possibilities for the government to reward potential investors. In Thomas’ words: “First, because the risks will fall on consumers and taxpayers, the project would be seen by financiers as low risk to them and would attract a low interest rate. Second, the finance charges [and these would be significant] would effectively be paid by consumers as a surcharge on their bills payable from the date of FID to completion of the plant”. There are alternative sources of energy. In the past fifty years, the cost of renewables has gone down, real nuclear costs have only ever gone up. But Shell expects to make 15% profit on investment in oil and gas against 5-8% returns from renewables. This is one reason for the continuing investment in new fossil fuel extraction and faltering financing of the realistic option for meeting carbon emission reduction targets; solar panels and wind turbines. Government colludes with energy companies and investors seeking to be as risk-free as possible, with their decisions and actions critical for mitigating climate change, based on profit taking at the expense of the citizen/consumer. Windfarms, for example off Lowestoft with one hundred turbines serving 630,000 homes, take after a preparatory phase, 2-3 years for construction offshore, longer for a larger windfarm under more difficult conditions. Their coastal infrastructure needs to be kept to a minimum, ideally with an offshore grid and subsea cables. With the kind of money made available for nuclear reactors, the energy-storage problem – caused by variable wind - is soluble. Renewables do not take 15 years to become operational, nor have an unmanageable afterlife: the disposal of highly radioactive material. Meanwhile access roads are being cut through nearby countryside, and the government has found £2.5 billion for the Sizewell C preparatory pot. Five years ago, it was estimated 37.5% of the world’s carbon emissions came from electricity generation. There is now urgent need for low carbon electricity-generating infrastructure. Government is obsessed with nuclear power stations as a solution. But they are too late. As Professor Thomas put it to me in conversation: “In an emergency you don’t choose the slowest and riskiest option”. See TheArticle 13/04/2024 Conservative politicians attribute our parlous economic situation to the cost of COVID and the inflated price of oil and gas due to the war in Ukraine. The barmy budgeting of Liz Truss and her malfortuné Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, sometimes get a mention, a cautionary tale of self-destruction. As for the third of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the word BREXIT shall never pass the lips of a government minister.
How should we describe this omission? Google to the rescue: an English version of the South Italian word Omerta, a “code of silence and code of honour and conduct that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders” - usually associated with the Mafia. Ministers and MPs know a great deal about the impact of BREXIT - hence Omerta. The UK Department of Trade and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy like the European Commission are all clients of Cambridge Econometrics. In a report commissioned by the Mayor of London and published in January 2024, Cambridge Econometrics estimates that we lost 2 million jobs due to BREXIT, and that in 2023 the average person was nearly £2,000 worse off (Londoners by £3,400) than had the Referendum gone the other way. Goldman Sachs’ 2024 report “The Structure and Cyclical Costs of Brexit”, puts the economic loss caused by BREXIT at between 4-8% of GDP and concludes that since the Referendum Britain “significantly underperformed other advanced economies”. Both reports, complex calculations, emphasise the impact on trade and investment. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), an independent public body funded by the Treasury, analyses our public finances and produces bi-annual economic forecasts intended to guide Government’s economic policy - so heeded by Prime Ministers, except of course Liz Truss. It broadly supports the conclusions of Cambridge Econometrics and Goldman Sachs. Rishi Sunak is well aware of the extent of BREXIT damage. In 2016, David Cameron, believing he would win the Referendum, turned a complex issue into a binary choice. No rules were established to govern the conduct of the ensuing campaigns, nor the information provided the electorate. Voters need accurate, relevant information to make informed political choices. Voters making a huge decision by direct democracy were lied to and disinformed in a campaign led by charismatic but unscrupulous men. The public did not necessarily believe their lies or the battle-bus promise of “£350 million sent per week to the EU” being returned to the NHS, but such disinformation served to dramatically and divisively raise awareness of the Leave campaign. Thanks to the nurturing of division and hostility, any empathy for the thinking and feelings of people on the other side of the argument could not get a look-in. ‘A shared framework for containing conflicting aims’ created by ‘good faith compromise’, ‘positive sum’ agreements and brokered bargains, appear in Brook Manville and Josiah Ober’s The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, Princeton & Oxford University Press 2023, as important ingredients in any functioning democracy. They offer a simple definition: the pithy “No boss – except one another”, but there is no discussion of how this is best achieved by direct or representative democracy. It is a stretch to describe the BREXIT referendum, conducted in a climate of disinformation and lies, the subsequent negotiations and the unlawful proroguing of Parliament, in these terms. Their consequences were the reverse of what Aristotle called ‘civic friendship’, seen by the two authors as sustaining democracy. OMERTA about Brexit is part of a wider government Omerta about the damage done to our political culture with its unwritten but well understood values and codes of conduct. It is important, though counter-intuitive, to recognise the erosion of democracy added to by the 2016 Referendum with its compelling slogan ‘Take Back Control’. The quantifiable economic consequences of BREXIT are not the only ones to contend with; there is also the absolutist mindset encouraged by the binary referendum choice, in versus out, pervading public attitudes. The gradual nibbling away of the mainstays of a democratic culture has done nothing to improve voter turn-out. Youth are giving up on their fundamental civil right to vote, to sack the government and install another, to put into practice – Manville and Ober’s - “no boss except one another”. In addition, many people are responding to continuous grim reports on radio and TV with ‘news avoidance’ that further encourages a “they’re all the same” rejection of political participation. The 2022 Electoral Reform Act directly affects turn-out and not only in general elections. The Bill abolished the supplementary (second choice) vote and made mayoral elections first past the post, favouring the Conservative Party. Voters not showing photographic voter ID are turned away, an imported form of voter suppression, part of the US Republican electoral playbook known to disadvantage youth, ethnic minorities and poorer voters. In the 2019 general election - before this requirement - 33 alleged impersonations with 9 convictions came to light - amongst 32 million people who voted. A 2023 You-Gov poll found one in four voters were unaware of the new requirement. In last year’s local elections, according to the Electoral Commission, some 4% of eligible voters said they didn’t vote because of the new regulations. Voters in a democracy need obstacles to voting removed not inserted on spurious grounds. Electoral campaigning can, and is, used as an opportunity for the destruction of ‘civic friendship’ by gas-lighting and the flagrant untruths of attack ads. In support of the Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, a video purporting to reveal panic on the London Underground appeared on X (Twitter). It turned out to be filmed in Penn station, New York. “Gripped by the tendrils of rising crime” Londoners were staying at home said the voiceover. Picture of empty street. The fake ‘evidence’ from the USA was taken down but the fake assertions about citizens’ safety in London stayed in. The Greater London area with 9.75 million people will have more crimes (for example than greater Glasgow, 1.7 million, to which London is sometimes compared), more bins to empty, more air pollution to be cut. As Ministers know, meaningful crime statistics are based on size of population. In the real world, the crime rate in London is below the national average. There is danger that such American-style attack ads have infected the Labour Party. Their on-line ad a year ago asked: “Do you think adults convicted of assaulting children should go to prison”, and answered, “Rishi Sunak Doesn’t”. Shocked Shadow Ministers and Party members protested. Sir Keir Starmer had a torrid time on Sky News trying to limit the fall-out. The truth is such ads are widely shared and read by millions creating serious temptation for politicians who find that honesty and truth-telling disadvantage them. We’ve got several more months campaigning to endure. Omerta, disinformation and voter suppression are poisoning our political culture. Together they preclude acknowledging and learning from experience. This is not how democracy survives. This is not how to heal domestic divisions nor counter the rise of threatening authoritarian regimes opposed to democratic values. You don’t have to read The Civic Bargain to figure that out. See TheArticle 02/04/2024 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 “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 |
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