The British people is a fucking idiot.
Not the actual, real people
of Britain – but The British People that Amber Rudd was talking to and about in
her Conservative Party conference speech this week. Not the people that voted in the EU referendum,
but The People that she is using to justify The Same Old Bullshit under the
re-branded New & Improved Bullshit following the referendum result. You follow me?
The British People have a life that the Home Secretary understands
completely. They is homogenous, and even
when she returns surprising voting results for a variety of complex – often competing
– motivations, the government gets him.
The British People is a racist simpleton, and the government is ready to
pander to the lowest common denominator, for as long as it’s expedient. The British People is a newspaper column, a
pub bore, a bewildered, stampeding herd.
Speaking to a party committed to further lowering living
standards in 2016, it would have been easy to be triumphalist. Especially as the party of government also
has a mandate – and, crucially, an historic opportunity – to return Britain to
the Victorian era. However, Rudd’s
speech was more measured and nuanced.
The government’s response to the chaos of late capitalism is
to call for unity while their policies exacerbate and create divisions – of wealth
disparity, political partisanship, cultural background. And whilst saying that they’ll be more
inclusive and champion working-class interests.
What even are we? We are a
divided, inward-facing wee island.
In time-honoured tradition, the new Home Secretary used her
appointment to make a pitch for the job of Prime Minister with the use of
authoritarian rhetoric. John Reid, David
Blunkett, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson and Michael Howard might have been watching,
thinking “Good luck with that…”. Theresa
May, the only person in recent history to make that pitch successfully, was
probably thinking “I’ll need to keep an eye on her”, whilst grinning like the
Emperor from Star Wars.
The job of Home Secretary is to make speeches that sound
relatively reasonable, whilst also appealing to irrational racists and all the
newspapers aimed at them. It’s a
tightrope too difficult for most; Charles Clarke and Kenneth Clarke (no
relation, as far as I’m aware), for example, both sounded a bit too reasonable, while John Reid and
David Blunkett both sounded just a bit too
fascist.
One consequence of this remit is to scare the shit out of a
lot of public servants, whose jobs are on the line if the latest Home Secratry
decides they might actually need to Do Something to throw their weight about, rather
than just make speeches that will please The Daily Mail. This would obviously be a disaster, which is
why no one who has tried to do it ever stays in the job long enough to do it. Public servants are best-placed to pick apart
the type of speech Amber Rudd made this week.
To take just
one relatively small example, what she said about international students is
worth looking at:
“While
an international student is studying here, their family members can do any form
of work.”
This
is a classic piece of political speech-making: it’s technically true, but is
really not true, because it’s so deliberately ignorant of context, with a view
to giving an entirely prejudiced opinion of said true facts. Which are: very few students bring their
families to the UK when they come to study – most are, like British students,
around 18-21 and childless.
Very
few students are entitled to bring their families to the UK; in fact, only
postgraduate students on courses longer than 12 months whose home governments
are sponsoring their study (ie, paying their fees). Those who are entitled to apply aren’t automatically
granted visas for their families. So it’s
a tiny proportion of the international student population. But to listen to the speech, anyone without
prior knowledge of UK Visas & Immigration policy could be forgiven for
thinking that there are thousands of students with unknown numbers of family
members on dubious visas working several jobs each. Jobs that should be going to British Workers,
according to the government.
So, either the Home Secretary is being seriously
disingenuous about this, or doesn’t know her own policy. Neither would be especially surprising, but
the Home Secretary is not stupid. It puts
a bit of doubt around the seemingly-enlightened (ie, rational, human, displaying
a minimal concern for vulnerable people) things she said about modern slavery
and prosecution of rape cases.
The reason the current – and previous – Home Secretary harps
on about student visas on a regular basis is that they are the easiest type of
visas to regulate. Which is why the
government have been regulating them obsessively for the past five years or so,
bringing in petty and spiteful rules.
The current Home Secretary, like that former Home Secretary, is hammering
universities, even though they only bring in immigrants that the government
likes – the ones that pay exorbitantly high fees to British universities and
spend money while they’re here and then leave when they finish their studies.
A party with a historical antipathy to university education and
widening participation in it are likely to be enthusiastic about reducing student
numbers; given the current fervour for reducing the number of immigrants, this
is playing to the gallery, traditional conference stuff. The problem for the government is that all
the petty, spiteful regulatory changes made recently have been judged to be
insufficiently petty and spiteful by a news media who have committed wholesale
to the idea of immigration as The Big Problem Of Our Time.
What no Home
Secretary has ever explained is why it is necessarily a good thing to reduce
migration to the UK. After forty years
of people talking about immigration, including about 30 years of people saying
they aren’t allowed to talk about immigration, it is now just regarded as
unquestionably true that immigration is inherently problematic. Even though “Twenty years ago levels of
immigration weren’t really an issue in British politics”, immigration has always been an issue. However, public
discourse has continued to move steadily rightwards on this issue as
politicians and pressure groups brandish numbers to prove they’re one of The Lads.
And UKIP, a
party who now have no official reason to exist, are continuing to push the
Conservative Party even further to the right; almost like that was their
objective all along.
Now that pandering to ignorant bullshit is
considered the first duty of government, the assumption is more entrenched than
ever. It could take a generation to have
the “reasoned debate” politicians say they want before making unthinking
assumptions that sound very much like unreasonable, racist pandering. Even though the debate has been going for
decades. Decades in which you weren’t
allowed to talk about racism because of the loony left.
And then, following the Home Secretary attacking companies
for employing too many foreigners, the new Conservative Prime Minister made a
speech advocating borrowing for public
spending – following six years of the party saying they had to cut all public services
to the bone because borrowing had got out of hand under Labour and they were
targeting eliminating the budget deficit.
Which they have now quietly abandoned after it obviously didn’t work,
and in tacit admission that it wasn’t really that necessary in the first
place.
But that’s democracy: an unelected Prime Minister reverses
six years of policy enacted by an elected government and we’re all supposed to
roll over to have our bellies tickled, because they acknowledge the good,
old-fashioned parochial jingoism of The British People….
If you want to parse the effect of the Labour membership
surge, look at the Prime Minister’s speech: the fact that she felt the need to
use the term “working class” (especially without the suffix “scum” – very restrained)
is itself significant. Since the
government’s primary concern is rhetoric and image, it’s worth noting that
these have shifted in response to challenges from the left, as well as from the
right.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, as
Corrine Bailey Rae once sang.
Remember her? (Me
neither.)
What strange times we live in.
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