Month: Feb 2020

A hostile environment

‘Migration hardly gets a mention’ I wrote in a post two days ago. I was wrong.

The Home Secretary as I wrote was beginning a round of interviews explaining her new immigration proposals. A minimum salary limit of £26500 would be imposed for anyone taking a job in the U.K. Business groups, and the farming, hospitality and care sectors, have expressed their alarm. Patel insisted that it would be necessary for businesses to look more to potential British workers, helping them to ‘up their skills and makes their skills more relevant to the job market.’ (The Guardian.) There are eight million economically inactive people who businesses can draw in.

I’m not qualified to provide a full critique of her proposals. But I’m perplexed as to how the care sector can by the end of the year replace the low-paid overseas staff who are critical to its functioning, and how as a sector it can in short order redesign its business models so as to pay more and draw in some of the economically inactive, who aren’t in fact inactive, but are students and home carers, and the sick and elderly.

It will be goodbye to ‘cheap low-skilled labour from Europe’, as Patel describes it. If that does indeed happen I will miss them. They have contributed a lot, helped our world go round a bit better, and broadened our minds. The only plus is for countries like Poland who will get their ‘unskilled labour’ back, and they will benefit from the energies we will lose.

There is an arrogance and a crassness about the proposals which ought to embarrass but not in a government where attitudes if not all policy details are dictated by Cummings. Patel and Cummings it seems are of a piece. There’s a front-page article in Thursday’s Times about Patel’s arrogance. She’s at odds with her permanent secretary at the Home Office. We don’t know the details. But indications are there’s fall-out related to the immigration proposals, to the removal of the phrase ‘institutionally racist’ from the report into the Windrush scandal, and to attempts to reverse a High Court ruling barring the deportation of twenty-five ‘foreign’ criminals to Jamaica. (Foreign-born but brought up in the UK. If they are brought up here, they are surely our responsibility.) Theresa May practised a ‘hostile environment’ policy, Patel is taking it a step further.

I cannot be ‘philosophical’ (I did try!) about a government which shows itself more and more to be of the hard right. The agenda of Scruton and Starkey I mentioned in my last post is indeed this government’s agenda. Obedience we know is expected of Tory MPs, as the new MPs were reminded, but the nation too must fall into line. The old liberal nation with its broad sympathies and attempts at least at human understanding must be consigned to history.

Cummings has in the last few days been forced to sack a newly recruited adviser, Andrew Sabicky, who has espoused some highly unpalatable eugenicist views. His own comments on designer babies also cause concern. Would-be parents would inevitably select babies with ‘the highest potential for IQ’. ‘An NHS system should fund everybody to do this,’ thereby avoiding an unfair advantage to the better off.

After drafting this post I read an article in The Times by Rachel Sylvester. We are on the same page on this government. Cummings is indeed ‘not a Conservative’. He espouses creative destruction. Taking over the institutions. Re-framing the debate. They’re issues I’ve referred to before in this blog. Redefining what is considered to be ‘normal’. You could say that with Scruton and Starkey they were ‘academic’ arguments. But this isn’t academic.  It’s for real.

In Sylvester’s words, Cummings ‘is convinced that the institutions he wants to overthrow are run by an unelected metropolitan liberal elite. There may be some truth in this, but, in the name of the people, he appears to want to replace the current equilibrium with something more dangerous – autocratic centralised power’.

Reporting back

I was determined to be philosophical two months ago, after the election. Judge the government by how it handled the issues. Don’t pre-judge…

We’re past Brexit day, Independence Day, 31st January, and we limp on as before. No celebrations of any significance on the day, because as Fintan O’Toole remarked – who are the ‘people’ being liberated. The UK is four nations, and multiple ‘nations’ within. We’ve had a brief majoritarian moment, a reaction to issues of immigration and sovereignty, and a desire to get the shenanigans over and done with, at whatever cost. And we’re now back to normal. Nothing has happened. We haven’t actually left yet. The borders are open. Brexit without Brexit, the ideal situation one might think. But we’ve 31st December to deal with, full-regulation deals and regulation-lite Canada-style deals and no deal, all in play.

There’s much talk of not signing up to European regulations. The current refrain from the Telegraph and elsewhere is that we already have in many areas stronger regulations in place than those laid down by Brussels, so why the alarm. A curious argument given that a bonfire of regulations has long been a Brexit refrain, and a tragedy because Britain has done much to raise workplace and environmental standards across Europe. And we will henceforth be without influence.

Migration hardly gets a mention. But let’s go back a few years. Britain we were told was full. The world’s poor were about to invade. Remember the Turkish hordes.  ‘In the YouGov poll weeks before the referendum, when anti-migrant press coverage was at its zenith, 56% thought immigration and asylum were the most important issues facing Britain.’ (Roy Greenslade) Taking an average of 24 polls in 2019, ‘the average number of people who believed immigration was the key issue was 23%, with the latest total standing at just 20%.’

Instead, as a new priority, we have the BBC, and the licence fee, which Dom wants to do away with. Disruption for Dom is a free-thinking, free market, libertarian (with an egalitarian overlay)  landscape. You are welcome to join him, the only proviso being that you think like he does.

The papers tell me that Dom is against HS2. Well, I’m with him there. He doesn’t have a London mindset. And that matches Conservative Party imperatives for the moment. Keeping places such as Sunderland and Leigh (in Lancashire, and home to my Collier forebears back in the 19th century) signed up. What we don’t have of course is any devolution of power to the North, any more than we did under the Northern Powerhouse initiative. All is tightly controlled from the centre. (Sad to see the Economist clip its own wings and fall into line, supporting HS2 – citing commuters in and out of Euston, as I recall. Freeing up space for freight. At a cost of £100 billion plus. This simply isn’t serious analysis.)

David Goodhart argued, several years ago, that voters could be divided into ‘somewheres’, with deep local roots, and ‘anywheres’, who were happy anywhere, and had the skills to carry with them. This has been taken up by commentators as a convenient divide. There are indeed advocates for a ‘provincial tilt’ in the Tory party, but I’ve a strong suspicion this is expediency, and not any kind of sea change. Brexit and Corbyn drove the electorate in the Tories’ arms.

Arguing against this, and widening out the ‘somewhere’ notion, is the way social conservatism has come to influence the debate. Tory and old working-class mindsets are aligned. Identity is tied to the past, memories of perceived greatness, Empire, a people apart, gender, where we were comfortable within the old definitions, race – we are in the last analysis Anglo-Saxon (aren’t we?), the small town against big city, university education…  ‘68% of voters with a degree chose Remain in 2016, while 70% of those who left school at 16 voted Leave.’ (William Davies, in the London Review of Books.) Commentators on the right blame universities for the radicalisation of young people.  It depends on which end of the telescope you use…A university education is likely to leave you better informed. Or so one would hope. More aware of history. Of gender issues. Of the harsh realities of a world where China’s Belt and Road initiative is marching across Central Asia toward us, when the USA no longer sees its own interests as ultimately those of the wider world. Where China opens, America closes. Aware of climate and conservation imperatives. Of the importance of change, adapting, finding solutions – not closing minds and closing borders.

My philosophical mindset, post-election two months ago, is, indeed, being sorely challenged. Recent sackings of ministers suggest Dom and Boris want a government of one mind and one voice, where criticism and self-criticism and the awareness that comes from contrarian debate are banished. And banished from the Civil Service as well. (‘Disruption’ can also work as censorship.) Remember free schools, and the Blob, Cummings’ term for the education ‘establishment’ when he worked with Michael Gove, when Gove was Secretary of State for education. Free schools, the flagship policy, fooled many, but didn’t begin to touch the real problems of under-achievement – they only did harm.

We’re up against a fundamental issue – what really is Conservatism? And how much will ‘Conservative’ ideas get free rein under a government with what should be a secure mandate for five years. I remember puzzling over why the late Roger Scruton could argue so virulently against something as fundamental as social justice. Kenan Malik in the Observer helped a little: ‘The ideal society (for Scruton) was built not on values such as liberty and equality but on obedience.’ Obedience is, in Scruton’s own words, ‘the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them. In the good society one accepted one’s station in life.’ Prejudice and exclusion and inequality were part of the natural order of things.

Ferdinand Mount refers, in an article in the London Review of Books, to an indictment drawn up by Scruton and David Starkey which accuses the ‘liberal elite’ of foisting five abominations on the ‘long-suffering British people, who asked for none of them ….: membership of the EU, mass immigration, devolution, the introduction of human rights into English and Scottish law, and the Supreme Court.’

Was I wonder the BBC, with its 80% support from the public, also foisted on the British people?

This helps us to see where this government may be headed. Where are the older and wiser Tories, expelled or silenced, hanging out?

The landscape is quiet.