That, however, is only the beginning of the story. Any illusion that the government might be gradually turning itself into a more recognisably Labour administration has been firmly dispelled by the prime minister and Gordon Brown in the past few days. Both have been busy explaining why those earning over £100,000 cannot afford to pay a few thousand pounds a year more in tax for fear of undermining their incentive to work, and the chancellor has declared he wants to see every teacher in the land winning over children’s hearts and minds for the spirit of private enterprise.
Meanwhile, Blair says he wants to intensify the modernisation (for which read privatisation) of health and education, as well as the reform of welfare (for which read cuts). Unconcerned about the growing anti-corporate mood, New Labour has shown it is determined to position itself as Britain’s foremost party of big business. And there have been renewed mutterings at Millbank about breaking the party’s links with the trade unions if there is any more nonsense about transport workers going on strike. The Blairite project, it seems, is up and running again.
This week’s Italian elections – won by a billionaire media monopolist running in harness with a regionalist xenophobe and the political heirs of Benito Mussolini – offer a timely warning about where this kind of marginalisation of core supporters can end up. To be fair to the Blairophile centre-left coalition that has ruled Italy for the past five years, it never stretched quite as far to the right as its British counterpart. But, like New Labour, it offered itself as the best bet for international business – which repaid the compliment by campaigning hard against a Berlusconi victory – and pushed through a programme of welfare cuts, privatisation, labour flexibility and budget austerity to squeeze Italy into the eurozone.
Faced with a left-leaning government which failed to deliver to its heartlands and a demagogic opposition which played mercilessly on the racism and social tensions around illegal migrants, voters haemorrhaged to the right, producing Sunday’s gruesome result. Factor out the specifics of Italian political culture and it is not so hard to imagine a British version of this debacle a few years down the line.
Politicians are articulators of power and social interests and they respond to pressure. At the moment, New Labour feels far more heat from its powerful business and media friends – as well as allies and international institutions abroad – than it does from its own core supporters, such at the trade unions, which have sold their loyalty cheaply over the past four years.
Tony Blair’s government has, arguably despite itself, shifted the terms of political trade, for example, around the issue of public spending. But the prime minister has also helped create a crisis of political representation by effectively closing down internal Labour democracy, while weighting the balance of political influence inside his big tent heavily towards middle-class and employer interests. Under the current electoral system, both main parties have to be led as genuine coalitions or they undermine confidence in politics itself.
Supporters may acknowledge a Labour government as preferable to a Tory one, but if the gap is seen as too narrow, some will inevitably peel off and the coalition will erode. Without a second-term shift to a politically broader administration, challenges from the left are bound to grow and where they are credible – as in London last year – are likely to be effective. The risk must also be, though, of a parallel drift into voter apathy and an eventual collapse, Berlusconi-style, of part of Labour’s electorate into Tory populism.6
(16/5/01)
Globalisation and a war on asylum
The mood music has become steadily harsher as the extent of the far right’s advance on the European mainland has been rammed home. First David Blunkett described asylum seekers as ‘swamping’ schools and medical services. Then Peter Hain singled out Britain’s Muslims for their supposed ‘separatism’, while denouncing southern Europe for being a ‘soft touch’ for asylum seekers. But now, as the tabloid campaign against refugees reaches a new frenzy, Whitehall officials say it is Tony Blair – far more even than his would-be hardman Blunkett – who is driving the government towards an aggressive new line on asylum and immigration.
Earlier this week, Blair celebrated his success in convincing José María Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, to back a British plan to withdraw EU aid from poor countries which fail to join the crackdown on migrants. The message could not be clearer. Just as Australia’s conservative prime minister John Howard swept away an electoral challenge from the populist right by stealing its clothes on immigration, Blair is now determined to buy off any potential domestic backlash from the racist right with a political war on asylum.
How far he intends to go is spelled out for the first time in an ‘action plan’, delivered by Downing Street last week to senior ministers and civil servants – and leaked to me – aimed at bringing about a ‘radical reduction’ in the number of ‘unfounded asylum applications’.
The document bears all the hallmarks of official panic, with civil servants pulling every conceivable policy lever in an effort to respond to pressure from the top: from proposals to park British immigration officials at Paris and Amsterdam airports, and the tightening of visa requirements for countries such as Zimbabwe, to cutting the length of time refugees from war zones are given exceptional leave to remain. There are plans for bulk removals by the RAF, a new ‘white list’ of ‘safe’ countries such as Pakistan, and entitlement cards for asylum seekers. And so the list goes on.
In an accompanying letter circulated around the upper reaches of Whitehall, the No. 10 policy adviser Olivia McLeod singled out two ideas in particular for ministers to discuss at a meeting with Tony Blair last Wednesday. Would it be possible, she asked, for the Ministry of Defence and security services to help catch ‘people traffickers’ bringing asylum seekers to Britain? The Royal Navy warships in the eastern Mediterranean, she proposed, should be given the job.
This would be a new departure for Britain indeed – though already a staple of Australian political theatre – and gives a literal twist to Blair’s war on asylum. But Downing Street’s other main demand last week is likely to cause even more internal trouble for the government. No. 10, it transpires, now wants direct British aid to ‘source countries’ for asylum claimants (such as Turkey) to be made conditional on cooperating with repatriation. Having just steered an international development act through parliament outlawing any such conditions, Clare Short is said to be fighting a rearguard action against the linkage.
The aid penalty plan encapsulates the dislocated absurdity at the heart of Britain’s asylum and immigration policy. Migration into western Europe is the inevitable product of pauperisation and conflict at its periphery, in an arc stretching across the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe through the Middle East and North Africa. The free-market globalisation policies promoted by Britain and other EU governments have decimated jobs and living standards throughout those regions, while conflicts for which Britain and its allies share responsibility have become a veritable engine of refugees. Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and, until recently, the former Yugoslavia have long headed the list of countries of origin for asylum seekers coming to Britain – and the British government has either directly or indirectly intervened with bombs, sanctions or support for large-scale internal repression in every one. Deliberately to impoverish these states still further would be utterly perverse.
Many of those most closely involved in managing asylum, including in government, believe this to be a confected crisis. The 130 asylum seekers the authorities are said to lose track of every day roughly equal the number of mostly antipodean ‘working holidaymakers’ daily flying into Heathrow. Almost 50 per cent of asylum seekers are either eventually granted refugee status or given exceptional leave to remain. And there was no correlation whatever in this month’s local elections between BNP votes and the presence of asylum seekers. But by talking and acting as though there is a growing crisis and appeasing a racist agenda, the government risks destabilising and poisoning community relations for years to come.7
(23/5/02)
Zimbabwe: Colonialism and the New World Order
Tony