“The trouble with Labour is they won’t stop the boats.” Drifting from BBC Radio 4’s morning Today program as your correspondent emerged from sleep into morning wakefulness in his flophouse hotel near Kings Cross station, could this really be happening? Had I come halfway across the world to get the same sodding politics? So it would appear. In the United Kingdom, where everything is conducted in the shadow of World War II, the Tories are repurposing Australian-style politics in a sort of reverse-Dunkirk spirit.
The upshot appears to be this. The beleaguered Tory government of Rishi Sunak, facing the necessity of having an election this year — it could have one in January 2025 but no-one thinks it will — and an electoral disaster and possibly a wipeout, has thrown the switch to the hard politics of fear and xenophobia, which of course means Australian-style politics.
Australian, especially, in that it’s largely a confected crisis. Migrants have been crossing the channel in boats for a number of years, and the numbers have diminished recently. But the drowning of five migrants last week has put the issue front and centre, largely because it is occurring in the wake of Brexit. The latter was meant to solve the migration problem, which was why many millions voted for it. But while it stopped untold numbers coming in legally, it didn’t stop the simple fact that people will risk their lives to get to a place with plentiful jobs, paid in sterling, where people speak English, which everyone speaks.
With Australian advisers — Crosby Textor and now the Tory-whisperer Isaac Levido — having shaped UK politics for more than a decade now, immigration politics has come front and centre as the Tories face extinction, on well, any other issue. Expect our Tony, the dual citizen mad monk, to pop up any time. Expect our Tony to run for a Commons seat.
The issue the country is going mad over is the Rwanda bill. This is the latest iteration of a scheme to send illegal immigrants in the UK to an African country that suffered an actual genocide a generation ago and is now run by the current dictator, Paul Kagame, who stopped it but whom many believe will start the next one.
It’s a measure of the fact that British right-wing politics is not yet as depraved as Australian politics that the Rwanda plan received significant internal Tory opposition when first proposed in 2022. By the time the Johnson government proposed it, Britons had become more concerned that the country was actually coming apart at the seams. Shaping an economy, for several decades, around a massive customs union and then suddenly withdrawing from it, has, quelle surprise, created major and basic supply chain problems throughout the economy. Simultaneously, the privatised and underfunded infrastructure system started to fall apart — most particularly, the sewage system, built in the 19th century, laggardly modernised since, privatised (with the help of Australia’s Macquarie bank) and after years of underinvestment, now pumping raw shit into rivers and coastal areas.
The whole raw sewage thing proved the old adage that polities produce more history than they can locally consume and must excrete it by whatever means possible, but it was soon upstaged by the sub-post office scandal. This was the sudden turning of public attention to a disaster that has been occurring for two decades — the persecution, prosecution, destruction, collapse and in some cases suicide of people who run the thousands of small sub-post offices — based in village corner shops, cafes and other venues across the country — and found that the console/software system installed to run their accounts was generating consistent deficits where there were none. The sub-postmasters were then obliged to make up the shortfall — often five figures — or be locked out of their own post offices.
The computer system — “Horizon” — was a product of Fujitsu UK, and the hapless clients who used its helpline to try and work out why their accounts were going screwy were told, utterly falsely, that they were the only ones this was happening to. Some were prosecuted, some were jailed. Practically all of the thousands persecuted were innocent. The system was just shitty cheap software, pumped out as such contracts always are, the only punishment for adopting them usually being that, I dunno, you get appointed to be governor of a major Australian state.
The scandal was first exposed in the early 2010s, and some of us have been following it in Private Eye, that UK champion of inquiry journalism, for years. It has exploded into British public consciousness in the traditional way, through a TV mini-series. Wittily titled The Post Office Scandal, the ITV show has a glacial pace and intensity but has put the issue front and centre for the nation. In a weird way, it has entwined with the whole sewage crisis, and the sense that 13 years of Tory government — 30 out of the last 43 — has turned both social mores, and the actual country, to shit.
With all this going on, plus inflation, housing crises and more, most of the money is on a majority Labour government being convened after the next election, despite or because of the current leader Sir (good god!) Keir Starmer’s determination to remove any last trace of left politics from Labour in the lead-up to the poll. No-one really thinks the Tories will “win” the next election. But there are many different ways they can lose, and save the furniture (and what is worse than someone who buys their own furniture?) They currently hold an 80+ majority in a 650-seat Parliament, and there will need to be an 8% swing to demolish that. Swings are bigger in first-past-the-post elections. Even so, this is a big ask, and it is made worse by a redistribution of seats — taking the Commons down from 650 to 600.
Where Australia’s boundaries are arbitrary, its division names designed to honour great figures, UK constituencies are meant to shadow traditional boundaries and retain their names, Little Friddling, Spofforth Water, Upper Sidcup, etc. That has advantaged Labour in the past. The change puts another seven seats in the Tory camp. Labour also has to take a good 30 or more seats from the Scottish National Party (SNP) to form majority government. The SNP is somewhat diminished by scandal and contradictory politics — having put together a broad coalition of Labour left and “Tartan tories”, it has undermined it by running hard left on progressive cultural issues, alien to both those groups. What may save it is the contradictions of England and Scotland. Where Starmer’s track to the centre is working down south, it is doing rather the opposite in Glasgow and the former industrial belt.
Thus the Tories made a rush to the boats, or to “stop the boats”, with a renewed push to use the Australian-style method of denying undocumented immigrants any chance at settling in this other Eden. We thought Nauru and Papua New Guinea were tough choices. You’ve got to give the UK Tories some evil points for choosing an actual post-genocide nation, Rwanda, as a place to send immigrants coming across the channel. The plan was dodged up a couple of years ago but received a blow when the UK Supreme Court declared that Rwanda’s lack of guarantee that it would not send such migrants on to another country, including the ones they fled from, made the bill to establish it unlawful.
The new law is a bastard of a thing, again, Aussie-style. Using a revised treaty with Rwanda — whose President Paul Kagame is accused of running a regime of substantial human rights abuses — the “Safety of Rwanda” Bill simply declares that Rwanda is safe and that courts cannot interfere, and limits the application of the human rights act — and even of the European Court of Human Rights to its actions.
It’s a doozy, and its passage last night came with 11 or so dissenting votes from backbenchers — even though up to 60 had said at one stage they would oppose it. Brave one-nation Tories standing up for the best in the Conservative tradition? Haha, no, they are the new hardcore social war advocates, such as Boris Johnston’s home secretary Suella Braverman, who believes the law doesn’t go far enough. Only by completely repudiating the European Convention on Human Rights, they say, can the bill be protected from being struck down by the courts afresh.
However, what’s really interesting about this political move is that, in applying the Australian playbook, it is dodging up a politics somewhat alien to current British political-culture wars. Many Brits were up in arms about immigration for years, but it was overwhelmingly legal immigration of fellow EU citizens they were getting antsy about. It wasn’t the small number of boats arriving that worried them; it was the large number of Poles, Romanians and others, piling out of Victoria Coach station every morning after 70-hour bus journeys. They objected, especially outside London, to the transformation of their high streets by this new population, with their strange shops, blizzards of non-English, etc, and lack of interest in cricket.
They wanted it stopped and they got that, with Brexit. Turning the political-cultural guns on illegals is a second-rate substitute at best, and it is wholly designed to project internal political contestation outwards, onto an external enemy. It is designed to, once again, tap into the World War II spirit of soldiering on with domestic inconvenience — brutal persecuting institutions, the collapse of the rail system, the destruction of council facilities, the undermining of the tax base, the collapse of the sewage system, and much more — and turn it into patriotic stoicism, obscuring the total destruction of the social contract and the legacy of 13 years of ruling class war on the working and middle classes, and, really, 40 years of “Bla(ir)tcherism” and its variants.
Will it work? Success will not be defined by the Tories retaining power — my God, if that were to happen people should occupy buildings, or choose absolute monarchy, or both — but by holding Labor to a low absolute majority, capable of being reversed in one or two terms. The Tories might actually prefer that to holding Labour to minority, since that would give minority parties the angle to introduce proportional voting, with the hope that a right-wing Tory government could never take power again! Like in New Zealand!
Really, the polls indicate that the Tories will be lucky to hold their losses down to 100 seats at the very least. But a year’s a long time, and really, the Tory party is England in some way. So anything could happen on this septic isle, this throne uncleaned, this blessed plop, as a brave flotilla of turds sails out to the continent to meet the huddled masses coming the other way.
I’m on the verge of becoming a devout anarchist.
Governments in Australia, the UK, the USA, Russia etc, are now so riddled with corruption, greed and idiocy that perhaps we should wonder whether all societies would truly be better off without a political class to stymie humanity.
I guess the other option is to ban the use of technology in government bureaucracy and rely on clerks in stiff white collars to do the work they used to to do without the monumental stuff-ups we seem to be saddled with these days. Possible a lot fewer innocent people might end up in gaol or dead.
Revolution, anyone?
concur jobs and wages enough hospitals – the figures do not lie ; health pathology services privatised along with jobs aged care and water and childcare …,, wake up they even flog our public pools via the big four to leasees who then privatised those public assets .. oh and street parking and road tolls … and … no wonder we aint buying houses ; but no even though the privatised medical operators and i do mean ‘operators’.. have had their funding increased its all diverted into their own capital assets and CEO SALaries like the NDIS blow outs ; dumb ol media propaganda say 1400 dead when it is 26, 000 in just over 2 months
Depends on your definition of anarchy. It basically means self-regulation, so no need for an external authority to govern a situation. For instance, nature is anarchic; each organism self regulates, no organism takes more than it needs and the laws of nature are enforced by no authority. The slow, stupid and simple (read conservatives) tend to think that anarchy and chaos are interchangeable but if there is rioting and breakdown of order, that’s not anarchy, that’s chaos.
Rather than revolution, all we need to do is to add weight to the paradigm shift that gained a lot of traction with the COVID (scam).1.
And what better way to start a game changing shift than by subverting a dominant paradigm.
Religion.
Basically the organisations that underpin the various religions obtain financial benefit from what is essentially intellectual and moral fraud. That would make these organisations eligible to be proscribed as RICOs (Racketeering Influenced Criminal Organisations). The leadership of these RICOs can then be charged with RICO level fraud. Good luck locking them up. I have another suggestion but it’s unlawful to disseminate it.
It’s not actually marijuana. It’s cannabis. Cannabis indica and cannabis sativa. The name marijuana is it’s Mexican name that was promoted during the prohibition era to demonise the pyschoactive plant. why? The Mexican trope, recently Exploited by T….p.
Another story says it was to demonise the hemp plant, which had the potental to challenge cotton (and therefore the powerful US cotton industry) in the manufacture of textiles and clothing, and nothing to do with its potential for drug use.
Marijuana, over the years, has come to mean the psychoactive form of the plant, used recreationally, whereas cannabis refers to the plant, whether active in that regard or not. I think we’ve – mostly – got over the hysteria of ‘Devli’s Weed from Hell’ and “Reefer Madness’.
So medicinal marijuana seems to be the preferred term. But I agree, we could do away with the exotic name and use ‘cannabis’ for the drug and ‘hemp’ for the plant.
All power to the anarchist. Havin a go. Givin some person in powers idea of a “fact” a kickin.
Any and all anarchists holding the powerful to account.
Sounds good to me.
We have been presented symptoms, but think the ‘architecture of influence’ has been missed that traverses the Anglosphere, parts of Europe e.g. Hungary and elsewhere, playing up to ageing monocultural, less educated, often regional and low info voters on ‘the great replacement’ etc.., see Brexit, Trump and the Voice.
On the UK, in short see fossil fuel Atlas or Koch Network via Tufton St. with a Tanton ‘migration’ NGO, direct line to RW MSM now inc. (K)GB News, lobbying of Tory MPs/Ministers, GOP trained pollsters, RW influencers and online astroturfing campaigns; whiff of not just the US but Russia too (esp. Hungary).
You should read Rutger Bergman’s ‘Humankind’ – it will strengthen your will to revolt, because it provides logical arguments against governments and control.
Plus, it’s a fascinating, interesting read.
We could use tech to create a proper anarchist government – ie, a government that includes everyone. The reason anarchy is so demonised is that it represents transparency, accountability and accessibility.
Check out Clay Shirky on TED talking about a government that looks like GitHub.
Nice to see an article devoted to UK politics from an Australian perspective.
I read Guardian Australia and Guardian UK daily and look forward to UK columns, particularly those by John Crace and Marina Hyde. I have just finished Depraved New World by Crace which covers 18 months of UK politics up until the resignation of Boris Johnson in June 2023 after the Harmon Committee found he had deliberately misled Parliament with his denials of parties at No 10 during Covid lockdowns.
What puzzles me is that the Guardian UK wrote very little about the Robodebt RC and its recommendations or the multiple findings around PwC while the Guardian Australia has written almost nothing about Mr Bates versus The Post Office or the involvement of Fujitsu in the Horizon computer systems debacle.
It appears to me that the much lauded Westminster system of government has produced gross failures of humanity in accusing ordinary people of accruing large debts because “computer says” rather than accepting that the people might be correct and the system is totally at fault. Both Robodebt and Horizon have led to people suiciding when told they owed money that was not owed. I read the testimony of a woman who was eight months pregnant when convicted of PO fraud and gave birth in jail while shackled.
What we seem to need is a series of revolutions as elections are producing the wrong results.
Agree, there certainly is a valid comparison between Robodebt and the PO Horizon scandal, and yet ‘accusing ordinary people of accruing large debts because “computer says” rather than accepting that the people might be correct’ is a bit too kind to the governments and whoever runs its computers, as it implies those involved might have genuinely believed in their system when they rejected complaints.
In reality, those who designed and ran Robodebt knew it was based on a false premise (averaging annual income) and there was no evidence of debt they could take to court. That’s why they deliberately obfuscated and did all they could to ensure nothing ever came to court, year after year. They also ran interference and deceived government auditors to ensure the truth about Robodebt remained buried a few years more. With the PO Horizon scandal it was known Horizon was a heap of crap right from the beginning over 20 years ago when a limited trial of the system showed it did not work properly. Fujitsu and the PO management knew this all along, but to save face and make money they chose to lie and lie and lie, saying the system was totally secure and totally reliable (nobody with serious knowledge of IT would believe that), and using the PO’s authority to investigate and prosecute on its own say-so to crush every employee who fell victim to Horizon errors. Each year they succeeded in keeping Horizon running they knew they would ruin yet more victims. In both cases there was a conspiracy to commit fraud and pervert justice, not a mistake. There were probably some at the periphery who accepted what they were told about Robodebt and Horizon being reliable and trustworthy — the UK courts that convicted on the basis of Horizon evidence fall into that category — but those who are actually responsible for these scandals acted with full intent. Perhaps at the rarified heights where such fine folk float effortlessly, the ‘little people’ look just like ants, and get about as much consideration.
Thankyou Rat, for once again exposing the real nature of these schemes. The planned and conscious intent behind both schemes makes them extortion, surely. If a street kid or mafia boss were caught trying to extort a small fraction of these sums, they’d be jailed. Why aren’t these bastards?
“Your comment is approved” verbatim two days later. What a clever moderating system!
As usual, ever upgrade here makes the ‘system'(does it even deserve that name?) worse.
What is the point of commenting on a current topic if it doesn’t appear until 24hrs until at the earliest?
The weak as disclaimer “we are a small team…” is meaningless if every comment must automatically await approval.
Which, apart from anything else, is an insult.
Language, Peter, language!
But they approved it!
Thankyou Rat, for once again exposing the real nature of these schemes. The planned and conscious intent behind both schemes makes them extortion, surely. If a street kid or mafia boss were caught trying to extort a small fraction of these sums, they’d be jailed. Why aren’t these b-a-s-t-a-r-d-s?
They operate at arm’s length…. Corporations are a separate entity, under the law. How do you “jail” a company? Or a “trust”? Oxymoron on that last one! Diffusion of responsibility, also. Once you have a board of directors who vote on decisions, how do you propose to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which one pulls the strings? Required for a criminal prosecution to be successful… trusts can have companies as trustees, adding another layer to the complexity…. Aren’t we smart? Us human beings operating under a patriarchal capitalist structure?
You also have to prove the element of intent…
My comment addresses the mens rea by citing the facts already known; there is no other credible explanation for the actions of those at the centre of both scandals.
Take just one example from what Rat quickly lists. There were almost 80 cases where the AAT ruled against the legality of Robodebt. Normally the government would either appeal any adverse AAT Centrelink finding to shut down the possibility of a precedent being set, or they would accept the AAT’s ruling and change the offending policy. With Robodebt they appealed NONE and continued with the policy. That’s a pretty clear indication of wilful intent.
And if a street kid or mafia boss is not allowed to get away with: ‘But I didn’t really mean it’ as a defence, then neither should these b-a-s-t-a-r-d-s.
Letter demanding money with menaces – 10 years jail maximum sentence in most states.
Just so. And on that aspect of Robodebt, the guilty parties did not just sit back and take it when they realised the AAT was putting a spanner in the works (i.e. it was doing its job); the government set out to stuff the AAT with its own creatures, hand-picked from the ranks of Liberal rejects and failures left over from previous elections (the famous No Liberal Left Behind middle-class welfare program), confident they would judge cases in the government’s favour rather than let themselves be misled by the facts.
I’d say ‘hear, hear’ but it occurs to me that this understated endorsement belonging to old white farts doesn’t cut the mustard. Instead I’ll use a couple of African American terms; one half as antiquated, the other more contemporary.
TESTIFY.
REPRESENT.
What’s wrong with hear-hear. Ahhh, the youth of today. Ha ha. Hear-hear is better at least than veneer-veneer. Some traditions are worth keeping, you know. Change a tradition sure, if there is good reason. Everyone, too should enjoy a seat at the table – including old white farts, young ones too, and those not white, or ebony or anything in particular. And anyway, it’s the content that is carried which is important. The thing, as the metaphysicians among us will loudly proclaim. Ha.
It’s better than here, here, at least
Not exclude old white farts more generally, but it’s an expression of plummy old white farts of the ruling class, who are basically the problem here.
Also, consider the connotations of the terms I chose instead – ‘testify’ with its churchy gospel vibe implies a spiritual, moral dimension. And ‘represent’ reminds us how little of that is happening.
Hey Kimmo, thanks for bothering to respond. Appreciate it. I like how you explain those new words of yours as well – Testify and Represent. Introduce a spiritual-moral dimension, and keeping us / them honest with a reminder to be real. And your word for those ruling old white men, ‘plummy’ made me chuckle out loud …. and gave me a new word. Thanks. WASPs is the comparable, older terms there of course. I genuinely like your thinking and expression. Go girl (is that okay?).
Plummy is in reference to the posh pom accent – ‘plum in the mouth’. WASP is a yank thing, isn’t it? Represent is a hip-hop term, by the way.
Go girl isn’t cool; it’s misgendering me. I’d have thought the o on the end would’ve clued you in
As for WASP – I don’t get the Anglo -Saxon bit… Saxons are German, aren’t they? We’re Anglo-Celtic around here. I guess you see a lot of German names in the US…
Ha ha. Saxons were part of the early English setting (before and after when the Romans came) as well as referring to the Gerries. Well, at least some of them. In terms of Europe, the Germans and the English do share a common culture traditionally, carried in their mother tongues (which are also proximate – listen to English and German, and then some Italian and you’ll get what I mean). I think WASPs speaks of what can be called the Anglosphere. This goes right into the heart of contemporary global bio-politics. Ha. The Anglosphere is a product of the Enlightenment, and might be considered the philosophical thought out of which the British Empire arose, and North America pretty much. It’s attitude of high reason (I don’t say high treason) still reigns, pretty much, in the world order. Witness, the UN. Significantly, the Anglosphere stands in contrast to the bulk of Continental Europe which is characterised by a more holistic, or bodily philosophy and way of life. Witness the French, the Portuguese, Italians and the Spanish. The Romantic countries, languages and cultures, to draw a point. Yer, and I like the hip-hop. Reminds of other protest-based cultures like Punk. I’d be shit-scared were I to meet Iggy Pop, say, while on one of his benders. However, the basic position of outlier, and articulating from the margins ahh, yes. This is the one, and what is needed today. I can see the o on the end, but you’ll have to enlighten me how this details gender in any way.
I have very little or no sympathy for the British and European countries who are facing boatloads of people, mainly from Africa, looking for a decent life. After all these same countries through their empires spent decades ripping as much wealth as they could from third world countries and exploiting their people and lands. Chickens, home, roost.
Fair enough as long as you extend that lack of sympathy to everyone who benefits from stolen Aboriginal land, but whinges everytime some kind of decency is suggested.
I do.
What relevance do this comment have to the issue at hand?
You’re not a solutions person are you?
There are solutions – one would be to reimburse these third world countries at least some of the ill-gotten gains – making sure any money went to organisations who are not corrupt which would out quite a number of governments. I don’t believe there are many people who would choose to migrate if a decent standard of living was to be had in the land of their birth.
It takes more than a gift of money to make a decent standard of living. It takes worthwhile jobs, trustworthy political institutions, fair social attitudes etc.
Reimburse for what?
History?
Let’s have everyone reimburse everyone for what happened in history.
By the time we go back a few thousand years we’d probably have to call it all quits.
Any solutions predicated on some ridiculous retelling of history based on modern concepts of law and ethics is doomed to fail.
That’s not to say money is not the solution here. To be clear we’d be encouraging wealthier countries to spend money on poorer countries out of self-interest – to reduce the push factors.
And recently destroying Libya as a functioning state so that it is no longer able to accommodate African refugees. Simple cause-effect – suck it up, sweethearts.
Those countries are still doing the same things today. albeit under a different name or guise.
Completely agree with the general argument. The Tories have exceeded all expectations in trashing the UK so thoroughly in the last 14 years or so. In response the Labour opposition, under Starmer, is doing all it can to promise nothing. Given how thoroughly the Tories have ruined or broken more or less everything in the manner of an army conducting a scorched earth retreat, maybe Labour is wise. If it wins power this year it will have many thankless years, maybe decades, of just picking through the rubble, applying bandages and trying to make basic things work.
That said, the claim that the Tory government
is not quite right. It has blocked the movement of workers from the remaining EU into the UK and expelled many that were in the UK, but at the same time many are replaced by workers brought in legally from elsewhere. And these replacement workers, moving from much more distant and often poorer countries, are far more often applying to bring family with them. So the result of Brexit is more legal migration to the UK from non-EU countries.
The ITV drama is better known as Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office, but I don’t know if that is any more witty. I thought it was gripping and did a very good job summarising the most important elements of events that took place over two decades in just four 50-minute episodes, while its focus on just a handful of sub-postmasters and their familes made very clear the shattering damage done; as one critic noted, it was as though ITV had rediscovered the old Play For Today format of drama with a serious socio-political edge. A minor detail worth noting: all the lines spoken by the PO’s CEO Paula Vennels in the drama were taken verbatim from interviews and transcripts. She really said all those things.
yep and zip at THE neo lib bastardized ABC ; Anderson , Ita, Netflix interest groups waiting for their spoils .. sack the lot god save independants and real ethics ; Labor are now failing to stem the real rot coming from the top down
I’ve been following the Post Office Horizon unpleasantness (not the Deepwater Horizon unpleasantness, similar vintage) since Computer Weekly and the Eye got hold of it.
One thing struck me apart from the deep, gung-ho injustice and cowardly refusal to accept responsibility, which continues. It’s this. At all material times the British Post Office has had around 11,000 post offices, most of them “agency” (“franchise”) operations. At least 900 sub-posties have walked the plank for “fraud”. In a real business, a failure rate of one in nine exhibiting substantially similar features would convince rational executives and curious board members that there was a systemic problem somewhere, not merely a vaguely regrettable series of random events. Probably with the recruitment process, or the cash management system, or the manual processes enforced, or all of them. The sheer number of problems is crushing evidence that a systematic and unsolved problem existed.
It’s no surprise that the most relevant CEO was diagnosed as suffering from acute “faith” and became a priest prior to becoming chief postie. You cannot run anything if you’re afflicted with faith: you need skepticism and curiosity, the very anathemata of faith.
Good point. It’s always the same. But management failures are never management’s fault. What the hell are they doing for their obscene pay packets?
Pissing on us; exactly what they’re paid for.