How New Labour's tough rhetoric on immigration boosted the right

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Under Jeremy Corbyn, as I wrote at the start of the month, Labour has quite moderate policies but does its very best so sound like far-left party.

Under Tony Blair, by contrast Labour had progressive social policies but did its best to sound right wing.

I am reminded of this contrast by an article in Prospect by Steve Bloomfield, who writes about the Blair government's rhetoric on immigration:

Under Tony Blair, New Labour passed five migration-related bills between 1997 and 2007. Each one was about making it harder for refugees and immigrants to live here. Each one was accompanied by a wave of dehumanising language in the media and political sphere. 

One of the first pieces of legislation removed benefits from asylum seekers, replacing money with vouchers. These vouchers could only be spent on what the government deemed “essential” - something that didn’t include razors or toothpaste. Shops were banned from giving change, which meant parts of the already meagre allowance often went spent. 

During this period, Labour liked to split asylum seekers up into “genuine” and “bogus.” The phrase “bogus asylum seeker” became so prevalent it was even used, without quote marks, in BBC news reports.

He goes on to chronicle the growing extremism of the rhetoric used by successive Labour home secretaries in this period - David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid - until the last-named was telling us that "foreigners come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits".

Go back to the source of this quote and you will find that Reid was condemned by Nick Clegg, God bless him.

All this went on while people from Europe were coming to work in Britain in unprecedented numbers.

Did Labour's approach do anything to calm public concern about immigration?

Bloomfield says not:

Ipsos Mori’s poll in 2008 showed that just 5 per cent of voters who thought immigration was important trusted Labour. The Conservatives were on 46 per cent ... 

"Tough" immigration policies, i.e. those that treated people fleeing terror as if they should be feared rather than helped, not only failed to improve Labour's standing, it normalised dehumanising language and policies. The debate wasn't, "should we help refugees and migrants?" Instead, it was "how best can we stop them causing damage?" And when those are the terms of the debate, the far-right will always be "tougher."

This seems right to me. I would add that liberal politicians should talk about the economic advantages that immigration brings - too often we just get sermons on multiculturalism.

And where immigration causes local problems, such as pressure for school places, those liberal politicians should be honest about this and be seen to be providing the extra resources that local authorities need.

Tony Blair, Labour and fox hunting

One of the benefits of having been blogging for so long is that I can repost old copy if I am feeling uninspired.

So here is Liberal Democrat News (ask your parents) column of mine from November 2004.

A cunning plan

As I write, the Lords and the Commons are fighting over the hunting bill like two greyhounds with a hare. It looks as though their lordships are going to force the prime minister to ban hunting at once so the resulting row takes place in the run up to the general election.

Forget all the guff about the upper house being the repository of the nation’s wisdom: this is a brilliant piece of low politics. And, whatever your views on hunting, Blair deserves it for his dithering and duplicity.

For Tony Blair never wanted to ban fox hunting. He wanted to be always in the process of banning it. That way, whenever his backbenches threatened to rebel over some nasty right-wing policy, he could buy them off with a little more progress on blood sports.

Not that most Labour MPs who vote to ban hunting are particularly concerned about animal welfare. You don’t find them putting down questions about factory farming. What they really want to do is have a go at the toffs. They would be just as happy banning polo or the Henley Regatta.

But when politicians insist on fighting the class war the outcome is seldom happy. We saw this during the miners strike and also when the Tories brought in the poll tax. In the long run, outbreaks of public disorder rarely do governments much good.

What will become of the foxes in all this? If hunting is banned, they will still be killed and the methods used may well be no more humane than hunting.

Worse than that, they will learn that under New Labour nothing comes without strings. Expect to see the introduction of compulsory lectures for foxes on the rights of chickens – or “members of the egg-laying community”, as they will probably be called. Look too for a network of Cubs Clubs run by Margaret Hodge and a Brush Your Brush campaign headed by John Reid.

All this may accelerate the trend that has seen foxes abandon the countryside to become urban scavengers and, as many householders know, significant pests. It will be a sad day when the only foxes you see are sitting round shopping malls wearing Burberry baseball caps and giving their children Sunny D.

Simon Hughes on the Tory and Labour arms race on prisons

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Speaking to a CentreForum and Prison Reform Trust event today Simon Hughes said:

The sad reality is that the political consensus needed for real reform remains the victim of an arms race between the two largest parties on who can sound toughest on law and order. 

Michael Howard’s 1993 declaration that ‘prison works’, contrary to all the evidence in so many cases of course, became an ideology which was then enthusiastically embraced by Labour Home and Justice Secretaries including Jack Straw, David Blunkett and John Reid. 

That misguided consensus has been directly responsible for a near doubling of the prison population: from about 44,000 in the early 1990s to the 84,656 people in prison at the end of last week.

You can read the whole speech on Simon's own website.

In which I am mentioned in Hansard three times

This morning Charlotte Henry tweeted that she would "officially give up" if Gareth Epps gets into Hansard. We can only hope that, however Gareth fares, she does not do so.

But her tweet did remind me that I was mentioned in the House of Commons three times in June 2003.

The first mention was by Angela Browning on 5 June. She asked John Reid, as Leader of the House:

Can we have a debate next week on the middle classes? I am sure that the Leader of the House will have noted that in Liberal Democrat News of 30 May, Jonathan Calder, who is a member of the party's federal policy committee, wrote an article about the Conservative policy of scrapping tuition fees. He says that it "has a lot to be said for it", but goes on to say:

"If the Conservatives do not speak for the stupid middle classes, who do they speak for?"

We should like to debate that rather old-fashioned concept with them.

And then on 23 June it was Tim Boswell in a debate on student finance said:

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford said, Liberal Democrat News provided a ringing endorsement of our policies in the shape of Jonathan Calder's article, which explained that my hon. Friend's idea of 

"getting rid of tuition fees, and financing the move by scrapping plans to extend the number of students even further, has a lot to be said for it." 

I agree. It is useful to have allies on occasion.

The member for Ashford was Damian Green, who had already intervened on Phil Willis, then our shadow education secretary, to say:

I feel that I should draw his attention to Liberal Democrat News of 30 May 2003. It is a publication that I read sporadically. This edition is particularly interesting because it makes the following thoughtful point: 

"Damian Green's idea of getting rid of tuition fees, and financing the move by scrapping plans to extend the number of students even further, has a lot to be said for it." 

I always welcome support from Liberal Democrat News, and I hope to get it from the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesmen, as well.

Phil, characteristically, was unfazed by this.

How long ago it all seems! In those days the Labour government's policy was to have 50 per cent of young people going to university. That always seemed unrealistic to me, and I even heard someone at the last Lib Dem Conference applauded with reasonable enthusiasm for saying so.

Today, of course, we have less than half of young people going to university and tuition fees, but that is austerity for you.

I imagine that my column appeared in a briefing for Conservative MPs and that Angela Browning seized on the wrong phrase. I doubt the bright young things at Tory head office included it because of my joke about the stupid middle classes, but it obviously enraged her.

June 2003, towards the end of Iain Duncan Smith's leadership, was about the nadir of Conservative fortunes. The fact that three of their MPs thought they could help their party by quoting me, confirms that judgement.

Mission accomplished in Afghanistan?

David Cameron announced today that our mission in Afghanistan has been accomplished.

But was he right? Come to that, what was our mission there?

I found the answer in an old House Points column of mine from Liberal Democrat News. In March 2006 I wrote:

Now British troops are off to Afghanistan again. At Monday’s defence questions John Reid confirmed there are currently around 1600 there, and this will increase to around 5700. 

Why are they going? Reid described their task as establishing democracy, ending terrorism, achieving security in the south of Afghanistan, helping the Afghan economy and dealing with poppy destruction. He did not say what they are doing after lunch.

A little research tells me that I was writing about defence questions on 27 February 2006.

The list of tasks was not a direct quote from John Reid, then the secretary of state, but were put into his mouth by James Gray.

I am not sure I would want anything of Mr Gray's put into my mouth, but Reid did not demur from them.

So, no, our mission in Afghanistan has not been achieved, but that is no reflection on our forces or David Camerson - even if he was stupid to use George W. Bush's glib phrase.

No, it is a reflection on the absurd ideas the last Labour government had when it sent troops there.

Just because you murder someone, it doesn't mean your views are worth hearing

The front page of today's Guardian is the worst I have ever seen on any newspaper. Why the Guardian wants to turn itself into a propaganda sheet for a murderer, I cannot imagine.

When you are over the anger, two possible explanations suggest themselves.

One is that this is an example of the sort of self-hatred that Western liberals can fall prey to and that Christopher Hitchens used to complain about. Hurt us because we deserve it, the paper thinks its readers will say.

The other is that we tend to assume that their must be something remarkable about someone who commits such a grotesque crime and that his view must therefore be listening to.

That is a fallacy, as Munira Mirza showed when writing of the videos the 'martyrdom videos' the 7/7 bombers left behind them:

What we see in these videos are not soldiers in a war, but self-righteous young men who believe that their own moral certainty absolves them of the need to explain themselves properly. 

Nobody elected Khan or Tanweer. As far as we know, they did not have relations with anyone in Palestine, Bosnia or Chechnya. Indeed, these two men did not even bother to ask their family, friends or neighbours what they thought. 

At the local mosque near where three of the bombers grew up, one of the committee members, Muhboob Hussein, reacted with anger to 7/7: ‘This is not Islam, this is not jihad, these people are not Muslim. This man [Khan] never came to our mosque....’ 

Obviously, Khan or Tanweer did not show much interest in trying to win people over to their worldview - they thought that ‘democratically elected governments’ had less claim to act on behalf of people than they did.

And we saw just the same contempt for democratic government from the idiot presented on the front page of today's Guardian.

When I blogged about Mirza's article at the time, someone left a comment reminding me of a prophetic piece by Ian Buruma that began:

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism.

Almost as depressing as the Guardian front page was the discussion of the Woolwich murder on Newsnight yesterday evening. One participant, the impressive Maajid Nawaz, spoke of the need for a Western narrative to challenge the world-view of Islamism. But you only had to look at the people with him to see there was little chance we would hear it last night.

There was John Reid who, as a Communist while the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, never bought into the Western narrative in the first place and is now employed by the security industry - though Newsnight never reminds of us during his frequent appearances. And there was Alex Carlile, a Liberal Democrat who long ago threw in his lot with the most repressive elements of Labourism.

And, sure enough, both Reid and Carlile told us that the most important thing is that we give the state more power to inspect the affairs of law-abiding citizens and weaken the safeguards for those it accuses of crime.

If that is the first reaction of those we are supposed to regard as statesmen, then you can see how weak the West's belief in its own values has become.

Remember when Tony Blair was a Womble

From a Calder's Comfort Farm, the column I used to write for the New Statesman website, published on 24 June 2008.

A couple of summers ago the excitement over Cash for Honours was at its height. There was even speculation that Lord Levy’s troubles might see the end of Tony Blair.

What would we have made in 1973, I wonder, of the thought that the arrest of Alvin Stardust’s manager might one day bring down the government?

But in those days the link between politics and pop music was closer than most voters realised. One of the most popular bands of the era was The Wombles, who always appeared on stage in large furry costumes.

The advantage of this was that anyone could be a Womble, and a shifting cast of session musicians used to share the gigs between them. But, thanks to the good offices of Michael Levy, on occasion a Womble costume would be worn by a hungry young Labour politico.

Levy’s recent memoirs are disappointingly sketchy on the subject, but it is known that Jack Straw, Patricia Hewitt and Dr John Reid all appeared as Wombles at one time or another.

Fascinatingly, a young lawyer named Anthony Blair would also pull on a costume when the briefs were slow coming in.

Alastair Campbell has ruthlessly expunged this episode from the Blair CV -- I feel a little nervous telling you about it even now -- but was he right to do so?

The Roman Emperors used to keep a slave to whisper “remember thou art mortal” when they got above themselves. Tony Blair would have done well to have an aide close at hand to say “remember you’re a Womble” now and then.

And if he was being particularly messianic, that aide could have added: “Re-member-member-member what a Womble Womble Womble you are.”

John Reid features in Correction of the Day

From the Corrections and Clarifications column in this morning's Guardian:

A commentary by John Reid ... omitted to make clear that the former home secretary is a paid director of the security company G4S Regional Management (UK & Ireland) Ltd. Guardian guidelines put the onus on editors to ensure that, in the case of external contributions to the newspaper, a writer's personal, philosophical or financial connections are spelled out at the end of the piece when these relate to the subject matter.

I think it would be best if the old brute could have this financial interest tattooed on his forehead, so no one could possibly be unaware of it.

David Cameron has let his admirers down

The current dust up between the two partners in the Coalition was inevitable, even if it is not wholly synthetic. The AV referendum campaign was bound to strain relations between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and the two party leaders do have to display some regard for the enthusiasms of their members and core supporters from time to time.

Nevertheless, in recent days David Cameron have given those who hoped he might be a new sort of Tory two separate causes for disappointment in recent days.

The first was his declaration that he was "very relaxed" about people offering unpaid internships to relations and the children of friends and neighbours. You can say that this was just Cameron reassuring the middle classes: I have argued before that the Liberal Democrats have not thought through the difficulties of their being committed to policies that will disadvantage their predominantly middle-class electorate.

But if the middle classes think about it they will realise that most of them do not know any prime ministers. Most of them will not know any Old Etonians. So what sounds like Cameron reassuring the middle classes who want their children to get on, is in reality Cameron telling them they he will do his best to make sure those children are being kept down by the wealthier and the better connected.

And then their was Cameron's decision to appear alongside John Reid at an anti-AV event. I am all for people from different parties talking to one another and the charge that Labour politicians would have been happier in the old Soviet Union is usually a libel.

It's just that, as I argued back in 2006, Reid's career gives the impression that this is pretty much the truth.

By sharing a platform with an old tankie like Reid, Cameron lost my respect. Whatever you thought about the Tories under Thatcher, their opposition to Soviet tyranny was adamant. Cameron, by contrast, has shown he is happy to accommodate that mind-set to maintain party advantage.

All of this leads me to wander where all the moderates Conservatives have gone. But that question, and the opportunity their disappearance offers the Liberal Democrats, must wait for another day.

House Points: What is Kim Howells?

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Perhaps the truth is that, like John Reid, Howells has just been a consistent authoritarian all his life. Hornsey College of Art at the sit-in point at something more libertarian, or am I just being seduced by the glamour of the sixties?

Incidentally, do people still read Kim. They certainly should do. When someone told Evan Davis on the Today programme this morning that India was Kipling's home, he scoffed at the idea. He would not have done that if he had read his best book.

Kim what?

“I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” Kipling’s young hero asks himself repeatedly. These days there is an even harder question: What is Kim Howells?

Because today this former student radical and former Communist union official finds himself defending Britain’s intelligence services unreservedly when even many Conservatives fear they have been complicit in the torture of suspects overseas. It’s worse than that: the head of MI5 sounded more reasonable than Howells when when he raised his head the other day.

Last week Howells, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), said any such suggestion was “a calumny and a slur and it should not be made”. For good measure he added “I don’t know what the Master of the Rolls is ... playing at.” (In my experience senior judges don’t play much. They tend to be rather serious about things.)

When it was set up, the ISC was loaded with senior parliamentarians so that it would have the clout to hold the security services to account, yet its chairman prefers to act as their cheerleader. (Perhaps they won him over by letting him play with their invisible ink?)

It has been a long journey to reach this lonely position. Howells first came to public notice in 1968 as the student organiser of a sit-in at Hornsey College of Art in North London. He reappeared in the eighties as a Communist research officer with the National Union of Mineworkers in South Wales during the strike of 1984-5 .

He became a Labour MP in 1989 and soon found himself a member of Neil Kinnock’s inner circle. One theory is that he received this rapid promotion because he was the only person who made Kinnock’s sound laconic and crisp in comparison. When Labour came back into government he filled a succession of ministerial positions, and now finds himself, in effect, the spokesman for the intelligence services.

You could say this is a common story: a young firebrand turns into a reactionary. But what story do people like Howells tell themselves. Do they detect a golden thread of principle that has run through their careers or do they prefer not to think about the past?

So the question remains: “What is Kim?”

Is John Reid behind the rebellion against Gordon Brown?

Heresy Corner, one of my favourite blogs, thinks so.

Mind you, if anything can make you feel warmer towards Brown it is the prospect of Reid returning from the political dead.

Here is a reminder of Reid's career.

Have a Go with Kiron Reid

Kiron Reid, my friend and fellow Liberator collective member, has an article on Comment is Free today. He talks about a report by the think tank Reform that suggests the "have a go hero" is rarer in Britain today than other European countries.

He writes:

The policy paper highlights a truth that many politicians do not want to admit – that the government and politicians cannot tackle crime; that it is local people, the police and local agencies working together that can.

Initiatives like the Community Justice Centre presided over by Judge David Fletcher are showing the community that the system will deal with their concerns. So are energetic young police inspectors and their teams on the ground.

But innovations only appear to be allowed if they fit in with centralised policy and funding regimes.

There has been a trend - on the left and among some liberals - to argue that tackling crime must be left entirely to the police. Any public intervention in the field is dismissed as "vigilantism".

The other day I turned up an old posting on this blog that defended John Reid's plans for a campaign under the slogan: "Don't moan - take action. It's your street too".

David Davis had claimed "It is brazen beyond belief for the Government to try to shift responsibility on to the shoulders of the public."

That was nonsense then and it is still nonsense now. In a free society citizens should not surrender responsibility for public order wholly to the state.

Look what happens when you threaten to stand against Gordon Brown

One of the mysteries of recent weeks has been the sudden disappearance of John Reid. One moment he was being widely tipped as the Blairite Stop Gordon candidate. The next he had announced his resignation from the front bench.

Last week I pointed with approval to one explanation. But Reid's withdrawal may also have had a lot to the fact that stories like this were circulating around what we used to call Fleet Street.

Thanks to Iain Dale.

If you value it, don't give it to John Reid

The government used Tony Blair's announcement yesterday to bury the bad news about the cost of identity cards. We expect nothing better from them.

John Reid had an article in the Guardian in which he claimed:

Our own, unique, identity is inexorably becoming our most precious possession.

I am not sure if that is true. I am not even sure that it means anything.

But if it meaningful and true, what follows from it?

Our houses and cars are also valuable possessions. Do we make those over to the state to look after for us? Do we bunnies.

I would be particularly unwilling to put anything in the hands of John Reid, because I find him morally disgusting.

When the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, Reid was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain - which, it has since turned out, really was funded from Moscow.

Remember: this was after the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and after knowledge of the Gulag became widespread in the West.

Well, we all make mistakes in our youth. But far from apologising for this, Reid treats it as though it makes him endearing. He is on record as saying: "I used to be a communist. I used to believe in Santa Claus."

He also describes his time at Stirling University in these terms:

Reid himself is more dismissive of neat labels, arguing that, in the skewed politics of the time, apart from the chess club, the Communist party was the only non-Trotskyite group on campus.

Well, I played chess for York University at the end of the 1970s, and our captain was a Trot. But I was a Liberal even then.

Why is John Reid resigning?

Paul Linford considers the theories and comes down in favour of my own view:

He is staging a canny tactical retreat to distance himself from what he sees as the impending disaster of the Brown premiership so that he can live to fight another day after the next election.

Little brother is watching you

John Reid's campaign to make Britain more like the Soviet Union he so admired in his youth is gathering pace with the introduction of talking CCTV cameras.

As the BBC says, the cameras are already in operation in Middlesbrough, and are to be installed in Southwark, Barking and Dagenham, in London, Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington at the cost of half a million pounds.

Lib Dem bloggers have risen against the idea - Edis Bevan has the links - but it remains to be seen whether Lib Dem councils will have any scruples about operating them.

In true totalitarian style, the young are being recruited to harangue their elders. Competitions are to be held in local schools so that children cab become the voice of the cameras. The ARCH blog looks at some of the important questions that are being ignored in the process.