Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Really excellent Bagehot piece in the Economist:

Bagehot
What Tony taught Boris
Seen from the suburbs, Blairism and Johnsonism look uncannily alike
Aug 28th 2021

IN SEPTEMBER 1995 Boris Johnson, a rising star of the Daily Telegraph's comment pages, spent an evening with the Dulwich Labour Party. His trip to the south London suburb was an act of anthropology, undertaken to study a new tribe: the educated middle classes who had fallen hard for Tony Blair. Mr Johnson's hosts plied him with Bulgarian red wine and taco crisps, and raged at the dying Conservative government. He was an observant visitor, recalls John McTernan, his chaperone and a future aide to Mr Blair.

Mr Johnson was a keen student of New Labour, whose era coincided with his own ascent to prominence. He was repelled by its "bare-faced quasi-messianic effrontery", "spin-driven vanilla-flavoured candyfloss nothingness", and assaults on fox-hunters and smokers. But he was mesmerised, too, for Mr Blair was a winner. Mr Johnson watched how "Supertone" ransacked the Tory wardrobe, played the press "like a master organist" and imposed a new doctrine on his party. ("In the game of political repression, the Burmese police have little to teach New Labour.") As the years went on, scandals and sleaze seemed not to touch his popularity. In 2002, now editing the Spectator, a Tory-leaning weekly, Mr Johnson named Mr Blair parliamentarian of the year, hailing his "unchallenged dominance of the political landscape".

These days the two premiers seem to occupy opposite ends of that landscape. Mr Blair marched into Afghanistan shoulder to shoulder with an American president; Mr Johnson, at odds with the White House, is forced to retreat. Mr Blair wanted Britain at the heart of Europe; Mr Johnson delivered Brexit. In university seminars Mr Blair is described as a centrist and Mr Johnson as a right-wing populist. One belongs to Clintonworld and the other is claimed by Trumpland. Mr Johnson's ministers denounce the Supreme Court and Scottish and Welsh parliaments created by Mr Blair as constitutional vandalism, and stuff quangos once dominated by Blairites with their own fellow-travellers. Fourteen years into his retirement, Mr Blair still outshines Mr Johnson in intellectual discipline, darting ahead of a disorganised government with plans to fix covid-19 testing and vaccinations. They are ancien régime and brutish new order, separated by the Brexit revolution.

Yet the prism of Brexit refracts political hues into artificial separation. Seen through it, the past is distorted, too. Mr Johnson has learned much from Mr Blair. On the campaign trail and in the suburbs, the two men look more alike. That resemblance contains a warning for the prime minister.

Mr Johnson's premiership, like Mr Blair's, rests on a supersized personal mandate. His appeal runs deep into places where his party's does not. ("They know that Tony won their seats," Mr Johnson once said of Labour's pliant MPs.) Both are instinctively comfortable in suburban England, never wagging the finger about how people should run their own lives. And they provoke a similar fury in their enemies, who give them the same epithet: liar.

Both focus ruthlessly on what they call "the people's priorities", namely jobs, health, crime and education. This is the terrain where elections are won and lost. Today's Tory leaflets are reminiscent of New Labour's early work, with endlessly repeated promises of more nurses, teachers and police officers. (Both men, notes Patrick Diamond, a former Blair aide, swept to office after a long period of tight public spending.) The skirmishes over flags and statues that dominate newspapers feature remarkably little. Mr Johnson's campaign slogan in 2019 to "Get Brexit Done" was a promise to make the wrangling go away, not to prolong it.

Their methods are increasingly similar, too. Mr Johnson lampooned public-sector targets as Soviet and dehumanising. Now he has adopted them and asked Sir Michael Barber, who ran Mr Blair's "delivery unit", to construct another for him. Mr Blair declared Whitehall inert and unresponsive long before the same thought occurred to Dominic Cummings, the erratic aide who helped bring Mr Johnson to Downing Street.

Mr Johnson has episodes of Blairite centrism, making promises on climate change and obesity of the sort he once described as nanny-statism. Mr Blair, for his part, sometimes had a Johnsonesque populist streak, dubbing his project the "political arm of the British people". He searched constantly for eye-catching initiatives that would convince voters that he was "on their side". Yobs and nuisance neighbours were favourite targets. Mr Johnson once called this stuff authoritarian, ineffective and depressingly popular—but in office, he has embraced it. Priti Patel, the home secretary, is scarcely more draconian than her New Labour predecessors, who mooted tagging asylum-seekers as if they were criminals, or processing them overseas.

His final lesson

Mr Johnson revelled in Mr Blair's downfall in 2007, squeezed out by his chancellor, Gordon Brown ("a blubfest of nauseating proportions"). Mr Blair left office frustrated. The retail offers that brought him to power—shorter waits for health care, smaller school classes—now seemed to him ridiculously modest. He settled too late on the structural reforms the public sector required, by which point his government was distrusted and tired, weighed by scandal and the war in Iraq.

The question, says Mr Diamond, is whether Mr Johnson is capable of becoming a reformer too. Despite a hiring spree, it will be hard to improve public services before the next election, since covid-19 has created long backlogs for practically everything. Sweeping reforms are in short supply. Tory MPs may neuter his overhauls of social care and planning law. Ideas to "level up" Britain's poor regions are sparse. Mr Cummings, who had a Blairite appetite for fighting vested interests, has gone. And all the while the government acquires an air of fatigue and muck at remarkable speed. Mr Blair's most important lesson is that it is not enough to win power: you must use it before it wanes.

I think of New Labour a lot as very similar in a lot of ways to this government (it's why I think part of it is just because they have a big majority - though nowhere near as big as Blair's). Especially whenever I see the latest scandal about Priti Patel because in almost every case it reminds me of David Blunkett.

I saw legal Twitter go crazy about her latest line about "leftie lawyers" being a problem - they were clutching their pearls at this unfair and unprecedented attack on an essential part of the system to hold power to account (which is true - but they are paid for it). And it just occurred to me that maybe it's my age but everyone's really memory-holed Blunkett who gave a speech about "left-wing human rights lawyers" who cared more about the rights of terrorists and bogus asylum seekers than the rights of the public.

It's one of the reasons I tend to be a bit dubious about almost any of the pieces about how Johnson represents some unique or profound threat - because a lot of it is stuff I remember happening before. Even with Annette Dittert's piece about "honesty" and "lying" in political discourse - which I really liked - did make me think people have really forgotten New Labour and Tony Blair. Or they're just trying to re-write history - especially when I saw Alastair Campbell re-tweet it

[The Larch]

The implications of this tweet... 

[Valmy]

Hey they have five days to get out the other ones.

[Sheilbh]

The implications of this tweet... 

Ugh - and this article gives details:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/25/uk-nationals-of-afghan-origin-being-overlooked-in-kabul-airlift-claim-lawyers

Separately - excellent piece by Kenan Malik on Britain's "offer" for refugees:

Britain's offer to Afghan refugees is not 'generous'. It's blindly inhumane
Kenan Malik
Home Office policy is to regard asylum seekers with suspicion and find ways to reject them. There's little sign of a sudden culture change
Sun 22 Aug 2021 08.30 BST

Boris Johnson and Priti Patel believe that Britain's "bespoke scheme" for Afghan refugees is "one of the most generous in our country's history". That says more about their ignorance of British history than it does about the scheme itself. The government has promised 5,000 refugees to be resettled this year, in addition to the existing Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme for locally employed staff and 20,000 in the coming years. It is not possible to take in any more, Patel argued.

That's not what previous governments thought. Between August and November 1972, Ted Heath's Tory government took in 27,000 Ugandan Asians who had been expelled by Idi Amin. This despite the fierce opposition of Enoch Powell and the reactionary right. At the end of the 1970s, Heath's successor, Margaret Thatcher, was more reluctant to give refuge to the so-called Vietnamese "boat people", fearing "riots on the streets". Nevertheless, more than 19,000 eventually came to Britain. Even this was tiny compared with other countries. France accepted 95,000, Australia and Canada both 137,000 and the US 822,000.

From the First World War, when 250,000 Belgians fled the German invasion, including 16,000 in a single day to Folkestone, to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, after which Britain took in 11,000 refugees, there have been many instances of it accommodating large numbers of refugees in a crisis.

In truth, Britain has a tarnished history but even by those standards the current response to the Afghan catastrophe is hardly "generous". The idea of setting a fixed quota for refugees in such emergencies is meaningless. The figure of 5,000 is one that meets the government's political needs rather than the needs on the ground in Afghanistan, allowing it to mediate between two conflicting aims. The first is to be seen responding to a crisis, the second to be keeping to the narrative the government has been pushing, that Britain is facing an invasion of migrants and we need tough measures to keep them out – 5,000 is probably the product of an attempt to triangulate those opposing aims. It is, though, no more meaningful that telling the people of Haiti devastated by the earthquake: "We'll help 5,000 of you, and only 5,000."

The argument for a more open refugee policy is usually met with two kinds of pushbacks. The first is the claim that "we can't let everyone in". That's true, but not everyone is coming here. Only a tiny proportion of Afghan refugees come to Europe. More than 80% are in Pakistan and Iran – around 2.3 million registered refugees and another 2.5 million who are unregistered. Compare that with Britain: 1,336 asylum applications from Afghans last year, of which just 454 were accepted. The "we can't let everyone in" excuse is simply denying reality.

The second pushback is that the British public won't stand for a more open approach. The public, however, appears more liberal than government ministers. A poll for the Daily Mail suggests that a majority of Britons think the government should be doing more to help Afghan refugees. According to YouGov, 41% want Britain to admit either "tens of thousands" or "hundreds of thousands" of Afghan refugees. The idea that the government's hands are tied by a reluctant public has little basis in fact.

The real problem is neither that Britain is about to be overwhelmed with Afghan refugees, nor that there is a hostile public. Rather, it is that Britain has a long history of betrayal when it comes to asylum seekers. In 2002, the then home secretary, David Blunkett, told Afghan refugees he had "no sympathy" for those who did not "get back home and rebuild their country". It has become British policy to enforce that sentiment.

Between 2008 and 2020, Britain repatriated more than 15,000 refugees to Afghanistan, largely on the grounds that it was a "safe country". This is far more than any other European country and three times as many as will be allowed in this year through Patel's "bespoke scheme". It was only last Monday that the Home Office changed its ruling that there was no "real risk of harm" to asylum seekers returned to Afghanistan. A businesswoman targeted by the Taliban was told she did not "face a real risk of suffering serious harm" if she was sent back to Kabul. Another was deported despite a court order stopping his removal.

Even those who have put themselves in danger by aiding British forces have been shabbily treated. A 2018 parliamentary defence select committee report condemned the government for having "dismally failed to give any meaningful assurance of protection" to Afghans working with the military and called on it to "abandon its policy of leaving former interpreters and other loyal personnel dangerously exposed". And today, many Afghans, such as embassy guards, who were hired through subcontractors, are being left to fend for themselves. Britain's responsibility is not just to those who worked with British forces. But when it cannot meet even those responsibilities, there is something rotten in the system.

What has developed over the years is a bunker mentality in the Home Office, in which the starting point is to view asylum seekers – and migrants more broadly – with suspicion and seek ways of rejecting them. It is the same mentality that has led to such outrageous decisions in the Windrush scandal. So ingrained is that frame of mind that, even faced with an immediate crisis, officials find it hard not to be mean-spirited.

The bunker mentality is perhaps best expressed in the government's nationality and borders bill now passing through parliament. This seeks to criminalise those who arrive here without proper papers. But as Afghanistan has so graphically revealed, that is often an impossibility for many seeking refuge. That the Home Office cannot see this even now shows how profound is its blindness.

Britain's Afghan refugee scheme seems "generous" only because of the way "generosity" has been redefined from within the Home Office bunker. Beyond the immediate issue of Afghan refugees, we need a rethinking of the whole Home Office approach to asylum seekers and, more broadly, to immigration. And a rethinking, too, of what the Home Office is for.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

[Josquius]

The single nationality people are all that counts -

[alfred russel]

Hey they have five days to get out the other ones.

The question that no one seems to be asking is why we have any obligation to get these people out. I can't speak to the UK but the US government gave ample warning months ago that we were pulling out and advised citizens to leave. Military or government workers in the country--I get that we have an obligation to get them out. Private citizens on the other hand...

[Sheilbh]

Hey they have five days to get out the other ones.

The question that no one seems to be asking is why we have any obligation to get these people out. I can't speak to the UK but the US government gave ample warning months ago that we were pulling out and advised citizens to leave. Military or government workers in the country--I get that we have an obligation to get them out. Private citizens on the other hand...

Private citizens working for NGOs and international organisations (who don't have their own planes), often hand-in-glove with the UK or the US government. Also various bits of state functions that we've outsourced like the embassy guards.

[Neil]

Absolutely furious about this animal sanctuary in Afghanistan. Apparently the PM has over-ruled the Defence Secretary and given clearance for the 200 animals and the assorted volunteers to be airlifted; from a Guardian reporter: "As one person who works for an MP said to me the other day: "We've had more emails demanding we save the Afghan dogs than emails demanding we save the Afghan people. It's very disconcerting.""

It's a shameful and morally indefensible decision. There's been a (successful) campaign to raise money to charter a plane. I did see one of the organisers noting that after they've rescued the animals there'd be space for 138 people - after the animals

Just nuke the country - at least it'll get Geronimo the alpaca and all these lunatics

You knew that Britain had lost its mind the minute they banned foxhunting.  Using a thin veil of animal rights to cover a class warfare agenda ended up encouraging a vastly more powerful and political animal rights lobby. 

[The Larch]

It seems that the UK's operation with Afghan refugees could do with some improvement in the home front as well.

'We're stuck, everyone is hungry': Afghan evacuees stranded at UK airport
Exclusive: Passengers tell openDemocracy they've been forced to remain in Birmingham Airport for more than 24 hours after landing

People evacuated from Afghanistan have told openDemocracy they are still stranded at Birmingham airport – more than 24 hours after their flight landed.

"We're just completely stuck," said one passenger. "The children are in a bad situation and everyone is on the floor."

Speaking from the airport, this morning, he said that "everyone is hungry" because the last time they were offered any food was at 3am.

After landing at lunchtime on Tuesday, the evacuees – including babies and children – were apparently kept on the plane for eight hours before finally being let out into the airport.

The passengers were then left waiting in the airport overnight, without being given an explanation. At the time of writing, they are still waiting to get out.

Photos and videos obtained by openDemocracy show terrible conditions on the plane and in the airport, with dirty toilets and children crying.

"The condition of the flight was really bad," said one passenger. "There was only one thing we could eat – the same thing for adults and children."

"The people from the airport, they didn't even come to say 'OK, we're in this situation where you have to wait'. They didn't even come to say hello.

He said: "The children are in a bad situation and everyone is on the floor. The last time we had toast [the only food available] was 3 o'clock this morning... Everyone is hungry.

"I have been asking them since last night to get a cup of coffee. We couldn't get a cup of coffee, they say they're not allowed to give us anything like that."

The passenger – who is a British citizen – said he had been in Afghanistan to visit family. His journey back to the UK has now taken more than four days, having set off to Kabul airport on Saturday morning. It took more than eight hours for his family to push through crowds at Kabul airport before they reached the British Army.

Another evacuee waiting at the airport said there were not enough blankets provided at Birmingham Airport. "I myself didn't get the chance to have a blanket because the blanket was for children," he said. "Children were crying through the night. It's exhausting."

A government spokesperson told openDemocracy: "We take the welfare of those in our care incredibly seriously and are working round the clock to process all arrivals from Afghanistan as quickly as possible at airports, and so far we have evacuated more than 10,000 people.

"The government operates robust and extensive border checks such as taking fingerprints, therefore the arrival process can take longer than usual. However, all arrivals waiting are provided with food and drink and there is medical support on hand should anyone require it. We are standing up other airports to distribute arrivals more equitably and speed up the process."

A spokesperson for Birmingham Airport – which is responsible for facilities and cleaning standards – said: "We are working tirelessly to support the humanitarian effort which we stood up at extremely short notice to assist the UK government and the thousands of people being repatriated into the UK from Afghanistan.

"Every effort is being made by the entire airport community, as well as voluntary, charity and government agencies, to coordinate this very complex and sensitive operation. However, the nature of the flights, with the added complexity that they are from a 'red list' country, carrying people who have been evacuated under extraordinary circumstances has meant that the arrival and border process has been lengthy at times, but has now improved and stabilised.

"We thank everyone involved so far for their hard work and kindness to provide food, water, blankets, baby products, clothing, toiletries and first aid support and for putting passenger welfare at the centre of this emergency coordinated effort."

As Musa Okwonga said on Twitter, these people should dress as pets, and then British people would drive the length of the country to feed them gourmet meals.

[viper37]

The question that no one seems to be asking is why we have any obligation to get these people out.

Because they may have been employed by the US government and required to stay there?  Because some are Afghanis who helped the US (and allies) and we owe it to them to get them out as we pull out?  As long as we were there fighting the Talibans with them, they were possibly required to stay, or wanted to stay, but now that we are officially pulling out, it's all our duty to bring them with us.  Soldiers who fought, interpreters embedded with our armies, civilian workers in our embassies, etc, etc.

[crazy canuck]

Hey they have five days to get out the other ones.

The question that no one seems to be asking is why we have any obligation to get these people out. I can't speak to the UK but the US government gave ample warning months ago that we were pulling out and advised citizens to leave. Military or government workers in the country--I get that we have an obligation to get them out. Private citizens on the other hand...

Are you imputing some knowledge or foresight of a private person might have had months ago that your own government did not have?

[The Larch]

Radio caller on "Operation Ark": https://twitter.com/TomSwarbrick1/status/1430836438283718659

Shelbh, please don't click on that if you're not having a good day. 

[crazy canuck]

My twitter feed is filling up with the Brits I follow posting pictures of empty store shelves.  I think grocery stores.

[Richard Hakluyt]

My twitter feed is filling up with the Brits I follow posting pictures of empty store shelves.  I think grocery stores.

Still not seeing that. There is a mysterious shortage of feta at Lidl, being the rugged individualist that i am I walk 600 yards down the road and get my feta fron Aldi 

[Sheilbh]

It seems that the UK's operation with Afghan refugees could do with some improvement in the home front as well.[...]
As Musa Okwonga said on Twitter, these people should dress as pets, and then British people would drive the length of the country to feed them gourmet meals.

So this doesn't bother me so much. According to the latest relase by the MoD there's been 13,000 people evacuated in about a fortnight including 2-2,500 in the last 24 hours.

I think it's going to be chaotic (I mean complaining about the food options on an evacuation flight strikes me as a little bit much ) - you know if Afghanistan had a coast it would probably be people crammed on ships too. My priority, because times is running out, would be get people out and worry about the rest later and it is not going to be like a commercial flight where you land and smoothly disembark - there might be a period where you have to stay at the airport while everyone's processed. I imagine things will get better organised relatively quickly - I can believe Birmingham Airport's comment that they had very short notice to get anything ready I think the lack of coffee facilities is probably quite low down the list when they've been given, probably a few hours, to prepare a space for a thousand people to stay while they're processed

Not least because apparently the UK has accidentally airlifted one person who is on the no fly list

Still not seeing that. There is a mysterious shortage of feta at Lidl, being the rugged individualist that i am I walk 600 yards down the road and get my feta fron Aldi 

Same - there's national stuff like McDonald's milkshakes and Nandos but locally my stores are fine. I have no idea whether the local Lidl, Co-op or TFC (Turkish Food Centre - a chain of big Turkish supermarkets in London) are being prioritised or just lucky but it is weird.