The past two weeks in the British political mediascape were almost entirely dominated by the reheated debate about Covid Lockdowns sparked off by Isabelle Oakeshott’s decision to hand over former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s personal WhatsApp message to the Telegraph, and by the Tory evergreen theme of immigration. The latter was reignited by Home Secretary Braverman’s introduction of the Illegal Immigration Bill (IIB) and the row that followed after Match of the Day (MOTD) host Gary Lineker tweeted about the similarities of Braverman’s language with that used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This Tweet earned him a suspension from presenting MOTD on Saturday and plunged the BBCs sport section in turmoil as other presenters withheld their labour in solidarity with Lineker, until an agreement was reached on Monday.
One thing to note about both these issues is that in fact they are non-issues. That is not to say that the government’s handling of the pandemic should not be scrutinised, or that small boats with refugees crossing the channels are not a problem. However, regarding the former, there is an official Covid inquiry underway, to which – despite Oakshott’s insistence to the contrary – the leaked messages do nothing to help with. Indeed, her move – and the selective publication of the messages by the Telegraph – is clearly motivated by the interests and preferences of the anti-lockdown wing of the Tory party. Regarding the latter, people crossing the English Channel in dinghies is a problem in terms of the safety of the refugees whose lives are at risk. It most certainly is not a cause for panic when around 40,000 people a year arrive in a country of 67m or when the government – which spends around £1,000bn a year – spends £5m a day on accommodation for these people. These figures may seem huge in absolute terms, but in comparison to the size of the country and the government budget they are tiny. Indeed, in international comparison, the UK takes on very few refugees and asylum seekers, as reasonable Tory MPs too will admit.
So, why does Britain indulge in the luxury of busying itself with non-issues when the country is facing various very serious global (climate, Ukraine war) and domestic (NHS, cost-of-living and poverty) crises? The answer is that the Tories would rather have us talk about culture war issues – like lockdowns and vaccines or illegal immigration – than the things they are not good with, i.e. managing the economy and solving real problems.
Of course, Rishi Sunak will claim he solved the Northern Ireland issue a couple of weeks ago and that he got a deal with France’s president Emanuel Macron over the ‘small boats crisis.’ So, the government will certainly claim it is very much on top of the pressing issues. The reality of course is that both instance – NIP and raise in numbers of people arriving in small boats – are issues caused by the very same government that now wants credit for allegedly solving them. Indeed, both issues are self-inflicted wounds related to Brexit. In the case of the NIP the link is very direct and widely known; in the latter case, the problem is caused by the UK government’s (unnecessary and ideologically driven) withdrawal from the Dublin III agreement. So, at best, any solution the government finds for these issues amount to damage limitation. But it is even doubtful that these are solutions. The deal with France resembles previous ones and essentially consists in Sunak having successfully convinced Macron to take £500bn from the UK. The money will be used to build a new detention centre for refugees near Dunkirk and to step up patrols on the French shores. Experts expect none of these measures to work. But of course, it gives Sunak a photo op and a headline in the Daily Mail (although that headline was certainly less positive then he will have hoped, as the paper and other far right actors like Farage were primarily shocked by the £500m price tag of the policy). On the key issue, however, – getting a returns agreement for refugees arriving in the UK via France –, Sunak got nothing at all from Macron.
Being unwilling, too incompetent, or ideologically blinded to solve any of the real issues plaguing the country, the Tories’ last-ditch effort to avoid an electoral wipe out means more culture wars and symbolic policies and less substance. The Illegal Immigration Bill, introduce in the Commons last week, fulfils that – and only that – purpose.
Illegal Immigration Bill
The aptly named Illegal Immigration Bill – aptly named in the sense that various legal experts and political actors – including the EU – consider it almost certain that the bill violates international law. The IIB includes clauses that deny asylum seekers existing routes to appeal decisions, it disapplies protections for victims of modern slavery that the UK has signed up to under the European Convention Against Trafficking (ECAT), and it even removes the possibility for refugees to received legal counsel (a good summary can be found here). As Nick Cohen put it poignantly, as such Rishi Sunak has become the first UK PM in 200 years who is opposed to anti-slavery legislation.
The most worrying bit of the bill are perhaps art. 11 and 12, which give the Home Secretary wide-ranging new power to decide about the detention of illegal immigrants. Indeed, rather than defining the power to detain in objective language as existing legislation does, the IIB only refers to the ‘opinion of the Secretary of State,’ which makes a legal challenge difficult. One charity called the removal of the right to appeal a ‘shocking attack on the rule of law.’ By disapplying various modern laws protecting refugees, the bill may force courts to fall back on older, common law legal principles, such as the habeas corpus principle to protect refugees from arbitrary detention by the state. As such, the bill provides another example of a governmental power grab, that betray authoritarian tendencies.
In terms of the substance, few people seem to believe that this bill will ever solve the problem, as the ‘solutions’ that it proposes are simply impractical. Indeed, there is only a very faint chance that the new plan will stop boats from crossing the channel or enable the government to remove illegal immigrants from the country. Instead it will most likely create new problems, such as pushing refugees to disappear into the informal economy.
So, this is clearly another case where the government is purely interested in starting a culture war, catering towards the most extreme right-wing fringes of voters and the media – who have labelled the BBC presenter walk out a ‘mutinous chaos’ –, and has no intention to actually solve the ‘problem’ at hand. This may explain the reaction to Gary Lineker’s tweet. As Sunak said, the government is ready to pick a fight not just with ‘lefty lawyers’ but also public figures like Lineker who speak their minds. In fact, picking a fight was the very purpose of the bill. The government openly admits that it does not really know – or care – whether the bill is compatible with the UK’s legal obligations. Thus, the Home Secretary herself wrote to MPs saying there was "more than a 50% chance" the legislation was not compatible with the European Court of Human Rights. In fact, challenging international law seems to have been the very purpose of the bill, as Braverman revealed that the stated goal of the bill was to ‘test the limits’ of the UK’s international legal obligations and ‘push the boundaries’ of international law.
Lucky Labour?
On the News Agent podcast, Emily Maitlis commented on the IIB arguing that labour was lucky that the Tories were proposing yet another policy that was bound to fail. In her view, it makes it easy for Labour to simply attack the Tories on their inability to design effective policies that achieve their goals, while avoiding to have to engage with more substantive discussions about concrete aspects of these policies, e.g. how many refugees are too many?
I would disagree with this analysis. In fact, Labour is in the process of falling into the same trap it as fallen into with Brexit in general. A couple of months ago, I argued that one problem with Starmer’s ‘make-Brexit-work’ strategy was that it suggested that the failure of Brexit is merely a problem of implementation, rather than one of a fundamentally flawed project. Instead, I argued, we should continue to ‘bremoan’ and challenge not just the concrete implementation of Brexit, but also its fundamental principle. The same goes for the UK’s post-Brexit immigration policy. If Labour merely focuses on attacking the Tories’ track record in delivering on the goals, they themselves have define (stopping boats, bringing down net immigration), Labour let the Tories set the agenda and define the terms of the debate. That will make it more difficult to propose a real alternative once Labour is in power.
For instance, after Sunak’s meeting with Macron, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper stated that “Rishi Sunak has failed to secure a strong enough agreement with France to deal with the dangerous boat crossings. He has failed to get a returns agreement in place, and it looks like his planned new law will make it even harder to get that vital agreement with Europe. Meanwhile, some of the border cooperation measures won’t even be in place for several years even though the problem is now.” That statement implies that Labour accepts the Tories analysis of the problem and the metrics by which a successful immigration policy should be judged, namely a returns agreement, stopping boats from crossing the Channel, and seeking stronger policing at the border. That may be a sound electoral strategy as long as the Tories do not get a grip on the situation, but it makes it more difficult for Labour to propose a different analysis of the situation, for instance that 45,000 people arriving in the country a year is not our biggest problem, that trying to prevent them from crossing by sheer force is not a viable solution.
In the past two weeks, Labour’s room for manoeuvre has considerably shrunk. Sunak’s successful negotiation with the EU of a deal on the NIP (although the ratification of that deal by the UK parliament is currently not making progress – see Chris Grey’s blog for an update on that) and his enthusiasm for NI’s single market membership, leaves Labour with its self-imposed customs union, single market, and freedom of movement red lines in a difficult position. If the Tories are shifting towards a position where SM membership for parts of the UK is compatible with their definition of Brexit, then what is there left for Starmer to say about his vision for a closer relationship with the EU? He all of a sudden finds himself on the hard Brexit side of the debate. Similarly, if the boats need to be stopped as a matter of urgency, returns agreements and stronger controls on the shores of France and the UK are accepted as the way to do it, what alternative vision for an immigration policy can Labour provide? In both cases, Labour seems to be trapped by its over-eager acceptance of the terms of debate imposed by the Tories and all it can do is promise to be better at achieving the goals defined by the Tories. That is hardly a great basis for providing the country with an alternative vision and plan for the country then what the Tories can provide. This mindset amongst the Labour leadership was also on display when Emily Thornberry commented on Lineker’s tweet and agreed with the Tory narrative that Lineker that he had gone too far; playing once again into their hands.
Towards state broadcaster
The BBC sunk to new lows this week by not only deciding not to broadcast an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s latest documentary for fear of right-wing backlash, but also by suspending - in the name of impartiality! – a sport commentator for their political views. The argument that this is a row about impartiality, is utterly ludicrous when one looks at how the BBC has handled other instances of presenters making political statements. Many people have pointed out Lord Sugar’s tweets urging voters to back Johnson’s Tories in the 2019 General Election. Similarly, early on in the current Tory reign, Jeremy Clarkson famously said “Frankly, I'd have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean, how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?" Clarkson did apologies at the time, but the Tory outrage about impartiality was limited if I remember correctly and then PM David Cameron simply said it was "a silly thing to say... I'm sure he didn't mean it".
So, what is happening here is not the BBC struggling with its impartiality rules in a changed 21st century context, where its presenters have a reach not just when on air, but also as private individuals on Twitter and other social media. What is happening is something a lot more sinister, namely that a government with authoritarian tendencies tries to turn the public broadcaster into a mouthpiece for the government rather than an independent and impartial provider of news and analysis.
Indeed, among all the things Brexit – and more generally the Tories in government for 13 years – has broken, the most high profile victim is the BBC. The Lineker crisis shows that the BBC is on a path to be transformed from a public broadcaster into a state broadcaster. The former is a publicly funded media company whose mission is to inform, educate, and provide quality journalism in a sea of commercially and politically motivated news production. The latter is a media company whose sole purpose is to broadcast and defend the policies and ideologies of the government of the day, however indefensible they may be.
Clearly the right-wing of the Tory party either want no BBC at all (and therefore advocate an end to the TV licence system), or – while they are in government – they want a BBC that is a state broadcaster, just like Russia 1 is. One example of this mindset was on display when Tory minister Robert Jenrick told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that the duty of a BBC journalist was to be in lock step with ‘public opinion.’ Public opinion, of course, is not unambiguously in favour of the government’s approach to illegal immigration. While support amongst conservative voters is high, the number of people who consider the government’s immigration policies to be right, is no larger than those who trust labour (35% in both cases according to a Ipsos poll). So, what Jenrick is saying of course, is that the BBC should speak for those people who support the government and thus become the government’s mouthpiece.
The whole saga is even more ludicrous when one considers that the very same people that attack Lineker are often self-declared advocates of ‘free speech’ as Nick Tyron has also pointed out in his blog post. If there was still any need for this, the Lineker affair showed how the far-right (and I would include most of the front bench of the Tory party in that category) waffling on about ‘free speech’ really is just a partisan tool to try and shut up any dissenting voices. It is not an attitude born out of liberal conviction, but to the contrary a tool in their authoritarian toolbox – and as such not dissimilar to 1930s Germany.
1930s Germany
Even people who agree with Lineker have voiced concern about his tweet, pointing to Godwin’s Law according to which whenever you have to invoke Nazi Germany in an argument, it is a sign that you have lost the argument. So, was Lineker’s Nazi comparison out of order?
In the current context, I think Lineker’s comparison of the UK government’s narrative on immigration to the language used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s seems warranted. It should be made clear that Lineker did not compare the immigration bill to concentration camps or the Holocaust. His claim was about similarity of language during the 1930s (not the 1940s). He was not the first one to be appalled by that similarity, as the protest of some Holocaust survivors at Braverman’s ‘invasion rhetoric’ shows. In fact, the current Tory government, in more than one respect, does indeed show parallels with Nazi Germany before November 1938 (November 9/10 1938 was the night of the ‘Reichskristallnacht,’ which according to Hannah Arendt marks the moment where the Nazi regime stopped being ‘just’ authoritarian, and became totalitarian.).
In fact, I would go further than Lineker and argue that the similarities are not just in words, but also in deeds. Here, one striking recent development is the increasingly frequent recourse by the government to removing people’s rights as citizens.
Brexit removed in one stroke all our EU citizenship rights, which surely is one of the most extensive revocations of individual citizenship rights in modern UK history (we all lost the right to travel, work, vote in local elections, and settle freely in 27 other countries, which in itself is an absolutely enormous attack on our rights). Yet, under Home Secretary Javid, Patel, and Braverman even UK citizenship has become increasingly precarious. According to the charity Free Movement, there has been a jump in the number of people who have been stripped of their UK citizenship since rules were relaxed in 2015. Shamima Begum is only one high profile case in this respect, which illustrates that underneath the still fairly liberal discourse about equality before the law, the Begum case is fundamentally about how we define Britishness. As Ex Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said following Begum’s recent failed appeal against the decision: had she been a white teenager from Manchester called Sharon, removing her citizenship would most certainly not have been considered, however grave her crime.
Removing someone’s citizenship and thus denying them not just political rights, but also any meaningful protection of their basic human rights, is an extreme measure, because in the current system any individual human rights are essentially tied in with one’s status as a citizen of country. That is why Arendt called for a ‘right to have rights’ as a precondition for the post-war human rights order to have any practical meaning whatsoever. Stripping people of their citizenship rights is a sure indication of authoritarian tendencies in a polity, because it seeks to solve problems of public order and criminality not by treating the offenders as a subject of the law, but by casting them outside the political community altogether and thus make them rightless. That is precisely what Nazi Germany did at an increasingly large scale during the 1930s.
The IIB continues on this path of restricting the ‘right to have rights’ by becoming a UK citizen. One of the harsh new rules introduced by the bill is refusing people the right to become members of the British political community if they reached this country by the only ways that are open to them due to the government’s decision to not provide any safe and legal routes for most refugees. This is part of the government’s approach to keep refugees and asylum seekers in a rightless limbo where they are being denied even basic human rights. For the government only British humans should be entitled to have rights. Others should be locked up for 28 days “with no recourse for bail or judicial review.”
In another sense too Lineker’s ‘Nazi comparison’ is spot on. The current system of international human rights including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the European Convention of Human Rights – and indeed the whole current rights- and rules-based international order as it has emerged after WW2 – was a direct reaction to the authoritarian and even totalitarian horrors of the fascist period. It was a system devised to constrain governments and force them to adhere to rules about the protection of individuals and their rights. The problem of course is that a state strong enough to protect your rights, is also strong enough to violate them. So, these duties and constraints on states by necessity have to be enshrined in international law so that states can be held accountable not just by their own population, but by other states in the international community.
As we know only too well in this country, politicians with authoritarian inclinations and delusions of grandeur do not like that system, because it limits their appetited for unlimited power. That is why the current government riles against ‘lefty lawyers’ and why Tories push for leaving the ECHR and break international law. Here too, parallels with 1930s Germany are perfectly reasonable to observe. Experts of international law have pointed out the struggles the Hitler regime had during the early 1930s with formulating a coherent National Socialist stance on international law. A regime based on the idea of racial superiority of the Volk almost naturally tended towards an absolute definition of national sovereignty, which logically implies a rejection of the legitimacy of international law. As one scholar writes: ‘If the Volk was the highest and finest institution of common life, how could it ow duties to follow rules laid down by some more universal system?’ it does not seem too much of a stretch to see parallels in this idea that no external force can tell the German people what to do and the never ending waffling of Brexiters about ‘sovereignty’ and British exceptionalism that I have written about before. The whole point of Brexit was to reject the international order, ‘take back control,’ and ‘do things our own way,’ without caring what other countries do or what the international community considers universal principles.
It is no coincidence, that this British exceptionalism and sovereign – like in Germany in the 1930s -also leads to a very open and violent distain for lawyers. The undignified way in which the PM uses his office to attack ‘lefty lawyers’ is in itself shocking and utterly condemnable. The attacks become even more shocking when seen in light of how the legal profession and legal scholars were attacked under the Nazis in Germany. “Nazi theorists understood that […]hostile or indifferent lawyers could sabotage or slow their program by adhering to old precedents or by reading the new statutes restrictive.” This explains their virulent attacks on lawyers – especially international lawyers – and the anti-academic rhetoric targeted at them. Of course, the Nazi attacks on legal scholars in the early 1930s went a lot further than what we are witnessing in the UK in the 2020s. To quote the same scholarly article, in Germany in the 1930s ‘[p]eople who hold certain views on international law are dismissed, exiled, imprisoned and even hanged.“ But Lineker pointed out the similarity in language and here the obvious hatred of lawyers who dare challenging the government is indeed ‘not dissimilar’ to how the Nazis treated legal scholars.
Project Fear
I remember well, when I first heard the term ‘project fear’ during the 2016 Brexit Referendum campaign I immediately thought it was referring to the Leave campaign not the campaign for remaining in the EU. After all, it was Leavers who painted a picture of a UK too weak to defend its interests inside the EU without being pushed around and bullied by other countries or EU bureaucrats. Indeed, it was the leave campaign that painted a picture of a dangerous world out there that Britain had to protect itself from – a world full of migrants waiting to invade our shores, taking our jobs, and houses. It seems to me that this is precisely the project fear the Tories have now made their main policy. Braverman’s absurd claims about 100m immigrants heading our way illustrates that only too clearly. The talk about ‘invasion’ is geared towards stoking fear and that is all I could ever see in the Brexit project: a cowardly reaction to a world changing in a way that they do not like and that scares them. A Britain preferring to cosy up with Putin’s oligarchs who promise a world that ‘strongmen’ can still control, rather than a Britain that defends the rules-based liberal world order in face of ever-growing challenges.
Fear is crucial to understanding this government’s actions at another level too, namely Sunak’s fear of the Tories’ own right-wing fringe that seems to motivate much of Sunak’s policy programme. Similarly, Baroness Jenny Jones very eloquently explained in the House of Lords how fear of the public may explain the government’s authoritarian agenda.
Sadly, fear also has gripped the main opposition party. Namely, the fear of seeming to urban and elitist and thus losing the ‘red wall vote’ again in the next General Election.
The only hope we have, is that the British public will slowly understand that ‘hostile environment’ is not just the Tory government’s official immigration policy, but its plan for the country as a whole. Indeed, the government is making this country more and more hostile not just for refugees and immigrants, but for most of us. That includes not only people who want clean rivers and sea shores, or people working in the public sector, but also large numbers of those who own a house. Mortgage costs will increase for an estimated 4m households in 2023, which – together with the expected increase in unemployment – means that more households are at risk of defaulting or have to cut other spending to be able to pay their mortgages.
While the Tories may welcome the fact that immigration has taken centre stage this week, distracting the public from its other failures, the above-quoted Ipsos poll shows that the issue is way down the public’s priority list that is led by economic concerns and concerns about the NHS. Immigration only comes in in 7th place. Making noise about invasions and boats will deflect attention from the economy for a few weeks perhaps, but ultimately given the sheer extent of economic hardship many people are facing, the real issues facing the country cannot be kept off the front pages for very long. At one stage the government or the opposition need to come up with a plan for how to make this country a less hostile environment for the people living here.