Messing about in boats…
JVL Introduction
Last week Starmer used all his five questions to rubbish the Tories’ record on asylum.
He was in his element: government failure to keep their promises to keep numbers down, a record number of crossings, money spent on hotels, failure to process applications or deport enough – but nothing about the inhumanity and immorality of their proposed laws.
Taking on the arguments politically instead of as a manager and a bureaucrat, argues Phil Burton-Cartledge “means telling people with unfounded prejudices and racist attitudes that they’re wrong. Which is something the Labour right are never willing to do… Treating refugees like human beings now hampers Labour’s room for manoeuvre later.”
This article was originally published by A Very Public Sociologist blog on Wed 8 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
Cultivating Labour's Scapegoats
No one wants people to cross the Channel in dinghies and small boats. Except perhaps the Tories, because they think it plays to their strengths. No one should have to resort risking life and limb and brave the busiest shipping lane in the world in the flimsiest of craft. As a minimum, there should be an asylum processing centre in Calais and a multiplication of safe routes to the UK. None of this we’ll-give-Lebanon-a-pittance-to-support-Syrian-refugees nonsense, which is just a Tory body swerve to evade our treaty obligations. That people actually want to come to this rainy grey island is something worth celebrating.
Turning to Prime Minister’s Questions this Wednesday, given Rishi Sunak’s song and dance about his Illegal Migration Bill Keir Starmer used all his five questions to rubbish the Tories’ record on asylum. He was in his element. The government had made promises about getting numbers down, applications processed, and people deported. Another symptom of state dilapidation and failure. But these were, as with so much of Starmer’s critique, process criticisms. It fell to SNP Commons leader Stephen Flynn to attack the Tories on the Kafkaesque immorality of their proposed laws.
Starmer’s attack on Sunak’s record was foreshadowed in Labour’s social media blitz on Monday. Memeable content like this shared by Stephen Kinnock stresses the record numbers of crossings and the money it’s costing to put people up in hotels. Who needs Jonathan Gullis and the co-called “Patriotic Alternative” when the Labour Party is lamenting the expenditure of miniscule sums? None of this is a bolt from the blue. Throughout Covid, throughout the Johnson years, and even now with the Tories on their knees, Keir Starmer-flavoured Labourism fights shy of challenging the political consensus. More authoritarianism, good. Businesses fleecing the public sector, also good. Treating refugees as unpeople that need deterring from coming to Britain, yes, Starmer is on board with that too.
Why? “Racism” as an explanation isn’t really satisfying. They can turn it off and on if occasion demands. Neither is chasing the “social conservatives” in the seats Labour lost in 2019. By default, Labour is currently the recipient of a powerful electoral coalition of anti-Tory sentiment it has done little to cohere or win. I suppose the argument that going on cost while refusing to contest the sewer politics of the Tories might be explained as shoring up support among tabloid-reading pensioners worried their place in the Post Office queue will be usurped by Iranians. I can imagine the shadcab away days nodding away at the PowerPoints making these points. Labour has “earned permission” from these voters to “get a hearing”, and conceding their “real concerns” means the party is on its way to “sealing the deal”. Yes, but entirely unnecessary. The cost of living crisis is doing more for Labour’s vote than anything else.
We therefore have to consider the consequences of Starmer’s refusal to venture into moral criticisms. Taking on the arguments politically instead of as a manager and a bureaucrat means telling people with unfounded prejudices and racist attitudes that they’re wrong. Which is something the Labour right are never willing to do, unless the public are opposed to a war or, as per more recently, want the nationalisation of water and energy. Offering political leadership is hard. It’s much easier to surf the wave of reactionary public opinion than challenge it, because the press are on side. And second, bringing morality into politics hamstrings future action. Treating refugees like human beings now hampers Labour’s room for manoeuvre later. Especially when the very right wing Yvette Cooper will be responsible for asylum after the next election.
And there’s another thing. Right wing politics has to have its scapegoats. This was as true of the New Labour years as any Conservative government before it and since. Young people, Muslims, benefits cheats, and refugees each took their turn in the Blair years to star as monster-of-the-week. We can see from the emerging Starmerist politics that young people are going to again be in Labour’s sights with the proposed son-of-ASBOs schemes. And, naturally, keeping refugees in play as a political football might prove just as useful to Starmer’s authoritarian politics as it has done for Sunak’s authoritarian politics. In other words, any moral or political criticism the Labour leader makes of the Tories, if he should – my word – defend refugees from the calumny heaped on them, Starmer would draw some of the strength from attempts his government makes to peddle these poisonous politics. And so he doesn’t. Choosing to play the establishment politics game incentivises against it.
This is how it’s going to be between now and the next election. The Tories will grand stand, and all Starmer and Cooper will do is quote back at them the falling number of deportations. What a grim, ghastly spectacle we have to look forward to.
I’m ashamed to have Starmer as the Leader of the Labour Party !! Foolishly I voted for him and thought his pledges were from an honest man! Should have listened !
“Memeable content like this shared by Stephen Kinnock stresses the record numbers of crossings and the money it’s costing to put people up in hotels.”
He voted for Trident replacement. Clearly not bothered about the cost.
The positions taken by Starmer on behalf of ‘his’ party on issues like asylum seekers, benefit claimants, the right to protest, picket lines, Shamina Begum, anti-black racism and Islamophobia, to name but a few, are ones you would expect from a fringe group with an extreme nationalist agenda – Britain First, say, as distinct from a party traditionally supportive of minorities and human rights. Of course we have been here before, with the establishment-friendly activities of the Blair government and Ed Miliband’s notorious ‘controls on immigration’, but those positions were never as front and centre as they seem to be now. Starmer seems to be angling to replace the votes lost by his war on Corbyn and the left with disgruntled Tories and Red Wall Brexiteers who deserted Labour in 2019. For the moment, given the party’s substantial lead in the polls, his gamble seems to be paying off.
But there are ominous signs that the lead is built on sand. Those voters previously prepared to take Starmer at face value seem to have sussed him out. Despite the Tories’ woeful record of economic competence, he currently lags one point behind Sunak in the polls for best Prime Minister. The problem with Starmer’s strategy is that a voting bloc that wants to see asylum seekers turned away is less likely to entrust the task to Labour than to the Tories, the party traditionally associated with that policy. Obviously with a year to go it is too early to say who will win the next election. My gut feeling is that Labour would be better served establishing a distance from the Tories rather than competing with them for ownership of the same nativist focus-group driven policies. But I have been wrong before and will doubtless be wrong again. All I know is that Starmer’s Labour is unrecognizable from the party I joined eight years ago, hoping that at last there was something worth voting for. I am more than ever glad I resigned.