Wednesday 9 March 2022

The Politics of Refugee Visa Refusal

When the UK left the European Union, rightwingers hoped that Brexit would allow us to do things differently. Looking at Vladimir Putin's war and the unfolding refugee crisis, the government's refusal to suspend visas and not allow Ukrainians to travel here - the only European nation to do so - wasn't likely what most of them had in mind. It's a situation that puts the Tories badly out of step with public opinion. 75% of those polled by YouGov supported a visa waiver. Break that down by party loyalties and we find 84% of Labour voters vs 69% of Conservatives in favour. There is no electoral advantage to be had by digging their heels in and resisting calls for opening the borders, which begs the question why.

For Johnson, as with all things, party management comes first. With PartyGate in abeyance thanks to the Met's intervention, it is going to come back regardless of what happens in Ukraine and he needs as many backbenchers on side if he's to survive the fallout. And those Tory MPs don't share the public's enthusiasm for a humanitarian gesture. The reliably awful Daniel Kawcsynski, for instance, argues offering refugees sanctuary "is immoral". They should stay in countries near to Ukraine so they can readily travel back once the war is over. This view is by no means a minority one, and echoes a line we've heard many time from front benchers: Britain meets its obligations by giving generously to countries housing large refugee populations. Johnson isn't about to challenge a commonsense he himself supports if it means putting MPs' noses out of joint, so he won't.

It's not just about keeping the parliamentary party sweet. As far as the Tories are concerned, Ukrainians are the wrong type of refugee. A lot has been made recently of the unsubtle racism of the press and establishment about how war "isn't supposed to happen" in Europe, but we've seen the Tories willing to take in something like 106,000 people who've left Hong Kong. Compare this with their lack of enthusiasm to help Afghans fleeing the Taliban and we get nearer to the nub of the issue. It's about class. In the Tory imaginary, the Hong Kong'ers are entrepreneurial and more likely to have assets to their name. They speak fluent English and, politically, those making the journey are going to be right wing and anti-communist. A small but useful future constituency for the party that has offered them refuge. Ukrainians, like Afghans, do not. Most are women, working class, and likely to be travelling with dependents. Immigration minister Kevin Foster's suggestion that Ukrainians should apply to be fruit pickers betrayed the class frame the Tories are applying to this issue. The "strains" they will place on underfunded public services is not the reason, what is is a perceived vulnerability on their right flank. Farage is on his anti-green grift for the moment, but could quickly pivot to refugees if he thinks the political profits are there.

Does that explain everything? Again, no. While the Tories have tied themselves in knots over it, Labour hasn't covered itself in glory either. Yvette Cooper has been on the news, doing her overrated best to turn the visa issue into a matter of process. The problem, Cooper says, isn't the Tory refusal to waive visas, but that the visa office in Brussels should extend its opening hours. It's almost as if the shadow home secretary has form for this sort of thing. Again, looking at the polling and taking those lectures about being on the side of the public at face value, why have Labour joined with the Tories in an effort to ignore the popular mood?

It's a matter of what Johnson and Keir Starmer share: an authoritarian politics. Each has a different base. For Johnson, authoritarianism is the necessary flipside of his populism and is entirely crucial to the Tory project generally. For Starmer, as a manager accustomed to managerial habits the Fabian tradition with its emphasis on elite-led policy making and the Labour right's interminable preoccupation with protecting its factional advantages resolves itself in a politics concerned with rebuilding reverence in state institutions and, above all, the leader. Both leaderships have an interest in refusing public demands, simply because a concession on Ukrainian refugees green lights the idea both can be shifted by popular opinion. Consider PartyGate again, for example. Tory MPs haven't no-confidenced the Prime Minister (yet) because doing so under mass pressure sets a dangerous precedent. Starmer resisted hitching himself to the bandwagon for as long as he could get away with, subtly suggesting he would expect a quid pro quo from Tories alert to this sort of thing should he be subject to similar strain.

This is brittle politics. It shows how shallow both their projects are because they know they cannot be defended on their merits. Instead they have to affect a distance from the public mood every bit as wide as Putin's ludicrous table, even if accepting more refugees results in short term popularity. Opinion is fickle and can turn, so keeping to the status quo suits them fine: politics is narrowed to the point where both can police and define the terms of discourse, something the Tories normally rely on the press to do while Starmer has actively pursued this through his own party. It seems strange that denying public opinion is a sign of weakness, but what it shows is how, underneath all the blustering and posturing, mainstream politics in this country fears for itself.

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7 comments:

Blissex said...

«not allow Ukrainians to travel here - the only European nation to do so»

If every other european nation is welcoming ukrainian renters and workers, why does the UK need to do it too?

«Britain meets its obligations by giving generously to countries housing large refugee populations»

That would be quite true: refugees are only guaranteed the right to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach. The Ukraine borders Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, and there are France, Germany, Benelux between them and the UK. The problem with that statement is that the UK is not giving "generously" to the countries where the refugees have to apply for asylum, but very miserly.

«Immigration minister Kevin Foster's suggestion that Ukrainians should apply to be fruit pickers betrayed the class frame the Tories are applying to this issue.»

Nothing new there:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16942741>

«When Natalie Huss-Smickler arrived in England in 1938 as a 26-year-old, she found her new job as a domestic servant something of a shock compared with her secretarial work back home in Vienna. "My first job in England was very, very hard," she says. "I had to work from 8am to 11pm with an hour's break, cleaning and scrubbing and looking after the house, with half a day off a week. "After a few weeks I complained, saying it's a bit too hard. The lady of the house said, 'If it's too much for you, I'll send you back to Hitler.'"
[...] Anthony Grenville, of the Association of Jewish Refugees, says the women who came over using the domestic service visas were mostly from well-to-do Viennese families and "completely unprepared psychologically" for their new lives. "The British government brought in a visa requirement for refugees seeking entry from Germany and Austria after the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in March 1938. This was a way of the government controlling the sheer weight of numbers of applicants flooding over from the continent, particularly Austrian Jews for whom the situation had become desperate. Although they took them in great numbers, there was a very clear motive for the British having Jews over - not to save them, but to provide labour for middle and upper middle-class households. A small number of Jewish men also came as butlers or gardeners."»

Blissex said...

«Johnson and Keir Starmer share: an authoritarian politics. Each has a different base. For Johnson, authoritarianism is the necessary flipside of his populism and is entirely crucial to the Tory project generally. For Starmer, as a manager accustomed to managerial habits the Fabian tradition with its emphasis on elite-led policy making»

As usual I think that is a widly optimistic impression of Starmer, because it claims a similarity as to the style of political operation, top-down authoritarianism, but the *politics* of Johnson and Starmer are also similar, and that is far more important: it is not that one is authoritarian thetcherite, and the other is an authoritarian anti-thatcherite, they are both thatcherites, with small political differences, and larger differences mostly as to personal style.

It cannot be otherwise: the core target constituency for both Johnson and Starmer is affluent property-owning thatcherite voters, so their politics cannot be that different.

The historic mission of Starmer is not to present to voters an authoritarian anti-thatcherite alternative to the authoritarian thatcherism of the Conservatives, but to ensure that "There Is No Alternative" to thatcherism, just a change of people and of some policy details, if the voters tire of the current people and politicy details.

Usual quotes:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/22/tony-blairs-speech-on-the-future-of-the-labour-party-in-full
Tony Blair, 2015: “I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/jun/10/labour.uk
Peter Mandelson, 2002: “in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all Thatcherites now”

Blissex said...

There is another side to the refugees-and-visas situation: since 2014 these have been the statistics of the war of aggression by the ukrainian government against the people of the Donbas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas
"3,393 civilians killed (349 in 2016–2021)
13,100–13,300 killed; 29,500–33,500 wounded overall
414,798 Ukrainians internally displaced; 925,500 fled abroad"

That is 1.4 million refugees created by the ukrainian government. It would be interesting to know why there have been no campaigns to give them blanket access to the EU and the UK. Was that because the people of the Donbas are "terrorists" and those of the rest of Ukraine are "freedom fighters"?

https://www.unian.info/politics/zelensky-extends-sanctions-against-donbas-terrorists-russia-propagandists-11428756.html
«Zelensky extends sanctions against Donbas terrorists»

https://defence24.com/donbass-terrorist-provocations-continue-ukrainian-forces-attacked-16-times
«Donbass Terrorist Provocations Continue»

https://medium.com/@mikokati/terrorist-held-donbas-turns-into-isis-weapon-workshop-98705b5ec6f5
«Terrorist-held Donbas turns into ISIS weapon workshop»

https://euromaidanpress.com/2019/06/04/war-on-terms-whos-fighting-against-ukraine-in-donbas-terrorists-rebels-insurgents/
«Ukrainian courts refer to Article 1 of the law “On combating terrorism” classifying both “LNR” and “DNR” as terrorist organizations.»

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/photos/terrorists-donbass
«Browse 424 terrorists donbass stock photos and images available»

Blissex said...

«but the *politics* of Johnson and Starmer are also similar, and that is far more important: it is not that one is authoritarian thetcherite, and the other is an authoritarian anti-thatcherite, they are both thatcherites, with small political differences, and larger differences mostly as to personal style.»

Put another way my impression is that Starmer is presenting himself to his target core constituency as a version of Cameron (but hard brexiter instead of reluctant remainer), in "opposition" to Johnson.

TowerBridge said...

@Blissex:

"That would be quite true: refugees are only guaranteed the right to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach."

This statement is not true. It only ever applied in an EU wide agreement that the UK is not a part of. Even then, it was not legally watertight.

Graham said...

This is not a question of legality but of morals.
Millions are fleeing as their country is destroyed by a foreign dictatorship.
The least we can do is offer shelter to all those that want it in this country.

Blissex said...

«offer shelter to all those that want it in this country»

That is indeed a very progressive point of view, but only if “all those” does not mean just white christian ukrainians: 80-85% of the world's population is BIPOC, and probably 90-95% of refugees are BIPOC, so giving absolute priority to ukrainians who are 99% white and christian could seem straightforward racism.

The UK government or at least New Labour and the LibDems could easily prevent any criticism by announcing that for every 100,000 ukrainians given automatic entry to the UK, at least 800,000 BIPOC applicants will be given it too, from places like Xinjang, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Bolivia, Myanmar, Laos, north Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Lybia. Offer not applicable to Donbas and Yemen "terrorists".

This would also be popular with the property and small business owners targeted by all three/four main parties, as a large influx would be a real tonic for "the economy", improving property prices and labour affordability.