Monday 7 September 2015

Dithering Dave and the Refugees

I detest the term "game-changing", but the wide publication of the little body of Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach touched millions of hearts coarsened by decades of anti-immigrant racism and hysteria. Having obstinately set his face against taking more refugees, Dave and his pitiful government were shamed by the huge numbers taken in by Germany, and a rare united front by the press (excepting the Express, and the Daily Star for whom the latest Big Brother was more newsworthy) who turned on his unsympathetic response to the crisis. Matters weren't helped either by Yvette Cooper exploiting the government's difficulties - perhaps the only leadership candidate to do so during the contest. It is to be hoped then that if any good is to come out of this tragedy, and the nameless stories of suffering and loss that go untold, let it be a stake through the toxic attitudes to refugees and migrants once and for all.

This shift caught the government on the hop. While the Labour leadership contest captured the commentariat's attention, the tabloids in particular spent the summer whipping up hate toward the three thousand or so refugees camped in Calais. Stories abounded of men jumping onto trains, hiding in storage containers, clinging beneath lorries ... and of holidaymakers inconvenienced during their short Eurostar hop over to Paris. The BBC got in on the act showing how the refugees lived, and profiling their determination to get into Britain. This allowed Dave to show the "strong leadership" trailed heavily by the Borg-like message discipline of the general election. A little bit of hand-wringing was allowed to acknowledge the plight of Syrians and Mediterranean boat people, before Dave "got tough", rhetorically speaking, with the French for lax security around the port and Channel Tunnel entrance. Aspersions were cast on their bona fides. After all, wouldn't a genuine refugee claim asylum in the first safe country they landed in? The PM showed "leadership" by offering assistance with security, and reassured the baying press that "the swarm" would not be reaching British shores, no matter how bad it got across the Channel. Being strong against the weak about sums it up.

And then that photo. All of a sudden, the plight of refugees braving the Med went from insects scurrying toward Britain's shores to desperate people fleeing war. Completely unprepared for this about turn in popular attitudes, Dave did what came naturally: he dithered. Now, I'm not one to talk about dithering seeing as I've had a recent bout of the undecideds as well, but for Dave it's a characteristic of his premiership. He dithered over energy prices. He dithered over the 2014 floods. His government are dithering still over Universal Credit. And, in-keeping with the ruling tone, the Chilcott Report is setting new records for procrastination.

Dave's paralysis all of last week, and today's miserable announcement that the UK would be prepared to take 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years has triangulation stamped all over it. After getting an easy press ride all summer, he was mindful of right wing raggery turning on him at the moment they could be running blood-curdling smears about Jeremy Corbyn. Worse, too much sympathy and this hard right flanks becomes dangerously exposed to UKIP. They might be suffering at the moment, but persistent anti-immigrant bile and Europhobia will surely see a return to form in the not too distant. And as Dave wants to win the EU referendum, stoking their fires is the last thing he wants to do. Yet, at the same time, our Dave isn't nasty. Believe it or not, putting the poor under the Tory kosh is tough love - what His Royal Blairness used to call "compassion with a hard edge". He knows what's bad for them is what's best for them. Appearing callous in the week public opinion changed made this posture impossible to sustain without severe reputation damage. Hence the dogs dinner we're left with. 20,000 is too many for the bigots. It's too few for anyone not undergone a compassion bypass.

Yet there are opportunities for the Tories here too. The one thing Dave lacks is a foreign policy triumph. Having lost interest in the mess he helped create in Libya, and content to leave Northern Ireland to the hapless Theresa Villiers, he wants a big win in Syria. Prevented from launching air strikes two years ago thanks to his own ineptitude, the mood music for bombing IS is increasing in volume. No stranger to opportunism, The Sun wasted no time using Aylan's image to call for war against IS to prevent, what they call, "the migrants crisis". Dave's refugee troubles can be quietly forgotten as the news bulletins follow laser guided bombs all the way down to their targets, and people quietly accept it in the name of "doing something". Never mind doing so will aid a regime guilty of the most appalling war crimes who, had Dave got his way in 2013, would no longer be in contention. However, it's an opportunity for the Tories to seize the agenda again and portray their opponents across the chamber as weak.

Will Dave's gambit work? "Doing something" will only work if, like the US bombing raids in Syria, they are tied to specific ground operations a la the Kurdish YPG. Militarily, the RAF taking up some of the slack from the US Air Force won't add much, apart from making Dave look like a war leader. But given the intractable nature of the conflict, air raids and drone strikes by Biggles and co. are likely to cause IS to implode and/or be put out of commission. And as tangible results refuse to show themselves, so the ticker starts running down and the refugee crisis comes back to haunt Dave. Like everything else about this government, questions of war and peace have become matters of day-to-day Tory party presentation.

3 comments:

Speedy said...

Your criticism of Cameron is spot on, but I wonder if you have a blind spot about this issue. Perhaps it is the a-historical sociological perspective, combined with your utopian/ idealism? In short - what do you think will be the consequences of Germany offering refugee status to the world's poor? Because that is the real question. The Africans and Afghanistanis currently making their way to the Promised Land will not differentiate between themselves and Syrians - after all, most of them are genuine refugees in one form or another, perhaps more so than the family of the child that died, who had been living in a Turkish town for three years, their father working on a construction site, but who chose to move because they could not make ends meet. Many people literally live in mud huts in Africa (is it racist to have seen them?).

Can Europe, should Europe, take them all? Again, as a universalist and matirialist, presumably culture-blind, your answer must be yes. Right Phil? How many millions is too many? Europe is wealthy and technically support them, so why not take them all? I am not trying to reduce the argument to ad-absurdum or hysteria, I'm just interested. What do you think?

Sociologically, Europe must be a one-off. Immensely wealthy, even the poor by Third World standards. With a particular.set of values that differentiate it from, say, America or Saudi Arabia. Compassionate, guilty (for colonialism, the holocaust), secular, and suffering from a strange kind of ennui. It is anyone's guess what will happen next, but I think it's worth remembering that the rest of the world is not like that. Because underlying these European values is a profound arrogance, a deep-seated complacency, that clings on to its sense of superiority just as much as a Victorian colonialist. The trouble is, everyone is like that - these people are coming not because they love or respect our culture but because they want what we've got. If they are Islamic they will not bow to the superiority of our culture, on the contrary they will be quite happy with their own. And what, in the long run (in which we will be dead, but our successors will not) will this mean for a democratic, plural Europe of "human rights". What will it mean for a gay man or a short-skirted woman in 2100? Or simply a Muslim woman who wishes to marry outside her religion? What can we learn about the experience of other multi-confessional societies - only the Lebanon, Nigeria and India spring to mind. Is our society truly superior, as we seem to believe? Can it absorb these people and change them? Should it? And if, as history appears to suggest, it will not - what will be the consequences? And what do so few on the Left seem to care?



Anonymous said...

Yes, I noticed how Cooper was trotted out by the media to look all stateswoman like. I wonder what could be behind that!

Of course Corbyn has been speaking out for the refugees/migrants for years while Cooper was busy formulating something that appealed to what the tabloid press were spewing out. As is her want.

Obviously the entire right wing, are using the refugee/migrant crisis to further their war aims in Syria. You have to admire the lengths they have gone to to bring public opinion around to attacking Syria! Only Corbyn stands in their way, Cooper will be a willing accomplice.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I noticed how Cooper was trotted out by the media to look all stateswoman like. I wonder what could be behind that!

Of course Corbyn has been speaking out for the refugees/migrants for years while Cooper was busy formulating something that appealed to what the tabloid press were spewing out. As is her want.

Obviously the entire right wing, are using the refugee/migrant crisis to further their war aims in Syria. You have to admire the lengths they have gone to to bring public opinion around to attacking Syria! Only Corbyn stands in their way, Cooper will be a willing accomplice.