Game Theory.

David Goodhart has been appointed a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). To understand why this is a bad thing it is worth reflecting a bit on what he has said on the subject of race in the past, and on what he has left unsaid, and why.

Goodhart is one of a set of writers who style themselves as “post-liberal” truthtellers. They range from Paul Embery, and Munira Mirza, and Douglas Murray. People who can finally say the unsayable about things like race, immigration, multiculturalism and culture. This set define themselves as rebels and in order to do so they need a regime against which to revolt. Without it, why should anyone give their rebellion the time of day?

If one doesn’t exist then it is necessary that it be invented. And this is largely what David Goodhart has done. He has made his name, and a good portion of his living by assailing the smug, dishonest, and largely fictional regime of the “London Metropolitan Elite” (LME).

The LME is a protean and highly adaptable foe, they live in the cities, primarily in London but can be found elsewhere if the need arises. Their concerns can vary but whatever they are they are highly indulgent and completely out of touch with those that the real, authentic working people of the country care about. The same goes for their political allegiances, and even occasionally gender and sexuality. When it is required they can be women, or LGBT, and they almost always include people of colour.

By definition then the principles and beliefs of the truth-tellers is similarly flexible.

Nonetheless this truth-telling tends to have two basic leitmotifs :

1. Racism exists only at the level of deliberate intention regardless of outcome
2. Structural and cultural forces are only relevant to the extent they affect White British people

Of course, Goodhart has never, to my knowledge come out and stated these precepts directly. The implication is there, but the quiet part is not said out loud.

Nonetheless you can see them at work behind many of his interventions. They function to delegitimise the concerns of his opponents and minimise claims for racial justice. Because racial justice is something only the LME are concerned about.

The next is the appeal to class.

For instance, if we highlight the fact that children in Bangladeshi and Pakistani households are 2.8 and 2.4 times as likely to be living in poverty than those in white British households that is because we in the LME are missing the real issue here, which is class. Despite containing a great number of (often cultural) Marxists, the LME hate talking about class.

The slight-of-hand often relies on holding up the educational attainment of white working class boys. White working class boys are the group in the UK who suffer real injustice and any attempt to focus on anything else is only ever a result of a callous disregard on the part of the LME.

The problem with this argument is not exactly that it is wrong. White working class boys do suffer from lower educational attainment. It is just that it is dishonest. It’s the equivalent of the islamophobe who suddenly discovers a concern for women’s rights when it comes to the burka.

If its proponents were serious about addressing the issue of white working class under-attainment there are a whole range of things they could do. They could call for the return of the Educational Maintenance Allowance to support low income students, or better housing provision to reduce over-crowding, or a more generous benefits settlement to help those on lower incomes. Any and all of these might help. Crucially they wouldn’t just help white working class boys, but working class students of all ethnicities.

Its like jazz: you have to listen to the notes that aren’t being played. No proposals are put forward to help people on low incomes because better outcomes isn’t the point. The point is to portray the concerns of the LME as hypocritical and indulgent fripperies, born of a refusal to engage with the pressing issues of the day.

Another common trick is to claim that those highlighting injustice, or racial discrimination are really the ones to blame for it. Normally by cultivating or indulging (usually black) “victimhood“.

Black or “minority” victimhood is a common trope in David Goodhart’s comments on race. It is a very bad thing, it creates an illegitimate sense of grievance within minority cultures and holds people back from achieving better outcomes for themselves.

But it is only black victimhood that is a problem, and only the grievances of the minority that are illegitimate. The grievance of the (white) majority is perfectly justified.

To be clear, majority grievance is not racism, it just so happens to be the grievance of the white majority and to be focussed on the presence of those of other races. Goodhart does not come out and say “the problem is people of other races” but he leaves us to fill in the blanks. This looks remarkably like fostering racial division: provoking the kind of resentments that can lead to violence, or at least a damaging “culture of victimhood” but for some reason those concerns do not apply when one is talking about the majority.

Once again, his target here is actually the LME. It is they who would tar anyone who disagrees with racism, because of their smug insistence on multiculturalism. They don’t care about the concerns of the authentic majority, because they are not part of it, and anyway it impedes their desire for more takeaway options. No-one outside the LME ever eats anything other than British food, by the way. By opposing the LME in this way David gets to reassert, once more his status as an honest, and fearless truthteller. And then to leverage that status to sell more books, write more columns and maybe bag himself another gig at a thinktank.

This is perhaps the most dispiriting thing about the whole process. So much of it is just a game. The real status of people of colour or the white working class are not the concern. They are just features of a rhetorical parlour trick. Moves in a game; the aim being to win points against an opponent who has been invented purely so that spectators can be charged to watch you defeat them.

David Goodhart et al might or might not think racial injustice is a real concern in England. He might or might not think that racially just outcomes are as important as intentions. He might or might not think white greivance (nudge nudge) is valid. But he’s built a reputation and a career out of taking the positions he has.

And now David Goodhart has been given the chance to play at the EHRC. He’ll decide on matters that affect people’s daily life: matters of employment, criminal justice and the impact of government policy. It may or may not be a coincidence that he has been appointed by the government of the hostile environment, a government that has spent the last decade undermining the position of people of colour in the UK. But it certainly benefits both to give him a bigger board to play on. The real losers are everyone for whom this is not a game, but who have to play along anyway.

The meaning of London, and of Belonging and of English

Is London English any more?

What colour do you have to be, to be English?

What colour are the elite?

What does it mean to belong?

Over the past couple of months, a slew of white men have all decided to pontificate and fret about “Immigration” and “Englishness” and “Belonging”. Taken together we can piece together an idea of what is meant by ‘Englishness’, by ‘belonging’, by ‘elite’ and by ‘London’.

None of these words mean what you think they mean.

To start with the most recent, and the most obvious; John Cleese peaked out from his home in the Caribbean to declare that London wasn’t really English anymore. Foreign friends visiting the city had confirmed this view.

It is not clear how these foreign friends ascertained the nationality of the people the saw in London. Presumably they didn’t talk to a representative sample of them? Perhaps they kept an ear out while seeing the sights? Seems like a bit of an oversight, to assume that the voices you hear at the London Dungeon are representative of the residents of Southwark. Let’s credit Cleese’ fabled, foreign friends with more acuity than that.

Maybe they based their opinion on observation of the general populace? How can you tell that people in England aren’t English just by looking at them? I think we know how, don’t we?

At the start of May, Tom Smail, a self-described “multi-lingual Londoner” wrote a piece in Prospect magazine lamenting the sense of isolation he now feels, at the lack of English voices in the communities that surround him. After thirty-five years living in Green Lanes with his French wife and Italian stepchildren, Tom now feels alienated by the Turkish and Kurdish voices that besiege him.

Let us ignore the cognitive dissonance sparked by referring to ones foreign family during a lament about immigration. Let’s also resist the urge to ponder how his immigrant family feel about this article, lamenting their presence in London.

Because Tom isn’t lamenting their presence is he? They’re not the type of immigrants he’s upset about. Why might that be? I think we can guess.

This week, Giles Fraser declared that Labour have “betrayed its working class base and turned itself into a party for London, Cambridge and Brighton.” The word “London” is doing a lot of work here. It apparently isn’t just a geographic signifier, so what is signified?

Giles past interventions have made it clear that he sees England as divided between an authentic, leave-voting, working class who understand patriotism and can appreciate football; and rootless, decadent, metropolitan Remainers. The latter are citizens of nowhere who sneer at love-of-country and could never appreciate the world cup.

London must mean elite, it must mean frothy-coffee drinking rootlessness, and absolutely no working-class people. But what else does London mean? It means not England.

Of course, some people acknowledge that there are multiple facets to London. Some of these facets are working class, some of them suffer from poverty and unemployment. Some of them are communities that have been at the sharp end of neo-liberalism for decades.

But here’s the rub, those people are white too. And of course, those are the people who are being swamped by the immigrants. Losing their culture and their communities to the influx of foreign people. None of those newcomers are part of the working class. Instead they are part of the elite, or at least if they’re not the elite, they are an infliction which the elite imposes in order to facilitate their frothy coffees and ‘diversity’. And no matter how long they’ve been here, they’re can never be English.

Some people just come right out and say this stuff. Lots of people are far more comfortable expressing their racism now than they were a few years ago. But most of the time they don’t need to.

If you spend a whole interview talking about immigration, then sign off by advising the left to talk about “Belonging”, it’s pretty clear who you think belongs, and who doesn’t.

You don’t have to say that only white people can be English, you just need to talk about how places with lots of non-white people (like London for instance) are not English.

You can’t talk about who the English are without creating a negative image of who the English aren’t. You can’t talk about belonging, without defining who doesn’t belong. So you don’t have to. Do the first bit, and people will fill in the blanks.

I was born in London, and have lived here my whole life. My wife is white, she was born and brought up in Canada. She still has a Canadian accent, She is an immigrant. But John Cleese et al seem to be more perturbed by my presence than by hers. And I think we all know why.

The privilege of being generic

Some White people don’t like being called “white“.

Why do we need labels? Why can’t we all just be people?

Those of us with post-colonial backgrounds, and elsewhere might raise an eyebrow at this,

“Why indeed?”

Some people have always had labels affixed to them. If you’re not white in the U.K. you likely spend a lot of time negotiating various labels both those you affix yourself for others and those they place upon you. Where you’re from, where you’re really from.

But being white does not normally necessitate this. If you’re white you’re assumed to be from here. This is perhaps where the anger comes from. If you’re accustomed to being accepted wherever you go it can be difficult to feel that you suddenly require explanation.

There’s a historical irony to this. White as an ethnicity was a conscious creation of racial theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was shaped by the need to differentiate Europeans from inferior, colonised races; and by efforts to fashion and preserve hegemony by Protestant elites in America. Who got to be white has always been up for negotiation, but the principle of exclusion was vital.

Having moved from an identity based on reified differentiation, Whiteness became the default from which everything else is an exception. If you are the generic option then you must, by definition belong. However much space is allowed for people that differ from you (and that space can contract as much as it expands) it is clear that you are making space for others at your indulgence. They might be allowed to stay (or they might not), but that’s not the same as belonging.

The consequences of this trope become clear when a broadcaster comments on the number of white people that attend a Brexit rally and unleashes a torrent of white grievance. Grievance that would be called identity politics if the parties involved had more melanin.

But the consequences are bigger then just Jon Snow being made to give a public apology. The consequences of the White default are that members of the Windrush generation can face sudden deportation to countries they left as children. They are that MPs like Diane Abbott and David Lammy can face continual vicious racist abuse and death threats. Because some people think that just being born here and then getting elected does not give one carte blanch to criticise a state that fundamentally isn’t for you. They are that the Mail can decide a Black MC is being “ungrateful” when he castigates the failure to offer justice for the Grenfell disaster. The consequences are that Shamima Begum’s newborn baby can be left to die in a camp for the sin of having an abused teenager for a mother. Because the rule of law is only conditional for people who are exceptions to the rule.

It does not matter that the Home Secretary who revoked Shamima’s citizenship is not white. Not being white does not necessarily inoculate you from the overwhelming logic of the white default. Especially if your career ambitions rely on it not doing so.

White is not the only default. A recent book has pointed out how much of our lives takes men to be the basic unit of measurement, across culture, design, healthcare. And people who are LGBT have a lot they can tell you about the assumptions of heteronormativity that run though discussions of sexuality. These are just two examples. Each of these defaults have their own historical roots, and modes of expression. But all of them reinforce the idea that the generic is the common good. Everyone else has narrow sectional interests which are granted more or less tolerance depending on the times. To draw attention to this dynamic is to engage in divisive identity politics, and even the default are not free to do that.

Threats to The West.

Hurrah, another open debate.

Do middle-aged pundits pose a threat to civilised society? How might this threat be managed?

Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting that the likes of Claire Fox, Trevor Phillips, Matthew Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann and David Aaronovitch really are a threat, I’ve always opposed discrimination against pundits of all ages. I’m just asking questions.

There’s a debate taking place at Conway Hall, the original subject was ‘Is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the West?’A glance at the website shows they’ve changed the title to the less race-baity “Immigration and Diversity Politics: A Challenge to Liberal Democracy?” It is reassuring to know that ethnic minorities are no longer a threat to the whole of western civilisation, we only constitute a challenge to liberal democracy.

But the original is what the panel signed up to. So it is worth unpacking that original title a bit. On one level it might be dismissed as pure click-bait. Designed to garner publicity, I guess it was dumped when the backlash proved to be a little more vociferous than the organisers expected.

But what is implied by asking if ethnic diversity is a threat to the west?

Firstly, that there is something readily and unambiguously identified as “The West”. What might that be? Presumably this is not just a geographical marker.

So a concept then. Not just the west, but The West.

If ethnic diversity is potentially a threat to The West, then clearly ethnic diversity must be intrinsically lacking from The West to begin with. The West, therefore denotes something ethnically homogeneous, or at least it ought to be. It was in some purer, more authentic time. To the extent that The West is ethnically homogeneous it is safely The West, to the extent it is becoming diverse it is not.

Does it exist, this ethnically pure West? If so, when was it? And where?Who were the ethnically pure Westerners? The debate is taking place in London, so presumably the English are in. Or some of them at least. If the English are in The West, are the French? Presumably.

But are Australians? Geographically they can’t be, but if not then do Australians also constitute a threat to the ethnic purity that is so vital to its survival? What about Canadians? Or Americans? If they don’t count then this West is looking very small and embattled indeed.

But if they do, and Australia is in, then maybe it is just White Skin that defines the West? For how long have America and Australia been homogeneously White? Have they ever? Do Southern Italians count? They can be downright swarthy, so does Italian migration constitute a threat? There have certainly been times in American history when it did. But does it now? That might be news to Matteo Salvini and the Lega Nord.

What about the Irish? We might include them now, but I think if we were to inform some Victorians that Irish Catholics were to be included within the rarefied circumference of Western Civilisation many of them would object in the strongest possible terms.

If the West doesn’t make much sense as a term of definition, it does make sense as a term of exclusion. The most important point about The West has never really been about who it includes. Its always been more about who it excludes.

All ideas contain the idea of their opposite. So this West, the one that may or may not be threatened by ethnic diversity, cannot exist without its reverse. The Orient perhaps. The Orient is also not an actual place. It is a concept. The Orient signifies ethnically, diverse, polyglot impurity. When we talk of the threat to The West, post by ‘ethnic diversity’, we mean the threat that it will become like The Orient.

At the moment The Orient is often Asian and largely Muslim. At times however, it has included Africa and it sometimes still does. In the 50’s and 60’s it also included the Caribbean, and within the last century it has included the Irish and Jews. People who are not currently from The Orient, would do well to remember that they might find themselves from there at some point in the future.

People from The Orient are inherently destabilising. Their very presence is problematic. The more people from The Orient, that there are in The West, the more diverse it becomes and the less it can be said to exist. The very existence of these Orientals is a threat to the binary separation on which The West depends. Too many of them and it will simply collapse.

This impression is confirmed if we look at some of the people who have invoked the defence of The West, who have raised the alarm and rallied to its defence.

Last year Donald Trump voiced his concern over the threats to Western Civilisation and praised the far-right Polish government’s role in defending it. Marine Le Pen is fond of invoking defence of Western Civilisation to buttress her attempts to alienate and exclude French Muslims, and Victor Orban has made it a key plank of his authoritarian ethno-nationalism. To that rather unedifying list can we now presumably add Conway Hall and Academy of Ideas?

Some participants in this debate have been defending their liberal, anti-racist credentials and arguing that of course they fervently disagree with statement; but they believe in free-speech and confronting racism with open debate.

The problem is they’re not the ones currently being debated.

Once the topic of whether one’s identity is a civilisation-level threat has been put on the agenda, those who endorse the question do not have a great claim to the gratitude from the people who’s lives they are debating. They are playing the game regardless of which team they may be on.

Other of the participants in this debate have been on Twitter defending their participation on the grounds that they are just asking important questions. These questions are out there, whether or not they get publicly answered. The fact that they are now being answered at prestigious events involving Russell-Group academics, prominent radio and press-pundits is neither here nor there.

It’s a useful move, the “Just asking Questions” defence. It allows those who often have very little at stake to say irresponsible and offensive things without ever having to take responsibility for the tension they create. They would never shout fire in a crowded theatre. But they are loudly asking if anyone else sees all that smoke. It’s open debate and you can’t blame them for any resulting stampede. They’re just asking the question.

 

The right type of racism

Theresa May announced that the 22^nd April would be marked every year as Stephen Lawrence day in honour of the murdered teenager. There were some who felt that this was merely a cynical gesture by a PM under pressure. A sop to distract us from the horrific (and entirely predictable) effects of her hostile environment policies. I want to suggest that the truth might be worse than that. I think she might have been genuine.

There is a tendency to divide racism into two sorts. One is the wrong kind. It uses the N-word unironically and outside of hip hop, it sieg heils in public and stabs black teenagers to death at bus stops.

The right kind is much more polite. The right kind would never identify itself as such. The right kind of racism would never dream of using a racial epithet. But it requires constant performative displays of British Muslim’s loyalty. In France it bans the Burka, whereas in England it frets vocally about the rights of Muslim women, at the same time it slashes funding for refuge centres again and again. The right kind might never use a racial epithet but it does assume that brown people are likely to be illegal immigrants and will send vans to BME areas to deliver just this message. The good racism doesn’t stab anyone, but it does deport them, and intern them in detention centres. It deports now, and only allows appeals later. It destroys landing cards. It legislates that teachers, doctors and landlords must continually survey their students, patients and tenants in case any of them are an illegal immigrant. It doesn’t specify they have to target non-white people, and those with a foreign accent but well, it is the most efficient way.

The thing about the right kind of racism is that both relies upon and fuels the wrong kind.

It relies upon the wrong kind of racism to provide an alibi, a permanent exculpatory comparison. Racism just means the wrong kind. How dare you accuse the proponent of the right kind, of racism?

We can all agree that the wrong kind of racism is bad. It’s repugnant. People from across the political spectrum and every parliamentary party can unite to condemn it as such. Thus Richard Littlejohn can engage in performative outrage at being associated with the “knuckle-scraping scum” of the BNP, and still have published a book like Hell in a Handcart, a “400 page recruiting manual for the British National Party”. It allows the Daily Mail to proudly campaign for justice for the Lawrence family on the one hand, and continually fearmonger about Muslims, migrants and Ed Miliband’s foreign father, on the other.

More importantly, it allows a politician who pioneered the hostile environment, to declare her admiration for Doreen Lawrence and dedicate a day of remembrance to her son. Proponents of the right type may be cynical but I think are also often blind to the link between the right and the wrong. While at the Home Office Theresa May was more vocal on the issue disproportionality in stop and search than any of the Home Secretaries I remember from my lifetime. Part of this was tied to an on-going conflict with the police but in part I think she was genuine. Eye-wateringly disproportionate stop and search figures came to be seen as the bad kind of racism.

One effect of the Lawrence case and the Macpherson inquiry was that forced the country, and parties of all political stripes to accept that racism was a live issue in the police. The riots in 2011 reinforced the idea that the mistrust and resentment engendered had serious effects not just on communities affected but on the ability of the police to carry out their duties. So clear had this lesson become, that eventually even a Conservative Home Secretary had to acknowledge it.

But of course, the right kind of racism doesn’t only rely on wrong kind. It fuels it. The constant drip feed of stories and editorials, and laws and edicts that call into question the position of minorities in the country means people start to view them as an unwelcome intrusion. Continually dehumanising migrants in legislation and print tends to reduce the extent to which people view them as humans. So they shout racist names in the street, vote for racist parties and stab people.

And those in a position to do something about this, the people who print the headlines and make the laws well of course this is nothing to do with them. This is (the wrong type) of racism. They don’t do that, they only do the right type, and so they do nothing.

A bit of a rant about Rivers of Blood

There are two principles to bear in mind here. One is that censorship is bad. Two is that censorship is not categorically not the same as just not having a public platform. Having your works suppressed, and readers and publishers of them arrested or harassed is censorship. Not being given a a prime time slot on radio four, is not censorship. No one is censoring Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech. Anyone who wants access to the complete transcript can google the words “Rivers of Blood Speech” and they will find ample providers willing to supply it. I invite you to do so now. That’s the beauty of the internet.

So given that access to the entire Rivers of Blood Speech is not, actually very difficult to get hold of, the BBC’s decision to read the speech in full, on the basis that few people will have heard it in it’s entirety feels like a bit of a non-sequitur. It’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean the BBC is required to devote some prime programming time to providing it. On it’s own, it doesn’t mean they mustn’t but… It’s a bit like when politicians declare that immigrants must subscribe to our “tolerant, liberal way of life“. Sure, no one is objecting to tolerance, but we have questions about both their premise and their motivation.

The analogy is not accidental. Powell’s speech – for anyone who hasn’t googled it yet – is primarily concerned with the dangers of mass-migration to Britain. And to be clear, while pedants are right when they point out Powell never used the words “rivers of blood”, the speech incited violent racial antagonism against immigrants and their families for decades. Within ten days, a Caribbean man was stabbed to death by youths chanting “Powell” as they did so. That antagonism was far from a perversion of it’s message. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s far-right groups like the National Front looked to Powell, one far-right magazine was even named ‘Powellite’ a pun on the anti-fascist publication ‘Searchlight’.

The speech may have ended Powell’s time as a shadow-cabinet minister, but it was far from the end of his public career. He was a regular talking head on immigration for years to come. Further undermining the implication that Powell’s speech and his ideas have been taboo for so long, that they are due a re-evaluation in the cold-light of day.

And what about the speech itself? Every now and then someone pops up and decides to rehabilitate it, arguing that Powell wasn’t a racist, and / or the speech was really prophetic. But Powell clearly views migrants from the commonwealth as intrinsically unsuitable for life in the UK. Their continued presence is only ever described as cause of distress and suffering for the white population (though he is willing to concede a value in those migrants who come to staff the NHS as trainees then return home). The very presence of “negroes” in a neighbourhood is enough to elicit pity.

He deliberately picks emotive subjects: a little old lady being terrorised by “Negros”, the threat of the “black man having the whip hand over the white”. These are tropes that play to supremacist ideas of the natural dominance of the white race – with their not-very-veiled allusions to slavery; and chauvinistic ideas about the need to protect white womanhood from dishonour by colonial subjects. Finally, he depicts black communities as uncivilised and animalistic: they break windows and fling faeces, their children are: “charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist,” they chant.” The word “chant” implying an incantation, a savage, pagan ritual with which the heathen mock and persecute innocent white womanhood.

While he talks about threat of racial conflict the only examples he expounds upon are the threat that white people will be subject to the indignity of accommodating a non-white population. There is no concern for the violence that will be inflicted upon the non-white population either in his hypothetical future; or in reality as a result of his words.

The real target of Powell’s speech is not really immigration but race equality legislation. His fear is that white people will be prosecuted for the engaging in their natural aversion to interacting with people of another race. The fact that many of those arriving come from British colonised territories where they were forced to do just that, does not seem to have occured to Powell.

Though Powell only obliquely acknowledges it, Britain’s imperial expansion is the leitmotif that runs throughout the speech, and the racist fearmongering that underpins it. Powell was a heartbroken imperialist who once wanted to be viceroy of India. The sense of imperial superiority lies beneath a lot of the racist tropes that he toys with in the speech. He clearly views the empire as a good thing but has no wish to see the consequence of colonial exploitation: that people from colonised countries must leave to come to the metropole to find work.

A proper deconstruction of Powell’s speech is probably ovedue to be honest. For too long those revisionist voices that try to portray Powell as little more than a realist have been left unrebutted. But in the context of mounting racist violence; of the “hostile environment“; of “take back control” what confidence can we have that a proper deconstruction is what we will get?

Giving anti-racism campaigners the chance to weigh in is the least the BBC can do given the nature of the material, but it will be of no help if they are to be presented as just one take among many; alongside David Goodhart and James Delingpole’s particular brand of bad faith and racist dog whistle.

The speech has not been censored. Anyone who wants to is free to look it up at their leisure. And it is perfectly right that they should be able to do so. But that doesn’t mean the BBC has to grant it the legitimacy that comes from with a Radio Four dramatisation. The decision to read it in full, will not problematise the speech, it will reinforce the idea that it is just another controversy for us to debate. With wrongs and rights on both sides and the truth probably somewhere in the middle. But the truth isn’t somewhere in the middle. Powell was racist, and so was his speech, we should be wary of debate that obfuscates that fact.

Brutus is an Honourable Man

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights…The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen, because of a little theft.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Denying known illegal migrants the ability to continue to access banking services (including accounts opened before they overstayed) will make it harder for them to establish or maintain a settled life in the UK and should incentivise voluntary departure.

HM Treasury Immigration Bill: tackling existing current accounts held by illegal migrants. Impact assessment, 03/08/15.

The Home Office assures us no one with a valid visa will have their name accidentally placed on the list, and that only 6000 illegal migrants will have their bank account frozen.

The Home Office assures us the only people who have to worry about not being able to feed themselves are people who overstay, who are working without a work permit. An initial 6000 people, 0.009% of the population who are dragging down our wages and destroying our working conditions. And Brutus is an honourable man.

This is about making Britain a hostile environment for illegal migrants and failed asylum seekers.

Britain isn’t a hostile environment for them at the moment.

In 2013, Theresa May sent vans with “Go Home” emblazoned on the side to areas with a big minority population. Well, she said she did, but actually there were only ever two vans. One for the photo opp, and one to stop it being just a cheap photo opp. Once it was in the press, the job was really done.

The 2014 Immigration act required landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants. So now people with a foreign accent have to prove their right to stay when they try to find somewhere to live.

The same law could require GPs to inquire as to the residency status of their patients.

Section 44 of the Immigration Act 2016 makes it illegal to drive a car if you know or suspect that you don’t have a legal right to be in the country. It’s difficult to make out someone’s residency status if they are driving at or around the speed limit, so the safest bet for enforcing that to focus on stopping people who look the most, well, migratory.

And now the Home Secretary will give British banks the names of those who work without a permit, overstay their visa or have their asylum claim turned down. Banks are to freeze their accounts in the hope they’ll do us all a favour and just leave. Then they can have their money back. And then another set of names will be released, and we can all be reminded once again, that the Home Office is watching, ever ready to ensure a hostile environment to those who don’t belong here.

The same Home Office that sent hundreds of letters out to EU citizens, wrongly telling them to go home can be trusted to correctly identify the right bank accounts. No one else need worry.

But even if that’s true (it isn’t) but let’s examine the hypothetical. Let’s allow that the Home Office is as scrupulous and efficient as they would need to be to prevent the wrong people having their money frozen by government decree. Does that make this any better?

Is this a principle we’re happy with? Once your immigration status becomes unfavourable, the government is free to inflict bureaucratic misery upon you until you give up and go home. Maybe after a spell of indefinite detention in centres that drive people to attempt suicide every year.

This might only apply to criminals. Illegal migration is a crime (the clue is in the name after all). But it affects all of us. It’s not just migrants who are already disproportionately stopped while driving, for decades it has been black people. This will only get worse.

It wont just be people who overstay their visa who face suspicion when they try to rent a house. It will be anyone with a foreign name, or a funny accent. Failed asylum seekers are not the only ones who should worry if people with tuberculosis avoid treatment because they’re worried about their immigration status.

People who worry about migration often give the impression that the borders of the UK are porous, but increasingly it is the border regime that lacks definition. Whereas once it patrolled the entry and exit points of the country, now it patrols ever increasing aspects of our lives. Schools, homes, banks, transport. At any point, people who don’t look like they belong can be subject to checks and interrogation. This is not just an infringement of the rights of 6000 illegal migrants. If it doesn’t mean you, it might mean your friend, it might mean your partner, or your child.

Even if no-one you know is ever asked to prove their immigration status, you are still demeaned. Every time we freeze bank accounts, or send out racist vans, we push the line of decency back a little further. We grant the government a little more licence to say that there is less and less that is beyond the pale. We make daily life coarser and less civil for those who overstay their visa. And for everyone else.

Drugs, race and gender; and race and gender as drugs.

Throughout the 20th century drug policy has been shaped by ideas about race and gender. In particular, by concerns about immigration and the need to protect white women from the corrupting influence of foreign men.

During the First World War the front page of The Times was taken up with an advert for ‘Fear Banishers’, thin tabs of fabric impregnated with heroin or cocaine that readers could purchase to send to troops in the trenches. They were freely available from a pharmacist.

But ambivalent attitudes to opium in particular hardened once it became associated with Chinese immigration to Britain. The press picked up on the figure of the Chinese opium seller as an explicit threat to white women. In particular they picked up on the figure of “The Brilliant Chang” (real name Chan Nan) a Chinese migrant who in the 1920’s became a folk devil renowned for corrupting young English women, after his trial in 1924. Chan was reported to have an almost hypnotic ability to induce white women to try cocaine. He was said to be obsessed with English women, and would often demand sexual favours in return for supplying drugs. The Daily Mail assumed “that he did so explicitly as a member of the yellow race to degrade white women”. It was also said that “disgusting orgies” took place at opium dens. The Daily Mail declared “Men do not, as a rule, take to drugs unless there is some hereditary influence, but women are more temperamentally attracted”.
In 1918 the Daily Express informed readers “You will find the dope fiend, in Chelsea, in Mayfair and Maida Vale” before outlining an archetypal morality play about a woman brought low:

“A young and attractive girl deeply interested in social conditions and political economy made the acquaintance of another woman through a mutual friend. Within months she had become a confirmed haunter of a certain notorious cafe. She had lost her looks and health. Before she closed her miserable existence a bare nine months later she had introduced four other decent girls to her practice of vice”

The yellow peril was intent on corrupting white femininity in order to undermine the fabric of the nation, and it was up to white masculinity to protect both.

In the 1950’s the threat to white womanhood came from Caribbean migrants bringing jazz music and cannabis. The same press that raised fears over Chinese opium peddlers now raised the spectre of the hyper-masculine Caribbean male. In 1957 the Times expressed alarm at the idea that:
“White girls who become friendly with West Indians are from time to time enticed to hemp smoking”.

The combination of jazz music and “hemp” was said to elicit a frenzy, particularly among impressionable young women. One man reported that he had to call off his engagement because his fiancee had been ruined by attending “hemp cigarette” parties. It apparently took her months to recover.

During this period, Sapper – the pen name of H.C. McNeile, author of the popular (and highly jingoistic) Bulldog Drummond adventures, inspired a group of young vigilantes who “disgusted by the degenerate parasites of the west end, against whom the police were powerless” would patrol the streets intent on rounding up “dope peddlers” and beating them until they agreed to change their ways.

Visible in these moral panics is a conflation of the drug itself, with the migrant who apparently pushes it, and the character of white women with the moral status of the nation.

Immigration introduces these tempting but degrading forces into the nation. The means of entry is the section of the community considered to be most vulnerable – both as individuals and as a collectivity – white women. The process parallels the manner in which the prohibited substance enters the body of individual women eliciting dangerous passions and most importantly the risk of racially inappropriate sexual liaisons. Lurking in the background to all of this is threatened, white masculinity.

Folk panics about drug consumption fuel antagonism against migrants by playing on white British masculinity. But they do so in an interestingly contradictory manner. It is the duty of white men to defend white women (individual women, and white womanhood as a concept) from the predation of drug-pushing, foreign men. White men are therefore both empowered and emasculated.

Empowered by the authority vested in them to protect (and by implication police) white women, and to inflict violence (either legal or extra-judicial) upon foreign men. Foreign men, are portrayed as both an irresistible and alarming threat, but also weak and feeble. Unable to physically challenge white men they must rely on underhand tactics and target white women / womanhood.

But conversely white men are emasculated, if white women are at such a risk, surely that is a sign that white men have been failing to protect them? Surely if white manhood was sufficiently potent either white women would not need to seek out strange thrills on strange substances with strangers from abroad? Or at least they would not be able to, because white men would have kept the foreign menace at bay.
White women conversely are both belittled, and deified. On the one hand, they are feeble-minded dupes (dopes), unable to resist the blandishments and exotic substances of swarthy foreigners. But on the other, they are pinnacles of femininity; further evidence of white supremacy, they are so irresistible to men of other races that they inspire these outlandish and nefarious schemes.

I think that it is this contradictory dynamic that makes appeals to protect white femininity such a powerful drug for political mobilisation. The ego is continually built up at the same time that it is threatened with humiliation. Being unable to resolve this tension it is, in effect addictive, a drug.

All of the quotes from the press above come from Duncan Campbell’s book We’ll all be murdered in our beds! The shocking history of crime reporting in Britain.

Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink

There is an episode in season 3 of liberal comfort blanket The West Wing called “The Indians in the Lobby” (I am sure no one would use that title now) which ends with two characters discussing how they will spin news that a new poverty measure captures thousands more Americans than the old one. Political fixer Bruno assures his colleague Toby that the news can be sold using a bit of canny framing, citing P.T. Barnum’s (almost certainly apocryphal) ploy to shift unmarketable white salmon with the slogan, “guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!”.

I was reminded of this incident when the latest immigration figures were released. They show a net increase of 246,000 by the end of March 2017. This is 81,000 fewer than in the year ending March 2016. Accompanying the hosannas in the right wing press, a few outlets noted a correction to the immigration statistics. The Office of National Statistics reported that, contrary to previous assumptions, 97% of students whose visas had expired had in fact returned home.

This seems a good example of what we might call the “white salmon” mode of thinking about immigration. We can either view this as a story about the government taking steps towards its migration target, or we can see it as a story about a long-standing bungling of immigration statistics.

A Frame’s a Helluva Drug.

That government and public were so happy to accept the first interpretation says a lot about the way immigration has been positioned as inherently problematic. For well over a decade, immigration has been discussed as something to worry about – and not only by the right. When the coalition government first announced its intention to bring net immigration down to the tens of thousands, even the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank, discussed why the government would not achieve its target. But there was far less ink spilled on whether such precipitous decline in net immigration would actually be a good thing, even if it were possible.

This was one example of a wider problem. The last years of the Labour government were littered with self-flagellating proclamations from ministers declaring that immigration must be addressed. Always there was the coda: it’s time for an honest conversation. Well, the problem with continually declaring an intention to speak honestly is that it implies you have been lying in the past. Once that tone is set, voters are hard to convince, no matter how tough your talk is. So, immigration became even more toxic, and the tough talk arms race continued apace. Vans were sent to black asian and minority ethnic neighbourhoods telling migrants to go home. The government promised immigration levels that were legally impossible to deliver. Now, a prime minister repeats that promise, despite watching her predecessor fall from power after losing a referendum to a campaign that ruthlessly weaponised exactly that failure of delivery. And round we go again.

Virus-free. www.avg.com

•••