“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.
